Spring rainfall pulls state out of drought conditions after two years

[MUSIC PLAYING] NINA MOINI: Our top story today may not come as a surprise to some of you who have been dealing with consistent rainfall over the past few weeks. According to the drought monitor out this morning, the state of Minnesota is officially no longer in a drought. You heard about it from Emily Reese there after two years of drought conditions. Seems like this wet, warm spring has really made up for our dry winter to explain this sudden shift. Senior climatologist with the state, Kenny Blumenfeld, is here. Kenny, thanks for your time this afternoon.

KENNY BLUMENFELD: Yeah, happy to be on. Thanks, Nina.

NINA MOINI: I'm glad we're talking about this-- I bet a big sigh of relief for a lot of people. Can you, for starters, explain, How do we know that the drought is really over?

KENNY BLUMENFELD: Well, that's a great question. Because drought is ultimately-- it's actually subjective to an extent. I mean, so there's this product called the US drought monitor, and this is a collaborative product that's made by these authors-- they call them authors. Every week, they make a map. They're at the National Drought Mitigation Center. And they work with all the states to get as much local information as possible.

Mostly, the information that's available is, How wet has it been versus how much precipitation we would normally expect at a given time of year. And then what kind of either surpluses or deficits have we accumulated over, say, a period of multiple months? Often, it's a period of no fewer than three months and frequently, depending on where and when you're looking, it might be up to nine months or even a year that you're looking at.

And when you get to a point where you're pretty sure there are no more deficits, and you see other signs on the landscape, like stream levels looking good, lake levels starting to improve, soil moisture either becoming more saturated or in some cases, overly so, then you start having signs that maybe, maybe there aren't any drought conditions left in the state in real time. But so, there are a lot of indications that as early as late May, maybe even the third week in May, there was really no drought functionally going on in Minnesota.

But these are lagged indices that take some time to respond. And you've got to be careful. And you have to make sure all of the data are kind of lined up across multiple sources. So that's why I think people will always notice the change before it's reflected in the actual drought categories. They'll notice, oh, it's been really dry, long before you'll see drought actually designated.

And the same is true when you come out of a drought. It's been really wet for-- it was wet for a period of several weeks before we really started seeing big improvements. And that's because these are both long games. Going into drought is a long game, and coming out of drought is a long game. It can take months on either end.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. We were in drought for two years, We. Mentioned I mean, just how damaging is that to our environment? Is there compounding damage? Does being out of a drought make up for that time?

KENNY BLUMENFELD: Oh, these are good questions. I would say, for one, really, we've been in drought most of the time, going back to 2021. So, we had this small break in the spring of 2022 because we had a lot of precipitation that spring. And that got us out of drought on a statewide basis very temporarily. We went right back into it in southern Minnesota that summer.

But 2021 was actually quite a bad year for drought. And my colleagues here, Pete and Luigi, keep tabs on this. And I think they would be remiss not to mention that we've really been dominated by drought, going back to 2021.

In terms of the damage it does, on one hand, droughts are a normal part of our climate. Nobody likes it. It's actually really hated. It's, I'd say, one of our most hated weather and climate patterns. People would take wet conditions over drought just about any day, even though you'll hear a lot of people complaining about it being wet.

The damage is kind of depending on what you're looking at. We know from some of our foresters that there have been damage to trees because of drought stress. But some of that is compound damage of drought stress on top of what had previously been an exceptionally wet period. And then when you overlay onto that the fact that our climate has been warming, in general-- has not been getting as cold, especially during the winter time, and we've been having some warmer summer conditions, too, that's put some of our vegetation in forms of distress.

But I'd say, on the long term, the hydrologic system can respond. When you actually come out of drought, we have a very responsive system, and you won't see a lot of damage in that--

NINA MOINI: Oh, good.

KENNY BLUMENFELD: --as you go from highs to lows hydrologically. But we've had a lot of hydrologic extremes over the last few years also.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely. Before I let you go, we don't know exactly what the summer might bring, if we might get back into a situation. But can you think of anything Minnesotans are allowed to do now that they couldn't before? We hear, oh, the drought's done. For most people, it might not resonate for their daily lives. But what does this mean for people in their day to day?

KENNY BLUMENFELD: Oh, I mean, right now, anyway, you can enjoy the abundance of water. I mean, we're at this sweet spot. If we continue to be wet, we're going to have bigger problems with that than we've had so far. We're really at introductory problematic levels of too much water right now.

So I'd say just enjoy the abundance of water. There aren't going to be watering restrictions. You certainly don't need to water anything else. Almost nothing really needs to be watered right now.

But also keep in the back of your mind that-- my colleague always reminds us you're always just one to two months away from drought at any given point, which just means it doesn't take that long, especially in the summertime. If you go dry, like we did the last few summers, we're still running precipitation deficits of 6 to 10 inches across the state, going back to 2020. Which means that if we are exposed to another really hot, really dry period, well, it would not take that long for us to end up right back where we were.

So we're not totally out of the woods, even though all of the short term drought is gone in Minnesota right now. We still have some longer-term concerns. So we'd actually like to have normal precipitation through the summer. And that'll keep people able to enjoy their aquatic resources to their fullest.

NINA MOINI: Absolutely. Kenny, thank you for that update.

KENNY BLUMENFELD: You're welcome. Thanks for having me on.

NINA MOINI: Sure. That was Kenny Blumenfeld, senior climatologist with Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources.