In the past few months the US has been plagued by droughts and floods. The recent southeastern hurricanes have made us aware of destructive flooding. These flooding events resolve more quickly than droughts, but sometimes result in sudden, tragic death. In contrast, droughts can persist for the short term or long term.
Most of our home state of Iowa was blessed with a growing season of adequate rainfall in the spring and summer of 2024. But after the growing season faded at the close of August, we received less than 0.25 inches of precipitation in the next eight weeks. The U. S. Drought monitor reports that 54.08% of the lower 48 states are experiencing drought at the present time. Drought conditions do not impact every location the same way: Our locality has received 4+ inches of rain since the beginning of November. This region has experienced, therefore, a (1) meteorological drought, now resolved, the least serious of many categories of droughts. More impactful are (2) agricultural droughts resulting in reduced groundwater and reservoir levels, (3) hydrological droughts resulting in serious stream flow deficits, and finally, (4) socioeconomic droughts resulting in negative effects on people’s health, quality of life, and the nation’s economy.
A government agency supplies the “U. S. Drought Monitor” by email each week. This feature supplies information concerning ongoing drought conditions in our country. The site graphically indicates drought levels by color from DO, D1, D2, D3, to D4—none, moderate, severe, extreme, and exceptional.
In researching historic droughts of the 20th and 21st centuries, we discovered three drought episodes, all of which I personally experienced in various ways. In 1940 when I traveled to Oklahoma with my family, my uncles were experiencing the “Dust Bowl” drought. They told of the intense drought and heat of the “Dust Bowl,” a historic time in U. S. History when intense heat baked the plains. The Dust Bowl was exacerbated by the farmers plowing down prairie sod which later was blown away by wind in the intense heat. The events of the Dust Bowl inspired the John Steinbeck novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” Effects of the Dust Bowl extended from 1928 to 1942.
Another drought episode occurred from 1949 to 1957. Still another time metric communicates a drought episode from 1998 to 2014—the early 21st century drought. We recall an intense dry spell in 2012. In order to be considered a drought episode there must be a large geographical area affected along with long time duration. In the physical operating system created by God for Planet Earth, droughts are ubiquitous cyclical events. Understanding the complex interplay of various weather and climate phenomena is a challenging task. Cyclical droughts have been present on Earth for thousands of years. Our Creator has given humanity the ability to manage the effects of drought.
For additional reading, link to the post we submitted in 2012 regarding historic droughts: https://jasscience.blogspot.com/2012/08/responses-in-complex-system.html
