Drought persists in the southwestern United States
Drought persists in the southwestern United States
Persistent drought conditions have spread throughout the southwestern United States. With the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah standing out as extremely dry. At the beginning of November 2018, more than 9 million people lived in areas of drought in those four states; another 6 million lived in abnormally dry areas, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System.
The map above shows the drought conditions in the United States as of November 6, 2018. The data comes from United States Drying Monitor, an association of the Department of Agriculture of the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The map shows drought areas in progressive shades of orange to red and is based on measurements of climate, soil and water conditions of more than 350 federal, state and local observers across the country. NASA provides Measures and experimental models. to this effort to monitor the drought.
More than half of the population in New Mexico and Arizona is located in areas affected by the drought. In Utah, the entire population is grappling with the drought as the state experiences its worst drought in a decade.
According to the US Drought Monitor UU., The Four Corners area has been experiencing "Extreme drought" the conditions since January 2018. In April, drought conditions in certain areas intensified and since then they have persisted at the most severe level known as "exceptional drought", which potentially leads to widespread crop losses and water emergencies.
The conditions in 2018 fit a long-term pattern. "This particular year is really a continuation of a drought in that region that has been occurring almost continuously since the late 1990s and early 2000s," said Ben Cook, a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "Maybe once or twice a decade, you'll get a big year of drought in much of the western United States, but the really unusual part is the duration of the drought."
The cook cites some reasons for the prolonged drought. A main driver has been the relatively cold conditions of the ocean in the Eastern tropical Pacific During the last two decades. As a result, winter storms that normally reach the southwest of the US UU And Mexico is pushed north. "The storms are not bringing much moisture, rain and snow to the region," Cook said, "and that means the water that would come and the restoration of the soil and snow cover is not available for the next growing season."
The last time the western United States had such a long or intense drought was in the 1950s, Cook said, when there were far fewer people in the region. The population has increased substantially in the last six decades, and the southwest is home to some of the fastest growing The great cities of America.
As more and more people depend on the Colorado River for their water supply, two large reservoirs are falling and could one day cause a water shortage. Seven states have drought contingency plans drafted to manage the decrease in water levels in the Colorado River basin. But even if the region receives a lot of rain, warm temperatures can affect the southwest of the US. UU Even after the drought passes.
"Regardless of the rain and snowfall in the region, we are seeing that the warmer temperatures associated with climate change are drying up," Cook said. "Eventually, we will return to some kind of more" normal "conditions, but even those conditions are probably drier than we used to think" normal. "
Map of the Earth Observatory of NASA by Lauren Dauphin, using data from the United States Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Tale of Kasha Patel.
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