Texas Agriculture Daily News
Drought worsening across Texas
Tuesday, December 04, 2012
|
A dry fall has pushed even more of the Lone Star State back into a severe or extreme drought situation, according to state climatologists.
A report in Bloomberg Businessweek says that 55 percent of Texas is now listed as experiencing a severe drought, up 40 percent from last week’s Drought Monitor report.
The number of areas listed as extreme drought jumped from 1.5 percent last week to 24.5 percent this week.
Some 80 percent of the state is now experiencing some form of drought. That number is up 5 percent from last week.
“September and November could be the driest of those months since 1950 and among the top five driest on record,” State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said.
Nielsen-Gammon says not much more rain is expected this winter as the El Niño pattern appears to have fizzled out.
The state never really recovered from the historic 2011 drought, according to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist from the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. “We climbed up on the fence, but we never really got off the fence. It’s a very fast tumble off of recovery back into the depths of drought.”
Nielsen-Gammon says the worsening drought could causes food prices and the price of hay to rise this winter. He says it will also impact water in the Lone Star State as reservoirs are not refilling or dropping.
The U.S. Drought Monitor can be viewed online at http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/about.html.
|
|
|
|
|
|