Posted on 05/14/2014 3:01:40 PM PDT by blam
Half Of The US Is In A Drought
Mike Carlowicz, NASA Earth Observatory
May 14, 2014
Drought - NASA Earth Observatory
U.S. Drought Monitor.
As of May 6, 2014, half of the United States was experiencing some level of drought. Nearly 15 percent of the nation was gripped by extreme to exceptional drought. For the Plains and the Southwest, it's a pattern that has been persistent for much of the past several years.
The map above was developed by the U.S. National Drought Monitor, a partnership of U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It depicts areas of drought in progressive shades of orange to red. It is based on measurements of climate, soil, and water conditions from more than 350 federal, state, and local observers around the country. (NASA also provides experimental measurements and models to the drought monitoring effort.)
In a May 6 summary, Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center wrote of the Plains States:
Kansas continues to set the edge of the intense drought that seems to be waking up and pushing rapidly north along with warmer temperatures...Soil moisture and groundwater levels are hurting well in front of the peak demand season, as the cumulative impacts of such an intense multi-year drought are already glaringly evident...The story is even bleaker in the southern Plains, where the heat and drought are even more pronounced and entrenched across western Oklahoma and much of Texas as well...Streamflow and groundwater levels are hurting, given the long duration and sustained intensity of this drought, which is now going on close to four years.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Judgement.
Obama should have enough money stashed away to rent Cheney’s weather machine.
B O H I C A
This is of concern to me. It’s one of the reasons that we are growing more of our own vegetables this year.
In other news, Kansas crops are not being destroyed by hail storms out of the rockies and pheasant and quail populations are expected to flourish........
We had quite a bit of rain in eastern Kansas the last couple of days. You may want to take us off the drought watch.
And the other half isn’t.
And yet here in California we are still building a high-speed rail system to provide “transportation” for our illegal alien farm worker population instead of building more water storage capacity. California does a big portion of feeding the nation, but it can’t do it without water. Still, we have Jerry the Fairy forging ahead on his toonerville trolley “legacy.”
Planting more than EVER in the veggie garden this season. Enjoying fresh asparagus these days. :)
It's been worse.
Parts of the area north of Houston had several inches of rain this week and we had 3 inches south of Houston. I would think that would change the drought ratings a bit for us, too.
see that darkest red part in TX, that me... we haven’t had any real rain in close to 4 years.....it’s almost beyond comprehension, we don’t even see clouds that look like they will rain anymore
my dad has farmed the same land for 70 years here and he has nothing to compare it to ...not even the drought in the 50s was close to this
the local paper said the driest 4 year period on record was 1908-1911 and we’re currently 8 inches less rain than that ....and much drier than the dustbowl 30s.....
people are at a breaking point and we just all shake our heads and pray ...we know one day it’s going to rain again ...and it may not stop for a long time ...but, man it’s tough right now ....it’s unbelievable
Texas has always been a very dry place, before we started building lakes and inventing AC, who’d want to live here besides us crazies?
How much of that drought is government created?
I don’t know how bad your drought was but in most places it will take more than a few inches to come out of the drought. Lakes, rivers and underwater aquifers have been depleted and need to be refilled.
The dry was what I disliked most about Texas. I love the rain and would be OK with rain pretty much every day.
Where I am from in western Kansas, the drought has been ongoing for 10 or 11 years. Just keeps getting worse. PFR!!!
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