The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows a wide area of the Eastern United States has bumped up to a worse drought classification this week. The change map below shows all the places where the drought classification has gotten worse. Many places in the Southeast are included in that. Only a couple of areas in the Florida Peninsula improved their drought condition due to recent rains from a front stalled across the area. This expansion was due to warmer than usual temperatures coupled with an almost complete lack of rain in many places. This is a concern to farmers who are near or at harvest, since rain is needed to finish the crop and provide suitable conditions for harvest, especially peanut farmers who need soil with some moisture in it to successfully invert their plants without losing too many peanuts. Other farmers like soybean, cotton, and pecan growers still need rain to fill pods and nuts, especially dryland farmers who do not have access to irrigation. You can se the current drought map at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx. Note that Puerto Rico saw very slight improvements in the coverage of abnormally dry conditions but the US Virgin Islands are now showing as abnormally dry.
