I know we just got a lot of rain this week, but that doesn’t mean that drought conditions are over.
The latest seasonal drought outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that for much of Texas and the rest of the Southwest, the drought is likely to “persist or intensify” over the next three months. Currently, 97 percent of the state is in drought conditions, with Texas’ water supply reservoirs only 65 percent full overall. And a late December briefing by NOAA on the climate notes that drought continues in over 61 percent of the country.
“During the upcoming three months, a much drier pattern is expected across the southwestern quadrant of the nation, limiting the prospects for further drought improvements during the wet season in California and Nevada,” NOAA says in its drought outlook.
State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon adds on.
2012 was a drought year. Following the driest 12 consecutive months on record and second driest calendar year on record, 2012 was running 0.14″ above normal through September. This wasn’t enough to end the drought statewide, but many parts of Texas, especially in its eastern half, drought became a distant memory and a distant problem. Elsewhere, reservoir levels continued to drop, but rain in most of the major metropolitan areas of the state made things seem much better.
Then, starting in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and eventually spreading to much of the rest of the state, the rainfall stopped. The final three months of 2012 were the third-driest October-December on record for Texas. Drought spread, and Galveston even had to impose water restrictions, although restrictions on outdoor watering aren’t much of a problem this time of year.
With the year ending up with below-normal precipitation, the combined two-year period 2011-2012 was the fourth-driest on record, beaten only by 1916-1917, 1955-1956, and 1909-1910.
Click over to see the pictures. We headed into January last year expecting a dry winter and were very pleasantly surprised to get an unusually large amount of rain over the next few months, enough to erase the drought in many places. We got lucky, in other words. We need to be lucky again, but more than that we need to be better prepared for when we’re not so lucky. Oh, and 2012 was really warm, too. It’d be nice to be better prepared for that, too.