Friday, May 02, 2008

Steady Drought Progress




As the two images above show, the historic drought in the Southeast has eased dramatically over the past four months as La Nina has loosened its grip and a steady stream of storms has rumbled through the region.
The first image is the current drought map for the region; the second is from December 25, 2007--a dry Christmas indeed. Virginia is still dry, but not nearly as much so as in December. On these maps, brownish-red means "exceptional drought," red="extreme drought," brown="severe drought," light brown="moderate drought," and yellow="abnormally dry." Late last year, more than 45% of the Southeast was classified as "extreme drought" or worse; today less than 10% of the Southeast falls in the extreme drought category and none in the extraordinary drought category.


Who knows--maybe Georgia won't even have to go to war with Florida, Alabama and Tennessee so that Atlantans can water their lawns!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

so red is good here?

X Curmudgeon said...

Thanks for pointing that out to me--the maps posted backwards from what I'd thought. Red is bad. I'm revising the post to make it accurate.