Drought Deception

Northwest drought is being exaggerated by a group including publicly funded agencies, the media, local government, and climate activists.   

At its essence, it is ideological, anti-science, political, and self-serving.

This blog will go into the problem in greater depth than my analysis of last week.

The center of what might be called the Drought Exaggeration Industry (DEI) is the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is associated with the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  

The most viewed product of this National Drought Center is the Drought Monitor graphic, the national view of which is shown below.

To see how nonsensical and anti-science this effort is, consider the latest drought map for Washington State (released yesterday, and shown below).    

Most of Washington State is "abnormally dry" or in drought, with severe or extreme drought over the eastern slopes of the Cascades and the far portion of the state (see below).  

As shown below, this is total nonsense and inconsistent with hard data.  

Precipitation has been above normal, soils are moist, rivers are above normal levels, reservoirs are above normal, and snowpack is in decent shape.

But this wacky website does not end there.  It claims that 2.4 million Washington residents are in drought:

It states that 1,778,920 King County residents, many of whom are dealing with flooded roads, failing levees, and sodden fields, are affected by drought.

But the national drought meisters don't stop there!   They inform us that in KING COUNTY, 3266 cattle and 755 sheep are in drought.   And that thousands of acres of King County hay are in drought.

Perhaps the national drought folks should speak to one of our local cows, many of which have been moved to escape flooding (see below)

Picture courtesy of Stephen Braishear

It is easy to prove that the drought claims for Washington State are entirely baseless.

For the past 90 days, precipitation over Washington has been near normal (light green or yellow) or above normal (blue and purple).

Soil moisture is above normal over much of the state and MUCH above normal over the eastern Cascades slopes, where the drought monitor graphic has moderate to severe drought.  Go figure.

Our rivers are mostly running above normal levels, some at near record levels (black dots, particularly east of the Cascades):

Reservoirs are way above normal.   The critical Yakima storage system....the fixation of the drought folks for a long time.... is not only above normal, but at levels commonly found at the end of winter.

Seattle's reservoirs are way above normal (see below) as are most of the others in the region.

What about snowpack, another fixation of the drought folks?   Good news, there has been lots of recent snow in the mountains, and most ski areas are open for Christmas. 

 Below are the latest numbers, which show a stunning recovery from a few weeks ago.  The snowpack feeding the Columbia River is now ABOVE NORMAL, and the snowpack for most of the western Cascades is 75% of normal.  More snow is expected during the next few days.

By any rational analysis, there is no drought going on.  

There will be plenty of water for all uses.  Furthermore, this is a La Niña year, which is usually good for water resources.

The unsupportable and unscientific drought talk is very destructive and counterproductive.   

It induces fear and worry in the population, particularly the most psychologically vulnerable.  It results in poor decision-making.    

Who are some folks doing this?   

Some are doing it to promote their politics and ideology.  Others to push a climate change agenda, which they either believe in or profit from.  Media, such as the Seattle Times Climate Lab, do so for clicks and financial support from activist groups.  YouTube and social media channels do it for clicks and advertising revenue.

But whatever their reasons, I hope that the current administration takes a deep look at this drought-pushing enterprise and reforms the government-supported side of the advocacy campaign.  

Wishing all of you a good holiday.

Crying wolf is a bad idea

A Christmas Eve Windstorm?

Some of the media are talking about a big wind event tomorrow over western Washington, and some of the amateur weather enthusiast sites have been going a bit over the top.

The truth is a bit less exciting:  the winds will get gusty tomorrow afternoon, and some people may lose power, but this is not going to be a major windstorm.  Gusts to 30-45 mph.

This was a difficult event to forecast earlier, with a great deal of uncertainty until today.  

Why?  Because we had a very small system moving directly up the coast, far harder to predict than a large cyclone moving off the Pacific.   I have seen this situation many times and have learned to be careful.

The modeling systems predicted the uncertainty, something expressed by very different forecasts of the members of our ensemble forecast systems, in which we run the models many times with small differences in their initial state or model physics.

Want some inner weather "baseball"?   

Yesterday, the highly skillful European Center and UKMET office models were going for much weaker winds.

The American GFS and NAM models were doing for a crazy strong event.  But these are generally far less skillful for systems over the eastern Pacific.  Pretty embarrassing that the U.S. models are generally inferior.  Make American Weather Models Great Again!

The latest UW forecast takes a modest low-pressure system to Vancouver Island tomorrow at 4 PM (see below).   

This graphic shows the sea level pressure analysis and there are a lot of pressure changes to the south of the low.  That means strong winds.

How strong?  Below is the forecast of maximum gusts at 4 PM tomorrow.  Up to around 35 knots over northern Puget Sound, with higher gusts in Northwest Washington.

Rainfall will be modest from this system (see the totals through tomorrow morning).  And much of that will be snow.