WOAY-TV (Oak Hill, WV): Trees are wilting, river levels dropping to record low levels and lawns have browned up with a historical drought gripping the state.
The Drought Monitor updated Thursday, and probably not to your surprise, if you look at your lawn and you look across the region, the moderate to severe to extreme drought has expanded across the entire state.
For the first time since the Drought Monitor has been in existence in the last 22 years, we have a level four drought (highest category) west of Sutton. The entire state is seeing very poor to poor soil conditions and 92% of the pastures are in very bad shape.
Now let’s look forward to September. Here are the historical rain trends since 1963.
We’ve had 18 Septembers with above average rain, but 38 years with below average rain. So, obviously drought is on our side going forward through September. When reviewing the historical start to fall’s dry season, the one inch or more of rainfall in one day is most likely to happen prior to September 15th. Usually after we get past September 15th, we don’t see that much rain. For the three years with the dry season not beginning until October, the September pattern was very dry.
La Nina was common with dry Septembers and we are on our way to a La Nina this fall.
Now, you can look around you and see the colors on the leaves changing. So how is Mother Nature? How are these trees dealing with the drought stress?
These trees are going into drought stress mode. The trees are still tapping into water, but conserving water by not letting distributing the rain to all the branches. So, that’s why these leaves are changing color prematurely and will eventually fall off. That’s why the fall foliage season is going to be abbreviated and much earlier this season. This will lead to an enhanced wildfire risk as early as late August into the first part of September.
This drought is not going anywhere anytime soon. And we will continue to follow the trends and bring you the latest each week.
Chief Meteorologist Chad Merrill has the latest 7-Day weather forecast:
