Drought

  • The USDM expanded its website capabilities in late June with the addition of county-level statistics on drought to their maps. When you go to their current map at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap.aspx and click down through region to state map and then click on your county, you will see a table of drought statistics for that county farther…

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  • The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows a patchwork of improvements and degradations across the region depending on whether an area got hit or missed by the spotty rains. Overall, the percent of the region affected by drought had only minor changes. You can see the change map at https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/ChangeMaps.aspx. Alabama improved overall but…

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  • The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, shows a big expansion in the areas of moderate (D1) and severe (D2) drought along with increases in abnormally dry conditions (D0). Even so, I think they missed some areas that should really be in drought and am working to let the authors know for next week. The…

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  • A few weeks ago, I wrote about how extension agents and agricultural producers in the Southeast can file reports on local conditions, including both droughts and floods. This hyper-local information is used by the weekly authors of the U. S. Drought Monitor to draw updated maps of drought conditions across the country. I took a…

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  • The latest Drought Monitor was released today, and it shows that across the Southeast, abnormally dry (D0) and moderate (D1) drought expanded due to the light rainfall and high temperatures that were experienced under a strong dome of high pressure. For agricultural producers, the hot and dry conditions could not come at a worse time…

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  • As you might expect, some of our region has experienced an increase in abnormally dry conditions in the latest Drought Monitor, released this morning. While severe drought has not changed or slightly decreased (in NC), other areas have seen abnormally dry (D0) conditions expand under the heat and lack of rainfall. In Virginia, Florida, and…

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  • I am not a fan of spicy food but I know some of you are. Here is a consequence of the California drought that you might not have seen–a shortage of the spicy Sriracha hot sauce that many people use in Asian cooking due to the failure of the red chile pepper crop in California…

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