Image courtesy of US Drought Monitor

While significant worsening of the ongoing drought is not expected heading into the spring, any potential improvement is also hard to forecast over the course of the next several months. State Climatologist Justin Glisan says the outlook for winter released in October shows equal chances for above or below normal precipitation during the upcoming winter, but with an El Nino pattern settling into the Pacific, recent trends suggest wetter than average conditions are a strong possibility. 

However, Glisan says in order for the drought to improve, snowpack needs to either stay intact for a long period of time heading into the spring thaw, or, if the ground doesn’t freeze as deep, rain could better penetrate the soil. 

“We have to remember snowpack, even if we get 30, 40, 50 inches (of snow) it generally a 10:1 ratio, so ten inches of snow (and) one inch of moisture. Whereas, those rainfall events, as we saw last December early on in the month, widespread across the state and really supplied soil moisture profiles with some moisture to go into the ‘tank.’ And wetter soils don’t freeze as deep or freeze as fast, so you have better potential for infiltration if you do get rainfall events.”     

According to the latest US Drought Monitor, all of Dallas and Guthrie counties are in a severe drought, while most of Greene County is abnormally dry.