Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doodlebugging | Hacker News Reader

The map looks to be pretty accurate if I consider my own location except that I should be in the Exceptional Drought instead of Extreme Drought category but recognizing that it is highly smoothed and can't show all the bumps, like my place, I can say it is pretty close.

I have tracked and measured rainfall at my place for more than 20 years. So far this year we are still almost 2" (51 mm) below the lowest YTD rainfall total for this date in 20 years. In addition, we are almost 11" (279 mm) below the average YTD rainfall total for this date in the last 20 years.

YTD Numbers from my worksheet for September 4 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.8" (604 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for September 4 - 13" (330 mm)

That's better off than we were 2 weeks ago though. The temperature had been >100F (>37.8C) for weeks and everything had dried out including established trees. My local rainfall totals showed almost 16" (406 mm) below the average YTD rainfall for the date during the last 20 years and more than 7.4" (188 mm) under the lowest YTD rainfall total for that date in the last 20 years.

YTD Numbers from my worksheet for August 22 - Lowest since 2002 14.8" (376 mm); Average since 2002 23.1" (587 mm); Actual YTD 2022 for August 22 - 7.4" (188 mm)

The lowest YTD totals before this year are from 2011.

With temperatures ranging from 85F to 93F (29.4-33.9*C) since the first storm front came through it has been a huge contrast. I am letting everything that will still grow go to seed now. Migratory birds always stop by during the coldest days to eat the berries on the trees and perennials I have planted. Two weeks ago the plants were dormant and appeared dead. They have bloomed and it appears that I may have some set fruit before autumn shuts it all down in a few weeks.

My data point is highly exaggerated. The reservoirs here are high, we're on a freshwater river, and no one is talking about drought here - and yet it says Severe drought.

I also question the selection of "abnormally dry" as the lowest level. Also, why aren't "abnormally wet" regions shown? ....and what about different colors in the same watershed? Lower areas of a watershed shouldn't be dryer than the highlands.

I wonder what the rainfall cut-offs for the drought level designations are and how much smoothing occurs. I also wonder about the grid used - relatively sparse or regularized and evenly sampled? Is there any weighting applied to specific data sources? It's great that they produce this graphic. It makes me want to find out more about the inputs to the display since those will drive the quality of the output.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx

What would the point of showing "abnormally wet" be?

Whataboutism fuel for climate change arguments.

Or just an accurate reporting of the data? This is a confusing comment unless I’m misreading your point.

"Abnormally wet" would also be an indication of climate change. As would an increasing frequency of extreme precipitation events. Both of which are occurring in some areas.

Just wanted to say thank you for including Celsius and freedom units, made it a lot easier for me to understand.

You're welcome. When I started typing all those numbers it occurred to me that the story would be harder to convey to a large part of HN audience without the conversions. I wanted all the people who read the post to be able to relate to the information.

Very interesting. Where are you located?

North Texas, west of Fort Worth between there and Abilene. Where the west begins, LOL.

Lucky you.

We have land near there. While it did rain this year and fill the tanks (man-made ponds the cows drink from, for coastal folks reading along), we lost most of our topsoil. I've never seen the mesquite / cedar trees and other plants so dead.

We have a field for sunflowers that we rent out to dove hunters. The sunflowers are under a foot tall this year (which is unprecedented) so we can't rent it out.

I guess the unprecedented wildfires this year also missed you.

Tanks are low all over this area. I went by the lake over here the other day because I read it was less than 60% full. There are boats in their docks 10' above the water which is more than 50' from the dock in some spots.

I understand the topsoil. I don't have much to lose. That's why I'm in the process of taking this place to full native grasses and plants. My topsoil is less than 6" deep over 80% of my place with solid fossiliferous limestone more than a foot thick under it. The limestone outcrops on all the slopes. I mow twice a year at most so that everything has ample opportunity to go to seed.

When the mesquite yellows and drops its leaves in the summer you know its hot. Mine lost 80% of its canopy this summer. The 5.5" of rain we've had in the last couple of weeks is regenerating the trees now though. I have some I've planted nearly 20 years ago that are still under 10' tall. My elms were brick red last week but have now started to drop the dead leaves and sprout new growth. That's a good thing since more than half my trees looked dead. I lost most of my live oaks to oak wilt so I can't afford to lose more of them to drought.

I am surrounded by cedar, live oak, and elms with hackberry, bois d'arc, and hercules club too. There's lots of spots for birds here and they still hunt them on the land behind me, deer too. My spot was farmed for a long time and after I bought it I have been killing off everything non-native. My main focus now is on stopping the bermuda grass. It's a slow slog. It took me nearly 10 years to get rid of the Johnson grass but I finally dug all that shit out and clipped the seedheads so now I'm finding less than 10 new plants annually, all sprouting from old seed. I pick a grass or weed and concentrate on eliminating it every year. Restoration by hand is a slow process but the squirrels have returned, crows visit every day, roadrunners nest in the privet thickets, there's a fox and a bobcat that meander through pretty regularly too. It's in much better shape overall.

Did the sunflowers not set seed at all or are they just stunted? Even my lantana was dead up till the rain and now it has all sprouted and is trying to set flowers like the sage. The winter birds depend on the lantana berries for food on the coldest days. I was pretty happy to see that pop up.

Good luck to you with your place! We're still way behind normal but it all came together just in time to give it all a chance around here. Maybe mother nature is just stringing me along.

I want to applaud your idealism and hard work on building this place but am filled with dread that a year such as 2022 will just be the new normal and extremes will be getting worse at least for the next 30 years.

What gives you hope that it won't just all turn to a desert?

I understand what you're feeling. I agree that this year is probably just a step on the steady climb up to a warmer, drier climate for this region. I think in the long-term that we will see wide-spread desertification across large parts of north and northwest Texas. Conservation efforts are lagging changes we already see in climatic conditions, and water usage in the region is still not low enough to be sustainable. Land use practices need to be reevaluated to slow the process.

The long term temperature trend is not favorable for this region. We are lucky though that this year is the third La Nina year (warmer and drier overall in this region) and since it is unusual to see that many consecutive La Ninas, we are due for a reversal to El Nino which tends to be milder and wetter. My only task is to keep as many things healthy as possible so that they can benefit from the more favorable growing conditions.

My own records here show the cyclic variability and demonstrate that the average rainfall should be plenty to support the native plants that I am trying to maintain. In the 20 years that I have been keeping detailed records annual rainfall has varied across a wide range from 19.21" (488 mm) to 68.33" (1736 mm). The average total is 34.37" (873 mm). We are 2/3 of the way through the year and I have accumulated roughly 2/3 of volume from our lowest ever year (2005). It will be interesting to see whether autumn rains push me past that low number.

I'm a geoscientist by training so there is already the knowledge that change is inevitable, but that it usually happens on much longer time scales. I'm fighting a delaying action here. It can work but things will need help so I capture rainwater for dry times since my only water out here comes from rain and from our water well and I don't want to use well water to water lawns or trees. That is why I focus on native plants and trees that are adapted to regional climatic variability.

I'll continue working to keep my place vibrant with native plants and grasses so that maybe in the long term it can be an oasis in the desert for wildlife moving through the area instead of just a great spot for another convenience store for all the people that are leaving the big city and heading out this way.

I’m not optimistic (due to climate change, I think the entire US southwest is basically screwed). However, we noticed that people put these in 100+ years ago. They’ve failed due to lack of maintenance, but the place used to look like the “after” pictures, and currently looks like the “before” pictures:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/world/bunds-geoengineering-re...

It looks easy enough to do, assuming you own a tractor.

I have a swale on my place from the days when it was farmed. When we bought it they were growing black-eyes, garlic, corn, and various fruits. I think digging bunds like those in photos would be painful here since the soil is very shallow. To get a transplanted tree to grow here I have to dig through two rock ledges that are each about one foot thick (1/3 meter). The rocky clay between them is also only easily dug in the wet part of the year since the clay becomes very hard when it dries so that I need to use a bullprick bar to punch through all the rock. I drill fence posts since there isn't enough dirt to hammer one of those t-posts deep enough to be stable.

I wish I had the soil they have there but farming this land resulted in deflation (soil loss to high wind events) that you can measure by looking at elevation changes along the fence lines and the farmed/unfarmed areas. Like the people in the story, to start the restoration I let my place lay idle for more than a year with no mowing so that all the grasses could set seed multiple times. That helped me reestablish native grasses.

I limit mowing to twice annually now because mowing tends to enable spread of invasive or non-native grasses. Even then I mow in a pattern, starting with areas that I have mostly restored and finishing on the areas that still need some work so that any seeds that drop off of the equipment tend to be native seeds redistributed into areas where I am fighting non-natives. I let the seeds piggyback. It's a process.

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