From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln comes a news release about the 12 year old U.S. Drought Monitor dataset, proclaiming “record worst ever” as if this has some relevance in history. Sorry, I have to call BS on this. Take June 1934 for example:
Well over half of the USA then was in moderate to severe to extreme drought.NOAA wrote in 2002 describing the summer drought then:
The most extensive national drought coverage during the past 100 years (the period of instrumental record) occurred in July 1934 when 80 percent of the contiguous United States was in moderate to extreme drought.
Compare that to June 2012 where UNL claims 47 percent of the CONUS is experiencing “some level of drought”:
Color me unimpressed with the University of Nebraska’s PR fear mongering which can easily be dispelled in a few seconds of Internet search. Source: NCDC here. Now let’s see how many feckless reporters pick up this UNL press release from Eurekalert and run with it as “worst ever” without bothering to check history.
US Drought Monitor shows record-breaking expanse of drought across US
Nearly 47 percent of nation experiencing some level of drought, officials say
More of the United States is in moderate drought or worse than at any other time in the 12-year history of the U.S. Drought Monitor, officials from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said today.
Analysis of the latest drought monitor data revealed that 46.84 percent of the nation’s land area is in various stages of drought, up from 42.8 percent a week ago. Previous records were 45.87 percent in drought on Aug. 26, 2003, and 45.64 percent on Sept. 10, 2002.
Looking only at the 48 contiguous states, 55.96 percent of the country’s land area is in moderate drought or worse – also the highest percentage on record in that regard, officials said. The previous highs had been 54.79 percent on Aug. 26, 2003, and 54.63 percent on Sept. 10, 2002.
“The recent heat and dryness is catching up with us on a national scale,” said Michael J. Hayes, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at UNL. “Now, we have a larger section of the country in these lesser categories of drought than we’ve previously experienced in the history of the Drought Monitor.”
The monitor uses a ranking system that begins at D0 (abnormal dryness) and moves through D1 (moderate drought), D2 (severe drought), D3 (extreme drought) and D4 (exceptional drought).
Moderate drought’s telltale signs are some damage to crops and pastures, with streams, reservoirs or wells getting low. At the other end of the scale, exceptional drought includes widespread crop and pasture losses, as well as shortages of water in reservoirs, streams and wells, creating water emergencies. So far, just 8.64 percent of the country is in either extreme or exceptional drought.
“During 2002 and 2003, there were several very significant droughts taking place that had a much greater areal coverage of the more severe and extreme drought categories,” Hayes said. “Right now we are seeing pockets of more severe drought, but it is spread out over different parts of the country.
“It’s early in the season, though. The potential development is something we will be watching.”
The U.S. Drought Monitor is a joint endeavor by the National Drought Mitigation Center at UNL, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and drought observers across the country.
To examine the monitor’s current and archived national, regional and state-by-state drought maps and conditions, go to http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu.
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Scheduling my car wash now! What a great way to begin after that first remark. I love it. Still laughing.
Here in the UK we’ve had the worst drought ever and the most rain, go figure!
Those cherries look ripe for picking though…
The past dozen years have seen the 12 honest summers, and the 11 coldest winters of this millennium. The 11 strongest hurricane & tornado seasons of this millennium have all occurred in the past 12 years. We’re just doomed, abandon all hope.
Many have commented on how it doesn’t look like a drought in their area of the US you should come to the UK to see a proper drought ! It is raining again this morning and the grass in the garden is growing tall and I can’t get out to cut it. The only patch of dry for our cat to sit in is in a tray of compost in the greenhouse or the log pile under the tree house.
James Bull
There’s a big dam near here.
Every year, no matter the rainfall, they let a large amount of water go for fear of floods.
A few months later, we have a drought.
This is known, of course, as “bad luck.”
They can never seem to manage to keep near “high” lake levels even after a wet spring, not for many years now.
What does the worst (weather) drought in 12 years tell me about climate which is at least 30 years? What does it tell me about US drought over the past 1,000 years? What did the ‘permanent’ drought of Australia tell me about the following Biblical floods?
Nothing! It’s just the weather and not the climate.
Monsoon and Megadrought variability in climate history.
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/monsoons-megadroughts
“Steve says:
July 5, 2012 at 4:45 pm
We still need rain. Badly.”
Please, have some of ours.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2169586/UK-weather-Severe-flood-warning-issued-forecasters-say-months-rain-fall-24-hours.html
@max
Brilliant!
beesa
I was going to offer the US some of our rain – falling steadily again this morning on us (half way between London and Cambridge). But of course you are right, we are still under water-use restrictions despite the wettest April and June on record (and obviously as a result the wettest AMJ sequence – May was a bit worse than average). To be fair to our local water company, we are one of the regions that relies most on ground water rather than surface storage, and that takes a lot longer to recharge, especially in spring and summer when a lot is intercepted for plant growth.
An irony that should appeal to the WUWT readership – I have seen one person flouting the ban on hosepipe use. They were using it to clear debris from their drive and garden caused by minor flooding.
Imagine if the following were to occur today. Warmist would come out of the woodwork and blame ‘climate change’ caused by C02. This is just one of the many, many bitter droughts in recorded history.
Great Drought of 1876-78 – up to 30 million people killed in India, China, and Indonesia
http://news.discovery.com/earth/tracking-the-asian-monsoon.html
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2515990?uid=3738096&uid=2&uid=4&sid=00000000000000
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5977/486.short
http://www.ranker.com/list/the-worst-droughts-and-famines-in-history/drake-bird
The 2012 drought map has some suspicious looking reporting on it. Look around Florida/Georgia where and extreme wet border touches an extreme dry border. Or up by northeast Virginia with a tiny patch of extreme drought surrounded by normal conditions.
I would bet dollars against donuts that the two regions I pointed out have some fraud going on in order to get relief money or aid of some sort. Nature doesn’t have political borders like that map does nor stark instant transitions between extremes.
Given the 70 or so years of AMO since 1934, I decided that I would Google drought of 1864 as an experiment. Yep, there was one: http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/up_and_down_california/5-1.html at least in CA. Obviously, the infrastructure was not sufficiently developed to get the data to compare that one with the Dust Bowl or the present ENSO/AMO event, but to one bit of accuracy, you get a severe drought every ~70 years.
“We still need rain. Badly.
[Moderator’s Suggestion: Schedule a car wash, a concert or an outdoor water-color exhibit. -REP]
”
You Yankee Doodles should learn to play Cricket.. We had a drought here, some government flunky mentioned the drought at the start of the Cricket Season, it hasn’t stopped raining since……
People act like they have alzheimers–everything is surprising. Look, its hot outside! Unprecedented! Oh, it is summer? Nevermind. And yet the historical data are available. It is just too funny that the IPCC extreme events report came out and they couldn’t find much of anything to report in terms of trends of extremes.
Crowing “Record Breaking” about a climate parameter, against a 12 year long “record” ???
Really??
It takes widespread, institutionalized bias for this sort of thing to occur, let alone go unchallenged by the academic community. That bias is the basis of the “consensus”. Groupthink.
Will this years stunted tree rings indicate a cool period in a 2100 Dendrochronology?
I think this is an appropriate time to consider why the university football team has a big “N” on their helmets. Of course, it stands for “Nowledge.”
All ready spent, WAY TOO MUCH of OUR MONEY on this nonsense to BACK DOWN now.
remember the ”Maginot Line” and the consequences of ”REFUSING to SEE”,:- ”CATASTROPHE”
I can say from where I am in W. Colorado that this year isn’t as dry as 2002. I noticed last week while hiking at 10K feet that things are not as dry as they are a few thousand feet lower. Flowers are in bloom, and I saw only one spot along a dirt rad that appeared stressed by lack of moisture. We were told to expect a rash of bear encounters at lower elevations due to lack of berries higher up, but the berries seemed plentiful, and we have had no bruin encounters around our house, nor our neighbors. The monsoon flow has apparently started, some three weeks early, as came spring. Knowing the hummingbirds left early the past two years, I would guess we are in for another early winter. We went sub-zero a good three weeks early last year. The .27″ of H2O we received in the past two days more than doubled the precip we’ve had since May 25th.
In other news, I am more hungry than I have ever been in the history of my monitoring my hunger over the last 25 minutes.
1998 and 2006 were bad in TX, but according to the old guys, the 1950s, 1930s, and 1917 were worse. If this year were as bad as the 30s, you would see a huge drop in farm production. That is not the case.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat “It is the worst ever.”
I’m sure most of us are now aware that as NOAA shifts from the from the Traditional Climate Division Dataset (TCDD) to the Gridded Divisional Dataset (GrDD) that NOAA’s historical estimates for average State temperatures show a distantly downward trend in the earlier years (driving up the apparent trend to “increasing” temperatures)… Thanks to Anthony’s article “NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center Caught Cooling the Past – Modern Processed Records Don’t Match Paper Records” (June 06, 2012).
However, it doesn’t appear that most are aware that the changes also impact NOAA’s dataset for: Precipitation, the Palmer Drought Severity Index, the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index, the Modified Palmer Drought Index, the Palmer Z index; the Standard Precipitation Indexes for 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, and 24 months.
Consequently, I expect to see more of these the “climate is getting worse” stories as NOAA’s rewrites the United State’s climate “history”.
Here’s a taste of things to come – using 1885-2009 data for the Southeast (where I live):
– The GrDD data significantly lowers the southeast’s estimated
average air temperatures from 1895 thru roughly 1985.
This changes the air temperature trend from decreasing with
time to increasing with time… by slightly over 0.5 F
from 1985-2009.
– The GrDD data also shows the Southeast getting roughly
3.5 inches/year less rain from 1895 to 2009 than the
TDCC data does (by eye-ball method). This changes
the trend from an increasing rate of annual precipitation
over time to a stagnate rate of precipitation from 1895-2009.
The mean annual rainfall in the Southeast is
50.2 inches/year according to TDCC data. So this is a
significant change. (Personally, I question the GrDD
precipitation estimates; given NOAA’s GrDD figures would
lead one to believe the Southeast’s rainfall wasn’t never
accurately measured from 1885 to 2009. Due to flooding/river
management concerns State and Federal Agencies
tend to track precipitation quite closely in the Southeast).
– The GrDD data also alters the Southeast’s Palmer Drought
Severity Index. From a trend showing less drought
(an increasing index) to more drought… the total change is
roughly full decrease of slightly over 1 Palmer Drought
Index (by eye-ball method).
For confirmation of the above see NOAA’s comparisons of the TCDD and GrDD datasets found at: http://nidis1.ncdc.noaa.gov/GHCNViewer/ (Don’t forget to check the regression line box).
Here’s the short version: Where the historical data was showing that the Southeast was experiencing slightly decreasing temperatures, increasing precipitation, and decreasing drought. NOAA’s revised “history” paints a region plagued with increasing temperatures, stagnate precipitation, and a trend towards slightly increased drought.
Given the above, I expect this revised “history” will be used to justify more than one “the world is coming to an end” claim.
Incidentally… many thanks to Paul Homewood for directing us to the NOAA site above. It’s not likely I would have found the site had Paul not provided the reference. And it was only thru this reference that I was able to determine if the historical State temperature/precipitation data NOAA presents on line (see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/) was TCDD or GrDD data… much less anticipate what changes to prepare for.
[See Paul Homewood’s June 11, 2012 at 8:47 am comment to Anthony’s article “NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center caught cooling the past – modern processed records don’t match paper records”. (June 11, 2012)].
Regards,
Kforestcat
I live in that bright red part of South Carolina. We got 3 to 5 inches of rain in the last 30 days. Yeah, maybe there’s some sort of cumulative deficiency, but it’s definitely not a drought.
I just started keeping weather data today and we’ve already set a bunch of records. It’s the coldest, hottest, wettest, driest, sunniest, cloudiest, windiest, calmest day in history! The drought index is the highest and lowest it’s ever been as are both sea levels and Arctic ice extent. It warmed up rapidly throughout the day. If this trend continues we’ll all burn up in a few days! Can I have a grant?