Parts of the Mountain West have been tangled up in long-term drought and it doesn’t look like it’s lifting anytime soon.
Nearly all of Utah and two-thirds of Colorado are in some form of drought, according to the latest numbers from the federal U.S. Drought Monitor.
David Simeral is a climatologist with the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno.
He says high temperatures over the past year evaporated what rain the states did get that might’ve soaked the ground.
“We had a warm winter last year and temperatures were above normal in the summertime as well, so the soil columns were very dry,” Simeral says.
The National Weather Service’s three-month forecast shows a chance for above-average precipitation for Colorado and southern Utah.
But Simeral says it’ll likely be warmer than normal as well.
“We’re looking at above normal temperatures across the winter in general,” he says.
About a quarter of Idaho is in some form of drought, while Wyoming is just starting to see dry conditions creep in.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUER in Salt Lake City and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.

“Climate change will likely continue to alter the occurrence of record-breaking wet and dry months in the future,” the study predicts, “with severe consequences for agricultural production and food security.” Heavy rainfall events, with severe flooding, are occurring more often in the central and Eastern United States, Northern Europe and northern Asia.
The number of months with record-high rainfall increased in the central and Eastern United States by more than 25 percent between 1980 and 2013.
In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria contributed to a total of $306 billion in damage from extreme weather events in the United States.
The number of record-setting dry months increased by nearly 50 percent in sub-Saharan Africa during the study period.
Jascha Lehmann, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and lead author of the study, compared extreme weather events to a high roll of a die.
“That’s not to say models are not good,” Lehmann said in an interview, but his observational data “fits what we expect from physics and what models also show.” Climate models have long predicted that because of the greenhouse gases human activity has pumped into the atmosphere and the warming that results, the world’s wet regions are likely to grow wetter.
Regions that tend to be dry, by contrast, are expected to grow even more parched as higher temperatures dry the soil and air.
“Climate change drives both wet and dry extremes,” Lehmann said.
Given natural weather variability, some extreme weather events were to be expected, so the researchers tried to determine how many events would have occurred without the influence of global warming.
The researchers determined that one-third of the record-dry months recorded in the African regions under study would not have occurred without the influence of climate change.

UC Merced researchers have evidence that California’s forests are especially vulnerable to multi-year droughts because their health depends on water stored several feet below ground.
Trees typically need about the same amount of water every year — more in hotter years.
If the drought is long enough and especially hot, as was the case from fall 2011 through 2015, large numbers of trees run out of water and die.
The researchers delved into data from sites across the semi-arid West to determine the amount of water storage available in the root zones of different areas.
Bales, Rungee and their colleagues wanted to know how dependent different areas in the West are on that subsurface water storage and how many dry years the plants can survive.
Our wet seasons are getting shorter, which means that the dry seasons are getting longer and drier — we’re getting less snow than rain — and the wet seasons are warmer, meaning the stored water gets used earlier in the year, leaving less for the hottest parts of the year Bales explained that areas with Mediterranean climate, such as California, are especially vulnerable because of their climate variability, even though they have considerable subsurface storage.
Areas with year-round precipitation, such as Colorado, are vulnerable, too, because they have less subsurface storage, even though their year-to-year precipitation is less variable than California’s.
“Usually the year-round precipitation would see those areas through drought years, but longer, hotter droughts are going to pose more problems,” Bales said.
“In California, more than half of the water use by forests, grasslands and shrublands comes during the dry season, and it comes from water stored in the root zone after rainfall and snowmelt end in spring.” In contrast, less than one-third of water used by vegetation at sites they studied in Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona was drawn from subsurface storage during dry periods.
“In some areas, this means thinning overstocked forests to prevent further tree mortality,” Bales said.

On Abbadoah Station, the Moody family has been feeding stock for seven years.
He is 26, a fourth generation grazier, and alongside his family manages more than 50,000 hectares near Cunnamulla, in south-west Queensland.
Unfortunately that came again before the country had time to recover.
Back-to-back droughts Cunnamulla has only received its annual average rainfall of 375 millimetres in 11 of the last 20 years.
Exodus of younger generation More concerning to Mr Godfrey is the exodus of the next generation.
"Some of our best people have left, and a lot of our young people are thinking about it," he said.
"There was no money coming in in the end, that was the decision that was worrying me," Mr Martin said.
"So we made the decision that we’d sell the cattle, and then we said, ‘We’ve only got eight or 12 months and we’ve got to do something else, otherwise we’ll lose the place’."
Generations after his grandfather first took up country in the Cunnamulla district, Jesse and his family are still hopeful about the future.
"If we can get some reasonable — even average — seasons there’s a good future here," Michael Moody said.

by the Climate Centre at COP 24 in Katowice New research published on Monday, as the second week of UN climate talks in Poland got underway, shows “clear ties between today’s extremes and human causes” in both the developed and developing world.
The report – Explaining Extreme Events in 2017 from a Climate Perspective – is the seventh in an annual series that began in 2011.
“These attribution studies are telling us that a warming Earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said BAMS Editor Jeff Rosenfeld.
‘In a decade the research has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges’ This is the second year that scientists have identified extreme weather they say could not have happened without warming.
“Scientific evidence supports increasing confidence that human activity is driving a variety of extreme events now,” he added.
“These are having large economic impacts across the United States and around the world.” ‘Local risks’ The extreme-weather events studied in the seven issues of the report to date do not represent a comprehensive analysis of all events during that span, BAMS said.
About 70 per cent of the 146 research findings published in the series identified a substantial link between an extreme event and climate change; 30 per cent did not.
Researchers are “often going after more local risks like heatwaves, fire danger, and floods on scales of a few days, for pinpoint areas of extreme impacts,” Rosenfeld added.
“In barely a decade, the research focus has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges.” Coastal waters The research on 2017 includes findings that very warm seas off the coast of Africa that “could not have occurred in a pre-industrial climate” doubled the probability of drought in East Africa, which left more than 6 million people in Somalia facing food shortages.
Climate change made heatwaves in the European Mediterranean region at least as hot as last year’s three times more likely than in 1950, it says, while the record-breaking 2017 heat in China, once rare, is now a one-in-five-year event due to climate change.

STOCK water levels are critically low across large parts of New South Wales as drought conditions re-intensify across large parts of the state.
The NSW Department of Primary Industries State Seasonal Update for November indicates that drought conditions have re-intensified across much of NSW, particularly in the west of the state, despite isolated rainfall throughout the month.
DPI’s Leader of Climate Applications and Digital Agriculture, Anthony Clark said on ground conditions are highly complex, due to storm rainfall patterns that have been passing across NSW.
“The continuation of the drought means stock water levels remain critically low across large parts of NSW, particularly in the western, north-west and central west region,” Dr Clark said.
“During November, scattered storms provided above 100mm in the Central Tablelands, Greater Sydney and South East regions, with high falls also recorded in the Alpine zone.
“Isolated areas in parts of the coastal Hinterland, southern Central and Northern Tablelands are faring better than most with positive signs of strong pasture growth,” he said.
“In late November, a large low pressure system provided over 100mm of rainfall in parts of the Sydney Basin through to Wollongong, but the benefits will not be seen for some weeks and given its geographic distribution, it will not significantly change the state-wide drought.” The Bureau of Meteorology rainfall outlook for December to February indicates that there is a near equal chance, 40-60 percent, of wetter or drier that average conditions across most of NSW.
There is an increased chance of warmer than average daytime and overnight temperatures across all of NSW.
Source: NSW DPI.
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F.P.
Report ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Meteorological Department’s (PMD) National Drought Monitoring Centre has released its third drought warning for the year.
According to a notification by the Met Office, below normal rainfall has been recorded over most of the southern parts of the country while major rainfall deficit was experienced in the province of Sindh (-71.9 per cent), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (-46.9 per cent) and Balochistan (-44.2 per cent) during the months of June to November.
19 districts of Sindh and 11 districts of Balochistan are facing moderate to severe drought, the notification further said.
Karachi, Hyderabad, Badin, Larkana, Sanghar, Dadu, Mityari, Shaheed Benzairabad, Mohenjodaro, Tharparkar, Jacobabad, Padidan, Thatta, Jamshoro, Qambar Shadadkot, Umerkot, Rohri, Khairpur and Sajwal are facing drought in Sindh.
In Balochistan, Quetta, Mastung, Gwadar, Awaran, Kech, Panjgur, Bolan, Kharan, Chagi, Noushki and Washuk are among the district’s facing drought.
The meteorological department added that the water availability in the Tarbela and Mangla dams is at its lowest in the last nine years i.e. half filled.
However, water storage of small dams situated in Pothwar region is satisfactory.
The Met Office has advised that keeping in view the climatology, dam’s situation and current seasonal forecast, drought conditions may exacerbate and affect the agriculture and livestocks in the above-said districts and can propagate to other districts as well.
Dry conditions will cause water stress in the cultivated lands and areas of the country due to the limited supply of irrigation water for Rabi crops, the Met added.

Ranchi: A Central team that had visited Jharkhand today confirmed that the standing crops int the state were damaged due to drought, a state official said in Ranchi.
The team, led by Agriculture Joint Secretary Atish Chandra, had visited seven districts to assess the ground situation.
Before returning to New Delhi, the team held a meeting with state government officials in Ranchi yeterday.
"The Central team visited the districts and admitted that crops were damaged due to drought.
The team has sought some more information which will be provided to them," Sudhir Tripathy, Chief Secretary of Jharkhand, told the media.
Sources in the state government said that the team has resolved to submit a report to the Agriculture Ministry in 10 days so that R 818 crore relief funds sought by Jharkhand could be released.
The team had met Chief Minister Raghubar Das last week.
The Jharkhand government had already declared 216 blocks of 18 districts as drought affected.
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ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD)’s National Drought Monitoring Centre has released its third drought warning for the year.
According to a notification by the Met Office below normal rainfall has been recorded over most of the southern parts of the country while major rainfall deficit was experienced in the province of Sindh (71.9 percent), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ( 46.9 percent) and Balochistan (44.2 percent) during the months of June to November.
Nineteen districts of Sindh and 11 districts of Balochistan are facing moderate to severe drought, the notification further said.
Karachi, Hyderabad, Badin, Larkana, Sanghar, Dadu, Mityari, Shaheed Benzairabad, Mohenjodaro, Tharparkar, Jacobabad, Padidan, Thatta, Jamshoro, Qambar, Shadadkot, Umerkot, Rohri, Khairpur and Sajwal are facing drought in Sindh.
In Balochistan Quetta, Mastung, Gwadar, Awaran, Kech, Panjgur Bolan, Kharan, Chagi, Noushki, and Washuk are among the district’s facing drought.
The meteorological department added that the water availability in the Tarbela and Mangla dams is at its lowest in the last nine years ie half filled.
However, water storage of small dams situated in potohar region is satisfactory.
The Met Office has advised that keeping in view the climatology dam’s situation and current seasonal forecast drought conditions may exacerbate and affect the agriculture and livestock in the above said districts and can propagate to other districts as well.
Dry conditions will cause water stress in the cultivated lands and areas of the country due to the limited supply of irrigation water for Rabi crops the PMD added.

LAS VEGAS — With drought entering a second decade and reservoirs continuing to shrink, seven Southwestern U.S. states that depend on the overtaxed Colorado River for crop irrigation and drinking water had been expected to ink a crucial share-the-pain contingency plan by the end of 2018.
Federal water managers wanted a deal to sign at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference beginning Wednesday in Las Vegas, and threatened earlier this year to impose unspecified measures from Washington if a voluntary drought contingency plan wasn’t reached.
“Reclamation remains cautiously optimistic that the parties will find a path forward,” the bureau said in a statement on Friday, “because finding a consensus deal recognizing the risks of continuing drought and the benefits of a drought contingency plan is in each state’s best interest.” Colorado River water supports about 40 million people and millions of acres of farmland in the U.S. and Mexico.
After 19 years of drought and increasing demand, federal water managers project a 52 percent chance that the river’s biggest reservoir, Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, will fall low enough to trigger cutbacks under agreements governing the system.
Lake Powell upstream from of the Grand Canyon is currently at 43 percent capacity; Lake Mead, downstream, is at 38 percent.
The Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada aim to keep Lake Mead above a shortage declaration trigger point by using less water than they’re legally entitled to.
If Lake Mead falls below that level, Arizona will face a 9 percent reduction in water supply, Nevada a 3 percent cut and California up to 8 percent.
Water officials in most states — from the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas to the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Glenwood Springs, Colorado — have signed off on plans in recent weeks.
In Arizona, the board governing the Central Arizona Project irrigation system approved the Lower Basin plan on Thursday.
According to a board briefing, the Bureau of Reclamation, seven basin states and water contractors will begin negotiating again beginning no later than 2020.