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| This weeks's U.S. Drought Monitor shows little improvement over last week, despite some rain. Red area is extreme drought, orange is severe, lighter orange is moderate drought. |
About two thirds of the Green Mountain State is in extreme drought, about the same level has the week before.
Droughts are categorized in rank of increasing severity as moderate, severe, extreme and exceptional.
By the time you get up to extreme drought, you see crop losses, struggling dairy farms, extremely low water in rivers and steams and exceptionally busy well drillers and bulk water haulers. All of that is definitely happening in Vermont.
All but tiny slivers in the rest of Vermont is in extreme drought. Only minuscule areas in extreme southern Vermont, northern Grand Isle County and a small section of southwest Rutland County are in moderate drought.
The section of Rutland County that's now in moderate instead of severe drought is the only slight improvement over last week I could find. The area of extreme drought in Rutland County also shrank a little.
That improvement was offset by extreme drought spreading more into eastern Chittenden and Franklin counties and western Lamoille County.
These are all fussy little changes. Essentially, things are unchanged for the report that came out a week ago.
In the rest of the Northeast, heavy rains improved things somewhat in southern New England, but drought worsened in eastern Maine and New York's St. Lawrence Valley.
OUTLOOK
This was a flash drought in Vermont, one that develops within weeks instead of months that regular droughts do. However, you almost never see a flash end to a drought.
Even if we get a lot of soaking rains, and big blitzes of winter snows, I don't think the drought will disappear anytime soon. I'm betting it could easily last into the spring. It might improve over the coming months if we get a lot of precipitation, but it will be a long slog.
Plus, there's no promise of much soaking rains. We do have several chances of rain over the next week or two, but I'm unimpressed by the amount of precipitation we'll get from these weather systems.
In the short term, today is a high risk fire day in the Green Mountain State. The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation rates today's wildfire risk as very high, except for the southern Green Mountains, where the risk is "merely" high, with no adjectives.
True, we had a little rain earlier this week, but not much. It was enough to briefly wet down fallen leaves and dead grasses and weeds, but not enough to soak the fallen branches and trees, and underground roots in our forests.
The wind has dried out the leaves and weeds. Winds are forecast to gust to 30 mph or more for the rest of today. That means any fires that start will spread fast.
The breezes will be lighter tomorrow and Saturday, so the risk of rapidly spreading fires will be lower. But new fires could easily start, as it will be quite dry those days.
Rain is still in the forecast Sunday night and Monday, but we don't yet know how much we'll get. Unlike the few rain storms we've had this fall, mainly cloudy, somewhat damp and showery weather could continue into the middle of next week, which would be great.
We seem to be switching out of a weather pattern in which big, dry high pressure systems stalled over us and kept rainmakers away. But the new weather pattern looks only somewhat wetter, with relatively weak, fast moving little storms throwing some shots of generally light rain at us.
The worsening trend in the drought might slow or even stop in the coming weeks, but unless we see some pleasant surprises, don't count on a lot of improvement anytime soon.
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