The latest Drought Monitor has come on, and while improved, is not exactly what you would like to see in the middle of summer.
Below is the map from the Drought Monitor released Thursday, August 4th. The data includes any rain that fell through August 2nd.
The US Drought Monitor releases this data every Thursday.
Rainfall from 3 of the 4 past months have been below normal in Columbus.
- April 2.31″ (below 1.09″)
- May 2.74″ (below 1.43″)
- June 5.22″ (above 1.21″)
- July 2.49″ (below 2.30″)
Columbus is not alone either, for the most part July was a dry month across most of the state, with the exception of the southern part of the state. Below is a graphic that represents the rainfall that fell over the past 30 days vs what is normal in an area for the last 30 days. For example, if a city normally see 2″ of rain, and only received 1″, then a “50%” would be represented. That means that any number below 100% equals a dry period, with numbers closer to 0% being the worst.
Now I did mention the latest drought monitor is a bit better, and this was due to some rainfall over the past week. Currently almost 30% of the state is now free of any drought status. This is up from only 24.4% last week, that is good news. Here is the flip side though, our D1-D4 drought, which in this case only represents areas in the state that are in a “Moderate Drought”, that number has gone up.
Last week, we had a third of the state that was considered to be in a “Moderate Drought”, this week that number swells to almost 43%.
If you look at where we were 3 months ago, we are in much worse shape, as we had 0% of the state considered even dry back then. However, consider our low-snow Winter we had, when the first snow didn’t occur in Columbus until the 2nd week of January. We started this year with almost half the state considered “Abnormally Dry (D0)”.
A year ago, we were in great shape again, with 0% of the state dry.
Below is a chart with the data:
July is typically one of our wetter months, and August is our driest of the Summer months historically. It does not appear at this time that we are going to see a major turnaround in the month of August going forward for precipitation. Spotty pop-ups are providing local areas with rainfall, but a good drought busting rain does not appear in the short term.
