Fire & Flood

The news has been rather active of late with stories of wildfires in Southwest, floods in the Mississippi, Ohio, and Missouri River Valleys, not to mention the wild tornado season we experienced in April and May -- much of which can be blamed on the weakening La Nina that wreaked havoc across the US with record snows and rains in the North and Ohio Valley, while leaving little if any rain to spare for Texas and the Southwest.   Over the last couple of months or so, the most waterlogged parts of the country compared to "typical" have been in the High Plains of Montana and in a belt from the Ozarks through the Northeast.  Notice our region had been just slightly below average over that timeframe...and if you throw out the three inch soaker that pelted our region on April 16th we had been running between 50 and 75 percent of normal in the rainfall department through late last week and before our much needed rains that we picked up late last week and again last Sunday.

Taking that 60 day trend and extending it out to six months, you can see the excessive rains (and snows) to average across the High Plains, an area that had seen excessive snow and rain all winter (going back to November), with the conveyor belt of moisture in the Ohio Valley not as excessive (rains started in earnest there in February).   The dryness, however, of the South and Southwest has been persistent -- particularly in Texas as they have been drought stricken and suffering from exceptional drought conditions that have been going on since October.    La Nina is a major consideration in the precipitation patterns of the past winter as storm systems will gravitate towards a northern track and subtropical moisture from the Pacific is less of a factor, meaning that the South stays dry while the North generally is not...the reverse would be true with an El Nino (the South is wet, North is typically not).