WASHINGTON: Drought in the contiguous US has reached record levels for this time of year, weather data shows. Meteorologists said it’s a bad sign for the upcoming wildfire season, food prices and western water issues.
More than 61 percent of the Lower 48 states is in moderate to exceptional drought — including 97 percent of the Southeast and two-thirds of the West — according to the US Drought Monitor. It’s the highest levels for this time of year since the drought monitor began in 2000.
Burning time for North American wildfires is going into overtime. Flames are lasting later into the night and starting earlier in the morning because human-caused climate change is extending the hotter and drier conditions that feed fires, a new study found.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s comprehensive Palmer Drought Severity Index not only hit its highest level for March since records started in 1895, but last month was the third-driest month recorded regardless of time of year. It trailed only the famed Dust Bowl months of July and August 1934.
Because of record heat, much of the West has had exceptionally low levels of snow in the first few months of the year, which is usually how the region stores water for the summer.
A different drought — connected to the jet stream keeping storms further north — has put the South from Texas all the way to the East Coast into a separate drought that just happens to coincide with what’s going on in the West, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought
Mitigation Center.
It would take 19 inches of rain in one month to break the drought in eastern Texas and more than a foot of rain to solve the deficit for most of the Southeast, NOAA calculated.
“Right now 61 percent of the country is in drought and that’s steadily been going up for the calendar year,” Fuchs said. “We just haven’t seen too many springs where this amount of the country has been in this kind of shape.”
Sticking out like a sore thumb is a highly technical but crucial measurement of “the sponginess” of the atmosphere — or how much moisture the hot, dry air is sucking up from the land it’s baking. It’s called vapor pressure deficit. It’s 77 percent above normal and more than 25 percent higher than the previous record for January through March in the West, said UCLA hydroclimatologist Park Williams.
Drought usually peaks in summer, not spring, and that’s what worries meteorologists.
“Fire tends to respond to heat and drought in an exponential manner,” Williams said. “For each degree of warming, you get a bigger bang in terms of fire than you got from the previous degree of warming.”
