As we move deeper into fall, it is important to see where we stand with ongoing and developing drought. The current (as of October 15th) Drought Monitor looks like this:

You can see that MUCH of the country is dealing with drought issues. Zooming in a bit closer, you can see the areas of our immediate region that are struggling.

To put this in perspective, you can see the % of normal rainfall over the past 90 days.

Far Southwest Texas, the Red River Valley, and many areas of East/Northeast Texas have really struggled. This is leading to drought maintenance and some rapid drought expansion. To tell another part of this story, let’s look at soil moisture from the surface down to about 3 feet.

You can see that while many areas in Texas are struggling with lack of soil moisture, it could be a lot worse. Almost all of Oklahoma, Kansas, and other neighboring states to the north are really suffering. This begs the question… “Is there any significant hope of this being erased in the coming months?” I have serious doubts… In fact, I think that a lot of Texas will likely look quite a bit worse through the rest of fall and winter. The one wildcard is whether we can ditch the La Niña pattern soon enough to make a difference this spring. I’ve been saying for quite some time that this La Niña event will likely be a weak one and will likely have departed by February. The latest ENSO ( La Niña, El Niño, or Neutral) probabilities are shown below.

You can see the La Niña probabilities max out just above 50% in November/December/January and December/January/February periods, before dropping off quite a bit thereafter. Neutral probabilities increase quite a bit this spring, which would be a good thing. However, with a high likelihood that we will have to overcome quite a bit of drought, it will take a pretty significant pattern change to reverse that trend. That’s something I’ll be updating on you in the coming months…