Weather Talk: Droughts are a regular part of your climate.
Drought, simply put, is a lack of rain.
But drought is not a simple thing to classify.
It isn’t a drought just because the yard isn’t as green as one might like.
Crops that are a little stressed, even if it means a reduced yield, are not indicative of a drought.
These sorts of things happen every few years and are to be expected.
An honest-to-goodness drought is when the lawn is brown, the crop might not make it at all, and communities are trying to function in an extreme water shortage.
This kind of severe drought is also a regular part of our climate, but one with much less regularity.
Here in the Fargo Moorhead area, the last true drought was in summer 1989, which followed an even worse drought in summer 1988.
Before that, a severe drought happened in 1976.