Agricultural News
Unexpected Rainfall Amounts Improve Oklahoma's Drought Map
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 14:51:17 CDT
Totally unexpected but deeply appreciated amounts of rainfall fell across some of the highly parched Oklahoma soils in recent days and helped alleviate some shades of drought. Especially pleasing was the reduction in coverage of extreme drought (D3) from 3.74 percent to 2.99 percent of the landmass.
Today there remains pockets of D3 in the Cimarron, Texas, Blaine and Dewey Counties.
Basically, everything south of I-44 is drought free this week except for far northeast Oklahoma where yellow shades of abnormally dry cover the region.
Overall, 39 percent of Oklahoma is drought free, an improvement from 33 percent last week.
Interestingly, one year ago at this time, more than 99.76 percent of the state was drought free. In fact, in April 95 percent of the state was drought free so the extreme dryness has been a fairly recent phenomenon for Oklahoma. The exception being Cimarron County where drought has been a constant companion dating to last October.
Nationwide, extreme drought has expanded in Colorado and now covers almost the entire southern half, leaching down into New Mexico and southwest Kansas.
Pockets of D3 are scattered throughout the Texas Panhandle, western Utah, northern California, and southwestern and north central Oregon.
There are also stretches of abnormally dry yellow patches showing up across the corn belt and up into the far northeastern regions of the country.
The 7-day precipitation forecast for Oklahoma does not look promising, however, last week's 7-day forecast didn't either and look what happened!
To view the 7-day forecast click here.
To view the Oklahoma drought map, click here.
To view the U.S. Drought Monitor map, click here.
The U.S. Drought Monitor Map is developed through a partnership between the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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