This week's update to the US Drought Monitor is released on Thursday and assesses the seven day precipitation ending Tuesday morning. Degradation seems to be a given with much of the state continuing to be mostly dry and warm temperatures increasing water demand. Over the past month or so, one of the driest areas of the state is found in northeastern Iowa at Oelwein. The featured chart presents a number of metrics evaluating precipitation totals or departures over a trailing number of days ending yesterday. The values on each chart represent the given date until June 5th, so they should somewhat be evaluated from right to left. The bottom left panel denotes the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) values within the drought monitor assessment. You can see that over different time scales, different drought threshold indicators are to be found. The present drought monitor value for the location is "D1", which is well supported by this plot dating back into late 2022. The short term is certainly much drier and the weighting of this year's growing season totals continue to increase in the drought monitor assessment as impacts (brown lawns, degraded crops, low streamflows, etc) increase.

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Bad = 0
Abstain = 2

Tags:   precip