Lack of snow leads to early spring drought across majority of Minnesota
Normally in mid-March, Minnesotans would be digging out from a round of snow. This year, a majority of the state is instead dealing with drought.
As of Thursday, nearly 75 percent of the state is experiencing moderate drought conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. That’s up from 53 percent last week. More than 99 percent of the state is dealing with at least abnormal dryness. Extreme drought is lingering in the southeastern corner, including parts of Mower, Fillmore and Houston counties.
“It is really bad,” MPR News meteorologist Sven Sundgaard said. “Just kind of picking up where we left off last fall.”
Drought has persisted seasonally since the late summer of 2020, State Climatologist Luigi Romolo told MPR News.
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“It’s hard to really distinguish whether these were three individual droughts or one long drought with ablation of drought in between,” Romolo said. Now, the longer-term effects are beginning to show.
“You’re never more vulnerable than when you’re coming out of a drought,” he explained.
Emerging from drought in 2021, soil moisture and lake levels were low. Late summer saw a “healthy amount” of rain, followed by a “healthy snowpack” later in the year. This winter had minimal snowfall across the state, putting Minnesota far behind normal numbers.
“We’re not getting back the precipitation that we lost; we’re just getting enough to kind of get ourselves back to a state where we’re just out of drought,” Romolo said. “So what we’re starting to see now is these compounding impacts of agriculture, even on our ecology — on our trees, our lake levels. The more this starts to happen, the more difficult it is for us to get out of it.”
The National Weather Service reports the probability of spring flooding is below normal. The lack of snowpack means river levels are low, and it would take significant spring rainfall to cause the water to breach its banks.
Rainfall monitoring is critical to measuring drought, and Romolo pointed to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network, which is looking for more backyard weather observers to take precipitation measurements with low-cost equipment. The nationwide program has been around for 25 years and is reliant on volunteers.