Hi everyone, I'm Katie HU11
meteorologist Pat Kavalan with a
little bit of a discussion on drought.
It's something that we have been talking
about at nauseam for the last few months,
but a lot of you have been doing Google
searches as to what is a drought,
what are the different levels of drought?
What does it mean for us?
So we're gonna take a deeper
dive on all of those questions.
Kind of answer them for you in this
quick video and we're just going to
start with the current drought situation
as of the first week in August.
You can see there's a lot of orange,
a lot of red on this map and we've
got different levels of drought.
To talk about what each of those means,
but you can see the darker the right here,
the worse the situation.
So the farther to the right you
go on that scale.
It's the extreme and exceptional categories.
That's when things start to get very serious,
and this you know is a result
of of several different factors.
But the the big one is just
basically the lack of rainfall,
and that is what we're seeing right now.
We've got a huge lack of rainfall.
In fact,
year to date deficits around the
Houston area are generally between
6:00 and eight inches hobby,
though coming in with over a 17.
And rainfall deficit.
So all of this obviously contributing
to severe extreme and even
exceptional levels of drought.
So let's talk about the drought.
And again,
just very Simply put,
drought is an extended period where an
area is lacking rainfall and that could be
exacerbated or worsened by certain factors.
Of course, the biggest one,
being higher water demand.
That's something that we see
here in the summer months.
People are watering their lawns,
people are trying to stay cool,
they're running their,
they're running their pools.
Sprinklers so.
This obviously puts more of a strain.
On the system,
and this is the time of year
we need water the most.
So when you've got that lack of rainfall,
it does add to the problem and there
are four levels of drought severity,
so the first level is just a dry category.
That's not typically,
that's not technically rather
a level of drought.
The first level is actually moderate drought,
so again,
on any of those maps you'll see these five
boxes dry is just an abnormally dry area,
but we're not quite at the
level of drought yet.
It's moderate drought when you
finally start to get into that,
and historically speaking,
when an area gets into that moderate.
Category that's you start to see
wildfire frequency increase because the
brush becomes a little more dry and
so it's more susceptible to sparking
when you get into the severe category.
This is when counties and cities and
even states start taking action to kind
of mitigate that wildfire threat by
implementing burn bans or restrictions,
we've got that in place for all of
our counties here in Southeast Texas.
When you get to the next level,
this is Level 3.
Now the extreme category.
This is when it starts to impact agriculture.
End wildlife so you start to get crop
loss and you start to see animals
suffering because they can't find food
because there just isn't as much around
or they can't find water because it's
a little more difficult to come by.
And then finally when you get into
this top category, the 4th level,
the exceptional drought.
This is when you start to see
total crop loss and even water
restrictions put into place and we
are actually getting to this level.
Now we're starting to see local governments
putting water restrictions in place,
generally in bigger cities and that.
Could continue here as we continue
to see the drought situation
worse and so over the next month.
This is how much rainfall we would
need to see the drought improve.
The good news.
These numbers have come down a little bit
with an uptick in our rainfall numbers,
but still?
I mean, we've got a long way to go,
so it's about 12 to 16 inches of rain.
That's what we would need here in
Southeast and East Texas to see
the drought completely disappear.
So that's higher than our rainfall deficits.
And that's because there is
other factors into this.
There's soil.
Dryness, soil moisture content and justice.
Exactly how the brush is doing so.
A long way to go.
The two big things that will make up
our rainfall deficits like this are
tropical systems and we are in the
middle of hurricane season and also
frontal systems that come through and
kind of stall out across the area.
That's the big that would be the
big problem solver for this issue
across the state and you can see
we are not alone and it is the
entire state of Texas done with
drought conditions right now,
so hopefully that helped
to answer your questions.
We we hope that you learn something and
hopefully you could tune in next time.
For more on what's going on across
Houston and Southeast Texas.