Central U.S. Drought Update and Forecast

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The drought has shrunk in recent weeks. The most improvement has been from east Texas and Louisiana through the Southeast and Middle Atlantic States.

Here is the "rainfall needed to end drought" map from December 1, 2012.

The current map. While a few spots in the West worsened, most areas stayed the same or improved.

There is moisture on the way but it is too soon to say exactly how much and where. This is the European model out ten days.
Via AccuWeather's Professional web site. 
Two-part U.S. GFS model out to 192 hours (Jan. 30th).

Second part from 193 to 360 hours (15 days).
A couple of things stand out. All models improve the snowpack in Colorado. There will be mositure in the winter wheat belt although the amounts and locations are still speculative at this point.  

Comments

  1. PoetslifeJanuary 22, 2013 at 1:28 PM

    http://dm4community.com/hid/

    Allan Martell created this interactive hurricain GIS man of Irene. Its worth a look because it has application to your work.

    Here is is note to me asking permission to reuse my Irene post that explains it.

    "My name is Allan Martell, and I'm studying a master in Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm writing you to ask for your permission to use the entry titled "Hurricane Irene as I Saw Her", published on August 28, 2011 on the blog Poets Life (http://poetslife.blogspot.com/2011/08/hurricane-irene-as-i-saw-her.html).

    My graduation project is an interactive map of stories about hurricane Irene. It's intended to motivate people at risk of disasters (such as hurricanes) to start thinking what to do about them now, instead of waiting until they are about to happen, which most people do. The project will show a map with the trajectory of hurricane Irene, and different search criteria to access stories within the map. Those stories can be annotated with comments from other users different than the author's story, in a similar way a blog entry can be commented. In my system though, the intent is to purposefully direct the discussed topic on how to handle disasters taking each story as a starting point."

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