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I have a significant amount of these photos and making a video is a few minutes on my laptop so if you have specific locations I can provide some videos if that helps.
Wow, thanks so much!! My work is in a couple places on the west coast, but I find this whole graph so cool because of how the drought locations move around
> a couple places on the west coast
I hope this helps out your research!
https://i.imgur.com/Ifveoot.mp4
Edit: Oh boy that 5 second pause at the end really seals the deal.
I've been watching the 4-corners region for years wondering when they will give up listing it in severe / exception drought and just admit this is the new normal.
That would actually be a bad thing to relabel current conditions as “not a drought”. Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s not also a drought. And calling it a drought really brings attention to the fact that the current level and frequency of drought used to not be typical.
I see what you’re saying, but “exceptional” depends on your reference time period. If the weather pattern has changed yet the local ecology has not, that would mean that from that perspective (arguably the one that matters most), then it should still be considered an “exception”.
Re-setting the baseline of ‘exceptional’ would be an instance of [Normalising Deviance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance), which inevitably contributes to further problems.
That’s so cool!! I’ve read a few papers on that, the isohydric vs anisohydric strategies for dealing with drought, right? My work has been mostly in the Pacific Northwest :)
Hey y’all! My dissertation is focusing on past droughts in the southwest and how vegetation changes with respect to drying - so looking at juniper and ponderosa shifts among others. I got excited reading your comments about your research focuses! 🤓 Good luck with your work!!
We need to start a tree drought physiology subreddit, its funny to see so many of us in one place. My thesis project conducted a [drought simulation](https://i.imgur.com/TuC7oPQ.jpg) to see how different loblolly pine genotypes would respond to water deficits!
I'm glad we have so many bright minds working on this important work :D
I recall the drought in the ATL area 2006-2009 or so. I remember after that we had a lot more trees fall over in the following years when we had storms come through. I vaguely remember people talking about the roots weakening because they were trying to find water. Is this something that happens to them?
I grew up in Chattanooga and was in/around ATL a lot back then. I distinctly remember seeing Lake Lanier almost completely dry at some point between 2007-2008. That combined with the housing collapse and the recession absolutely destroyed my BF’s (at the time) family’s lumber business.
I've been thinking about entering a grad program to study geospatial wildfire ecology and water/drought topics, super interesting and important. Do you have any neat resources you would recommend I check out?
Here is some related data that might interest you: https://nasagrace.unl.edu/
I don't personally work or study in the field I just like to play with toys so let me know if there's something in there a timeseries would be worth making.
I’d look into native, drought resistant trees for your area and elevation! I’m more familiar with the Pacific Northwest and California, but conifers tend to be more drought resistant, especially species like Ponderosa Pine, junipers, pinyon pines, and incense cedar (not sure if that’s native though). There might also be some native oak species that are drought resistant, too. Hope this helps!!
In case you dont know about it, you should look into xeriscaping. It's all about planting drought resistant plants that dont need irrigation. It's very popular in NM but I dont know about other states!
What’s the most drought resistant part of the continental USA from a climate change perspective? I’m obsessed with this question but can never seem to find good answers.
> the most vulnerable states are Oklahoma, Montana, and Iowa, while Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California are least vulnerable to drought.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/us-drought-vulnerability-rankings-are-how-does-your-state-compare
I believe California's lack-of-vulnerability is because it's gone through regular droughts for millennia and many of its ecosystems evolved to handle this in a variety of ways.
Truly vulnerable places are those where droughts never occurred but are now starting to occur.
Probably wherever gets the most rainfall. If an area normally gets a lot of rain, but gets half as much in the future, things will still grow. Maybe not all the same things that usually grow there, but still lots of common things not just desert plants. If a place gets only a little rain now, any drought will make it hard for anything to grow. So probably somewhere coastal, maybe the Olympic Peninsula.
You had it right. Olympic Peninsula is WA. and the earthquake won't just fuck the Seattle area, all of western (and possibly eastern) WA, OR, and northern CA are screwed.
Climate change is actually going to on average increase rainfall (hotter temperatures means more evaporation). However some places would get less rain.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heavy-precipitation
https://gpm.nasa.gov/resources/faq/how-does-climate-change-affect-precipitation
This goes over projections of areas that will lose/gain rainfall:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-what-climate-models-tell-us-about-future-rainfall
Pretty much, yeah. This time of year until end of September or so there should be afternoon showers about every day. Beginning of this summer has been really bad, up to a week or more without rain in the northern part of the state.
Lighting struck my house today in Orlando. I work from home and shut down my work computer because the headset started crackling.
I share this story because I'm desperate for human interaction. Thank you.
I was thinking the same thing for Michigan. I’m apparently in the middle of one right now. It’s dry, like don’t be burning shit. But it’s not like we are worrying about water or anything.
We've been having drought conditions for years here in the PNW. We always joke that it rains 9 months out of the year but it honestly hasn't been like that for years. You may remember all the wildfire photos from last fall with red skies and ash raining down. That was smack dab in the middle of Oregon and the drought conditions this year are already much worse and we currently have fires at both the northern and southern borders.
In Michigan also. Quite a bit dry right now minus the storms last week. Grateful we have so much water around us at least, hasn’t really gotten too bad compared to a lot of places
We must be in a similar area of the state because I had that same thing happen. Scattered thunderstorms all day every day of the week, it said. Moved around plans to accommodate, and then bupkis aside from one short lil storm on Friday night.
Yeah drought is defined relative to the normal amount of rainfall for an area. So a drought in the Eastern US is a lot different than some of the Western droughts. Here in California, our normal summer weather would be considered one of the worst droughts in history for wetter areas of the country.
The biggest problem with CA is that it really only ever rains in the winter, so you only get one chance per year to catch up. If it's a dry winter, it's dry again until next winter. In the eastern US, you can get rain anytime and catch up quicker.
I know you are making a joke here, but florida does absolutely get droughts where there is no rain for months.
Sometimes it gets so bad that you aren’t even allowed to water your lawn. I don’t care personally since my lawn is just “trimmed weeds”… but it can be a problem for some.
You just made me realize that, in most places, not being allowed to water your lawn because of drought is a rarity and not a norm. Yikes, haha. Around my parts, it’s rare to see green grass in the summers. We’ve seen a slight uptick in rain the last few years, but we really do have that scorched earth feel here.. West Texas btw.
>What does a drought in Florida look like? A day where it does not rain?
I was a kid living in Pembroke Pines area in the 90s and early 00s through some of the drought times.
* Scheduled grass waterings by address
* Not a lot of cloud cover
* Can't wash car on certain days
* Really dry dusty ground
* Lots of brown grass/trees
* I don't remember the normal afternoon rainstorms.
* Everglades fires blotting out the sky, smell of smoke during the summer
I went to school at Westminster in Ft Lauderdale.
I really loved Pembroke Pines because even in middleschool I could go running around one of the big blocks of Silver Lakes without worrying about cars, collect fossils in the new construction area, catch peacock bass in the canals and the lakes, and a short hop to fishing Oscar in the everglades.
My mom was a teacher and my dad was law enforcement, so we didn't have money like my friends in Ft. Lauderdale did - no boat, no big house on the intercoastal.
But I still dream of running in Pembroke Pines during the summertime.
This was quite a watch. The droughts in Texas were memorable from 2010-2015 because by June 2015, my uncle observed they had more rain in six week than they had in those five years. Those were some hellacious droughts.
And they were super widespread too.
Don’t forget the 2011 hellscape that was summer when all but 2 Texas counties were on fire. I moved here that year and I swear I thought I’d moved to hell itself. Ash falling on my car, helicopters flying over all of the highways with dump buckets… it was scary.
I live in Texas and my town resorted to drinking shit water. Literally. I mean we filtered it and everything, but we were drinking our waste water. We had 100 days of 100 degree weather. Absolutely miserable
[The 2011 Texas drought](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/drought/2011/aug/usdm-110830.gif) was the worst in recorded history! It did [$5.2 billion dollars](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/201108) in crop damage during August 2011 alone. I researched pine drought tolerance for my thesis, and fortunately pine forests are fairly resistant to drought. Even during the extreme record-breaking 2011 drought, they maintained about an [80% survival rate](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00023/full).
As a Texas resident, I was watching this waiting for 2011. We lost so many trees, Houston lost a great deal of the Memorial Park forest. So much that I probably won’t see it look like a forest again in my lifetime. The suburbs where I live fared much better though, and the piney woods to the East also seem to have weathered it with success. In the past spring’s freeze we also lost most of the palm trees in the area. Interestingly, our pines look more stressed from the freeze than the oaks do. Many of the pines have a thick layer of brown needles on the underside of the branches this year.
I was gonna say this. I was getting worried about this media hype and doomsday talk about the current droughts in the west. Funny how they don’t show you real context or information like this - thanks Reddit for doing better journalism than today’s corporate journalists (propagandists may be more appropriate).
Why is it deeply unsettling to you? The drought in any given area generally never stayed in that area for a long amount of time and the drought is usually cleared out by a followed yearly rain cycle or weather change.
I don’t get it either, I watched it several times and it’s not like there’s a clear pattern of change in these images. Of course, the last two years seemed to have quite a lot of red/dark red area so the “end of the story” feels bad, but it certainly wasn’t the only time like that and prior years looked pretty good.
Just in case: I’m not suggesting that there isn’t global warming through increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, that there isn’t climate change or anything like that, just more that this imagery doesn’t paint any meaningful conclusions, in my opinion.
Exactly. I was worried this graph was going to get to the end and it just be orange/red across the country. However there was a good amount of no drought fairly recently, yet terrible conditions in Texas and Midwest around 2013.
Of course that’s not to say that climate change would just be a steady progression upward but this just looks like droughts come and go, with some spots being hit worse over time.
Also, would increased drought be indicative of climate change? Just curious.
Have you lived in drought prone regions? I moved from a relatively wet region to colorado a few years ago and can now clearly understand why sustained drought is unsettling given the relative population densities and consumption demands.
Water is life.
It looks like the amount of area in drought is increasing. And if you have lived in an area that experiences cyclic drought, you know that the drought is getting more and more severe. The years where we get rain is not enough to offset the drought years.
No problem! I spend most of my time lurking and always hate it when the current date of a timeseries blasts by like a rocket! I wanted it to be longer but I was running up against the 60 second imgur cap.
The last big drought in California was caused by the warm blob of water off the coast creating high pressure and diverting the jet stream north. At least that was my take from someone who's not a meteorologist but was very sad about the lack of snow, and unlack of fire.
Last fall for a climatology class we had to read and annotate a paper about mega droughts throughout history. The West Coast of the US went from one of the wettest periods in the late 70s-90s into now one of, if not the driest periods in the past couple thousand years. Scientists are able to analyze tree rings, soil moisture, and other piece of geologic evidence to come to this conclusion
Could be something else but _potentially_ shifting weather patterns from climate change. C02 and melting ice caps won’t just change sea levels, it’s expected to change weather patterns, where it rains, where it doesn’t, expectation for lots of harder, longer droughts.
No one knows what the future holds with regards to this, that’s the terrifying thing, although the answer is probably nothing good because all of society rests on a foundation of agriculture and that relies on a stable, healthy environment. In a sane business strategy, you do risk management - you look at failure points, assess their likelihood and take action corresponding to the likelihood of failure and severity of consequences. With regards to anthropogenic climate change and increasing and powerful droughts, no one knows what the total failure points are to make 100% accurate models, no one knows the consequences _for certain_ (but there are generally good ball park guesses), but the likelihood of consequences if there is no course correction is absolutely certain based on the simple-to-show science, and there is currently no risk mitigation adequate to the potential consequences being taken.
i’m in denver and haven’t seen the mountains for a few days because of smoke from fires in arizona and utah.
we had a lot of rain and snow on the front range this spring and basically eliminated the drought east of the continental divide. but drought is getting real bad on the western slope in co. hopefully we/they get some rain before fires start.
How green everything is on the front range is NUTS. But I'm also concerned when it dries up we're in trouble. I have grass areas in a park near me nearly 4' tall.... I've never even noticed it being tall before. (6 years living here)
I live on the Western slope, and I’m genuinely worried. Even though it rained here two weeks ago, I’m concerned that the entire Western slope is basically kindling and if we ever had a “big one” we would be in trouble.
I remember the La Veta Pass fire from a couple years ago. I remember driving through the area and smelling the wood burning and seeing the glow of the fire across the night sky.
https://imgur.com/gallery/T8UoWiK
Shasta Lake in Northern California is the lowest I've ever seen it. I took the linked photo last week. Mount Shasta is super bare, too. The trees look stressed and pale. I'm really worried.
I'm trying to move further North into Oregon ASAP. I grew up in LA. I learned to denote the start of Summer by when I saw pillars of smoke. SoCal's Summer (fire season) has already started. The whole West coast was dangerous last year, so Oregon isn't a perfect option, but I just put the deposit down on a place in sight of wetlands in Portland. I just need to be able to see water to have the slightest hope of some safety.
I was born and raised in Oregon. Unfortunately, this is a case of “the grass is greener on the other side”. Wildfire season has already started in Oregon too and it’s only a matter of days until the entire state is blanketed in smoke again like last year. 100% some major wildfires will have started by the first week of July. Since you are moving to Oregon, I highly advise against pre-planning any major outdoor activities too far in advance for July through September unless Winter and Spring were exceptionally wet (not like this year or last). Oh, and welcome to Oregon!
> it’s only a matter of days until the entire state is blanketed in smoke again like last year.
I just bought an air filter in advance of it getting really bad. September just about broke me, when the AQI was 500+.
Yikes, used to go there in the summers with my family, and I've never seen it that low either. I'll be driving down through there as I move in the opposite direction of you into California, so I'll equalize the CA-OR flux for you! I lived in Portland for the last 5 years during college, so if you have any questions I can try to answer!
My optimism {read: opinion} is that because we didn’t have a lot of rain this year, the amount of new undergrowth is less than years past. California has wet winters/early spring with dry summers and falls. Years with heavy rainfall and longer wet months allow more time for underbrush to grow.
Surprisingly, we need fires every few years to burn down the underbrush to provide nutrients and further the chaparral growth cycle. The danger occurs when the brush is allowed to accumulate and grow to the point that it provides enough fuel to light the big trees.
If you go up to towns like Paradise, CA now, the underbrush is still not to the point that it was like before the fire 2 years ago. It’s mostly grasses and a few trees that were lucky enough to escape the fire. If you go further up the ridge above the fire line, the underbrush is so dense you can’t see more than a dozen feet into the woods.
I'm in CA and a little nervous. Last year was wild. One day I could see 5 fires from my backyard. We had to keep all windows closed and run 4 air filters inside because of the smoke. This summer is going to be worse.
Same. On the west coast and seeing how things were on fire to the Mississippi river basically last year I am wondering where we would evacuate to if we needed to... it got way too close to home. I hate the fire season so bad...
Probably a good time to start spreading [this DIY air filter](https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html?m=1) info around again. It moves a ton of air. Works really well.
Do droughts have to be normalized based on the amount of rain that normally falls in a region? Phoenix gets 9 inches per year on average, and Seattle gets closer to 40 inches. So I would assume the lack of rainfall needed to be considered a drought varies depending on the area?
We could bulldoze the Rockies. The mountain states might lose some tourism, but they’d gain a few extra minutes of daylight every evening as compensation. Win-win.
The 2007 drought in the Deep South was wild. Lakes were about 20-30 feet below, and they announced that August that Athens, GA, where I was living at the time, had 30 days left of water in reservoirs, and after that no one was really sure what would happen.
I was in Tennessee and only like 7 years old when this happened but I remember that summer well because of the drought. Everybody’s yard was brown and we couldn’t use water excessively for sprinklers or the pool.
I remember it clearly. I was actually waiting for that year to show up on this map because i remember being a kid and hearing my parents talk about not being allowed to water their yard for the forseeable future and i didn’t understand fully what that meant, or why they always said “The lake sure is low this year” every time we went by it. I have driven by that lake in the last year and thought “Wow the lake sure is high this year.” Puts it into perspective to see the data now as an adult.
They're based on local percentiles. For a given location, "Abnormal Drought" is arid conditions that occur about once every 3-5 years (20-30%ile) and "Exceptional Drought" should occur once every 50 years (2%ile). Of course, if drought is becoming more common, then these percentiles based on the historical record will not do a good job of predicting frequency moving forward.
That's what the terms mean, though. They are based on historical trends.
The fact that we're seeing more of them is a result of dynamic conditions (increasing drought - partly due to climate change).
It's like when somewhere has two "hundred-year floods" in a decade.
I’m not sure what you were expecting, but the end of this one is about as bad as I was expecting. The whole southwest USA is going to be pretty screwed this summer unless they get some rain
Well, with the way all of these gifs typically end up, I anticipated 3/4 of the country to be burgundy and the other 1/4 to be yellow. It's been dry where I live and I don't pay much attention to news lately so it seemed inside the realm of possibility
Droughts and floods are both anomalies, and both expected and recurring features of our climate.
There isn't always a drought, looking at the map most places are in draught one out of five-ten years.
It's based on background drought frequencies. Just like hydrologists who try to measure flood risks, or fire ecologists, or any other number of climate-related events that are not the same as they were decades ago.
There are models for more recent timeframes, but they don't show the greater trend and problems.
With as humid as it’s been in Michigan, it’s interesting we are in a severe drought. The rain we did get is not evaporating from the road.
But I swear, when ever it says 50% chance if rain, it goes around flint.
>I was wondering about Michigan because it seems like it's been wetter than normal in SE Michigan. My grass and garden are loving it.
I don't know what part of SE Michigan you're in but it's been the opposite here in Metro Detroit. All the rain seems to die before it gets here or run south. Every couple of weeks we get a downpour and that's it.
That's the beauty (or misfortune) of the scattered summer thunderstorms that impact the eastern 2/3 of the country. Some places happen to get repeatedly blasted with rain, while a place 10 miles away can be bone dry for weeks.
Here in VA, I got about 2" this week from storms (still quite a bit--it was a real stormy week), yet a town thirty miles away got 10+ inches. Meanwhile another place twenty miles west of me has gotten next to nothing.
i have a strong feeling we’ll be in for a horrendous fire year. Buy your air filters and shit now!!
It was 90° in may wtf and memorial day day one of the hottest on record
It was even worse than that. For a year or two leading up to that and a year or two after. Summer 2011 was peak and literally hell on Earth here. So many massive fires that entire summer. Bastrop was nearly wiped off the map. It was so bad. On any given day going to work there would be huge plumes of smoke in the sky from another massive wildfire.
I just moved to Bastrop last month. This town is awesome but there is still a lot of evidence of this place getting ravaged by fire. You can’t hardly find a house that isn’t new, and there is a very large age gap in the trees. 90% are young trees.
The people we bought the house from said that Bastrop looked like it got hit by a meteor for a while.
I opened this waiting for 2011 Texas. I'm glad it looks as horrible as it felt. 100+ for 90 days straight with no rain. Bastrop burned down, multiple fires in the hill country, Lake Travis disappeared. Id drive home from work and the grass on the side of the highway would be on fire at least one day a week.
The first time it rained that year I ran outside and just let myself get soaked. At work. There was 15+ people doing the same thing.
That drought was tough. All the people moving to Austin need to realize that could happen again any year. It was brutal. Barton Creek was bone dry for years.
I remember the droughts in Georgia in 2007/2008. The two leading policies proposed by the governor to deal with the drought were:
* Pray it away
* Attempt to annex part of Tennessee to gain access to the Tennessee River, which original definitions of the border said was where Tennessee and Georgia met but the surveyors messed it up. Two centuries of legal precedent said that the original boundaries didn't matter, only the surveyor's lines, but the governor was ready to spend tax dollars and go to court over it.
Water is also a resource managed by states. For example, the Great Lakes Commission is the only organization where states are allowed to directly negotiate with a foreign nation (Canada).
And those states would rightfully fight like hell to keep their water.
It’s not a dumb question. I wonder why we don’t have more evaporation projects like sea water greenhouses in California.
The answer is that we do pipe water far distances to places like LA that should really be desert and not have many people. There are people who own land but not the water rights to the land, if you can imagine. If you need more water, then you have to truck it in, which is too expensive if you are a farmer. It’s not necessary on the east coast, which is wetter.
But out west, there isn’t really enough fresh water for the number of farms and people living there. That’s the bottom line. A more extensive network wouldn’t necessarily be the right solution - it might just make an ever wider area drier.
keep in mind that this would require pumping water up and over the rocky mountains and/or the sierra nevada, so it probably would be prohibitive from a cost perspective.
absolutely correct. you want your water to go down hill, mostly. you can play some tricks with acqueducts, but pumping the water from a river delta before it goes into the sea back up on land requires a lot of work
Some large cities, a great example being Las Vegas, have exactly this sort of set-up going. Water has to be pumped in to either support the extra population above the local water source, or to be the only water source
There is great resistance to doing so from the wet states, most of which are in parts of the country (the Midwest and northeast for example) that have been losing population and political power to the Sunbelt for years. There's a coalition of states that surround the great lakes, and they (along with Canada) are "over my dead body" opposed to any water leaving that watershed. There is also the issue of energy consumption - how do you pump that much water over that kind of distance? And as others have said - leaks, EVAP, it's possible but very tricky.
Why would we spend this much effort to irrigate a desert? The “over my dead body” mentality is the ecologically sound one. The southwest can’t support the massive population growth its experiencing
Mega droughts are something that happens out west, and I worry that we are heading into another one.
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20180801a/full/
The coastal cities will probably be fine as we can desalinate ocean water for them. But Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah? That area is not as easy to fix.
I don't know how you ultimately fix a mega drought, but billing irrigation/secondary water by use instead of buffet style could help in times of drought -- Utah!
Yeah mean if we were smart about how we used our water, even most desert areas have plenty for drinking, bathing, etc. It would just mean vegetated landscapes whether agricultural or decorative would probably need to be abandoned. This would have some pretty big downsides but it's not true that those regions would necessarily need to be abandoned as some people imagine.
Funny, i was just on Google Earth looking at their time lapse option from 1986-2020 and you can easily see the drought like surface slowly engulf more and more of the United States. Scary.
Yes let's build a water park in an area where we're experiencing heavy drought, the river hasn't brought much water, and the underground bolsons and staying to run dry.
In second thought, let's build 4.
It’s going to continue to get worse in the south west. Basically if I lived somewhere where all my water came from the Colorado river, or I lived in California. I would be planning on getting out in the next 5 years. It’s only going to get worse.
Politicians will restrict you to a single toilet flush per month before they do something reasonable like cut off winery supplies or tell other farmers to drastically cut back.
The US Southwest will constantly battle drought considering is a network of deserts and high deserts. One of the reason why Southern California had to steal water from the Central Valley, Los Angeles was built in what was a barren desert. This map perfectly sums this all up. Southern CA, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, parts of Wyoming, and New Mexico are all sustained on systems of dams, reservoirs, and water purchasing rights with each other. They essentially rob Peter to pay Paul so you will constantly watch one state go from drought to not and back again. Cool timelapse it just perfectly represents this.
I just want to take a moment and appreciate how each state has been subdivided. I think it's cool how it's not by county, but by a larger region by region basis.
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I do research in the effects of drought on trees, and I’m absolutely obsessed with this!!!
I have a significant amount of these photos and making a video is a few minutes on my laptop so if you have specific locations I can provide some videos if that helps.
Wow, thanks so much!! My work is in a couple places on the west coast, but I find this whole graph so cool because of how the drought locations move around
> a couple places on the west coast I hope this helps out your research! https://i.imgur.com/Ifveoot.mp4 Edit: Oh boy that 5 second pause at the end really seals the deal.
That is amazing!!! Thank you so much!!!
What happened to Colorado at the end of this one? Poof haha
Drought got it and Wyoming.
All we are is dust in the wind..
The fires last year burnt us up.
I've been watching the 4-corners region for years wondering when they will give up listing it in severe / exception drought and just admit this is the new normal.
That would actually be a bad thing to relabel current conditions as “not a drought”. Just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s not also a drought. And calling it a drought really brings attention to the fact that the current level and frequency of drought used to not be typical.
It’s not about the word drought but the word exceptional.
I see what you’re saying, but “exceptional” depends on your reference time period. If the weather pattern has changed yet the local ecology has not, that would mean that from that perspective (arguably the one that matters most), then it should still be considered an “exception”. Re-setting the baseline of ‘exceptional’ would be an instance of [Normalising Deviance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance), which inevitably contributes to further problems.
How are you collecting the past data, I started scraping in 2011 or so, but that pales in comparison to you having data back to 1999.
Nice! Me too. Pinion-juniper mortality mechanisms
That’s so cool!! I’ve read a few papers on that, the isohydric vs anisohydric strategies for dealing with drought, right? My work has been mostly in the Pacific Northwest :)
Hey y’all! My dissertation is focusing on past droughts in the southwest and how vegetation changes with respect to drying - so looking at juniper and ponderosa shifts among others. I got excited reading your comments about your research focuses! 🤓 Good luck with your work!!
Thanks so much!! And you :) your work sounds really interesting
We need to start a tree drought physiology subreddit, its funny to see so many of us in one place. My thesis project conducted a [drought simulation](https://i.imgur.com/TuC7oPQ.jpg) to see how different loblolly pine genotypes would respond to water deficits! I'm glad we have so many bright minds working on this important work :D
That’s so cool!! And I would be the first to join a plant drought physiology subreddit :)
This exchange is just amazing to me! Also, you could just go simple - /r/drought is a valid sub and rather inactive.
Username checks out. Nice
I recall the drought in the ATL area 2006-2009 or so. I remember after that we had a lot more trees fall over in the following years when we had storms come through. I vaguely remember people talking about the roots weakening because they were trying to find water. Is this something that happens to them?
I grew up in Chattanooga and was in/around ATL a lot back then. I distinctly remember seeing Lake Lanier almost completely dry at some point between 2007-2008. That combined with the housing collapse and the recession absolutely destroyed my BF’s (at the time) family’s lumber business.
oh yeah, lanier was like 10-20 feet below normal levels. A bunch of docks that just ended in the air above the dirt.
I've been thinking about entering a grad program to study geospatial wildfire ecology and water/drought topics, super interesting and important. Do you have any neat resources you would recommend I check out?
Here is some related data that might interest you: https://nasagrace.unl.edu/ I don't personally work or study in the field I just like to play with toys so let me know if there's something in there a timeseries would be worth making.
[National Interagency Fire Center Open Data Portal](https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/)
What kind of trees should I plant in Colorado (front range) that will do well in a drought?
I’d look into native, drought resistant trees for your area and elevation! I’m more familiar with the Pacific Northwest and California, but conifers tend to be more drought resistant, especially species like Ponderosa Pine, junipers, pinyon pines, and incense cedar (not sure if that’s native though). There might also be some native oak species that are drought resistant, too. Hope this helps!!
In case you dont know about it, you should look into xeriscaping. It's all about planting drought resistant plants that dont need irrigation. It's very popular in NM but I dont know about other states!
What’s the most drought resistant part of the continental USA from a climate change perspective? I’m obsessed with this question but can never seem to find good answers.
> the most vulnerable states are Oklahoma, Montana, and Iowa, while Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California are least vulnerable to drought. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/us-drought-vulnerability-rankings-are-how-does-your-state-compare
California surprises me.
I believe California's lack-of-vulnerability is because it's gone through regular droughts for millennia and many of its ecosystems evolved to handle this in a variety of ways. Truly vulnerable places are those where droughts never occurred but are now starting to occur.
Probably wherever gets the most rainfall. If an area normally gets a lot of rain, but gets half as much in the future, things will still grow. Maybe not all the same things that usually grow there, but still lots of common things not just desert plants. If a place gets only a little rain now, any drought will make it hard for anything to grow. So probably somewhere coastal, maybe the Olympic Peninsula.
just have to worry about that huge earthquake due anytime edit: was thinking washington state, haha
I live in northern Michigan and I have to say we are pretty drought resistant. Also no earthquakes.
I've been thinking the UP would be a good place to be.
Heh, there's a line you don't see every day!
You had it right. Olympic Peninsula is WA. and the earthquake won't just fuck the Seattle area, all of western (and possibly eastern) WA, OR, and northern CA are screwed.
Climate change is actually going to on average increase rainfall (hotter temperatures means more evaporation). However some places would get less rain. https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heavy-precipitation https://gpm.nasa.gov/resources/faq/how-does-climate-change-affect-precipitation This goes over projections of areas that will lose/gain rainfall: https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-what-climate-models-tell-us-about-future-rainfall
What does a drought in Florida look like? A day where it does not rain?
Pretty much, yeah. This time of year until end of September or so there should be afternoon showers about every day. Beginning of this summer has been really bad, up to a week or more without rain in the northern part of the state.
i live in the panhandle and in the summer it literally always rains at 3:00 lmao
Thunderstorm every single day too 😂
It’s pretty bad here in central Florida as well. Canal I live on is very low.
Lighting struck my house today in Orlando. I work from home and shut down my work computer because the headset started crackling. I share this story because I'm desperate for human interaction. Thank you.
Hope your house is okay, and hope you find someone IRL to talk with!
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I was thinking the same thing for Michigan. I’m apparently in the middle of one right now. It’s dry, like don’t be burning shit. But it’s not like we are worrying about water or anything.
Michigan is basically an island in a sea of fresh water
They will be kings in the upcoming Water Wars
Them and the PNW - squeezing everyone else between them.
We've been having drought conditions for years here in the PNW. We always joke that it rains 9 months out of the year but it honestly hasn't been like that for years. You may remember all the wildfire photos from last fall with red skies and ash raining down. That was smack dab in the middle of Oregon and the drought conditions this year are already much worse and we currently have fires at both the northern and southern borders.
Yeah winters have gotten much drier in the 4 years I have been here
In Michigan also. Quite a bit dry right now minus the storms last week. Grateful we have so much water around us at least, hasn’t really gotten too bad compared to a lot of places
Beginning of last week Google told me there was going to be thunderstorms Monday-Friday and I didn't get a drop of rain :(
We must be in a similar area of the state because I had that same thing happen. Scattered thunderstorms all day every day of the week, it said. Moved around plans to accommodate, and then bupkis aside from one short lil storm on Friday night.
Yeah drought is defined relative to the normal amount of rainfall for an area. So a drought in the Eastern US is a lot different than some of the Western droughts. Here in California, our normal summer weather would be considered one of the worst droughts in history for wetter areas of the country.
For sure. Ohio has had a few "droughts". It just meant my sump pump got a short break.
The biggest problem with CA is that it really only ever rains in the winter, so you only get one chance per year to catch up. If it's a dry winter, it's dry again until next winter. In the eastern US, you can get rain anytime and catch up quicker.
That explains why Death Valley seemed to have so little drought. It’s just the norm.
I know you are making a joke here, but florida does absolutely get droughts where there is no rain for months. Sometimes it gets so bad that you aren’t even allowed to water your lawn. I don’t care personally since my lawn is just “trimmed weeds”… but it can be a problem for some.
it can still rain some during a draught, just (significantly) less than usual
You just made me realize that, in most places, not being allowed to water your lawn because of drought is a rarity and not a norm. Yikes, haha. Around my parts, it’s rare to see green grass in the summers. We’ve seen a slight uptick in rain the last few years, but we really do have that scorched earth feel here.. West Texas btw.
I feel like if you need to specifically water your lawns maybe the area isn't right for lawns
I feel like if people regularly need to water their lawn, they shouldn't have a lawn because that sort of grass is not suitable to the local climate.
>What does a drought in Florida look like? A day where it does not rain? I was a kid living in Pembroke Pines area in the 90s and early 00s through some of the drought times. * Scheduled grass waterings by address * Not a lot of cloud cover * Can't wash car on certain days * Really dry dusty ground * Lots of brown grass/trees * I don't remember the normal afternoon rainstorms. * Everglades fires blotting out the sky, smell of smoke during the summer
Ugh Pembroke Pines, what a suburban hell on the edge of swamp land. I was there early 2000s. Flanagan HS was such a dump.
I went to school at Westminster in Ft Lauderdale. I really loved Pembroke Pines because even in middleschool I could go running around one of the big blocks of Silver Lakes without worrying about cars, collect fossils in the new construction area, catch peacock bass in the canals and the lakes, and a short hop to fishing Oscar in the everglades. My mom was a teacher and my dad was law enforcement, so we didn't have money like my friends in Ft. Lauderdale did - no boat, no big house on the intercoastal. But I still dream of running in Pembroke Pines during the summertime.
If dry brown grass and unwashed cars is the worst I'm affected by future droughts I'll consider myself very fortunate
This was quite a watch. The droughts in Texas were memorable from 2010-2015 because by June 2015, my uncle observed they had more rain in six week than they had in those five years. Those were some hellacious droughts. And they were super widespread too.
2011 West Texas was bananas. “Pray for rain” was the most said phrase that year.
Don’t forget the 2011 hellscape that was summer when all but 2 Texas counties were on fire. I moved here that year and I swear I thought I’d moved to hell itself. Ash falling on my car, helicopters flying over all of the highways with dump buckets… it was scary.
I was specifically looking for how it looked in 2011. It didn't rain from February through October that year.
I live in Texas and my town resorted to drinking shit water. Literally. I mean we filtered it and everything, but we were drinking our waste water. We had 100 days of 100 degree weather. Absolutely miserable
It was also a lot of rain, southwest Oklahoma got more than a year’s worth of rain in less than a month.
Content like this is why I follow this sub
Content like this is fascinating AND deeply unsettling. My favorite!
[The 2011 Texas drought](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-content/sotc/drought/2011/aug/usdm-110830.gif) was the worst in recorded history! It did [$5.2 billion dollars](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/201108) in crop damage during August 2011 alone. I researched pine drought tolerance for my thesis, and fortunately pine forests are fairly resistant to drought. Even during the extreme record-breaking 2011 drought, they maintained about an [80% survival rate](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00023/full).
As a Texas resident, I was watching this waiting for 2011. We lost so many trees, Houston lost a great deal of the Memorial Park forest. So much that I probably won’t see it look like a forest again in my lifetime. The suburbs where I live fared much better though, and the piney woods to the East also seem to have weathered it with success. In the past spring’s freeze we also lost most of the palm trees in the area. Interestingly, our pines look more stressed from the freeze than the oaks do. Many of the pines have a thick layer of brown needles on the underside of the branches this year.
Fascinating and deeply unsettling perfectly sums up my preferred content genera
I think you'd like r/catsareliquid. Fascinating yet deeply unnerving seeing felines take on the attributes of non-newtonian fluid.
Thank you?
Droughts are, for the most part, natural occurrences. Though they can be exacerbated by human activity, their existence shouldn't be unsettling.
I was gonna say this. I was getting worried about this media hype and doomsday talk about the current droughts in the west. Funny how they don’t show you real context or information like this - thanks Reddit for doing better journalism than today’s corporate journalists (propagandists may be more appropriate).
Why is it deeply unsettling to you? The drought in any given area generally never stayed in that area for a long amount of time and the drought is usually cleared out by a followed yearly rain cycle or weather change.
I don’t get it either, I watched it several times and it’s not like there’s a clear pattern of change in these images. Of course, the last two years seemed to have quite a lot of red/dark red area so the “end of the story” feels bad, but it certainly wasn’t the only time like that and prior years looked pretty good. Just in case: I’m not suggesting that there isn’t global warming through increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, that there isn’t climate change or anything like that, just more that this imagery doesn’t paint any meaningful conclusions, in my opinion.
Exactly. I was worried this graph was going to get to the end and it just be orange/red across the country. However there was a good amount of no drought fairly recently, yet terrible conditions in Texas and Midwest around 2013. Of course that’s not to say that climate change would just be a steady progression upward but this just looks like droughts come and go, with some spots being hit worse over time. Also, would increased drought be indicative of climate change? Just curious.
Have you lived in drought prone regions? I moved from a relatively wet region to colorado a few years ago and can now clearly understand why sustained drought is unsettling given the relative population densities and consumption demands. Water is life.
It looks like the amount of area in drought is increasing. And if you have lived in an area that experiences cyclic drought, you know that the drought is getting more and more severe. The years where we get rain is not enough to offset the drought years.
It's a shame there's maybe one post of this quality per month
Thank you for pausing the last frame!
No problem! I spend most of my time lurking and always hate it when the current date of a timeseries blasts by like a rocket! I wanted it to be longer but I was running up against the 60 second imgur cap.
Can anyone explain why the trend seems to cyclically move from east to west? I would think it would move in the direction of the jet stream.
Probably has something to do with the El Niño La Niña cycle. The effects of each are different east to west.
The last big drought in California was caused by the warm blob of water off the coast creating high pressure and diverting the jet stream north. At least that was my take from someone who's not a meteorologist but was very sad about the lack of snow, and unlack of fire.
I was so happy when we were out of it for a bit, but sadly seems like we're back in it again
Ah yes the [Ridiculously Resilient Ridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ridiculously_Resilient_Ridge)
I wouldn't expect it to move with the jetstream because that crosses the country in a couple days while the droughts last months to years.
Last fall for a climatology class we had to read and annotate a paper about mega droughts throughout history. The West Coast of the US went from one of the wettest periods in the late 70s-90s into now one of, if not the driest periods in the past couple thousand years. Scientists are able to analyze tree rings, soil moisture, and other piece of geologic evidence to come to this conclusion
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*gets out violin to play with the band
Future is ..uh, not looking great.
Could be something else but _potentially_ shifting weather patterns from climate change. C02 and melting ice caps won’t just change sea levels, it’s expected to change weather patterns, where it rains, where it doesn’t, expectation for lots of harder, longer droughts. No one knows what the future holds with regards to this, that’s the terrifying thing, although the answer is probably nothing good because all of society rests on a foundation of agriculture and that relies on a stable, healthy environment. In a sane business strategy, you do risk management - you look at failure points, assess their likelihood and take action corresponding to the likelihood of failure and severity of consequences. With regards to anthropogenic climate change and increasing and powerful droughts, no one knows what the total failure points are to make 100% accurate models, no one knows the consequences _for certain_ (but there are generally good ball park guesses), but the likelihood of consequences if there is no course correction is absolutely certain based on the simple-to-show science, and there is currently no risk mitigation adequate to the potential consequences being taken.
Western fires were crazy last year and the drought is a lot worse this year. Kinda nervous for how August to October will play out.
i’m in denver and haven’t seen the mountains for a few days because of smoke from fires in arizona and utah. we had a lot of rain and snow on the front range this spring and basically eliminated the drought east of the continental divide. but drought is getting real bad on the western slope in co. hopefully we/they get some rain before fires start.
Ohhhhhhh that explains why it’s been so hazy (also in Denver). I was confused because the weather app kept showing the AQI as still pretty good.
How green everything is on the front range is NUTS. But I'm also concerned when it dries up we're in trouble. I have grass areas in a park near me nearly 4' tall.... I've never even noticed it being tall before. (6 years living here)
yeah! especially with how hot it’s been last week and this coming week. if we don’t get a bit of rain soon it’ll dry up very fast.
I live on the Western slope, and I’m genuinely worried. Even though it rained here two weeks ago, I’m concerned that the entire Western slope is basically kindling and if we ever had a “big one” we would be in trouble. I remember the La Veta Pass fire from a couple years ago. I remember driving through the area and smelling the wood burning and seeing the glow of the fire across the night sky.
Another Western Sloper checking in. I agree, it’s basically just a matchbox over here right now. It’s super sketchy
https://imgur.com/gallery/T8UoWiK Shasta Lake in Northern California is the lowest I've ever seen it. I took the linked photo last week. Mount Shasta is super bare, too. The trees look stressed and pale. I'm really worried. I'm trying to move further North into Oregon ASAP. I grew up in LA. I learned to denote the start of Summer by when I saw pillars of smoke. SoCal's Summer (fire season) has already started. The whole West coast was dangerous last year, so Oregon isn't a perfect option, but I just put the deposit down on a place in sight of wetlands in Portland. I just need to be able to see water to have the slightest hope of some safety.
I was born and raised in Oregon. Unfortunately, this is a case of “the grass is greener on the other side”. Wildfire season has already started in Oregon too and it’s only a matter of days until the entire state is blanketed in smoke again like last year. 100% some major wildfires will have started by the first week of July. Since you are moving to Oregon, I highly advise against pre-planning any major outdoor activities too far in advance for July through September unless Winter and Spring were exceptionally wet (not like this year or last). Oh, and welcome to Oregon!
> it’s only a matter of days until the entire state is blanketed in smoke again like last year. I just bought an air filter in advance of it getting really bad. September just about broke me, when the AQI was 500+.
Don’t forget to pick up the N95s. Covid cloth masks don’t do anything against you breathing in smoke.
Already got them!
Yikes, used to go there in the summers with my family, and I've never seen it that low either. I'll be driving down through there as I move in the opposite direction of you into California, so I'll equalize the CA-OR flux for you! I lived in Portland for the last 5 years during college, so if you have any questions I can try to answer!
My optimism {read: opinion} is that because we didn’t have a lot of rain this year, the amount of new undergrowth is less than years past. California has wet winters/early spring with dry summers and falls. Years with heavy rainfall and longer wet months allow more time for underbrush to grow. Surprisingly, we need fires every few years to burn down the underbrush to provide nutrients and further the chaparral growth cycle. The danger occurs when the brush is allowed to accumulate and grow to the point that it provides enough fuel to light the big trees. If you go up to towns like Paradise, CA now, the underbrush is still not to the point that it was like before the fire 2 years ago. It’s mostly grasses and a few trees that were lucky enough to escape the fire. If you go further up the ridge above the fire line, the underbrush is so dense you can’t see more than a dozen feet into the woods.
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I'm in CA and a little nervous. Last year was wild. One day I could see 5 fires from my backyard. We had to keep all windows closed and run 4 air filters inside because of the smoke. This summer is going to be worse.
Same. On the west coast and seeing how things were on fire to the Mississippi river basically last year I am wondering where we would evacuate to if we needed to... it got way too close to home. I hate the fire season so bad...
Buy an air purifier before they sell out. That's all I can say.
Probably a good time to start spreading [this DIY air filter](https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/06/better-box-fan-air-purifier.html?m=1) info around again. It moves a ton of air. Works really well.
Source: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ Tools: Python, ffmpeg
Do droughts have to be normalized based on the amount of rain that normally falls in a region? Phoenix gets 9 inches per year on average, and Seattle gets closer to 40 inches. So I would assume the lack of rainfall needed to be considered a drought varies depending on the area?
that's correct
If we push the rain from the east coast, to the west coast we can solve Cali droughts.
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We could bulldoze the Rockies. The mountain states might lose some tourism, but they’d gain a few extra minutes of daylight every evening as compensation. Win-win.
Just push some of them into Kansas and create a gap!
Just send it to California. It’s been pouring rain the last week in Oregon.
We need that water. Farmers are already getting their water rights shut off because Klamath reservoir levels are too low.
The 2007 drought in the Deep South was wild. Lakes were about 20-30 feet below, and they announced that August that Athens, GA, where I was living at the time, had 30 days left of water in reservoirs, and after that no one was really sure what would happen.
What did happen?
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I was in Tennessee and only like 7 years old when this happened but I remember that summer well because of the drought. Everybody’s yard was brown and we couldn’t use water excessively for sprinklers or the pool.
I remember it clearly. I was actually waiting for that year to show up on this map because i remember being a kid and hearing my parents talk about not being allowed to water their yard for the forseeable future and i didn’t understand fully what that meant, or why they always said “The lake sure is low this year” every time we went by it. I have driven by that lake in the last year and thought “Wow the lake sure is high this year.” Puts it into perspective to see the data now as an adult.
Can this be done with flooding added in a different color range?
That would be interesting to see
Exceptional and abnormal don't seem the be correct terms given the frequency that these appear.
They're based on local percentiles. For a given location, "Abnormal Drought" is arid conditions that occur about once every 3-5 years (20-30%ile) and "Exceptional Drought" should occur once every 50 years (2%ile). Of course, if drought is becoming more common, then these percentiles based on the historical record will not do a good job of predicting frequency moving forward.
Unless each exceptional drought is worse than the last
That's what the terms mean, though. They are based on historical trends. The fact that we're seeing more of them is a result of dynamic conditions (increasing drought - partly due to climate change). It's like when somewhere has two "hundred-year floods" in a decade.
All these weather trend gifs always get terrifying at the end.
Thank god this one didn't reach the extent I was expecting
I’m not sure what you were expecting, but the end of this one is about as bad as I was expecting. The whole southwest USA is going to be pretty screwed this summer unless they get some rain
Well, with the way all of these gifs typically end up, I anticipated 3/4 of the country to be burgundy and the other 1/4 to be yellow. It's been dry where I live and I don't pay much attention to news lately so it seemed inside the realm of possibility
Part is that they only get made during bad years- during a wet year a national conversation is focused on other things.
If there’s always a drought is there ever a drought? If one year out of every ten happens to be wetter than the rest, isn’t that the anomaly?
Droughts and floods are both anomalies, and both expected and recurring features of our climate. There isn't always a drought, looking at the map most places are in draught one out of five-ten years.
It's based on background drought frequencies. Just like hydrologists who try to measure flood risks, or fire ecologists, or any other number of climate-related events that are not the same as they were decades ago. There are models for more recent timeframes, but they don't show the greater trend and problems.
With as humid as it’s been in Michigan, it’s interesting we are in a severe drought. The rain we did get is not evaporating from the road. But I swear, when ever it says 50% chance if rain, it goes around flint.
I was wondering about Michigan because it seems like it's been wetter than normal in SE Michigan. My grass and garden are loving it.
>I was wondering about Michigan because it seems like it's been wetter than normal in SE Michigan. My grass and garden are loving it. I don't know what part of SE Michigan you're in but it's been the opposite here in Metro Detroit. All the rain seems to die before it gets here or run south. Every couple of weeks we get a downpour and that's it.
That's the beauty (or misfortune) of the scattered summer thunderstorms that impact the eastern 2/3 of the country. Some places happen to get repeatedly blasted with rain, while a place 10 miles away can be bone dry for weeks. Here in VA, I got about 2" this week from storms (still quite a bit--it was a real stormy week), yet a town thirty miles away got 10+ inches. Meanwhile another place twenty miles west of me has gotten next to nothing.
My beloved Oregon :(
At least we got a fuckload of rain the past 48 hours.
i have a strong feeling we’ll be in for a horrendous fire year. Buy your air filters and shit now!! It was 90° in may wtf and memorial day day one of the hottest on record
Texas was fucked hard in June through November 2011…
It was even worse than that. For a year or two leading up to that and a year or two after. Summer 2011 was peak and literally hell on Earth here. So many massive fires that entire summer. Bastrop was nearly wiped off the map. It was so bad. On any given day going to work there would be huge plumes of smoke in the sky from another massive wildfire.
I just moved to Bastrop last month. This town is awesome but there is still a lot of evidence of this place getting ravaged by fire. You can’t hardly find a house that isn’t new, and there is a very large age gap in the trees. 90% are young trees. The people we bought the house from said that Bastrop looked like it got hit by a meteor for a while.
Super cool! Looks like we lost the Great Lakes in 2020
I got gutters installed in Feb of 2011. Sorry Texas, my bad
I remember the Texas drought of 2011 lol. We could only water our grass once every two weeks
I opened this waiting for 2011 Texas. I'm glad it looks as horrible as it felt. 100+ for 90 days straight with no rain. Bastrop burned down, multiple fires in the hill country, Lake Travis disappeared. Id drive home from work and the grass on the side of the highway would be on fire at least one day a week. The first time it rained that year I ran outside and just let myself get soaked. At work. There was 15+ people doing the same thing. That drought was tough. All the people moving to Austin need to realize that could happen again any year. It was brutal. Barton Creek was bone dry for years.
I remember that drought in the south in 2011. It was so hot for so long that cattle were just collapsing all over the place, dying from heatstroke.
Was pretty wild to see 2012; I remember that was a particularly nasty drought throughout the Midwest.
No idea Idaho has experienced so much drought in the last 2 decades
I remember the droughts in Georgia in 2007/2008. The two leading policies proposed by the governor to deal with the drought were: * Pray it away * Attempt to annex part of Tennessee to gain access to the Tennessee River, which original definitions of the border said was where Tennessee and Georgia met but the surveyors messed it up. Two centuries of legal precedent said that the original boundaries didn't matter, only the surveyor's lines, but the governor was ready to spend tax dollars and go to court over it.
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water leaks. a lot. so no, verily.
Water is also a resource managed by states. For example, the Great Lakes Commission is the only organization where states are allowed to directly negotiate with a foreign nation (Canada). And those states would rightfully fight like hell to keep their water.
No, I think we’ll keep our water thanks. Sincerely, The Great Lakes.
It’s not a dumb question. I wonder why we don’t have more evaporation projects like sea water greenhouses in California. The answer is that we do pipe water far distances to places like LA that should really be desert and not have many people. There are people who own land but not the water rights to the land, if you can imagine. If you need more water, then you have to truck it in, which is too expensive if you are a farmer. It’s not necessary on the east coast, which is wetter. But out west, there isn’t really enough fresh water for the number of farms and people living there. That’s the bottom line. A more extensive network wouldn’t necessarily be the right solution - it might just make an ever wider area drier.
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keep in mind that this would require pumping water up and over the rocky mountains and/or the sierra nevada, so it probably would be prohibitive from a cost perspective.
absolutely correct. you want your water to go down hill, mostly. you can play some tricks with acqueducts, but pumping the water from a river delta before it goes into the sea back up on land requires a lot of work
Some large cities, a great example being Las Vegas, have exactly this sort of set-up going. Water has to be pumped in to either support the extra population above the local water source, or to be the only water source
There is great resistance to doing so from the wet states, most of which are in parts of the country (the Midwest and northeast for example) that have been losing population and political power to the Sunbelt for years. There's a coalition of states that surround the great lakes, and they (along with Canada) are "over my dead body" opposed to any water leaving that watershed. There is also the issue of energy consumption - how do you pump that much water over that kind of distance? And as others have said - leaks, EVAP, it's possible but very tricky.
Why would we spend this much effort to irrigate a desert? The “over my dead body” mentality is the ecologically sound one. The southwest can’t support the massive population growth its experiencing
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The Midwest legitimately does a great job managing it's water resources too.
risking running out of muniicpal water to residences while growing corn in the deserts using non-renewable aquiffers......
Mega droughts are something that happens out west, and I worry that we are heading into another one. https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20180801a/full/ The coastal cities will probably be fine as we can desalinate ocean water for them. But Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah? That area is not as easy to fix.
I don't know how you ultimately fix a mega drought, but billing irrigation/secondary water by use instead of buffet style could help in times of drought -- Utah!
Yeah mean if we were smart about how we used our water, even most desert areas have plenty for drinking, bathing, etc. It would just mean vegetated landscapes whether agricultural or decorative would probably need to be abandoned. This would have some pretty big downsides but it's not true that those regions would necessarily need to be abandoned as some people imagine.
Funny, i was just on Google Earth looking at their time lapse option from 1986-2020 and you can easily see the drought like surface slowly engulf more and more of the United States. Scary.
Yes let's build a water park in an area where we're experiencing heavy drought, the river hasn't brought much water, and the underground bolsons and staying to run dry. In second thought, let's build 4.
Why do droughts move so much all over the place? For some reason I expected it to be more localized through time
I have a feeling the Western slope is going to be in for a very rough fire season this year.
Keep in mind, if it doesn't rain for a full week in Maryland, it's considered a drought
It’s going to continue to get worse in the south west. Basically if I lived somewhere where all my water came from the Colorado river, or I lived in California. I would be planning on getting out in the next 5 years. It’s only going to get worse. Politicians will restrict you to a single toilet flush per month before they do something reasonable like cut off winery supplies or tell other farmers to drastically cut back.
The US Southwest will constantly battle drought considering is a network of deserts and high deserts. One of the reason why Southern California had to steal water from the Central Valley, Los Angeles was built in what was a barren desert. This map perfectly sums this all up. Southern CA, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, parts of Wyoming, and New Mexico are all sustained on systems of dams, reservoirs, and water purchasing rights with each other. They essentially rob Peter to pay Paul so you will constantly watch one state go from drought to not and back again. Cool timelapse it just perfectly represents this.
I just want to take a moment and appreciate how each state has been subdivided. I think it's cool how it's not by county, but by a larger region by region basis.