USA Today had an article this morning about the drought conditions facing most of the United States. But, let me direct you to phillyweather.net’s article earlier this week which is far better and, well, more local.
First off, let me say that if you are not reading phillyweather.net‘s daily forecast you are not getting the best forecast out there for the Delaware Vally. Also, with every forecast, one actually gets educated. Real good stuff. You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
Now back to the drought. USA Today points us to The Drought Monitor, but as phillyweather.net explains:
While the Drought Monitor is good, it doesn’t really tell you how serious the shorter-term or developing drought may be. For instance, much of Texas is in a long range, long-term drought, but abundant rains the last few months have wittled away most of East Texas. However, while the ground is saturated there and a ton of precip has fallen, they still fall into the “long term drought” category.
Instead phillyweather.net points us to the Objective Short Term Drought Indicator.
While the region has seen abundant rainfall in the last year to prevent it from going into real drought, you can clearly see from the map at the left, that much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are in pretty significant short-term drought conditions.
[snip]
All in all, you get the picture. While the Drought Monitor is good for long-term trends, you can clearly see that in the short term, the area is in a fairly significant drought type pattern and will need a good bit of rain to start recovering…something to keep an eye on as we get deeper into spring and, ultimately, summer.
Hopefully, we’ll get some rain soon and lots of it.