Ticker for December 12, 2005

                
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December 12, 2005  December 12, 2005  December 12, 2005  December 12, 2005



Drought Lingers On

Drought is Mother Nature's tortoise. Creeping and incipient, it plies
its trade far from the spotlight while we concern ourselves with the
Hare of the Day. Last week, we cast our lagomorphic focus on the
bitter cold that came and went like a snow-tailed jackrabbit.

Well, we return our gaze to the tortoise today, only to discover the
inevitable: it has silently made another week's progress and is now
racking up some depressingly impressive statistics.

It has now been 71 consecutive days with less than a quarter-inch
of rainfall was observed at the Bixby Mesonet site, and much of the
western third of Oklahoma has gone 60+ days without such. The
majority of the rest of the state hasn't seen so much since Halloween.
The 60-day period ending yesterday was the driest such period of the
modern record for east-central and southeast Oklahoma. This very dry
autumn exacerbates existing longer-term problems in that part of the
state.

The Ticker has added two standing maps to its homepage which show,
respectively, the number of days without a quarter-inch or tenth-inch
of rainfall. The maps will be updated each morning until the drought
conditions abate.

You will find them here: http://ticker.mesonet.org/