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(NEXSTAR) – Drought conditions are already bad across the West, even “exceptionally” bad in some spots, and experts fear they’re about to get worse.
Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle are seeing large swaths of “extreme” and “exceptional” drought, as of mid-July. For many of those states, the dry season is far from over.
Long-range conditions don’t look much better, AccuWeather forecasters recently warned. Depending on what conditions materialize, a super-strong El Niño, like the one we’re expecting to see this year, could have a ripple effect on the Plains states for years, long-range expert Paul Pastelok said.
“If the long-term drought is as bad as it could be, and you are starting off already with severe drought, this raises the real possibility of a ‘mini Dust Bowl,’ said AccuWeather founder and executive chair Joel Myers.
Drought isn’t just a weather problem, Myers said. It’s also an economic problem. “Soybeans will be stressed further in the months and years ahead, and yields on some of these crops will be reduced in parts of the country. If that happens, it will have a negative impact on food production, leading to price inflation.”
How will El Niño impact the drought?
El Niño can bring more rain or less rain in the winter depending on where you live.
“Typically, when I think about El Niño, I think about how wet the American Southwest tends to get and how dry the Pacific Northwest gets,” Dillon Amaya, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University, told Nexstar.
For the Plains states, it’s more of a “small signal,” Amaya explained, meaning it could impact the area’s rainfall, but the anticipated effects are less clearcut.
El Nino winter weather pattern (NOAA) In the Southern Plains, where drought has been plaguing Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas on and off for years, the problem may be too big for one El Niño to fix. “One good year won’t eliminate six years of water deficit,” said Joel Lisonbee with the National Integrated Drought Information System.
Even if there are massive rain storms and flooding events this winter, the deficit may be too big. “It will take more than one wet year to refill low reservoirs, streams, and aquifers,” he said.
One exception was the El Niño period from 1957 to 1959, which brought so much rain that it ended a period of catastrophic drought by delivering a period of equally catastrophic flooding.
Other El Niños have been a mixed bag in terms of how they impact drought in the Plains states, Lisonbee found in his research.
For what it’s worth, this year’s El Niño is shaping up to be a big one. The Climate Prediction said earlier this month there’s an 81% chance it will grow to be “very strong” by its peak (sometimes called a “super” El Niño) and there’s a 97% chance it will last until spring 2027.
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