It might seem laughable for rain in the Pacific Northwest to make the news, but the little burst of it over the weekend has become something of a rarity.

According to data reaching back to 1980 from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office run by NASA, the average rainfall Port Townsend should have experienced by this time of year is more than 4.5 inches.

The combined rainfall from Friday and Saturday, the only two days of significant rain so far, added up to less than three-quarters of an inch.

Add that to only a quarter-inch of rain for the entire month of September when past wet seasons would begin.

“So far there isn’t really measurable rain yet,” said East Jefferson Fire Rescue Chief Bret Black on Friday with a light drizzle in the background.

“We’re hoping by Monday to see at least an inch or two so we can really make a well-rounded decision about burn restrictions. But we’ll see.”

Despite the dryness, Jefferson County hasn’t had any fires get out of control, but there was no avoiding the smoke from surrounding flames.

“We just got our crew back yesterday from the Nakia Creek Fire,” Black said which the Department of Natural Resources reported at more than 1,900 acres in size. There are still more than 500 personnel working to contain that fire.

That — combined with the Bolt Creek Fire at almost 15,000 acres — is what brought the Air Quality Index to hit 171 at its peak in Port Townsend, as reported by the DNR last Wednesday. Anything over 100 is considered unhealthy for sensitive groups including seniors, and more than 150 is considered unhealthy for the general public.

By the end of Friday, however, the AQI was down to 11.

The rain may have cleared the skies, but fires west of the Cascades have continued to burn.

Still, there is hope.

“It’s going to be tough for any wildfires to stay active much longer with all the cool/moist air on its way,” wrote Farren Thorpe of the Washington Department of Ecology and the Washington Smoke blog, a partnership between state, county, Tribes, and federal agencies.

As of Sunday, the National Weather Service had even put out snow advisories for the western slopes of the North Cascades.

As the years dry out, wildfire risks now top the state’s Department of Ecology climate change list.

The risk and extent of wildfires in the western United States is growing due to climate change according to the department, leading to a doubling in the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015 in the Western U.S.

To help combat these effects, Washington passed the Climate Commitment Act signed into law by Governor Jay Inslee last year.

Next year, monitoring will begin to establish a “cap and invest” program under the law limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted in Washington. The goal is to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Each decade leading up to that date has its own target reduction.

When the monitoring begins, the state will get its first chance to see how close it is to the first goal of reducing emissions in the 2020s to 1990s levels.