US forecast: Hot, dry weather to linger into fall

WASHINGTON (AP) — The unusu­ally hot dry weather that has gripped the nation will not let up its stran­gle­hold over the next few months, fed­eral weather fore­cast­ers said Thursday.

And that means the heartland’s “flash drought” will linger at least until around Hal­loween and even spread a bit far­ther north and east.

The National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Administration’s out­look for August through Octo­ber shows that nearly every state likely will have hot­ter than nor­mal tem­per­a­tures. Much of the Mid­west is likely to be drier than nor­mal, too.

“It cer­tainly is grim news for us in Illi­nois and other parts of the Mid­west,” said Illi­nois state cli­ma­tol­o­gist Jim Angel. “I kind of have given up hope for short-term relief.”

New fig­ures released Thurs­day show that the per­cent­age of the coun­try now suf­fer­ing from drought edged up from nearly 51 per­cent last week to more than 53 per­cent this week; the chunk of the coun­try expe­ri­enc­ing severe drought or worse rose in one week from 31 per­cent to 35 per­cent. Experts call it a flash drought because it devel­oped in a mat­ter of months, not mul­ti­ple seasons.

“It’s really unpleas­ant,” said drought spe­cial­ist Kelly Helm Smith at the National Drought Mit­i­ga­tion Cen­ter in Nebraska. She said relief “is not on the radar that I’m aware of.”

For the Mid­west, fore­cast­ers don’t see any improve­ment until at least past Octo­ber. In fact, if the weather phe­nom­e­non El Nino forms as pre­dicted, that means even more dry weather next win­ter for the Mid­west and North, said sea­sonal fore­caster Dan Collins of NOAA’s Cli­mate Pre­dic­tion Cen­ter in Maryland.

NOAA’s fore­cast for just the month of August indi­cates a high prob­a­bil­ity for lit­tle rain for all or parts of 15 states that are the epi­cen­ter of the drought. That region encom­passes Illi­nois, Indi­ana, Mis­souri and Iowa and the states gen­er­ally sur­round­ing them.

All told, 42 states or parts of them have been hit by the drought. A NOAA map shows it stretches from Cal­i­for­nia east to Ohio and from Texas north to Min­nesota. Tiny pock­ets of drought also dot the East, includ­ing much of Geor­gia and South Carolina.

The fore­cast for the next three months would push the drought far­ther north into Min­nesota, North Dakota and Michi­gan, and far­ther east into Penn­syl­va­nia, New York and West Vir­ginia. But in the South­west, espe­cially Ari­zona and New Mex­ico, and to a lesser degree Col­orado and Utah, the drought will ease a bit. And the east­ern drought pock­ets are also likely to improve a bit.

NOAA is also fore­cast­ing more triple-digit hot weather for sev­eral days start­ing Sat­ur­day for much of the Mid­west from Kansas and Nebraska to Indi­ana and Michi­gan, with tem­per­a­tures about 12 degrees hot­ter than nor­mal. And that will make the drought even worse, fore­cast­ers say.

One of the main prob­lems is the heat and lack of mois­ture are in a feed­back loop. The ground is so dry that there’s not enough mois­ture in the soil to evap­o­rate into the atmos­phere to cause rain­fall. And that means hot­ter, drier air.

Illi­nois’ Angel said the best chance for sig­nif­i­cant rain is going to come from the rem­nants of trop­i­cal storms or hur­ri­canes that push into the Mid­west, some­thing that doesn’t hap­pen often.

“That’s how des­per­ate we are,” Angel said.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Jul 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.