More drought improvement for Connecticut.
(WTNH) — The early-April rain storms are paying dividends as the drought continues to ease in Connecticut.
The improvement since last week is not huge, but the percentage of the state in a moderate drought is at its lowest point since last July.
As of Tuesday, April 11, 89% of the state is at least moderately dry, 57% is in a moderate drought, and now just 23% of Connecticut is in a severe drought.
At the start of this year, 100% of the state was in a moderate drought, and 83% was in a severe drought.
Precipitation totals are slightly above normal for 2017 in Windsor Locks and Bridgeport.
Computer model ensembles are predicting 1.5-2″ of rain in Connecticut in the next 14-16 days.
That is near normal during that time frame.
Most of Connecticut has received just 70-90% of the normal precipitation in the past three years.
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Region: Drought conditions improve.
The U.S. Drought Monitor map released Thursday indicates just less than half of Massachusetts, including northern sections of Worcester and Middlesex counties, is experiencing abnormally dry conditions.
Though the other half, which includes towns like Milford and Framingham, falls into the non-drought category, local officials say the change is not significant enough for them to roll back water restrictions in their communities.
In July last year, a startlingly low 0.87 inches of precipitation fell in Boston, whereas 3.62 inches have been recorded so far during this month alone.
The water level dropped steadily at Quabbin Reservoir from 92.4 percent capacity in June last year to a notably low 79.1 percent as of Jan. 1.
At Milford’s Echo Lake, officials measured 82.5 percent capacity Thursday, with a water line two inches below the spillway, according to David Condrey, director of the Milford Water Company.
“We’re just being very cautious.” The last time the lake reached full capacity was five years ago, he said.
“If we’re going to be very dry like last year it’s going to be very difficult for us to get there,” Condrey said.
Nonessential daytime outdoor watering will also be restricted in Upton from May 1 to Sept. 30, according to Department of Public Works Director Vincent Roy, who said the town’s water wells are in good shape.
“Talk to me in a month and it may be different,” Smith said.

Drought conditions improve, but still linger.
The state’s climatologist, Mary Stampone, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of New Hampshire, said that surface water – river, streams and lakes – are doing well, which is easy to see passing by those body of waters.
What is difficult to see, but what is measured, is ground water — like wells and aquifers.
Kernen said that rain today can take months before it drains down and recharges the ground water.
While the Stampone said recent rain has “definitely helped” the drought conditions, she is “not confident” the state will be lifted out of the drought designation this summer.
“We don’t have a distinct wet or dry season,” she said.
While we don’t know how much rain we will receive this spring and summer, “we are guaranteed to get warmer over the next few months,” she said.
“We know we will increase the outputs of moisture – we just don’t know what the inputs will be.” While many of area municipalities water supplies are doing better, especially for those with surface water reservoirs, households and business who depend on wells have had more challenges.
Sometimes, the ground is too cold in the winter to allow the water to trickle down to recharge the ground water supply.
The form can be found on the homepage of the DES’ website, www.des.nh.gov under the “What’s New” tab.

From the Department of Water Resources: Never in nearly a century of Department of Water Resources (DWR) recordkeeping has so much precipitation fallen in the northern Sierra in a water year. DWR reported today that 89.7 inches of precipitation – rain and snowmelt – has been recorded by the eight weather stations it has monitored continuously since 1920 from Shasta Lake to the American River basin. Today’s total surpassed the previous record of 88.5 inches recorded in the entirety of Water Year 1983. The region’s annual average is 50 inches. California traditionally receives 30 to 50 percent of its annual precipitation from atmospheric rivers (ARs), long and relatively narrow “rivers in the sky” laden with moisture that blow in from the Pacific. The West Coast…

As coastal ecosystems feel the heat of climate change worldwide, new research shows the humble mussel and marsh grass form an intimate interaction known as mutualism that benefits both partner species and may be critical to helping these ecosystems bounce back from extreme climatic events such as drought.
The study, led by the University of Florida, finds that when mussels pile up in mounds around the grass stems, they provide protection by improving water storage around the grass roots and reducing soil salinity.
Mussels protect grasses from drought by improving water storage around the grass roots and reducing soil salinity.
With mussels’ help, the study found, marshes can recover from drought in less than a decade.
"It’s a story of mutual benefit between marsh grass and mussels," said Christine Angelini, an assistant professor of environmental engineering sciences in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and lead author on the paper.
They found that wherever there were clusters of mussels embedded in the mud around the base of the grass stems, the grass survived; in fact, grass growing in mussel clusters had a 64 percent probability of surviving versus a 1 percent probability in areas where there were no mussels.
One of the research team’s marsh study sites was in the backyard of Dale Aren of Charleston, South Carolina.
After noticing the marsh behind her home was dying, she did some online research and found a paper about that very problem written by Angelini’s colleague, Brian Silliman, an assistant professor of biology at UF and a co-author on Angelini’s paper.
"We were worried," Aren said.
"The Spartina [grass] is beautiful and the increasing area of mudflats were very unattractive and did not look healthy."

Geophysicists at the University of Bonn have now visualized such processes for the first time using electrical impedance tomography.
The researchers have now published their results in the scientific journal Biogeosciences.
Plants imbibe the vital cocktail of water and mineral nutrients through their roots.
This twisting organ not only provides purchase in the soil — the fine root hairs actually grow actively into soil zones where the fount of nutrients bubbles particularly richly.
The mineral substances in the soil are usually present in the form of electrically charged ions.
"The ions influence the electrical properties of the roots, which enables us to visualize the uptake of nutrients by roots in a new way," says Prof. Dr. Andreas Kemna, geophysicist at the University of Bonn.
His team has now developed a new method: The scientists "x-ray" the root systems of the plants using electrical impedance tomography, which is also used as an imaging technique in medicine.
"Unlike doctors, however, we not only measure electrical conductivity, but also electrical polarizability, which is influenced by the uptake of nutrients at the plant root," explains Prof. Kemna.
"Researchers image roots in the ground: Geophysicists use new method to visualize the activity of root systems."
"Researchers image roots in the ground: Geophysicists use new method to visualize the activity of root systems."

While changing precipitation patterns can have a significant impact on stream flows in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers indicates that shifts in vegetation type resulting from warming and other factors may have an equal or greater effect.
Their findings appear in the journal PLOS One.
"We found that vegetation change may have a greater impact on the amount of stream flow in the Sierra than the direct effects of climate warming," said lead author Ryan Bart, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
Exacerbated by climate and drought, fires such as the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park can destroy entire stands of forest, which may not return.
Because the future composition of shrub lands and the distribution of shrub species in the Sierra Nevada is unknown, the researchers examined stream flows under multiple possible scenarios of vegetation-type conversion in two Sierra Nevada watersheds.
While some forest-to-shrub land conversion scenarios resulted in higher stream flow, depending on factors such as the size and area covered by shrub leaves relative to tree leaves, Bart noted that a shrub-dominated landscape would not necessarily result in more water in stream.
"Shrubs are adept at pulling water out of the soil, so that in some cases, a decent-sized shrub may use just as much water as a much taller tree.
It is only when shrubs are much smaller than trees that we see less water used by vegetation and thus more stream flow."
"The results underscore the importance of accounting for changes in vegetation communities to accurately characterize future stream flow for the Sierra Nevada."
Effect of Tree-to-Shrub Type Conversion in Lower Montane Forests of the Sierra Nevada (USA) on Streamflow.

Future drought will offset benefits of higher CO2 on soybean yields.
An eight-year study of soybeans grown outdoors in a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere like that expected by 2050 has yielded a new and worrisome finding: Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations will boost plant growth under ideal growing conditions, but drought — expected to worsen as the climate warms and rainfall patterns change — will outweigh those benefits and cause yield losses much sooner than anticipated.
The new discovery, reported in the journal Nature Plants, contradicts a widely accepted hypothesis about how climate change will affect food production, said University of Illinois plant biology professor Andrew Leakey, who led the new research.
Under hot and dry conditions at elevated CO2, the plants in the SoyFACE experiments used more, not less, water than those grown under current atmospheric conditions, the researchers found.
"What we think is happening is that early in the growing season, when the plant has enough water, it’s able to photosynthesize more as a result of the higher CO2 levels.
Elevated CO2 and drought together also influence soybean’s ability to fix nitrogen through nodules formed on its roots.
Under elevated CO2 and drought, the number of beneficial nodules on the soybean roots increases, Leakey said.
"But what we find is that they put all these extra nodules on in relatively shallow soil layers.
And the nodules don’t work well when they’re in dry soil."
Intensifying drought eliminates the expected benefits of elevated carbon dioxide for soybean.

NH1 Meteorologist Recent precipitation continues to help ease the state’s historic drought. Runoff from a steady melt of the winter’s snow has helped refill dry streams and low rivers across the Granite State. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor, published each Thursday, shows a great reduction in the drought severity across most of central and southern New Hampshire. The northern part of the state is completely removed from any type of drought. MORE: Drought was tough on farmers, but good…

GENEVA — United Nations and international aid agencies warn that cholera is spreading in drought-stricken Somalia as hunger grips that nation and the threat of famine inches closer. The World Health Organization reports more than 21,000 cases of cholera, including 533 deaths, in Somalia since the beginning of the year. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies also reports that an outbreak of the deadly disease in the self-declared autonomous region of Somaliland has killed 28 people in just the last week-and-a-half, and hospitalized nearly 170 others. Jens Laerke, spokesman for the U.N.’s Office…