US Drought Monitor
droughtmonitor.unl.edu
droughtmonitor.unl.edu
I have tracked and measured rainfall at my place for more than 20 years. So far this year we are still almost 2" (51 mm) below the lowest YTD rainfall total for this date in 20 years. In addition, we are almost 11" (279 mm) below the average YTD rainfall total for this date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for September 4 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.8" (604 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for September 4 - 13" (330 mm)
That's better off than we were 2 weeks ago though. The temperature had been >100F (>37.8C) for weeks and everything had dried out including established trees. My local rainfall totals showed almost 16" (406 mm) below the average YTD rainfall for the date during the last 20 years and more than 7.4" (188 mm) under the lowest YTD rainfall total for that date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for August 22 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.1" (587 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for August 22 - 7.4" (188 mm)
The lowest YTD totals before this year are from 2011.
With temperatures ranging from 85F to 93F (29.4-33.9*C) since the first storm front came through it has been a huge contrast. I am letting everything that will still grow go to seed now. Migratory birds always stop by during the coldest days to eat the berries on the trees and perennials I have planted. Two weeks ago the plants were dormant and appeared dead. They have bloomed and it appears that I may have some set fruit before autumn shuts it all down in a few weeks.
I also question the selection of "abnormally dry" as the lowest level. Also, why aren't "abnormally wet" regions shown? ....and what about different colors in the same watershed? Lower areas of a watershed shouldn't be dryer than the highlands.
What would the point of showing "abnormally wet" be?
We have land near there. While it did rain this year and fill the tanks (man-made ponds the cows drink from, for coastal folks reading along), we lost most of our topsoil. I've never seen the mesquite / cedar trees and other plants so dead.
We have a field for sunflowers that we rent out to dove hunters. The sunflowers are under a foot tall this year (which is unprecedented) so we can't rent it out.
I guess the unprecedented wildfires this year also missed you.
I understand the topsoil. I don't have much to lose. That's why I'm in the process of taking this place to full native grasses and plants. My topsoil is less than 6" deep over 80% of my place with solid fossiliferous limestone more than a foot thick under it. The limestone outcrops on all the slopes. I mow twice a year at most so that everything has ample opportunity to go to seed.
When the mesquite yellows and drops its leaves in the summer you know its hot. Mine lost 80% of its canopy this summer. The 5.5" of rain we've had in the last couple of weeks is regenerating the trees now though. I have some I've planted nearly 20 years ago that are still under 10' tall. My elms were brick red last week but have now started to drop the dead leaves and sprout new growth. That's a good thing since more than half my trees looked dead. I lost most of my live oaks to oak wilt so I can't afford to lose more of them to drought.
I am surrounded by cedar, live oak, and elms with hackberry, bois d'arc, and hercules club too. There's lots of spots for birds here and they still hunt them on the land behind me, deer too. My spot was farmed for a long time and after I bought it I have been killing off everything non-native. My main focus now is on stopping the bermuda grass. It's a slow slog. It took me nearly 10 years to get rid of the Johnson grass but I finally dug all that shit out and clipped the seedheads so now I'm finding less than 10 new plants annually, all sprouting from old seed. I pick a grass or weed and concentrate on eliminating it every year. Restoration by hand is a slow process but the squirrels have returned, crows visit every day, roadrunners nest in the privet thickets, there's a fox and a bobcat that meander through pretty regularly too. It's in much better shape overall.
Did the sunflowers not set seed at all or are they just stunted? Even my lantana was dead up till the rain and now it has all sprouted and is trying to set flowers like the sage. The winter birds depend on the lantana berries for food on the coldest days. I was pretty happy to see that pop up.
Good luck to you with your place! We're still way behind normal but it all came together just in time to give it all a chance around here. Maybe mother nature is just stringing me along.
What gives you hope that it won't just all turn to a desert?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/world/bunds-geoengineering-re...
It looks easy enough to do, assuming you own a tractor.
I wish I had the soil they have there but farming this land resulted in deflation (soil loss to high wind events) that you can measure by looking at elevation changes along the fence lines and the farmed/unfarmed areas. Like the people in the story, to start the restoration I let my place lay idle for more than a year with no mowing so that all the grasses could set seed multiple times. That helped me reestablish native grasses.
I limit mowing to twice annually now because mowing tends to enable spread of invasive or non-native grasses. Even then I mow in a pattern, starting with areas that I have mostly restored and finishing on the areas that still need some work so that any seeds that drop off of the equipment tend to be native seeds redistributed into areas where I am fighting non-natives. I let the seeds piggyback. It's a process.
The long term temperature trend is not favorable for this region. We are lucky though that this year is the third La Nina year (warmer and drier overall in this region) and since it is unusual to see that many consecutive La Ninas, we are due for a reversal to El Nino which tends to be milder and wetter. My only task is to keep as many things healthy as possible so that they can benefit from the more favorable growing conditions.
My own records here show the cyclic variability and demonstrate that the average rainfall should be plenty to support the native plants that I am trying to maintain. In the 20 years that I have been keeping detailed records annual rainfall has varied across a wide range from 19.21" (488 mm) to 68.33" (1736 mm). The average total is 34.37" (873 mm). We are 2/3 of the way through the year and I have accumulated roughly 2/3 of volume from our lowest ever year (2005). It will be interesting to see whether autumn rains push me past that low number.
I'm a geoscientist by training so there is already the knowledge that change is inevitable, but that it usually happens on much longer time scales. I'm fighting a delaying action here. It can work but things will need help so I capture rainwater for dry times since my only water out here comes from rain and from our water well and I don't want to use well water to water lawns or trees. That is why I focus on native plants and trees that are adapted to regional climatic variability.
I'll continue working to keep my place vibrant with native plants and grasses so that maybe in the long term it can be an oasis in the desert for wildlife moving through the area instead of just a great spot for another convenience store for all the people that are leaving the big city and heading out this way.
There's a website (it's in Czech): https://intersucho.cz/
Windy.com, being developed in Europe, often uses European datasets.
It’s a lot different than the long term trends driven by total annual precipitation, snowpack, etc.
The difference between “that looks really bad” and “ that looks really bad but will be moved on by the time I get there” is very helpful. Plus being able to text a screenshot of me about to drive into a major storm cell to the owner of my truck is priceless.
LA county water districts are further busy cleaning recycled water enough to pump as potable, despite a pretty bad track record of keeping that water actually clean [1]. All the while saying residents are too incompetent to have access to normal recycled water at properly for irrigation because “someone will mess up and interconnect with potable”. Many engineers have pointed out that it’s a solved problem, and that backflow prevention devices are a thing and will prevent such issues at individual property meters.
[1]https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-11/water-re...
San Diego started doing this decades ago, and it has worked out all right. "Toilet to tap," was the slogan the detractors came up with, and it stuck. My concern for LA would be industrial waste water in their waste streams.
California residents use a very small amount of California's water, most is Ag, which is exported to the rest of the world. [0]
So the idea that California is somehow shooting themselves in the foot (rather than refusing to further subsidize the Ag. industry which has done insane damage to the state's ecology) is severely misinformed.
[0]https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
https://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400573611/a-water-markets-mig...
It seems main issue is no political will in California to resolve it..
All that’s grown in CA supports humans. You could get all “America first” with it, which has some merit here, but CA still massively feeds the US.
This can be said about anything, but what matters is whether its is better to do something else to provide the same support.
California only produces 3% of the country's hay. We could just grow a bit more elsewhere to compensate. Ending alfalfa in California wouldn't be a big deal. It's an extremely low value crop.
Meanwhile, to grow this tiny amount of alfalfa we spend more than double all household water use in the entire state. Including swimming pools, toilets, showers, everything.
It's inexplicably foolish.
That is... get the water priced correctly, and let the market sort out ratio of cow alfalfa production to other water priorities...
The only reason we don’t, as far as I can see, is that the demand isn’t there.
Feeding crops to cows is bizarrely wasteful when you look at the big picture. Especially once you look at the subsidies that make meat affordable, the water usage we can no longer afford, the pathogens animal agriculture generates, etc. It seems completely untenable from my perspective. Which is strange to consider at times, because I was once a huge proponent of eating meat.
Dairy cows turn alfalfa into milk and we turn milk into butter, cheese, yogurt, kefir, cream, sour cream, cottage cheese, cream cheese, ice cream, whey, casein, pudding, flan, caramel, crema, etc.
For example for New Hampshire: https://www.drought.gov/states/new-hampshire
Scroll down to the graph, click "1895 - Present (Monthly)", and click the different levels of exceptional drought/exceptional wetness.
You can see that NH has been trending wetter for the last 100 years (as with all the northeast), more or less the opposite of the southwestern US. Large periods of exceptional wet have happened in my life, with fewer big droughts than ever. (Alas, we're in a drought right now.)
You can also see that California had some unusually wet periods in the 80's and 90's, which might have informed policy, but were simply an anomaly: https://www.drought.gov/states/california
Also, it should be base-lining on the median result, not the average result. California has always had a few very wet and many dry years so the monitor usually shows drought. This serves developers and farmers who don't want to admit California is dry place and you should do projects taking a lot of water.
And finally, the drought monitor measures dryness, not overall rainfall but it doesn't make this obvious. California's reservoirs are low but we have had fairly typical (median) rainfall for the last two years (and even had an usually humid spring and summer). The difference is increased heat increases evaporation and dryness and the map should make this distinction obvious.
Maybe the 'establishment' causing scientists to only disclose the most conservative and defensible estimates misled us as to how fast and severe this thing would be.
I caught myself getting frustrated the supermarket was out of instant coffee the other day and realized I'm in no way mentally prepared for what's coming.
I'm not sure about that. This year is a significant uptick from 3 years ago where I live (central Europe).
I did notice a slow warming since 2006 (when I moved to my current location), but even 2 years ago there were only a few summer nights where you could comfortably sit outside after dark without a jacket.
It has been that warm every single night this summer.
If you want to see it on a global scale, look at the oceans. It has been "steady" there, though not slow, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ocean-heat/
And most of the heat (90%) has gone into the ocean. Now the oceans are warm, so we will see it on land.
I'm expecting rapid acceleration over the next 10 years, not slow, and certainly not steady.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/01/extreme-...
Too short a time scale and too localised geographically to count as "average". First time I visited the USA, I spent Christmas in CA, which was several degrees warmer than normal for the season, people were surfing[0]; at the same time, the east coast of the US was several degrees colder than normal for the season, it was snowing[0].
> If you want to see it on a global scale, look at the oceans. It has been "steady" there, though not slow, https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ocean-heat/
Zettajoules without context is big and scary. But the Earth is an astronomical body and astronomical numbers are always big.
588 joules per square millimetre, sounds even scarier! But that doesn't tell me the depth over which the heat was added.
But fortunately I don't need to guess at that, as the temperature is easier to measure directly: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
Using that heating figure and that energy figure, that's like heating a water planet by 0.85 C to a depth of about 370 m.
[0] For all I know both these things happen every year at Christmas in the US, but it still felt very bizarre to me as an outsider, and that year did have opposite temperature anomalies on the east and west coasts.
I just found this youtube channel talking about the droughts in China, and the story is remarkable. Low water levels means hydroelectric dams are shutting off, rolling blackouts during a massive heat wave. Feels like a story out of California, but this is happening all over China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_5CAMs_wkc
There's the flooding in Bangladesh:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/22/bangladesh-floods-e...
Heat waves in Europe are leading to thousands of excess deaths:
https://www.politico.eu/article/excess-death-surged-heat-wav...
Global average temperature anomaly is now 0.85 C above pre-industrial levels.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
I noticed someone from the UK saying they had a heat wave in the 1970's, but then someone shared a plot of global temperature anomaly from back then and today. That summer there was a bit of an increase in the UK from that heat wave, but the rest of the world was more normal. Today, the increase is happening all over the world at once.
I desperately hope that people get the message. It seems that maybe the tide is turning, but I know it is already so late, I hope we can act fast before we make things so much worse.
We've just had over 40 °C here – nearly 5 °C more, half a century later.
40 °C and 36 °C feel quite different.
A few comments (which probably need to be emailed to them and not just put here):
1. The main page map absolutely NEEDS a legend.
2. I wonder if any sort of drought map should also include the other half of the spectrum. Are are blank regions normal? Exceptionally wet? Flooding?
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
> Who draws the map?
> Several authors from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA create the map. They take turns, usually two weeks at a time.
> How do they figure out where and how bad drought is?
> This is what makes the U.S. Drought Monitor unique. It is not a statistical model, although numeric inputs are many: [...]
12 months seems to be the max change range and it only goes back to July 2004, but cool to see!
Now take a look at the South East, which is a "red" strong hold (maybe Georgia will change soon in upcoming elections). Yet the South East is mostly showing as not drought conditions.
So I don't see where political barriers are coming from. Even looking at the state level. Sure, in aggregate, California is "blue." But Utah and Texas are "red." Yet they all have some elevated to serious drought conditions according to the map.
There are far more voters who are residents than there are farmers. When things get desperate those farmers’ water rights in the CA constitution will get amended in a heartbeat.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq0995
Climate change is increasing the risk of a California megaflood