Ticker for March 25, 2021

                
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March 25, 2021     March 25, 2021     March 25, 2021     March 25, 2021


Disaster interrupted




Drought me? Hey, drought you, pal! Two can play at that game! Oh, well, I didn't
know that you were talking to somebody else. I mean, I am the state's drought
tracker. I prefer drought whisperer, but everybody says I'm too loud so maybe
drought talker? Which is not as good as the movie "Windtalkers," despite the
presence of Nic Cage.

I'm cracking up? Not at all, just yearning for Oklahoma to finally be free of
drought. The map above shows the counties with 2021 secretarial drought disaster
designations. Contiguous counties are also eligible for disaster benefits, what
with drought being a "fuzzy line" hazard. That allows for any crack slippage
(and we all know just how painful that can be) to be avoided, hopefully. Here's a
bit more info on what being in a county with a secretarial disaster declaration
entails.

https://content.mesonet.org/ticker/archive/20210325/disaster_designation_factsheet.pdf

Whilst you read that, also ponder how much a young Patrick Swayze looks like
Corey Feldman at ANY age. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Now, back to my crack-up...errrr, my wish for a drought-free Oklahoma. Darned if
we didn't make some progress to that regard in the last 30 days or so, with most
of that coming in March. Check out these Mesonet rainfall maps to see our
glorious bounty of moisture over the past 30 days.







And here are the rankings and further statistics for the last 30 days. Keep in
mind that these are as of yesterday, so today's rainfall (also shown below)
hasn't made the cut just yet.





That's actually a pretty substantial amount of rain across parts of south central
Oklahoma, which had seen drought start to spread and intensify over the last
few months. You can see that far south central Oklahoma held pat in this
morning's new U.S. Drought Monitor map,improvements farther north, and also the
improvements across western Oklahoma for this week.





Oklahoma has actually been pretty lucky thus far through this La Nina event in
that many of our neighbors have suffered pretty mightily, while the fringes
of our state have been the most impacted.



Our rain chances are going to taper off for awhile, it would appear.



Speaking of tapering off...

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Climatological Survey
(405) 325-2253
gmcmanus@mesonet.org