A wet spring and cooler temperatures have led officials to lift the D.C. region’s drought watch on Friday, ending a nearly yearlong advisory that affected the area’s 6 million residents.
In a statement, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said regional experts met earlier this week and concluded that conditions have “improved significantly,” leading to the decision to scale the drought stage back to normal. The organization also stated the Potomac River Basin has received “a significant amount of rainfall” over the past six weeks.
“The drought is over,” Lisa Ragain, MWCOG’s principal water resources planner, told WTOP. “The weather outlook is very good for the foreseeable future.”
The agency considered several factors in its decision to lift the drought watch, including precipitation levels, the overall drought, watch predictors of future precipitation, stream flow and other indicators that each state uses, Ragain said.
“All of those models are indicating that, basically, our region and the entire Eastern Seaboard is going to have a higher-than-normal precipitation for the next three months,” she said.
The wet conditions have been consistent so far in 2025. The National Weather Service told WTOP that Reagan National Airport received 22.74 inches this year — 4.02 inches above normal. Last year, the region only had 19.02 inches by mid-June.
Regain added that one tropical storm or the remnants of a hurricane in dry conditions would not have been enough to end the drought watch because the water from those storms would have run off to nearby bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay, and not into area reserves and reservoirs. True precipitation from consistent rain that soaks into the ground is what the region needed.
“We got the weather we needed, and we should be very grateful for that,” Ragain said.
MWCOG officials called for the drought watch last July, following abnormally dry conditions across the D.C. area. The watch is a step that comes before a drought warning, which calls for additional water restrictions.
The last drought watch occurred in 2010 and lasted only a month.
The likelihood of the region experiencing another drought watch so soon is not likely, Regain said, as it is “very slow challenge” for drought circumstances to build. For example, dry conditions on this previous drought watch began in October 2023, and continued through the spring when there were months with little to no rainfall.
“The water supply system really relies on the reserves and the reservoirs getting filled up in the spring to not have drought,” she said. “It would take a long time to get us back into drought, just like it took us a long time to get out of drought.”
The area’s reserves and reservoirs are built up to withstand any future droughts, and area water agencies are working to expand the regional water supply.
Loudoun County, Virginia, is in the process of converting the Luck Stone quarry into a billion-gallon reservoir by 2028. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also conducting a feasibility study of ways to bolster the resilience of the area’s water supply.
Regain encourages residents to continue making small changes to their water usage despite the lifting of the drought watch.
Doing things like “sweeping your driveway and your sidewalks instead of hosing them down” and taking a close look “at how much water your plants and lawn need” will help, she said.
Residents need to “be conscious of using a really precious resource,” she added.
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