Over the last day, a line of thunderstorms crossed the nation’s midsection, brought some damaging winds and power outages, but reports suggest that there was nowhere close to enough water to dampen the raging drought. Like water on a hot skillet, a pounding rain on bone dry soil tends to run off quickly without soaking in.
Here in mid-michigan, we got some storms, but also, for the last 36 hours, some clouds and showers that have been keeping things helpfully moist. Farther south in the corn growing areas, not so much.
The Herald Bulletin (somewhere in Indiana, apparently..)
The rain that has fallen on northern Indiana for eight of the past 13 days hasn’t been enough to get South Bend out of a severe drought.
Weather officials say it will take weeks of rain to overcome months of dryness, and that’s true for the rest of the state as well. Almost all of Indiana is in some form of drought, and one-fifth of it is in the worst stage.
Conditions aren’t expected to improve in the next month, either. The long-term forecast for August calls for above normal temperatures and below normal rainfall, said Al Shipe, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.
“This drought is not short term,” added associate state climatologist Ken Scheeringa. “This drought is probably going to go on at least a few more months. It’s not going to be any quick fix where you get a series of rains and it’s done.”
The drought that has parched large regions of the U.S. this summer shows no signs of easing and is instead getting worse, according to a report released Thursday. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor shows “widespread intensification” of drought through the middle of the country and the map tracking it “set a record for the fourth straight week for the area in moderate drought or worse.” The map has 53.44% of the U.S. and Puerto Rico in moderate drought or worse, up from 53.17% last week while 38.11% is in severe drought or worse, compared with 35.32%.
Extreme drought is hitting 17.2% of the nation, vs. 11.32% the previous week and 1.99% is in exceptional drought, more than double the earlier figure. “We’ve seen tremendous intensification of drought through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Arkansas, Kansas and Nebraska, and into part of Wyoming and South Dakota in the last week,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist and author of the U.S. Drought Monitor. He added that every state in the country had at least some of its area under abnormally dry or worse conditions.
West Central Tribune, Willmar Minnesota:
The U.S. Drought Monitor classifies drought in various stages, from moderate to severe, extreme and, ultimately, exceptional. Five states — Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska — are blanketed by a drought that is severe or worse. States like Arkansas and Oklahoma are nearly as bad, with most areas covered in a severe drought and large portions in extreme or exceptional drought.
Other states are seeing conditions rapidly worsen. Illinois — a key producer of corn and soybeans — saw its percentage of land in extreme or exceptional drought balloon from just 8 percent last week to roughly 71 percent as of Thursday, the Drought Monitor reported.
And conditions are not expected to get better, with little rain and more intense heat forecast for the rest of the summer.
Devastating US drought heralds global food inflation
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jul2012/drou-j28.shtml
Snip:
“I’ll use the word catastrophe—that’s my definition,” Larry Pope, head of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, told the Financial Times. In June, Smithfield moved to lock in feed costs on the futures markets before corn broke $8 a bushel. “I thought that $6 corn was the end of the world,” he said. “I never could have realized that I would be thankful to be buying it at $7.”
“Beef is simply going to be too expensive to eat,” Pope said. “Pork is not going to be too far behind. Chicken is catching up fast… Are we going to really take protein away from Americans?” He said US meat prices would rise by “significant double digits” per year.