Drought conditions improve across portions of the state
Even though the drought conditions are ever so slowly starting to improve East River, the Black Hills area is not out of the woods just yet. Meteorologist Erik Dean breaks down the latest drought conditions.
Today is Thursday, which means the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, NE has updated the drought monitor conditions. I’ll do an article exactly like this every Thursday, so we know how everything is shaping up.
The good news is the color is slowly whittling away. This is one of the maps where no color is good news. Shown below is the drought data from last week, and this week.
Last week in NE South Dakota, Roberts, Marshall, Day, Grant, Codington, Brown, Spink, and portions of McPherson, Edmunds, and Faulk counties are in the clear.
This week, we can add portions of Hyde, Hand, Beadle, Clark and extreme NW Deuel County in the mix of no color on the map.
This map shows the year-to-date precipitation. Aberdeen and Sisseton are at 1.14″ and 2.00″ respectively. Winner is hanging on to above normal by a thread, and the same story goes for Sheridan, Gillette, and Watertown.
This was release by the Climate Prediction Center on April 30th for this month. Basically what they are saying in this map is that based on their forecast, our drought status will likely be removed.
This graphic is the Seasonal (May 1 – July 31st) and it shows the same thing, drought removal likely for the Black Hills, with a slight drought across southern South Dakota.
Let’s hope everything plays out that way.
