Weather Talk: Drought.
Drought, simply put, is a lack of rain.
But drought is not a simple thing to classify.
Like anything related to weather, it is complicated.
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.
Here in the Fargo Moorhead area, the last true drought was in the summer of 1989, which followed an even worse drought the summer of 1988.
Before that, a severe drought happened in 1976.