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Business News
Independence, MO —
The National Weather Service and other federal agencies use a five-step scale – from “abnormally dry” to “exceptional drought” – to measure the severity of extended dry weather.
The Kansas City area has gone from step 1 to step 5 in about three months, and there’s little to suggest it will get better soon.
Officially, at Kansas City International Airport, the area has gotten one-third of the normal amount of rain since April 1. Even the sprinkles and spotty downpours of the last few days only do so much.
“Unfortunately, precipitation amounts were meager at best and had little impact on the dried-up soils across the region,” the Weather Service’s Pleasant Hill office said in a weekly drought update posted Thursday.
The weekly update comes with a new drought-severity map, which now shows virtually the entire metro area in exceptional drought. Just a week ago, an area generally south of the metro – and with just a sliver of southwest Jackson County – carried that designation, as did other parts of Missouri.
That map, updated as the year has progressed, shows the drought’s swift spread. At the beginning of the year, just 4.5 percent of Missouri was listed in that first category of the five-step scale, “abnormally dry.”
Even in the middle of May, five-sixths of the state still wasn’t registering on the scale, but 12.3 percent – including the metro area – was abnormally dry and 4.1 percent had slipped into “moderate drought.”
Now it’s flipped around. Even the least hard-hit 5.3 percent of the state – eight northern counties from Tarkio east to Princeton – are at step 3, “severe drought.” Almost 60 percent of the state – Springfield, to the lakes to St. Louis, plus Hannibal west to St. Joseph – is at step 4, “extreme drought.”
And that leaves 35 percent of the state – the Kansas City area east to Columbia and then tailing back to Missouri’s southwest corner, plus a dozen counties near the Bootheel – in exceptional drought. (It’s worse in Kansas. Of its 105 counties, only about 25 are not at least partially covered by the “exceptional drought” tag.)
The effects are severe. Farmers expect sharply reduced harvests, particularly of corn and soybeans. Ranchers with cattle are expected to reduce or liquidate herds rather than pay higher prices for hay and other feed to get them through the winter.
Missouri has been in a state of emergency for weeks. Many areas, including Independence, have burn bans. In Blue Springs and Grain Valley, businesses have posted Central Jackson County Fire Protection District posters warning people to careful about flicking a match or light cigarette into the bushes. Virtually all of the state’s cropland has been rated as short of moisture – both topsoil and subsoil – for much of the summer.
The National Weather Service and other federal agencies use a five-step scale – from “abnormally dry” to “exceptional drought” – to measure the severity of extended dry weather.
The Kansas City area has gone from step 1 to step 5 in about three months, and there’s little to suggest it will get better soon.
Officially, at Kansas City International Airport, the area has gotten one-third of the normal amount of rain since April 1. Even the sprinkles and spotty downpours of the last few days only do so much.
“Unfortunately, precipitation amounts were meager at best and had little impact on the dried-up soils across the region,” the Weather Service’s Pleasant Hill office said in a weekly drought update posted Thursday.
The weekly update comes with a new drought-severity map, which now shows virtually the entire metro area in exceptional drought. Just a week ago, an area generally south of the metro – and with just a sliver of southwest Jackson County – carried that designation, as did other parts of Missouri.
That map, updated as the year has progressed, shows the drought’s swift spread. At the beginning of the year, just 4.5 percent of Missouri was listed in that first category of the five-step scale, “abnormally dry.”
Even in the middle of May, five-sixths of the state still wasn’t registering on the scale, but 12.3 percent – including the metro area – was abnormally dry and 4.1 percent had slipped into “moderate drought.”
Now it’s flipped around. Even the least hard-hit 5.3 percent of the state – eight northern counties from Tarkio east to Princeton – are at step 3, “severe drought.” Almost 60 percent of the state – Springfield, to the lakes to St. Louis, plus Hannibal west to St. Joseph – is at step 4, “extreme drought.”
And that leaves 35 percent of the state – the Kansas City area east to Columbia and then tailing back to Missouri’s southwest corner, plus a dozen counties near the Bootheel – in exceptional drought. (It’s worse in Kansas. Of its 105 counties, only about 25 are not at least partially covered by the “exceptional drought” tag.)
The effects are severe. Farmers expect sharply reduced harvests, particularly of corn and soybeans. Ranchers with cattle are expected to reduce or liquidate herds rather than pay higher prices for hay and other feed to get them through the winter.
Missouri has been in a state of emergency for weeks. Many areas, including Independence, have burn bans. In Blue Springs and Grain Valley, businesses have posted Central Jackson County Fire Protection District posters warning people to careful about flicking a match or light cigarette into the bushes. Virtually all of the state’s cropland has been rated as short of moisture – both topsoil and subsoil – for much of the summer.
That’s the story around much of the country. More than two-thirds of the United States is rated somewhere on that five-point drought scale. It’s the worst U.S. drought in decades but might be leveling off or even be easing ever so slightly in some lucky locales, federal weather forecasters said.
While the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center calls for the drought to linger in the nation’s breadbasket and parts of some mountain states at least through November, it provided a silver lining with the news that conditions aren’t expected to get worse.
Conditions may even improve in the Southwest and in a band sweeping from South Dakota through a section of Iowa and east to southern Indiana, then south to Texas.
Ed O’Lenic, a seasonal forecaster at the center, said his September-through-November outlook “is taking away the dry, but not necessarily making it wet.” Illinois state climatologist Jim Angel, a drought expert, said he would describe the drought as “leveling off,” rather than easing.
The Weather Service, by the way, is looking for reports from the public about the drought and its effects. Want to help? Go to http://www.crh.noaa.gov/eax/
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
