Long-range drought concerns continue in deep soil

Depending on where you live and visit, it either feels like everything is bone dry and dusty, or verdant and vibrant. There’s not much middle ground in Minnesota and surrounding counties right now. Drought actually extended this week, but what does that mean in day-to-day life? Let’s do a deep dive along with our friends at the National Integrated Drought Information System. We usually call them the drought.gov folks.

This is not a doom-and-gloom Updraft. For the moment, 80 percent of corn and soybeans are still doing very well based off of state supplied farmer reports. By acreage, under 40 percent of the state of Minnesota is actually in a drought right now. St. Cloud, the Fargo-Moorhead area, Duluth, Minneapolis and St. Paul are not in a drought — though we are certainly getting closer. There are four overall levels of drought possible. If you don’t look at this stuff all the time (like we meteorologists do at MPR News) it can get complex. The far southeast corner of Minnesota, including a sliver of Rochester, is in the first level. So are parts of southwestern MN, and much of northern Minnesota.

Into level two — this is called a severe drought — we head up to Cass, Itasca, Koochiching and more counties. Again, we zoom into southwestern Minnesota for level two. And in a tiny speck of Pipestone and Rock Counties, near Luverne, we are at level three — extreme. So that’s the numbers. The NIDIS folks go on to say: “Historically dry conditions across the Upper Midwest drove drought expansion in parts of Minnesota, northern Iowa, and Wisconsin,” they wrote Thursday in a special bulletin. They added: “Roughly 2.7 million people are in drought (estimated) across the Midwest, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.”

The Mississippi River is still exceptionally low at several gauges, from St. Cloud up to Aitkin, and even closer to the headwaters. Things are near historically bad levels, but the river level is flat enough and OK near the Twin Cities. If I were to pick one topic of concern, it’s this: There’s a surface drought which is what the drought monitor really covers. But there’s also a deep subsoil lack of moisture, that has been in place for a long time. That’s a long-term drought. I met up with some great climate experts this week and they shared the same outlook. State Climatologist Kenny Blumenfeld said some of these deep soil moisture levels are really indicative of long-range drought, and of course that’s not great for late-in-the-season farming when roots have extended farther down to grasp onto water.