(FARGO, ND)– Drought conditions continue to expand across a wide portion of the U.S. as fall harvest rolls along. The latest drought monitor shows well over 75% of the country in some form of drought from abnormally dry (D0) to exceptional drought (D4) as of this past Thursday. The question now is, when will we see meaningful precipitation?
Eric Snodgrass, Principal Atmospheric Scientist with Nutrien Ag Solutions, shares that typically we see a pattern shift around Halloween and he is watching for that exact thing to happen this year.
“If you want to get into a situation where we’ve got flow so you can do better fall application after harvest, you’ve got to get the jet stream level winds to come out of the Southwest. And they haven’t,” according to Snodgrass. “They’ve been either tucked away in Canada or they’ve been coming out of the Northwest.”
“I really think around, you know, two or three days before Halloween, we’re going to flip it all around. We’re going to get some southwest flow. We’re going to get something that could kick off a storm system, to bring some moisture out of the Gulf of Mexico, and finally, bring some, you know, a little bit of moisture. But this will not undo a drought. It just won’t. If it took us 60 days to get into this drought, I mean, to be honest with you, without major flooding, you have to take twice that amount of time to get out of it. We need 120 days of consistent rainfall to erase this and the thing is, we’re going in toward winter,” according to Snodgrass.
He adds that November does look like we could see above average moisture for a big section of the central U.S. but he also says we will probably need a pretty nasty winter in order to break the drought.
Long-range forecasts also suggest a weak La Niña, which could lead to early winter conditions in the West and prolonged drought risks into next year. Snodgrass also says the hurricane season might extend into early November, posing additional weather risks.
Listen to our full weather conversation on the Market Talk YouTube channel below:
