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The Drought News We've Been Hoping For

Okiedawn OK Zone 7
10 years ago

Hooray! Finally, finally, finally, the CPC's Drought Outlook shows more green and green/brown stripes and much less of the solid brown that indicates drought will persist and intensify.

Are you excited to hear that?

Click on the link below to see the most positive info we've seen on the Drought Outlook for quite some time. To those of you in the OK panhandle where improvement is not forecast to occur at this time,you truly have my sympathy.

Even better than seeing that most of OK will improve, I love that the same holds true for many areas of the central USA....all the way up to the US-Canadian border.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:188533}}

Comments (4)

  • chickencoupe
    10 years ago

    Wooohoo!!

  • chickencoupe
    10 years ago

    Yessss! It's breaking up. Let's hope for some more rain. I notice most of us are not speculating on a mild summer at all but looking forward to another massive heat wave. Who knows? Maybe by fall I could be gardening in decent temps for the first time. It's probably safe to say the drought is minimal compared to U.S. history. The drought waves are decadal and this one is surely mild.

  • Okiedawn OK Zone 7
    Original Author
    10 years ago

    Actually, the drought in 2012 is one of the worst ones ever recorded in U. S. history. In a Weather Underground blog post earlier this year, Dr. Jeff Masters described 2012 as second only to one previous drought year in the 1930s. We have been able to mitigate its impact somewhat compared to, let's say, the drought decades of the 1930s and 1950s because we use a lot of no-till farming now, and because irrigation is more readily available.

    I'm going to link a graphic from a NY Times article about drought because it shows a drought footprint map for each year. When you look at it, you can see that there are very few years where drought has been as widespread as the 2012 drought. The drought of 2012 is especially notable because so many areas were in Extreme or Exceptional Drought which means not only was drought very widespread but it was very deep and prolonged.

    At the present time, drought is forecast to continue in 2013, although I sure hope the weather pattern changes and that doesn't happen. (Realistically, I think they are right that drought will continue, but I hope they are wrong.) What usually happens is we come back out of drought in spring and slip back into it in summer.

    I don't know what it has been like at anyone else's house in every year of the 2000s, but at our house we have been in drought for a meaningful portion of these years: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2005, 2003 and 2001. That's decadal drought right there. By contrast, in the 1990s we only had 2 or 3 years when drought was an issue. I lived in Texas then...not sure what it was like here in OK in the 1990s.

    What worries me is that drought is becoming more and more the norm. I wonder if we'll ever have a nice rainy decade like the 1960s or 1970s again. I was only a kid in those decades, but it seemed like it rained all the time. Looking at the drought footprint map, I can see that even those otherwise wet decades had a few drought years too.

    Drought often is decadal on a wide scale, but isn't always. Sometimes, local droughts won't even show up on the Drought Monitor because they cover a relatively small area. We had horrendous drought here at our house in 2003 but it doesn't even show up on the Drought Monitor, so I assume most of OK wasn't as dry as Love County was that year. We had under 19" of rainfall that year and our average rainfall is 38",

    I am so tired of the recurring droughts of the 2000s that I can barely stand to say the word. I want a nice, wet year where we worry and fret about flooding. I don't want flooding...but hope it is wet enough to stop just short of flooding.

    Here is a link that might be useful: Drought Footprint Graphic

  • scottokla
    10 years ago

    Attached is a graphic that shows the annual rainfall for the state going back to 1895. It appears the 80s and 90s spoiled us with virtually no widespread droughts here, and the last decade is more representative of the earlier decades.

    Scroll down about a third of the way.

    Here is a link that might be useful: statewide rainfall history

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