The map looks to be pretty accurate if I consider my own location except that I should be in the Exceptional Drought instead of Extreme Drought category but recognizing that it is highly smoothed and can't show all the bumps, like my place, I can say it is pretty close.
I have tracked and measured rainfall at my place for more than 20 years. So far this year we are still almost 2" (51 mm) below the lowest YTD rainfall total for this date in 20 years. In addition, we are almost 11" (279 mm) below the average YTD rainfall total for this date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for September 4 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.8" (604 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for September 4 - 13" (330 mm)
That's better off than we were 2 weeks ago though. The temperature had been >100F (>37.8C) for weeks and everything had dried out including established trees. My local rainfall totals showed almost 16" (406 mm) below the average YTD rainfall for the date during the last 20 years and more than 7.4" (188 mm) under the lowest YTD rainfall total for that date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for August 22 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.1" (587 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for August 22 - 7.4" (188 mm)
The lowest YTD totals before this year are from 2011.
With temperatures ranging from 85F to 93F (29.4-33.9*C) since the first storm front came through it has been a huge contrast. I am letting everything that will still grow go to seed now. Migratory birds always stop by during the coldest days to eat the berries on the trees and perennials I have planted. Two weeks ago the plants were dormant and appeared dead. They have bloomed and it appears that I may have some set fruit before autumn shuts it all down in a few weeks.
My data point is highly exaggerated. The reservoirs here are high, we're on a freshwater river, and no one is talking about drought here - and yet it says Severe drought.
I also question the selection of "abnormally dry" as the lowest level. Also, why aren't "abnormally wet" regions shown? ....and what about different colors in the same watershed? Lower areas of a watershed shouldn't be dryer than the highlands.
I wonder what the rainfall cut-offs for the drought level designations are and how much smoothing occurs. I also wonder about the grid used - relatively sparse or regularized and evenly sampled? Is there any weighting applied to specific data sources? It's great that they produce this graphic. It makes me want to find out more about the inputs to the display since those will drive the quality of the output.
"Abnormally wet" would also be an indication of climate change. As would an increasing frequency of extreme precipitation events. Both of which are occurring in some areas.
You're welcome. When I started typing all those numbers it occurred to me that the story would be harder to convey to a large part of HN audience without the conversions. I wanted all the people who read the post to be able to relate to the information.
We have land near there. While it did rain this year and fill the tanks (man-made ponds the cows drink from, for coastal folks reading along), we lost most of our topsoil. I've never seen the mesquite / cedar trees and other plants so dead.
We have a field for sunflowers that we rent out to dove hunters. The sunflowers are under a foot tall this year (which is unprecedented) so we can't rent it out.
I guess the unprecedented wildfires this year also missed you.
Tanks are low all over this area. I went by the lake over here the other day because I read it was less than 60% full. There are boats in their docks 10' above the water which is more than 50' from the dock in some spots.
I understand the topsoil. I don't have much to lose. That's why I'm in the process of taking this place to full native grasses and plants. My topsoil is less than 6" deep over 80% of my place with solid fossiliferous limestone more than a foot thick under it. The limestone outcrops on all the slopes. I mow twice a year at most so that everything has ample opportunity to go to seed.
When the mesquite yellows and drops its leaves in the summer you know its hot. Mine lost 80% of its canopy this summer. The 5.5" of rain we've had in the last couple of weeks is regenerating the trees now though. I have some I've planted nearly 20 years ago that are still under 10' tall. My elms were brick red last week but have now started to drop the dead leaves and sprout new growth. That's a good thing since more than half my trees looked dead. I lost most of my live oaks to oak wilt so I can't afford to lose more of them to drought.
I am surrounded by cedar, live oak, and elms with hackberry, bois d'arc, and hercules club too. There's lots of spots for birds here and they still hunt them on the land behind me, deer too. My spot was farmed for a long time and after I bought it I have been killing off everything non-native. My main focus now is on stopping the bermuda grass. It's a slow slog. It took me nearly 10 years to get rid of the Johnson grass but I finally dug all that shit out and clipped the seedheads so now I'm finding less than 10 new plants annually, all sprouting from old seed. I pick a grass or weed and concentrate on eliminating it every year. Restoration by hand is a slow process but the squirrels have returned, crows visit every day, roadrunners nest in the privet thickets, there's a fox and a bobcat that meander through pretty regularly too. It's in much better shape overall.
Did the sunflowers not set seed at all or are they just stunted? Even my lantana was dead up till the rain and now it has all sprouted and is trying to set flowers like the sage. The winter birds depend on the lantana berries for food on the coldest days. I was pretty happy to see that pop up.
Good luck to you with your place! We're still way behind normal but it all came together just in time to give it all a chance around here. Maybe mother nature is just stringing me along.
I want to applaud your idealism and hard work on building this place but am filled with dread that a year such as 2022 will just be the new normal and extremes will be getting worse at least for the next 30 years.
What gives you hope that it won't just all turn to a desert?
I’m not optimistic (due to climate change, I think the entire US southwest is basically screwed). However, we noticed that people put these in 100+ years ago. They’ve failed due to lack of maintenance, but the place used to look like the “after” pictures, and currently looks like the “before” pictures:
I have a swale on my place from the days when it was farmed. When we bought it they were growing black-eyes, garlic, corn, and various fruits. I think digging bunds like those in photos would be painful here since the soil is very shallow. To get a transplanted tree to grow here I have to dig through two rock ledges that are each about one foot thick (1/3 meter). The rocky clay between them is also only easily dug in the wet part of the year since the clay becomes very hard when it dries so that I need to use a bullprick bar to punch through all the rock. I drill fence posts since there isn't enough dirt to hammer one of those t-posts deep enough to be stable.
I wish I had the soil they have there but farming this land resulted in deflation (soil loss to high wind events) that you can measure by looking at elevation changes along the fence lines and the farmed/unfarmed areas. Like the people in the story, to start the restoration I let my place lay idle for more than a year with no mowing so that all the grasses could set seed multiple times. That helped me reestablish native grasses.
I limit mowing to twice annually now because mowing tends to enable spread of invasive or non-native grasses. Even then I mow in a pattern, starting with areas that I have mostly restored and finishing on the areas that still need some work so that any seeds that drop off of the equipment tend to be native seeds redistributed into areas where I am fighting non-natives. I let the seeds piggyback. It's a process.
I understand what you're feeling. I agree that this year is probably just a step on the steady climb up to a warmer, drier climate for this region. I think in the long-term that we will see wide-spread desertification across large parts of north and northwest Texas. Conservation efforts are lagging changes we already see in climatic conditions, and water usage in the region is still not low enough to be sustainable. Land use practices need to be reevaluated to slow the process.
The long term temperature trend is not favorable for this region. We are lucky though that this year is the third La Nina year (warmer and drier overall in this region) and since it is unusual to see that many consecutive La Ninas, we are due for a reversal to El Nino which tends to be milder and wetter. My only task is to keep as many things healthy as possible so that they can benefit from the more favorable growing conditions.
My own records here show the cyclic variability and demonstrate that the average rainfall should be plenty to support the native plants that I am trying to maintain. In the 20 years that I have been keeping detailed records annual rainfall has varied across a wide range from 19.21" (488 mm) to 68.33" (1736 mm). The average total is 34.37" (873 mm). We are 2/3 of the way through the year and I have accumulated roughly 2/3 of volume from our lowest ever year (2005). It will be interesting to see whether autumn rains push me past that low number.
I'm a geoscientist by training so there is already the knowledge that change is inevitable, but that it usually happens on much longer time scales. I'm fighting a delaying action here. It can work but things will need help so I capture rainwater for dry times since my only water out here comes from rain and from our water well and I don't want to use well water to water lawns or trees. That is why I focus on native plants and trees that are adapted to regional climatic variability.
I'll continue working to keep my place vibrant with native plants and grasses so that maybe in the long term it can be an oasis in the desert for wildlife moving through the area instead of just a great spot for another convenience store for all the people that are leaving the big city and heading out this way.
Looks like windy.com is showing short-term trends, perhaps driven by things like “how long since it last rained”, etc. Michigan is showing severe drought, and then you set the date to the 12th and it all clears to normal (there’s rain in the forecast around then.)
It’s a lot different than the long term trends driven by total annual precipitation, snowpack, etc.
I’ve found it to be pretty accurate to not drive into potential tornadoes as it uses pretty up to date data which lets me track storm paths.
The difference between “that looks really bad” and “ that looks really bad but will be moved on by the time I get there” is very helpful. Plus being able to text a screenshot of me about to drive into a major storm cell to the owner of my truck is priceless.
Nice, my neck of the woods is absolutely parched :D. Some rain predicted this week though. I heard France was really bad but it doesn't look too bad in comparison.
It’s frankly appalling, but people are easy to manipulate with false promises of nearly free water efficiency and paint desalination as an expensive waste.
LA county water districts are further busy cleaning recycled water enough to pump as potable, despite a pretty bad track record of keeping that water actually clean [1]. All the while saying residents are too incompetent to have access to normal recycled water at properly for irrigation because “someone will mess up and interconnect with potable”. Many engineers have pointed out that it’s a solved problem, and that backflow prevention devices are a thing and will prevent such issues at individual property meters.
>LA county water districts are further busy cleaning recycled water enough to pump as potable,
San Diego started doing this decades ago, and it has worked out all right. "Toilet to tap," was the slogan the detractors came up with, and it stuck. My concern for LA would be industrial waste water in their waste streams.
It's frankly appalling that the agriculture lobby has made people believe that California is anywhere near needing desalination or even frankly grey water for urban use.
California residents use a very small amount of California's water, most is Ag, which is exported to the rest of the world. [0]
So the idea that California is somehow shooting themselves in the foot (rather than refusing to further subsidize the Ag. industry which has done insane damage to the state's ecology) is severely misinformed.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-d...
"But if all the savings from water rationing amounted to 20% of our residential water use, then that equals about 0.5 MAF, which is about 10% of the water used to irrigate alfalfa. The California alfalfa industry makes a total of $860 million worth of alfalfa hay per year. So if you calculate it out, a California resident who wants to spend her fair share of money to solve the water crisis without worrying about cutting back could do it by paying the alfalfa industry $2 to not grow $2 worth of alfalfa, thus saving as much water as if she very carefully rationed her own use."
I had been saying for years that proper market pricing for water should solve this. However, it was called out in a previous discussion of this topic that farmers don't get their water out of a faucet. They typically will get it out of wells or rivers that run through their properties. Addressing this would apparently require reworking water rights that have been in place for a long time.
Assuming we could solve the issues around wells (that now are frequently are deep enough to tap into the aquifer) that solution would also likely cause massive and probably violent resistance. Now one might argue that the situation will inevitably cause massive change and cause a lot of pain. The political will to do anything active that causes such uproar is totally missing though. I think an apt comparison is a version of the trolly problem where you do nothing and kill 5 people or you move the lever, kill only 1 person, but also open yourself up to massive hatred and potentially a civil-war-like situation because you took an active measure.
This can be said about anything, but what matters is whether its is better to do something else to provide the same support.
California only produces 3% of the country's hay. We could just grow a bit more elsewhere to compensate. Ending alfalfa in California wouldn't be a big deal. It's an extremely low value crop.
Meanwhile, to grow this tiny amount of alfalfa we spend more than double all household water use in the entire state. Including swimming pools, toilets, showers, everything.
If that alfalfa is really that cheap and easily shipped, it doesn't seem to make economic sense to produce it there, and if there was a real water market, it seems it would not be. So, producing cow feed in calfornia seems, at least from those 2 articles to not only be heavily subsidised by a poorly designed system of legacy water rights, but also completely unsustainable.
That is... get the water priced correctly, and let the market sort out ratio of cow alfalfa production to other water priorities...
Look at a crop like lentils though. They require relatively little water, allow for farming practices which mitigate soil erosion and the need for tilling, are not nutrient-intensive, and they yield an excellent food. Alfalfa seems insane to grow beside such a great crop like lentils.
The only reason we don’t, as far as I can see, is that the demand isn’t there.
That’s partially the point I intended but failed to make. We can grow lentils easily, then just eat them! It’s insanely efficient.
Feeding crops to cows is bizarrely wasteful when you look at the big picture. Especially once you look at the subsidies that make meat affordable, the water usage we can no longer afford, the pathogens animal agriculture generates, etc. It seems completely untenable from my perspective. Which is strange to consider at times, because I was once a huge proponent of eating meat.
Dairy is significantly less resource intensive than meat (though still bad in its own right) since we don’t have to regrow a cow every time it is milked (whereas we do every time it’s slaughtered)
We should eat a lot less meat, particularly red meat, which is extremely wasteful and destructive to the environment compared to other sources of food.
The thing is, the less we take out of the environment, the more water is left for things like fish, birds, insects and so on. Desalination is not without environmental costs, but we are not considering all the externalities of diverting water from ecosystems either. Ag use is part of that water rights system that we need independence from. Desalination is one way for that independence. I’m sure there are other ways too.
That's a red herring. The biggest problem during a drought is for agriculture, and you can't afford to desalinate enough water to make agriculture work.
But what Ag. wants you to believe is that they should get the cheap water and those coastal elite cities should have to pay a premium for their desalinated water.
You mean the county with the largest(and still expanding) indirect potable reuse plant in the world?
Poseidon HB desalination was rejected for a variety of reasons: enormously risky in terms of finance and water reliability(located in a flood zone, for example), excessive costs, lack of committed buyers, environmental impact, etc.. The CCC uniformly rejected it for many of those reasons with the staff report also including the lack of mitigation steps Poseidon have yet to undertake for their Carlsbad plant.
Doheny desalination is still under consideration due to the use of slant wells, municipally owned, and the lack of aquifers in south county make it more viable as a means of water security.
I think there is some selection bias in maps like this because it has no data on above average rainfall. I know where I live we've had one of the rainiest summers ever but you won't see this on a map like this.
Scroll down to the graph, click "1895 - Present (Monthly)", and click the different levels of exceptional drought/exceptional wetness.
You can see that NH has been trending wetter for the last 100 years (as with all the northeast), more or less the opposite of the southwestern US. Large periods of exceptional wet have happened in my life, with fewer big droughts than ever. (Alas, we're in a drought right now.)
You can also see that California had some unusually wet periods in the 80's and 90's, which might have informed policy, but were simply an anomaly: https://www.drought.gov/states/california
The monitor seems problematic to me in all sorts of ways. As you say, there's no reference to above average rainfall.
Also, it should be base-lining on the median result, not the average result. California has always had a few very wet and many dry years so the monitor usually shows drought. This serves developers and farmers who don't want to admit California is dry place and you should do projects taking a lot of water.
And finally, the drought monitor measures dryness, not overall rainfall but it doesn't make this obvious. California's reservoirs are low but we have had fairly typical (median) rainfall for the last two years (and even had an usually humid spring and summer). The difference is increased heat increases evaporation and dryness and the map should make this distinction obvious.
It's better to go to the government agency site for the source data. They make it clear that the drought level is based on the availability of water compared to normal.
Strong same. While 1 swallow doesn't make a summer the combination of 1/3rd of Pakistan being underwater plus heatwaves in Europe and blackouts in China with all the other stuff does get concerning.
Maybe the 'establishment' causing scientists to only disclose the most conservative and defensible estimates misled us as to how fast and severe this thing would be.
I caught myself getting frustrated the supermarket was out of instant coffee the other day and realized I'm in no way mentally prepared for what's coming.
I think establishment science has talked about increased weather variability as a result of the slowing of the jetstream for a while. No one done a good job in saying "So a one degree increase overall can mean five or ten degrees increase hovering over a given area for weeks and that's devastating and deadly in many places, especially areas that have already pushed their ecology and infrastructure to the edge".
It used to be a „future concern“ in the past, but due to the nature of time moving forward (and humanity not doing anything of significance to addresses the issue) that future is now.
For me, yes and no at the same time. The average increase is slow, steady, and not too far from what I was expecting… but the geographic variation and the behaviour of the extremes is much stronger than I expected.
I'm not sure about that. This year is a significant uptick from 3 years ago where I live (central Europe).
I did notice a slow warming since 2006 (when I moved to my current location), but even 2 years ago there were only a few summer nights where you could comfortably sit outside after dark without a jacket.
It has been that warm every single night this summer.
> This year is a significant uptick from 3 years ago where I live
Too short a time scale and too localised geographically to count as "average". First time I visited the USA, I spent Christmas in CA, which was several degrees warmer than normal for the season, people were surfing[0]; at the same time, the east coast of the US was several degrees colder than normal for the season, it was snowing[0].
Using that heating figure and that energy figure, that's like heating a water planet by 0.85 C to a depth of about 370 m.
[0] For all I know both these things happen every year at Christmas in the US, but it still felt very bizarre to me as an outsider, and that year did have opposite temperature anomalies on the east and west coasts.
It's fascinating watching the extreme conditions going on all over the world. I live in California and we have of course been getting drought and wildfires for a long time now, but I am noticing too that this is happening in many places.
I just found this youtube channel talking about the droughts in China, and the story is remarkable. Low water levels means hydroelectric dams are shutting off, rolling blackouts during a massive heat wave. Feels like a story out of California, but this is happening all over China.
I noticed someone from the UK saying they had a heat wave in the 1970's, but then someone shared a plot of global temperature anomaly from back then and today. That summer there was a bit of an increase in the UK from that heat wave, but the rest of the world was more normal. Today, the increase is happening all over the world at once.
I desperately hope that people get the message. It seems that maybe the tide is turning, but I know it is already so late, I hope we can act fast before we make things so much worse.
I appear to be in the one state with zero drought impact. This may be why people jumped me when I said lawns weren't all that bad. I didn't realize the scale of impact.
Just because it rains a lot in the tropics doesnt mean there cant be a drought. Fresh water supplies are often in short supply on islands, especially ones where there are lots of people.
Curious that drought seems to respect political boundaries in many cases. Is that because political boundaries often respect geographic features? Or is reporting not uniform across those boundaries?
Yea, I don't get this comment. The places with the worst droughts according to the maps are often red areas. While California is overall "blue," it has more conservatives in the central parts of the state than probably the number of people in North Dakota and South Dakota combined. A lot of the more agricultural regions of California are heavily red.
Now take a look at the South East, which is a "red" strong hold (maybe Georgia will change soon in upcoming elections). Yet the South East is mostly showing as not drought conditions.
So I don't see where political barriers are coming from. Even looking at the state level. Sure, in aggregate, California is "blue." But Utah and Texas are "red." Yet they all have some elevated to serious drought conditions according to the map.
I think GP was talking about the boundaries of countries, states and counties (as in, a political map), rather than where voters live or which politicians states elected.
those comprise an adjoined geographical region of extreme desert, regardless of which band of professional politicians is in control at any current time.
Its interesting how you can see how the large storms that came thru Arizona and Texas between the 16th and the 30th reduced drought over so much of that area.
when does the water just run out? like is it possible say in 2 months or 14 months that there will be no water for millions of people? in particular in Southern California?
We’re not even close. Keep in mind the vast majority of water is still going to ag and industry. Residents are left fighting over like 15% of the total flow.
There are far more voters who are residents than there are farmers. When things get desperate those farmers’ water rights in the CA constitution will get amended in a heartbeat.
Still not quite 1930s dust bowl dry, but we're on the brink. Dangerous situation with no easy fixes either (other than telling California farmers they can't water)
I have tracked and measured rainfall at my place for more than 20 years. So far this year we are still almost 2" (51 mm) below the lowest YTD rainfall total for this date in 20 years. In addition, we are almost 11" (279 mm) below the average YTD rainfall total for this date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for September 4 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.8" (604 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for September 4 - 13" (330 mm)
That's better off than we were 2 weeks ago though. The temperature had been >100F (>37.8C) for weeks and everything had dried out including established trees. My local rainfall totals showed almost 16" (406 mm) below the average YTD rainfall for the date during the last 20 years and more than 7.4" (188 mm) under the lowest YTD rainfall total for that date in the last 20 years.
YTD Numbers from my worksheet for August 22 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.1" (587 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for August 22 - 7.4" (188 mm)
The lowest YTD totals before this year are from 2011.
With temperatures ranging from 85F to 93F (29.4-33.9*C) since the first storm front came through it has been a huge contrast. I am letting everything that will still grow go to seed now. Migratory birds always stop by during the coldest days to eat the berries on the trees and perennials I have planted. Two weeks ago the plants were dormant and appeared dead. They have bloomed and it appears that I may have some set fruit before autumn shuts it all down in a few weeks.