Drought
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This morning’s Drought Monitor shows a reduction in drought in the panhandle of Florida as well as southern Georgia. Dry conditions were removed from the Georgia coast as well due to plenty of rain. However, extreme drought expanded in northwest South Carolina due to lack of rain there. The latest Drought Outlook, also released today,…
Posted in: Drought -
According to Nova Next on PBS, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have analyzed soil moisture and snowpack data in the months leading up to the drought and have discovered that they could have been used to make a much earlier drought prediction. If the model can be applied to similar droughts…
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The Washington Post reported this week that in spite of the giant sequoias appearing to be almost indestructible, they are finding many trees are dying from the prolonged drought that has plagued California that past few years. If it is too dry, tiny bubbles form in the tree sap, forming what are like embolisms in…
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The welcome rain in the past week helped reduce the worst drought in the Southeast, although the overall area of dry conditions did not change. Just like the drought status is slow to worsen when we are going into a drought, the Drought Monitor authors remove drought slowly until it is clear that we have…
Posted in: Drought -
The web site Adventures in Mapping shows a new drought map for the Southeast which captures the complexity of the current (fortunately waning) drought in our region using colored dots to represent drought intensity and frequency. You can read more about it and find a link to explain how they made the map at https://adventuresinmapping.com/2016/12/06/six-months-of-drought-in-the-american-southeast/.
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The WunderBlog posted a story yesterday describing the large number of record fall temperatures for cities across the US this year. A number of them are in the Southeast, particularly in the areas most affected by drought. You can read it here.
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The rampant wildfires that have been affecting the Southeast over the last month have caused a lot of heartache. Certainly some of the blame for the wildfires can be put on the exceptional drought that is occurring over the region (which may in turn be partly linked to the weak La Niña occurring now), and…