Drought

  • The latest Drought Monitor, released this morning, show that abnormally dry (D0) conditions have expanded in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina in the past week. This was expected due to the lack of big rain-makers and is likely to continue to expand over the next few weeks under our current La Nina conditions. Rain…

    Posted in:
  • Scientists who study western wildfires have discovered that multi-year droughts and wet periods can have bad impacts on the forests’ ability to renew themselves after a fire. Drought years were particularly hard on the forests’ ability to grow new seedlings. You can read more at Physics Today here.

    Posted in: , ,
  • The latest Drought Monitor, released today, shows that there has been a slight increase in abnormally dry (D0) conditions in the Southeast. The biggest increase was in Alabama, where several pockets of D0 have appeared. Other states had lower increases. There will be some rain this coming week, but not a lot, so things may…

    Posted in: ,
  • This week’s Drought Monitor shows a slight decrease in abnormally dry conditions in Alabama and Georgia and no change in South Carolina, Florida and Puerto Rico. There continues to be no drought in the region. I don’t foresee any big changes in next week’s map, either.

    Posted in:
  • At my Flash Drought conference this week, one of the tools mentioned that I had not seen in a while was a map of short-term dry conditions that covers the US and provides a detailed spatial look at the variability of those conditions. It is the QuickDRI map that is available at https://quickdri.unl.edu/. In addition…

    Posted in: , ,
  • I’m attending a virtual conference on flash drought this week, and one of the things we have discussed so far is the difficulty in identifying where drought conditions are occurring, especially when they are just beginning to be felt. The current network of weather stations, even when supplemented with entries in the Drought Impact Reporter…

    Posted in: , ,
  • This week’s Drought Monitor map shows that nearly half of Georgia is now covered by abnormally dry (D0) conditions, while D0 conditions expanded slightly in South Carolina and were reintroduced into Alabama. Overall the areal coverage across the Southeast almost tripled in size. It’s not clear how long this will last, however, since we expect…

    Posted in: