Incredible SE Drought, Historical Perspective
The "exceptional" (official term from NOAA) drought of 2007 continues in the Southeast, according to the USDA Drought Monitor. My mother lives in Northwest North Carolina and describes the creeks running dry there. Other blog readers in the Carolinas can't remember drier times. The drought is equally bad or worse in SE Kentucky, Tennessee, northern Georgia and Alabama.
Here are some sample rainfall deficits for 2007, in inches:
I wondered how this drought stacked up against history in North Carolina, so I set out to find past drought records, but they are hard to find on the Internet.
This file photo from Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, shows a dried-up cove at Lake Martin near Alexander City, Ala. The city is worried that falling water levels during the drought will make it impossible to draw drinking water from the lake. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)
I remember 1986 as being particularly bad in Wilkes County, NC, where I lived at the time, because ashes fell from the sky during the Spring. I also remember seeing humidity below 10% on my analog hygrometer, which was the driest I saw in my youth. The ashes were coming from nearby forest fires, and when you live deep in the woods, that's scary. Of course back then we couldn't just hit the net and lookup current fires, and we only had one TV station from a distant city, and when you live deep in the woods and don't know how close the fires are, that's scary. I was looking at some of the rivers in the area. Here's one that is 0.34 ft high now. Record low stage of 0.30 was most recently in that year when ashes fell from the sky, in 1986.
But Carolinians remember 1998-2002 [very detailed PDF] as the most impressive recent, long-term drought there, and it set record low water levels at some locations in the western part of the state. (The year 1986 is mentioned often in that article).
High Rock Lake, North Carolina June 2002 (USGS)
The truth is, it's hard to tell. It depends on what time frame you're looking at, and whether you look at precipitation, hydrologic (river/creek/lake) heights and flow, or drought indices.
