Drought: long-term or short-term, not a pleasant scenario

Howard Cormier, Extension Agent in Vermilion Parish, La., sent the following note today:

“The weatherman said this morning we can expect no significant rain until the next tropical system or hurricane. Not a pleasant scenario.”

Howard, like most folks along the Gulf Coast, doesn’t like to think in those terms these days, not after 2005’s hurricane season. But that’s the reality. Much of the south is dry, from west Texas to Georgia. (Parts of the lower Southeast did get a respite from Alberto, but as dry as it’s been there this year, three inches of rain won’t last long.)

Late last week when I was making calls for PeanutFax – and before I heard about tropical storm Alberto brewing in the Caribbean – Dallas Hartzog said that it would take a tropical depression or storm to bring appreciable relief to farmers in southeast Alabama. Hartzog, Alabama Extension Peanut Specialist, said the region was so dry that scattered showers would not be enough. Extension workers and consultants in Florida and Georgia have essentially said the same thing.

One thing that some tropical storms or weak hurricanes seem to bring is atmospheric instability. After the system moves ashore, there can be periods when more summer showers develop in coastal regions. Garry McCauley, a Texas A&M rice researcher and acting Extension specialist, pointed that out to me a couple of years ago. I’ve since noticed that you tend to see strings of showers sometimes developing days or even a week later.

Granted, neither Garry nor I are meteorologists, and this may sound a bit like a couple of old guys sitting on a country porch trying to predict the weather based on how the crickets are chirping. But the thing that separates Garry and me from the country porch is that we can look at weather radar, and days after a hurricane we’re seeing more of those green blobs popping up along the Texas coast.

The thing that’s probably the most disturbing about Howard’s message this morning is that we seem to be in a monsoon weather pattern – either no rain or enough to drown people. India and Bangladesh, in other words.

The weather is changing, the climate is growing warmer. One science magazine recently showed aerial photos of Glacier National Park’s main ice formation now and compared to a few decades ago, and the glacier sheet is down to a sampling of what was once there.

All that water went somewhere. Howard Cormier will tell you it probably didn’t make it to Vermilion Parish.