The latest Drought Monitor, released on Thursday morning, shows that drought has expanded across most of the western part of our region due to heat and lack of rainfall. A small sliver of extreme (D3) drought was identified in northern Alabama and many areas of drought jumped up a category, while there were just a few small areas of improvement. The cutoff date for the map was on Tuesday when Hurricane Francine was still approaching the coast of Louisiana, so I expect there to be more improvement on next week’s map due to the rain from Francine.
