AUSTIN (KXAN) — Thursday morning’s latest Drought Monitor update continues to expand and worsen our drought in Central Texas for the fifth week in a row. The latest update now puts the city of Austin in the “extreme” category. You can see there was a worsening of a full class change for a large portion of the Austin metro including parts of Gillespie and Burnet counties.

A worsening drought was expected as we continue to remain rain-free here in Austin all of October. As of Thursday morning, we haven’t seen measurable rain at Camp Mabry in 36 days. Even during the month of September, one of our wetter months of the year, we only saw three days of rain that totaled less than half an inch.

Improvements expected ahead

With that said, we will finally see the best chance of rain that we have seen for Central Texas in weeks.

An approaching disturbance from the west combined with our strongest cold front of the season is set to bring us periods of widespread heavy rain that could last for a few days. Here is a look at a few of our forecasting models’ projections for rainfall totals.

Forecasting models are on average predicting about half an inch of rain with a few spots getting up to an inch. This should in return help our drought situation at least a little for Central Texas. Stay with us for updates as we track our next chance of rain.