New drought maps include much of Missouri in driest areas of the country

A severe drought is lurking only 4 to 5 inches below the soil surface across most of Missouri.

Small, spotty, quick showers have replenished topsoil moisture across the state, said Pat Guinan, extension climatologist with Commercial Agriculture at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The subsoil, however, remains dry across most of Missouri north of the Missouri River and down through the central Ozarks to the Arkansas border.

The prolonged dry weather puts much of Missouri in the “severe drought” category on the U.S. Drought Monitor map, released May 18 by the Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska.

The D-2 “severe” drought rating extends from central Nebraska, includes much of Iowa, dips into Missouri, then extends across central Illinois into northern Indiana.

Adding to the concern, Guinan said, is a new “Drought Outlook” for June to August from the National Weather Service map includes about the same area in the Midwest now under the severe drought zone.

“The forecast favors below normal precipitation and warmer than normal temperatures — a combination that will lead to a worsening drought,” Guinan said.

In Missouri, the subsoil drought has been building since June last year, Guinan said. Much of the state recorded one of the driest fall seasons on record. Replenishing spring rains failed to materialize.

April in mid-Missouri was the driest on record. “Normally, May is our wettest month,” Guinan said. “But, it doesn’t look that way now.”

The spring drought is beginning to parallel the crop-devastating drought of 1988, Guinan said. That year, April and May were also extremely dry. However, there was more subsoil moisture available then.

A weather station at Hundley-Whaley Farm, a MU research farm at Albany, in northwest Missouri, had a 13-inch moisture deficit during the last six months of 1999. Since January 1, the deficit has grown by another 6 inches.

A similar report comes from MU Wurdack Farm near Cook Station, in the Ozarks. Since Jan. 1, only 6.6 inches of rain has fallen, compared with an average of 14 inches.

Drying winds and unseasonably high temperatures, with several days in the 80s and 90s, have accompanied recent dry weather.

Thunderstorms moving across the Midwest are bringing showers to some areas, but are likely not to be enough to erase the nine months of dryness in many parts of the region, according the climatologists.

The southern border of the United States from New Mexico to Florida is also in severe to extreme drought conditions. The dryness in the southern states is an expected result from the La Nina. Cooler-than-normal surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of South America deflect the air movements that brings moisture into the United States.