IT’S been a week-and-a-half now since the rains have returned.That, according to the Meteorological Service of Jamaica and the National Water Commission (NWC) — which use different definitions of the term — means the drought is effectively over.

“The cautious academic would want to wait on the data coming in from all the areas, but with the rainfall being observed and with the gradual improvement in the stream flows that we’ve observed, it would be reasonable to say the drought has been broken.

This morning our water storage level at Hermitage Dam was 63 per cent and at the Mona Reservoir it was 40 per cent,” NWC communications manager Charles Buchanan told the Jamaica Observer Monday.

The Hermitage facility has a capacity of 393 million gallons, while the dam can hold 809 million gallons. Hermitage and Mona are the largest water storage facilitates in the country.

They serve the Greater Kingston area, stretching from sections of Stony Hill and Constant Spring in the west to downtown Kingston in the east. “Those levels are not fantastic, but they are better compared with where we were some two weeks ago,” said Buchanan in reference to Monday’s water storage levels.

“(Then), we would have been just about 20-something per cent at Hermitage and we would’ve been brushing 30 per cent at Mona and up to that time we were on a declining trajectory.

Thankfully, at the moment, with the recent rains, we have seen an increase. That is in keeping also with the normal expectation for the month of May which we hope will soon see the reservoirs being filled,” he continued.

There have also been improvements in flow to sources across the island “to different degrees, but improvements nonetheless”. But what does this mean for those who have been forced in the past several months to forsake showers in favour of hurried splashes from buckets and basins?

What does it mean for those who have had to wait up until the wee hours of the morning to fill up with what eventually comes from the tap? What does it mean for schools that have been forced to send children home early and to ask parents to equip them with bottles of water for handwashing and other purposes? Buchanan told the newspaper that while the company has stayed on the side of caution by not yet making any official announcements on the subject, the water restriction has been lifted in some areas.

“We have not officially announced the lifting of the water management measures that have been in place; some may remain, but most have been lifted.

Based on the daily monitoring, however, the operations teams will continue to regulate the supply with a view to bringing the reservoir levels to the maximum in the best way possible,” he said, adding that sustained replenishment of the acquifers is necessary for optimal operations.

The NWC uses the hydrological definition of drought, which is a period where streams and water sources register significantly lower than normal inflows and/or depleted reservoir stores.

The Met Office, meanwhile — which has consistently used the term “dry season” and not “drought” to define the period of limited showers — uses the meteorological definition, which measures the phenomenon according to the volume of rainfall recorded over a period of time.

There is also another definition — Agricultural Drought — which speaks to the inadequacy of soil moisture to meet the needs of crops and to initiate and sustain plant growth.

“All three are related to rainfall, but they don’t all happen at the same time or manifest themselves it the same way necessarily,” Buchanan explained.

Using data provided by the Met Office, the NWC spokesman said that between December 2013 and January 2014, St Elizabeth experienced only 53 per cent of its average normal rainfall, dropping below the 60 per cent criterion for meteorological drought.

Trelawny barely escaped, with 64 per cent. By the February to March period, however, an increasing number of parishes had slipped into drought conditions.

Trelawny registered 54 per cent of rainfall; St Ann had 40 per cent; Portland, 48 per cent; Kingston & St Andrew, 60 per cent; and St Mary was a mere 27 per cent. “All of those parishes that I just listed between February and March, by even the meteorological definition of drought have been in either a normal drought or severe drought,” said Buchanan. He gave the example of Turtle Crawl in Portland which, he said, fell to below 10 per cent of normal inflows.

“During April we went to several sources, especially the smaller surface water sources and one in particular, in Portland, for example, fell to below 10 per cent of what were normal inflows at that facility, so while one may look at whether the rainfall data matches with that reality, that description is absolutely in keeping with all the descriptions of a hydrological drought, regardless of whether it was raining cats and dogs elsewhere or whether it was not,” the water commission spokesman said.

The Met Office reported that moderate to heavy showers and isolated thunderstorms affected northern and southwestern parishes Monday with reported land slippages in several Montego Bay communities. It forecast widely scattered showers over northern parishes Monday night into early yesterday.

“As the instability persists, showers and thunderstorms, which could be heavy at times, are expected especially over northern parishes over the next two days,” it said in a statement Monday evening.