Arizona drought conditions worsen

There is a map of Arizona that’s turning increasingly red and it has nothing to do with politics.

After another below-average month of rain and snow, the latest map from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that Arizona’s dry spell is intensifying. The red areas signify extreme drought conditions, and that color covers about half of the state on the Drought Monitor map released April 5.

Drought Monitor categories roughly represent how frequently levels of drought occur and they attempt to put current conditions into historical context. Until now, Arizona hadn’t seen extreme levels of drought since 2015.

We’re normally a dry state – Arizona’s long-term drought has been going on for more than two decades – but the short-term drought (think surface conditions) is raising concerns as wildfire season approaches.

Phoenix has received 0.77 inch of rain so far in 2018. The normal for this period 2.82 inches, according to National Weather Service numbers.

In northern Arizona, where much of the state’s drinking water comes from, snowfall totals are well below normal. Flagstaff, for example, had 37.4 inches of snow from Jan. 1-March 31. Normal for that period is 64.8 inches.

January, February and March are typically Arizona’s wettest months outside of the monsoon. April, May and June are among the driest.

Mike Crimmins, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who also works with the Drought Monitor, said it’s probably too late to catch up.

“We’re pretty much out of time to patch up any of the winter deficits that we accumulated this year so far,” Crimmins said. “The weeks are slipping by. April is pretty much our last chance and we usually don’t get much in April anyway. Now we’ve turned our attention to monsoon season and picking up (precipitation) then, but again, we can’t patch up the water from snow situation.”

Climate Prediction Center forecasts don’t offer much reason for optimism.

The seasonal outlook calls for a 60 percent probability of above-normal temperatures for Arizona and a 40 percent probability of below-average precipitation for most of the state.

And, as Crimmins points out, that precipitation outlook is below normal

for some pretty meager numbers anyway. Phoenix, for example, has normal rainfall totals of 0.28 inch in April, 0.11 inch in May and 0.02 inch in June.

“The bar is pretty low anyway so it’s hard to get beneath that,” said Crimmins, who also serves as a drought monitoring expert on the Governor’s Drought Task Force. “Now we’re getting to climatological dry season, I think we’ll probably turn our attention to the heat and keep our eye on that.

“We’ll see if we really start to bake stuff out and see how quickly we kill the remaining snow pack. There is not much there. It will be how much we can hold on to any moisture we have in the ground now, how long we can stretch that out.”

Crimmins said he has been in contact with other people throughout Arizona who keep an eye on drought conditions and they are also expressing concern, particularly throughout the middle portion of the state.

“Gila (County) is in pretty rough shape,” Crimmins said. “I think they’re worried about fire danger and the range conditions are bad. I was talking to some people ... who said La Paz County has creosote dying. It’s tough to kill creosote. They showed me pictures of brown creosote. That’s not normal.”