Drought Update: Not Good News

Right now, we are in between major holidays, but fully bellies remain as we just passed Thanksgiving. There are many things that all of us are thankful for this holiday season, but we are not 100% thankful for the recent weather pattern. Sure, its been great to go outside, but we need the rain as parts of the area continue to fall back into a moderate to severe drought.

As of the new Drought Monitor that came out today, about 95% of the viewing area is currently in a drought. Plus, a sliver from northern Grimes County to southern Lee County slid back to Severe Drought conditions. Due to a prolonged period of quiet weather with little if any rain to show for it, we continue to dig deeper and deeper into a problem we dont want to have.

One way to answer this is to look at rainfall by the numbers. Within the first 3 months of 2012, about half of our annual average of rain fell from the sky. At Easterwood Airport, an astounding 20.74" fell in a period from January to February. In contrast, over the past 3 month from September though November, a mere 5.90" was squeezed out. Also, since October 17th, we have only been able to manage a disappointing 0.87".

Unfortunately, this problem wont be fixed for a while.

From what I can glean at with our current and future weather not much rain is in the forecast through the middle of December. Yes, we will have a few minor showers sprinkled here and there, but no large scale storms are in the offing to wash us out.

A key reason has to do with the upper level pattern.

Not only is it easy to see that the lower 48 is fairly quiet, but note how the jet stream is well north of us. The jet stream has two main fundamentals.

1) Divide cold air from warm.

2) Steer large scale storms.

Dividing cold air from warm is very evident when you look at the temperatures bottled up in Canada.

Several locations in the Yukon Province as well as the Northwest Territory dropped below -40°F!!!! Yeah, its that cold up there.

However, since the jet stream is barely budging, not only will the cold air stay up there, any significant storm that crosses the country will stay well to our north. Until the jet stream changes it orientation and dips farther south, we will be left in the dust.

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