(news.vt.edu)
The article mentions the potential for a super El Nino at the very end but doesn't discuss the effect it could have on content in the map should it go down as modeled. I suspect that a lot of yellows and red will disappear or shift to the north.
I know that the last super El Nino in 2015-2016 followed similar drought conditions due to La Nina such that rainfall at my property, which is normally ~36" (91.4 cm) annually (that's a 20 year average taken here on my property) was below average for the period 2010-2014 by 3-5" (7.62-12.7 cm) and up to 10" (25.4 cm) in 2014. Once La Nina faded it began to rain in August and rained out through December and we ended the year with 68" (172.7 cm) rainfall. In the decades that I have lived here and tracked rainfall that is the wettest year by more than 14" (35.6 cm).
We are currently behind the curve here but I have faith in their predictions since it also comes with a promise of ridiculously hot temperatures to make the last months of the year humid well past normal. It has been cooler than normal so far and drier than normal (La Nina hanging on by a thread). The script will flip and N Texas will again be a miserable place to be if you work outside.
If you go from a drought to a lot of water it generally builds up pretty badly as dried out dirt doesn't absorb water very well.
If the prediction holds true it may become a year with a lot of water damage/flooding in these regions.
Let's hope for the best though.
There won't be much we can do about soil absorption since keeping your yard watered will also cause runoff if the soil is saturated.
We just need to follow the common sense guidance to avoid driving into flooded underpasses and do not drive past barriers. Remember that at night it will be difficult to spot flooded sections of highway due to reflections so you will be dependent on center lines and painted markings and if they disappear it could indicate water depth sufficient to obscure them. Hydroplaning is a serious concern so drive more slowly and remember that if you begin to hydroplane you need to keep your wheels pointed in the direction that you need to travel and let off of the accelerator. The pooled water and sudden decrease in speed will put your tires back on the road surface so your vehicle will zip off in the direction that it is pointing. Check your tread depth before autumn and replace your tires if they are worn.
Carry a rain slicker or poncho with you in case traffic conditions force you to stop due to accidents or water across the roadway. You'll be a lot more comfortable dry than wet.
I intentionally bought property with a house that is on a hill with drainage away from the house so flooding isn't something that I worry about. I know that most other people will have to deal with flooding, especially around here where there are so many new construction issues - new concrete driveways, asphalt streets, and channelized creeks. Places that have never flooded in the past could flood now due to loss of open ground to home construction.
I am a couple decades into restoring my place to native prairie grasses, wildflowers, and trees so my place manages rainfall as it always has. I don't have much soil to absorb the rainfall though since I live on a limestone outcrop with poorly developed soils.
I hope people around here will follow guidance and be safe and use common sense when the rains come. I'm ready with my 4x4s to drag them out of their situations if they need a hand though.
Add a pair of rubber boots and a walking stick. The latter both to check the depth of water, and to brace yourself when there's bad footing or flowing water.
Real question is how will next years crop handle the supply constrains due to the Straight (outta) Hormuz lock down.
USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought - https://www.agweb.com/news/usda-projects-smallest-us-wheat-h...
Wheat Acreage Continues Decline as Producers Find More Lucrative Crops - https://www.proag.com/news/wheat-acreage-continues-decline-a...
In what way? Wheat hasn't even returned to early 2025 price levels yet. It is up relative to where is has been recently amid what were very low prices, but still have a long way to go to get where things had been through much of the 2020s.
Unfortunately, what I wanted to know also changed, in that I now use the site to keep tabs on the thoughts of folks are or who fund and work for hard-right technocrats.
There are, of course, many other folks on the site.
At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places: folks who, for instance, think Peter Thiel is of course quite sane and probably not trying to figure out a way to kill vast chunks of us off (and that it would be a reasonable thing if he were).
You think critics of Thiel are the techno fascists?
Big Tech social media are perfect platforms to drive people and society apart. Yesterday suddenly Youtube passed a vid [0] through the algorithmic filter bubble they feed me, showing Marco Rubio (or a deepfake version?) spew divisive misinfo about Macron and France. Most telling that none of the comments had a critical word on Rubio. Only Rubio fan comments behing highly critical of Europe and the EU.
Big Tech social media is pure poison to healthy society in how it insidiously spreads misinformation and propaganda to targeted audiences.
[0] No URL. I don't want to give this clicks, but the shorts vid ID is pgvVw5bZWiA
/s for anyone who doesn’t understand the mockery
The areas of extreme drought may change each year, but the total area affected seems rather ordinary to me.
The US southwest is now in the longest period of severe drought in at least 1200 years.
We are also refusing to maintain critical water-system infrastructure, setting ourselves up to lose critical water storage capacity [1].
We can get fined for washing our cars at certain times (although it's rarely enforced), but nobody ever turns the screws on the business machine.
[1] https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/north-county/plan-f...
Nearly every long term trend and statistics shows climate and environmental conditions getting worse, and it's almost solely due to human activity.
Cherry picking short term events isn't useful, especially when the climate getting worse often means an increase in the duration between normal events and an increase in extreme weather.
Now it snows, melts, gets cold, repeats and we don't really get any build up except maybe a big storm leaving enough for a week or two.
USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought
Always interested to see how creative people can be in trying to fit the undefinable and uncontrollable world into a narrative box.
I hope to hear words like "bollocks" and "bullshit" dispersed equitably.
That's also (again AFAIK) what causes the most concern among local residents in many locations. Separate from concerns about how a new neighbor might impact their electric bill in the future is the concern that drawing enough for a small city from the water table each day could prove detrimental in the long term.
https://kutv.com/news/utah-water/questions-grow-over-water-u...
Looks like the cedar rapids site is also closed loop, with the full buildout being a hair over 1 gigawatt. Compared to salt lake city, colder in the winter, and a bit cooler in the summer but with very high humidity comparatively.
https://corridorbusiness.com/qts-data-center-project-will-pu...
Plenty of places are using water faster than the aquifers they use regenerate. I hold no issue with banning using that limited freshwater resource for cooling.
Remove all water usage by individuals and DCs and you've barely made a dent in water usage, so why is the solution supposed to be a compromise somewhere between the two?
To pretend that providing an unprompted glass of drinking water (or not) makes any significant difference is reprehensibly inept.
(To be clear, I don't think that your description of the reality you observed is bad in any way. The report is fine; it's a good report. The thing you described in that report is simply very ugly, in and of itself.)
Granted I may not be the local expert on this any more since I have cut way back on restaurant visits over the last 6-8 years.
>Plenty of places are using water faster than the aquifers they use regenerate.
I thought I would split this since it can be a pretty deep subject. When I was in college in the 1980's (geoscience), one of the country's largest aquifers (Ogallala) was in the news all the time. The story was that at the rate they were pumping there would only be 25-30 years of water left in the reservoir. Recharge rates were too slow and the recharge zone was too far west. Late in the 90's T Boone Pickens fired the first real shots in the water wars by negotiating water rights over a large portion of the Ogallala aquifer building a water empire. Part of his plan was to pipeline water to N Texas cities that were running short of water, a consequence of their own failure to look far enough into the future to construct reservoirs and to upgrade systems and to manage supplies so that overuse was disincentivized. The pipelines were never built. Reservoirs are still difficult to construct. N Texas has an even more onerous problem with population growth outstripping supplies. Meanwhile, the Ogallala still has about 25-30 years before it is pumped dry. It isn't that the targets were wrong, it was more that those numbers applied to the areas where pumping was the most aggressive but overall there were areas that still had significant reserves and the programs instituted that encouraged upgrading equipment and more efficient water use were successful in putting the brakes on the decline of the aquifer. I'm probably getting most of this wrong so if you know something different, I'm all ears.
>I hold no issue with banning using that limited freshwater resource for cooling.
In line with the whole water problem here in Texas I agree that there should be statewide bans on using freshwater sources for cooling data centers. I especially would like that ban to be extended to the oil and gas industry so that they are prohibited from using freshwater for frac fluid. Since the shale boom really got rolling here in Texas they have left a trail of dry water wells and surface water pollution from poorly cemented casing or from injection of recovered production and frac fluids into subsurface formations that have created environmental issues when the injected fluids migrate through old joints or along dormant faults, re-energizing those faults and pushing water to the surface, especially through the pincushion of abandoned wells that were never plugged by their operators.
This is Texas so I expect that the industry will continue to get special treatment in Austin and since data centers are the new big thing, they will also take precedence over anything that local residents need in order to live comfortably. As a state, Texas has been rotten from the top down for a long time.
People should have the right to refuse to allow data centers in their areas in the same way that they have refused other things that could be described as a public benefit like landfills, wind and solar farms, new highways or high speed rail service, etc.
They will be the ones affected by their refusal when that industry passes them by and the local economy remains stagnant or in decline. It is ultimately their right to decide their own fates and if they gather opposition to a project and vote it down locally then the state and any industry should have no recourse other than to follow the will of the people on down the highway to some place where the locals are more accepting of the risk/rewards for the new infrastructure.
We don't need shit like this everywhere. There is plenty of room and somewhere, some group of gullibles will jump on the opportunity to be bled for someone else's benefit.
There is zero treason in that. I think you don't understand that word. That is freedom in its most pure form. Local people decide their own fates without lobbyists or other serial prevaricators spinning yarns about how great it will all be if they just accept all the downsides without arguing.
https://abc7.com/post/california-has-zero-areas-dryness-firs...
California is like 5% of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states.
Just because it is out of a drought doesn't negate the article.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
> Who draws the map?
> Meteorologists and climatologists from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA take turns as the lead author of the map, usually two weeks a time. The author’s job is to do something that a computer can’t. When the data is pointing in different directions, they make sense out of it.
> How do we know when we're in a drought?
> No single piece of evidence tells the full story, and neither do strictly physical indicators. That’s why the USDM isn’t a statistical model
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-large-portion-of-w...
> The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year.
> There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.
Cliff in an expert, he worked in the Obama administration on climate, and unsurprisingly, he is being cited for having opinions the support the thesis of the article.
Basically it’s complicated. Some areas did experience extreme droughts that year and others faired well.
BPA was able to lever up their reserves early due to those same forecasts which allowed them excess supply to sell when other utilities experienced extreme heat (drought) and couldn’t produce enough.
> Notably, Bonneville was able to offer much needed support to other Pacific Northwest and California utilities during late-summer heatwaves and scarcity events. Our hydropower operations planners and traders positioned the power system to maximize supply, enabling us to deliver significant amounts of power across the West to help keep the lights on during a string of energy emergencies.
https://www.bpa.gov/-/media/Aep/finance/annual-reports/ar202...
> [Authors] bring together the physical climate, weather and hydrology data and reconcile that with local expert feedback, impact reports and conditions observations. The author is also responsible for weighing different indicators based on what’s most appropriate for a particular place and time of year. In the West, for example, winter snowpack has a stronger bearing on water supplies than in the East
Also, there just isn't a more objective measure of drought out there, let alone a fully objective measure.
Also also, it's unclear to me that this black box is being gamed any harder than most other black boxes in our system. If you want to game agriculture, you game the farm bill.
I was just surprised at how subjective their work was, with differing opinions regarding the big picture depending on whom you asked and what their background was, as in university, whether they had worked for the navy or whether they had worked for the government.
The big surprise of the gambling mentality reminded me of people that dedicate their lives to losing as much money as possible betting on horses. These people know the form, the weather and so much, yet they do their own bets.
It was kind of the same when working out what the weather would be in Springfield tomorrow. Would it just be cloudy or actual rain? That would be a 'bet'.
The next day the observations would come in and the meteorologists would either win or lose their 'bet'. The guy who has been to Springfield and knows the local geography well would have his own reasons for his 'bet', whereas the guy who was more interested in long term storm development would have another rationale for his 'bet'.
Then there would be 'wrong all the time me', able to look at the low level cloud from contrails (which are really huge in some wavelengths on the satellite pictures) to assume rain every day.
Hence climate and weather is highly subjective even if it is highly educated and vastly experienced professionals that are interpreting the data.
This was right before GPU compute started to become a big thing, I do wonder if they now use machine learning models on these to speed up model iteration? I would hope so, but even then there is the human factor as you said. Eventually someone has to make the call on what the data shows and how to present it to the world.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/the-us-weather-model... (2016) {hard to believe this one is 10 years old}
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-... (2025)