 It began last month and has shown little sign of letting up. 7 News First Alert meteorologist Mark Pena says the rain that's in our forecast this week should help a bit. Drought conditions have expanded rapidly across the area over the past several weeks, so at this point any amount of rain will be welcome. And thankfully over the next week we're expecting about an inch to two inches of rain possible. While we do need more, this is a healthy amount of rain. We don't want too much at one time.