Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, IA
06-15-06
Drought making a return to southwest Iowa
PHIL ROONEY, Staff Writer
National Drought Mitigation Center
Construction projects are moving along without weather interruptions and
sporting events are going off as scheduled under sunny skies.
It's hot, it's getting dry and summer's less than a week away.
A rainy start to spring has been following by increasingly infrequent rains, and
land, that only weeks ago, was approaching normal moisture levels is once again
starting to dry out.
Experts say it's too early to panic, but conditions are far from ideal. Summer
begins Wednesday, and that usually brings the promise of hot and dry weather
for the next couple of months.
"It's gotten worse," said Mark Svoboda with the National Drought Mitigation
Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "The big fall-off has come in the
last 60 days. April and May were not too kind to us."
As the year moves through the final days of the wettest three-month period,
some rain is needed, Svoboda said. Things are better along the Missouri River
basin than in other areas, but a good part of the region is at 50 to 75 percent of
normal rainfall.
"Drought has crept back into the picture," he said. "We'll be relying on timely
rains to get us through."
Crops need an inch of rain per week this time of year, but Svoboda said with high
temperatures it's possible to lose a quarter of an inch or more per day from fields,
ponds and plants. Windy conditions, a common occurrence in southwest Iowa,
just make things worse.
Rains that moved through the area this morning were not expected to have an
impact on the situation, Svoboda said.
Elwynn Taylor, an Iowa State University climatologist, said it does look like
things are drying out again, and city lawns can provide an early warning of
seriously dry conditions.
"When people's lawns start to go dry, you've got another week or two on the
fields," Taylor said. "Ten days is the rule of thumb."
If rain falls within that 10-day period, problems can be avoided. In central Iowa,
he said, lawns already are starting to turn brown.
Several consecutive days of 90-degree temperatures, a strong possibility
according to local forecasts, will dramatically increase the need for moisture,
Taylor said.
Many areas are not now in bad shape, but things could change quickly in
southwest Iowa; and the benefits of the heavy rains that fell two weeks ago, in at
least some areas, soon will be exhausted. Southwest Iowa statistically is prone to
the greatest moisture fluctuations of any part of the state, Taylor said.
"A lot of times in southwest Iowa, it's either sopping wet or bone dry," he said.
"We don't know, but we have to anticipate that things could be on the warm and
dry side as usual."