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| Canada gifted us with a cold front Thursday and all we got was a wind shift and a couple clouds. |
I don't mean to dismiss the damage droughts inflict. Each one can cause millions, even billions of dollars in damage to crops, water infrastructure and more.
In some parts of the world, droughts cause or contribute to famines which can kill thousands. Droughts are not to be messed with.
Most weather disasters, though, have a pretty clear beginning and end. The hurricane, tornado or flood arrives and does its damage. When you're in it, you have a pretty good idea when it will be over. Then the storm indeed departs, leaving us humans to pick up the pieces.
A drought sneaks up on you. You don't realize you're in it until the crops start wilting, the well runs dry and the trees start turning brown. Worse, you have no idea when it will end. Plus, there's usually no clean break from it.
I look at droughts the way I look at my experiences in airport terminals. Some people are afraid of flying. I'm not. My phobia is airport terminals.
Airport terminals are where everything goes wrong. It usually takes the form of a slow cascade of escalating trouble. Like droughts. The worst part of airport terminals is you're there, and your flight gets delayed. They don't tell you how long the delay will last, why there's a delay or whether it will turn into a cancelation.
You don't know whether you'll have to rebook with another airline, how long you will be there, whether you will actually get to your destination, or where you will sleep tonight. The uncertainty is what kills you. You actually feel better getting terrible, concrete news at the airport than you do when you are lingering with all those unanswered questions.
Not knowing what will happen is strangely better than learning your flight is canceled and the next available flight is three days from now.
Droughts are the same way. There's no real end date. No information. There are moments of false hope. Maybe on a particular day during a drought it rains hard for awhile. But then it stops, and you return to endless days of blue skies and dry air. The drought worsens.
Even when the rains really returns, it takes forever for the drought to actually end. It's hard to end a drought. Months of near average rainfall won't do it. You need months and months of above average rainfall. The chances of that happening are less than 50/50.
OUR CURRENT EXPERIENCE
That's where we are in Vermont now. Each new forecast, each new day is another piece of frustration. It doesn't rain, again. A forecast that said rain was likely evaporates into a chance of scattered sprinkles.
A cold front went through Vermont Thursday but you're forgiven if you didn't notice. Most cold fronts at least have a band of showers with them. This one maybe had a couple puffy clouds. And a breeze that came from the north but didn't affect temperatures all that much.
The only moisture we had was the patchy dense river valley fog we so often get during calm early mornings in September. The cold front meant temperatures this morning fell into the upper 30s to mid 40s by dawn. There might have been a patch or two of frost again in the very coldest hollows.
Today is another sunny, dry one. It'll be a couple degrees cooler than yesterday but still pleasant. Except for the arid air that will keep worsening the drought.
Speaking of worsening, the forecast has dried up too. The hoped for rain this weekend will not materialize. At least not to any great extent.
Earlier forecasts had a disturbance coming down from Canada and going right over us. That would have been good for maybe a quarter inch of rain. Not much, but it would have tided us over for a day or two.
Instead, the disturbance now looks like it will zip by to our north, leaving just a weak trough (basically a semi-cold front) to come through Saturday night. It will have very little rain along it. Plus, the air is so dry most of the small amount of rain coming with that little front will evaporate on its way down from the clouds.
A few raindrops probably will make it to the ground, but they will basically amount to a trace. It might wet the dust down a tiny bit late Saturday or early Sunday.
Then it's back to another long period of sunny, dry weather. It feels strange to curse a string of sunny days in what used to be a perennially overcast Vermont.
This drought is stubborn. It will actually get a little warmer next week, which is doubly bad. Dry, sunny weather will keep evaporating what little water we have left. When it gets warmer, evaporation rates increase.
Expect at least some days next week to get up to near 80 degrees.
Our next shot at rain still looks like it will come in around September 20. Long range forecasts continue to indicate that the weather system that would bring that rain looks unimpressive, so don't expect any kind of nice soaking.
That would be too much to ask.
Vermont is stuck in Terminal A of Drought International Airport, and the ticket agents are not telling us anything about whether we'll eventually be able to leave. They're not even offering a drink of water.
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