drought

[pbrower2a]

(06-02-2016, 07:43 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Weather pattern changes occur all the time. California has had drought conditions before.

But some places are more vulnerable than others -- like places with extremely-seasonal rainfall. Should the seasonal rainfall fail, then a place like San Francisco can become even drier than Phoenix.  Should the subtropical high park itself farther north in the winter, let us say at 35 North instead of at 25 North, then California from San Francisco to San Diego.. and northern Baja California -- become Atacama-like or Namib-like deserts.

California remains in bad shape. The Golden State gets practically no summer rainfall, so I need not show a contrast between May and today.

Northern Georgia is having a rough time, so Greater Atlanta could be having some 'water problems':



I'm not predicting a severe drought in Michigan, but the Lower Peninsula of Michigan has mostly gotten rather dry in about three months:



I have my prediction of what Global Warming once entrenched will do to the American Midwest: the ice over the Arctic Ocean will melt earlier, and during the summer the Arctic Ocean will go from having a reflective surface of white ice to having an absorptive surface of open water. Because of the long summer days the Arctic Ocean will warm rapidly in the summer and become a zone of intense thunderstorms over a warm polar ocean. Such will suck air from the mid-latitudes, and the American Midwest will have dry summers due to a summer high of the type that prevents summer rains in California.

Winters will be shorter and less severe in temperature -- but blizzards that now protect soil moisture will give way to chilly rains. There might be more juice behind winter rainstorms... I remember Michigan's "Year Without a Winter"one that had a mild winter but a dry summer in 2012 with a freak heat wave in March. Except for different topography, Michigan began to remind me of California.  Thirty years from now such could be the New Normal.

......
The AP reports that New England is having a severe drought.

The dry blast in New Hampshire is being felt throughout the Northeast, from Maine to Pennsylvania, driven by a second year of below-average rainfall. Though not as dire as the West Coast drought of five-years running, the dry, hot weather has stressed farms and gardens, prompted water restrictions and bans in many towns and threatened to bring more wildfires than usual.
In the hardest hit areas of western New York, Massachusetts and southern parts of New Hampshire and Maine, it's been dryer than in a decade or more. And national weather experts predict the drought will persist at least through the end of October.
"The Northeast is a little bit of a mixed bag, but the bottom line is that the conditions have deteriorated over the past several weeks to a couple of months," said Rich Tinker, a drought specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
If there were a drought epicenter, it probably would be Massachusetts. More than 74 percent of the state, according to the United States Drought Monitor, is experiencing some degree of drought and almost the entire state is dry.