It's been very dry here in southeastern Iowa this winter. Almost no snow, a bit of rain now and again. Sub-soil moisture is probably OK for this year--next year, who knows.
Forty years ago 12 to 18 inch snows were common two or three times a winter. Lately, we are lucky to get a foot total.
Yup. Farmers can feel it in their bones. I sniff the air, I look at the grass lying brown and not covered by snow.
Good years, the snow falls on green grass and when it melts, the grass is already mostly greenish.
Personally, I don't remember it raining throughout the winter in the Midwest until recently. Cold and snow were the norm. Now the rain comes sporadically and the ground is dry. A geologist friend said that rain in winter is the worst because the water just runs off the land. That's why snow here is so important. It slowly percolates into the ground as the weather warms and holds the soil in place. But perhaps the new McMansions and all their artificial infrastructure will do the same job-not. If nothing else they heat the Earth far quicker than the cooling forests and wetlands they are replacing. Many people in the Midwest depend on wells to live and we are building over our water resources and funneling it down flash flooding streams. I heard that Chicago is no longer tying new communities into its Lake Michigan water. Oh well, there goes the neighborhood.
We used to almost never get rain in winter! Snow would fall before christmas and then more snow and then it would pile up to literally the rafters on the windward side!
This year, never more than 8" and always, melted swiftly in the rain and then it would freeze hard which is really nasty. Zero snowmelt for spring. This is real bad.
We are in the middle of the worst drought in the history of Kansas. The river that supplies the drinking and irrigation water to my hometown is at a historic low. It got as low as 1.2 cubic feet per second. I was riding my bike around central Kansas the other day and noticed giant expanses of tilled dirt with no wind breaks. Can you say dust bowl II?
Commenting by HaloScan
