US drought worsens after weeks of improvement

Nov 21, 6:46 PM EST -

ST. LOUIS (AP) — The worst U.S. drought in decades has deep­ened again after more than a month of encour­ag­ing reports of slowly improv­ing con­di­tions, a drought-tracking con­sor­tium said Wednes­day, as sci­en­tists strug­gled for an expla­na­tion other than a sim­ple lack of rain.

While more than half of the con­ti­nen­tal U.S. has been in a drought since sum­mer, rain storms had appeared to be eas­ing the sit­u­a­tion week by week since late Sep­tem­ber. But that promis­ing run ended with Wednesday’s weekly U.S. Drought Mon­i­tor report, which showed increases in the por­tion of the coun­try in drought and the sever­ity of it.

The report showed that 60.1 per­cent of the lower 48 states were in some form of drought as of Tues­day, up from 58.8 per­cent the pre­vi­ous week. The amount of land in extreme or excep­tional drought — the two worst clas­si­fi­ca­tions — increased from 18.3 per­cent to 19.04 percent.

The Drought Monitor’s map tells the story, with dark red blotches cov­er­ing the cen­ter of the nation and por­tions of Texas and the South­east as an indi­ca­tion of where con­di­tions are the most intense. Those areas are sur­rounded by oth­ers in lesser stages of drought, with only the North­west, Florida and a nar­row band from New Eng­land south to Mis­sis­sippi escaping.

A fed­eral mete­o­rol­o­gist cau­tioned that Wednesday’s num­bers shouldn’t be alarm­ing, say­ing that while drought usu­ally sub­sides head­ing into win­ter, the Drought Mon­i­tor report merely reflects a week with­out rain in a large chunk of the country.

“The places that are get­ting pre­cip­i­ta­tion, like the Pacific North­west, are not in drought, while areas that need the rain­fall to end the drought aren’t get­ting it,” added Richard Heim, a mete­o­rol­o­gist with the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Administration’s National Cli­matic Data Cen­ter. “I would expect the drought area to expand again” by next week since lit­tle rain is fore­cast in the Mid­west in com­ing days.

He said there was no clear, sci­en­tific expla­na­tion for why the drought was lin­ger­ing or esti­mate for how long it would last.

“What’s dri­ving the weather? It’s kind of a car with no one at the steer­ing wheel,” Heim said. “None of the atmos­pheric indi­ca­tors are really strong. A lot of them are tick­ling around the edges and fight­ing about who wants to be king of the hill, but none of them are dominant.”

The biggest area of excep­tional drought, the most severe of the five cat­e­gories listed by the Drought Mon­i­tor, cen­ters over the Great Plains. Vir­tu­ally all of Nebraska is in a deep drought, with more than three-fourths in the worst stage. But Nebraska, along with the Dako­tas to the north, could still see things get worse “in the near future,” the USDA’s Eric Lue­be­husen wrote in Wednesday’s update.

The drought also has been inten­si­fy­ing in Kansas, the top U.S. pro­ducer of win­ter wheat. It also is entirely cov­ered by drought, and the area in the worst stage rose nearly 4 per­cent­age points to 34.5 per­cent as of Tues­day. Much of that increase was in south­ern Kansas, where rain­fall has been 25 per­cent of nor­mal over the past half year.

After a sum­mer in which farm­ers watched help­less as their corn dried up in the heat and their soy­beans became stunted, many are now wor­ry­ing about their win­ter wheat.

It has come up at a rate on par with non-drought years, but the qual­ity of the drop doesn’t look good, accord­ing to the USDA. Nearly one-quarter of the win­ter wheat that ger­mi­nated is in poor or very poor con­di­tion, an increase of 2 per­cent­age points from the pre­vi­ous week and 9 per­cent­age points worse than the same time in 2011. Forty-two per­cent of the plant­i­ngs are described as in fair shape, the same as last week.

Farm­ers who might nor­mally irri­gate in such cir­cum­stances worry about low water lev­els in the rivers and reser­voirs they use, and many are hop­ing for snow to ease the sit­u­a­tion. But it would take a lot. About 20 inches of snow equals just an inch of actual water, and many areas have rain deficits of a foot or more.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Nov 22 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.