Drought Conditions

“Enchanted Light | New Mexico” by Jim Crotty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

In my area precipitation has been below normal for the last few months. This is the time of year when we would normally expect a good part of our annual rainfall, and the appropriate authorities have been warning us of the possibility of drought. The conditions are abnormally dry. If they continue abnormally dry then the criteria for moderate or worse drought conditions will be met, hence the warning. That’s what we pay them to do. We pay people to collect the data and we pay other people to interpret it for us so we can plan accordingly.

It’s not a perfect system. It doesn’t always get everything right. Sometimes the actual amounts of precipitation will differ from the forecasts used in their projections. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one we use. They have to work with the available data and this year the data is saying that it’s drier than normal. It would be wrong to criticize them for employing current best practises with an abundance of caution.

We’ve had some rain in the last couple of days. We’re still below normal for the period, and there are dry, sunny days in the forecast, but a local blog operator has made a post mocking the reports warning of possible drought conditions. He thinks it’s clever to seize on two wet days and mock the efforts of the people we pay to watch out for us. This same blogger has used a cold snap in the winter as an opportunity to say, “So much for global warming, eh?”

What are you supposed to do with people like that?

rjb