Taking one look at the rainfall totals so far this summer will tell you a story: it has been extremely dry. June didn’t seem too bad:

Climatology data for Lowell for June painted a typical summer-like picture: dry and beginning to get hot at the end of the month.
We were only around an inch and a half below the monthly average rainfall totals.Temperatures weren’t that warm either, so the danger of wildfires starting was low. Then came July…….
There was some rainfall to begin the month and it looked like we would finally catch up with our lack of rainfall that we had for the past few months. This much needed rain came just in time too as we began to see Highs reach the upper 80s to 90 degrees. A few cool days mixed in when the rain occurred, but then a pattern shift happened after the 11th, and that’s led us to what we are seeing today.

500mb height anomalies in the United States starting from July 22, 2016.
Anomalously High heights took over in the Central U.S. and this spread all the way to the East Coast. This brought in much warmer, drier air with only one day since July 11th having seen Highs below 80 degrees! Also with this pattern change came a lack of precipitation. We have seen only three days have rain and a total of 0.11″ since July 11th! That gives us a meager total of 1.35″ for the month of July, which is almost on par with what we saw in June, but leaves us with this for the year:

Another year of bone dry weather.
We are now 7.83″ below average for rainfall for the year and the U.S. Drought Monitor now has us under a Severe Drought.

We need water and we need it now!
The question is will this get any better any time soon? The long answer is that we do not know what the rest of the summer holds in respect to precipitation amounts, but the short term answer is a bit easier. We have a couple chances for some much needed rain this weekend thanks to this setup of moisture:

There is a large amount of water vapor in the atmosphere for some rain tomorrow
This will lead us to periods of rain throughout the day tomorrow (Friday). The biggest question the models have for tomorrow is where the heaviest bands will set up. The current two American Models have this to say:
The NAM keeps the heaviest of the rain to our South over Southern MA, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The GFS however wants the heaviest rain to extend from Southern MA all the way up into Southern New Hampshire. The heaviest rains for the NAM look to bring about 0.5″-0.75″ to our area and around and 1″-1.5″ to the areas to our South. The GFS brings much more torrential rains with increased moisture from ocean enhancement bringing totals across the state into the 2″-2.5″ range. This seems very excessive and we will most likely be in the lower end of around 0.5″-1″ by the end of the day tomorrow, but small changes can make big differences like the models show.
Saturday looks to be clear and sunny, but then we see another chance for rain on Sunday.
This looks to be a much more scattered showers event for the state and most areas will see periods of on and off rain beginning in the morning and ending in the evening. Most areas look to pick up between 0.1″-0.25″ when all is said and done.
Temperatures this weekend look to be much more manageable with Highs all three days in the low to mid 80s! Humidity will be a factor though as there is a lot of moisture in the atmosphere.
So will this rain cure our drought??? Nothing except for a good weeks worth of rain could do that, but anything that we can get will help!