{"id":50288,"date":"2020-11-21T19:02:51","date_gmt":"2020-11-22T02:02:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/despite-snowstorms-colorados-drought-continues-in-anomalous-direction\/"},"modified":"2020-11-22T02:02:51","modified_gmt":"2020-11-22T02:02:51","slug":"despite-snowstorms-colorados-drought-continues-in-anomalous-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/despite-snowstorms-colorados-drought-continues-in-anomalous-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite snowstorms, Colorado\u2019s drought continues in \u2018anomalous\u2019 direction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Adrian
Adrian Baldarrama wheels irrigation pipe into place to water at the Oliver farm northwest of Cortez.<\/span>The Journal file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

There\u2019s no way to water this down: Colorado is really, really dry right now.<\/p>\n

Thursday\u2019s drought monitor report estimates that 27.22% of the state is in \u201cexceptional\u201d drought, a category indicating drought conditions that historically have occurred every 50 years.<\/p>\n

This is up from 24.64% last week. The week-to-week increase came mostly from the southwestern corner of the state, which was previously in the \u201cextreme\u201d category. This category is for conditions historically occurring every 10 years.<\/p>\n

In Southwest Colorado, all of La Plata and Dolores counties and most of Montezuma County were in \u201cexceptional drought.\u201d At Level D4, \u201cexceptional drought\u201d is the deepest level of drought on a scale from D0 to D4. The southwestern corner of Montezuma County was in \u201cextreme drought, or Level D3.<\/p>\n

Some of the reasons for the current drought include the low snow totals from last winter, little rain this summer and a continued lack of precipitation into the fall. In the southwest, these factors have meant that soil moisture has continued to drop, and stream flows are much lower than normal.<\/p>\n\n

Rich Tinker, a meteorologist with the Climate Prediction Center and author of this week\u2019s report, noted that even after the state\u2019s recent snowstorms, it\u2019s too soon to tell if they indicate a change in momentum, or if they\u2019re \u201cjust a blip on the radar\u201d in what could be a very dry winter.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s way too early to make a projection as to how this winter is going to end up or how long (the drought) might continue,\u201d Tinker said.<\/p>\n

This time last year, about 75% of the state was in some sort of drought, but it was not as severe as the \u201cextreme\u201d or \u201cexceptional\u201d categories. The most significant difference year-to-year has occurred in the northern half of the state, and particularly Grand County and surrounding areas.<\/p>\n

All of Colorado has been in some degree of drought since mid-October. The last time this happened was in 2013, and even then, \u201cexceptional\u201d drought was not as widespread as it is now.<\/p>\n

Of the 1,090 weeks that the U.S. Drought Monitor has put out its national report, Colorado has seen just seven weeks when \u201cexceptional\u201d drought was this widespread, Tinker said. They all occurred in 2002.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a pretty anomalous situation that we\u2019re in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The drought monitor report is measured based on 30-year averages \u2014 which are themselves updated every 10 years \u2014 rather than averaging all the data available since scientists started measuring drought. Come 2021, the organization will update its 30-year average to end with 2020 data.<\/p>\n

Drought Monitor, Nov. 17 (PDF)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only seven weeks in 20 years have been as intensely dry<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[233,28],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-50288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-coloradosun-com","tag-headlines"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50288"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=50288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}