I predict that we will acknowledge that tree loss and city sprawl are significant drivers of drought and there will be a massive "plant trees" campaign someday.
60% contributing factor to the Mayan case. When the Mayans ran out of water, their civilization collapsed, and their technology and advanced astronomical science faded from memory.
We are speed running toward the same peril in modern times.
I read this article. Thanks for that link. I think it odd that they are focusing on drought conditions due to the La Nina conditions we have experienced when we are ramping up now for what has been described as a super El Nino. For much of the areas affected by the drought conditions, there will be an overabundance of precipitation by late summer into next spring.
The article mentions the potential for a super El Nino at the very end but doesn't discuss the effect it could have on content in the map should it go down as modeled. I suspect that a lot of yellows and red will disappear or shift to the north.
I know that the last super El Nino in 2015-2016 followed similar drought conditions due to La Nina such that rainfall at my property, which is normally ~36" (91.4 cm) annually (that's a 20 year average taken here on my property) was below average for the period 2010-2014 by 3-5" (7.62-12.7 cm) and up to 10" (25.4 cm) in 2014. Once La Nina faded it began to rain in August and rained out through December and we ended the year with 68" (172.7 cm) rainfall. In the decades that I have lived here and tracked rainfall that is the wettest year by more than 14" (35.6 cm).
We are currently behind the curve here but I have faith in their predictions since it also comes with a promise of ridiculously hot temperatures to make the last months of the year humid well past normal. It has been cooler than normal so far and drier than normal (La Nina hanging on by a thread). The script will flip and N Texas will again be a miserable place to be if you work outside.
I agree that we should hope for the best. We should prepare for the worst too since the updated models are indicating that the super El Nino event is very likely. People across the region that will be affected can expect an unusually wet and hot end to the year. We have time to prepare.
There won't be much we can do about soil absorption since keeping your yard watered will also cause runoff if the soil is saturated.
We just need to follow the common sense guidance to avoid driving into flooded underpasses and do not drive past barriers. Remember that at night it will be difficult to spot flooded sections of highway due to reflections so you will be dependent on center lines and painted markings and if they disappear it could indicate water depth sufficient to obscure them. Hydroplaning is a serious concern so drive more slowly and remember that if you begin to hydroplane you need to keep your wheels pointed in the direction that you need to travel and let off of the accelerator. The pooled water and sudden decrease in speed will put your tires back on the road surface so your vehicle will zip off in the direction that it is pointing. Check your tread depth before autumn and replace your tires if they are worn.
Carry a rain slicker or poncho with you in case traffic conditions force you to stop due to accidents or water across the roadway. You'll be a lot more comfortable dry than wet.
I intentionally bought property with a house that is on a hill with drainage away from the house so flooding isn't something that I worry about. I know that most other people will have to deal with flooding, especially around here where there are so many new construction issues - new concrete driveways, asphalt streets, and channelized creeks. Places that have never flooded in the past could flood now due to loss of open ground to home construction.
I am a couple decades into restoring my place to native prairie grasses, wildflowers, and trees so my place manages rainfall as it always has. I don't have much soil to absorb the rainfall though since I live on a limestone outcrop with poorly developed soils.
I hope people around here will follow guidance and be safe and use common sense when the rains come. I'm ready with my 4x4s to drag them out of their situations if they need a hand though.
> Carry a rain slicker or poncho with you in case ...
Add a pair of rubber boots and a walking stick. The latter both to check the depth of water, and to brace yourself when there's bad footing or flowing water.
It seems to be a double whammy on the wheat side. Lower planting this year combined with drought suppressing these smaller crops. Wheat down 35%, Corn down 6% but Soy beans looks to be up due to lesser reliance on fertilizer.
Real question is how will next years crop handle the supply constrains due to the Straight (outta) Hormuz lock down.
In what way? Wheat hasn't even returned to early 2025 price levels yet. It is up relative to where is has been recently amid what were very low prices, but still have a long way to go to get where things had been through much of the 2020s.
Well, it's a weird site. Most of my interactions are through the /active page or specific search terms. When I started to do that in about 2021 it certainly made it a lot easier to find what I as curious about.
Unfortunately, what I wanted to know also changed, in that I now use the site to keep tabs on the thoughts of folks are or who fund and work for hard-right technocrats.
There are, of course, many other folks on the site.
At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places: folks who, for instance, think Peter Thiel is of course quite sane and probably not trying to figure out a way to kill vast chunks of us off (and that it would be a reasonable thing if he were).
> At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places
Big Tech social media are perfect platforms to drive people and society apart. Yesterday suddenly Youtube passed a vid [0] through the algorithmic filter bubble they feed me, showing Marco Rubio (or a deepfake version?) spew divisive misinfo about Macron and France. Most telling that none of the comments had a critical word on Rubio. Only Rubio fan comments behing highly critical of Europe and the EU.
Big Tech social media is pure poison to healthy society in how it insidiously spreads misinformation and propaganda to targeted audiences.
[0] No URL. I don't want to give this clicks, but the shorts vid ID is pgvVw5bZWiA
Yes, lies and venom. With 'divisive' I was also thinking of the new US national security policy that calls for driving the EU apart into individual vasal states, and Rubio doing that dirty work in the vid, shielded by algorithms.
Indeed you read that backwards. He's saying that Thiel supporters and apologists can be found on HN more easily than on other sites. I'm not sure what to make of that claim though - he doesn't (or rather the events related to his companies that make it to the front page don't) seem very popular around here to me.
Scarecrowbob misused a colon, which I think is why you interpreted their post the way you did. But from the other context of the post, they clearly think the opposite.
I think they are saying they want to track the ideas of people who support techno-fascists like Thiel and who don't think that ideology is insane, and that it can be difficult to find them online
It should be pretty obvious that any major social media website is fully botted these days. News is coming out how reddit, twitch e.t.c. are full of fake accounts. This site is no different. Try to say something negative about Apple products and you get instantly downvoted.
Yea but see, that disagrees with my feelings and my political cult leaders stance, so it must be incorrect. And if you are stating obviously wrong things then you are a seditious liar.
I occasionally check out the map on the drought monitor website. The current map does not look significantly different than maps I have seen over the past 10 years.
The areas of extreme drought may change each year, but the total area affected seems rather ordinary to me.
Exactly. I feel like people forget about statistics and trends when it comes to the climate.
Nearly every long term trend and statistics shows climate and environmental conditions getting worse, and it's almost solely due to human activity.
Cherry picking short term events isn't useful, especially when the climate getting worse often means an increase in the duration between normal events and an increase in extreme weather.
In some places not strictly in drought the water cycle is still completely messed up. A few huge winter storms make up for lack of precipitation in the rest of the year and then promptly melts off. So the yearly average looks good on paper but it's dry as hell in summer/fire season with no snowmelt throughout the year.
As a kid in the Midwest (Minnesota) we'd get tons of snow and it would hang around until June or July since snow is such a good insulator - the big piles wouldn't melt I mean. Last time I remembered this happening maybe was 2005.
Now it snows, melts, gets cold, repeats and we don't really get any build up except maybe a big storm leaving enough for a week or two.
Dry here (southern IL). 12 years ago spring would be cool, drizzly, cloudy. Now (past 3 years) it's warm, dry, sunny. Periodically we get this big wind that lasts for a couple days.
Title is somewhat incorrect: more than 60% of the U.S. is facing drought, making it overall the worst in decades. The data do not show that the drought in each area is the worst in decades.
> Meteorologists and climatologists from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA take turns as the lead author of the map, usually two weeks a time. The author’s job is to do something that a computer can’t. When the data is pointing in different directions, they make sense out of it.
> How do we know when we're in a drought?
> No single piece of evidence tells the full story, and neither do strictly physical indicators. That’s why the USDM isn’t a statistical model
> The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year.
> There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.
cliff is an expert but also famously sort of a "climate contrarian" and his takes are regularly cited by climate skeptics and conservative irritants here in the PNW. just noting his takes don't exist in a vacuum.
Contrarian experts are really important imo, and I don't think their efforts should be devalued just because nuts might be attracted to them. As long as they're properly engaging in the scientific method I reckon that they're perfectly fine to quote.
So? You’re trying to engage in tu quoque without saying it explicitly. If you think the argument is wrong, make a counter-argument. Don’t just say that the arguer hangs out with people you don’t like.
Cliff in an expert, he worked in the Obama administration on climate, and unsurprisingly, he is being cited for having opinions the support the thesis of the article.
FWIW you can go back and look at historical data rather than rely on a snapshot of 2022 written in April.
Basically it’s complicated. Some areas did experience extreme droughts that year and others faired well.
BPA was able to lever up their reserves early due to those same forecasts which allowed them excess supply to sell when other utilities experienced extreme heat (drought) and couldn’t produce enough.
> Notably, Bonneville was able to offer much needed support to other Pacific
Northwest and California utilities during late-summer heatwaves and
scarcity events. Our hydropower operations planners and traders positioned
the power system to maximize supply, enabling us to deliver significant
amounts of power across the West to help keep the lights on during a
string of energy emergencies.
I like the map. It's usually on track but sometimes it's quite a bit off. I've seen it say drought when it's been wet --maybe just not as wet as usual. It also doesn't indicate when above average and I do not think it averages precip out when a wet week was extremely wet and the next one dry. It'll say it was dry last week. In other words you could have cumulative average precip but it's only counting last week's precipitation.
> [Authors] bring together the physical climate, weather and hydrology data and reconcile that with local expert feedback, impact reports and conditions observations. The author is also responsible for weighing different indicators based on what’s most appropriate for a particular place and time of year. In the West, for example, winter snowpack has a stronger bearing on water supplies than in the East
It is, and the subjective assessment component is a black box. That said, the USDM has many other components that are objective, so it's far from being a subjective measure -- I would argue that the Fed Funds rate, for instance, is determined far more subjectively.
Also, there just isn't a more objective measure of drought out there, let alone a fully objective measure.
Also also, it's unclear to me that this black box is being gamed any harder than most other black boxes in our system. If you want to game agriculture, you game the farm bill.
i think calling it "subjective opinion" is kind of disingenuous. it is a subject matter expert interpreting the data. there is a vast gulf between that and someone else simply offering their opinion on the matter.
I worked in weather for TV as a technician and I was lucky enough to work with meteorologists. I thought they were high priests in the church of science, however, I detected a gambling mentality going on.
I was just surprised at how subjective their work was, with differing opinions regarding the big picture depending on whom you asked and what their background was, as in university, whether they had worked for the navy or whether they had worked for the government.
The big surprise of the gambling mentality reminded me of people that dedicate their lives to losing as much money as possible betting on horses. These people know the form, the weather and so much, yet they do their own bets.
It was kind of the same when working out what the weather would be in Springfield tomorrow. Would it just be cloudy or actual rain? That would be a 'bet'.
The next day the observations would come in and the meteorologists would either win or lose their 'bet'. The guy who has been to Springfield and knows the local geography well would have his own reasons for his 'bet', whereas the guy who was more interested in long term storm development would have another rationale for his 'bet'.
Then there would be 'wrong all the time me', able to look at the low level cloud from contrails (which are really huge in some wavelengths on the satellite pictures) to assume rain every day.
Hence climate and weather is highly subjective even if it is highly educated and vastly experienced professionals that are interpreting the data.
There is also the additional issue of computer models constantly chasing global changes. About 10-15 years back I used to talk with folks that worked on weather modeling and they were in a state of frustration in that as soon as they could make models that could work on older data sets to do reasonable predictions, the global weather patterns had change just subtly enough that it made them just kind of average on forward predictions.
This was right before GPU compute started to become a big thing, I do wonder if they now use machine learning models on these to speed up model iteration? I would hope so, but even then there is the human factor as you said. Eventually someone has to make the call on what the data shows and how to present it to the world.
I predict that we will acknowledge that tree loss and city sprawl are significant drivers of drought and there will be a massive "plant trees" campaign someday.
Why do I think this? https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2012/08/20/forest-razing-b...
60% contributing factor to the Mayan case. When the Mayans ran out of water, their civilization collapsed, and their technology and advanced astronomical science faded from memory.
We are speed running toward the same peril in modern times.
I read this article. Thanks for that link. I think it odd that they are focusing on drought conditions due to the La Nina conditions we have experienced when we are ramping up now for what has been described as a super El Nino. For much of the areas affected by the drought conditions, there will be an overabundance of precipitation by late summer into next spring.
The article mentions the potential for a super El Nino at the very end but doesn't discuss the effect it could have on content in the map should it go down as modeled. I suspect that a lot of yellows and red will disappear or shift to the north.
I know that the last super El Nino in 2015-2016 followed similar drought conditions due to La Nina such that rainfall at my property, which is normally ~36" (91.4 cm) annually (that's a 20 year average taken here on my property) was below average for the period 2010-2014 by 3-5" (7.62-12.7 cm) and up to 10" (25.4 cm) in 2014. Once La Nina faded it began to rain in August and rained out through December and we ended the year with 68" (172.7 cm) rainfall. In the decades that I have lived here and tracked rainfall that is the wettest year by more than 14" (35.6 cm).
We are currently behind the curve here but I have faith in their predictions since it also comes with a promise of ridiculously hot temperatures to make the last months of the year humid well past normal. It has been cooler than normal so far and drier than normal (La Nina hanging on by a thread). The script will flip and N Texas will again be a miserable place to be if you work outside.
It's worth keeping in mind the danger of such a transition though.
If you go from a drought to a lot of water it generally builds up pretty badly as dried out dirt doesn't absorb water very well.
If the prediction holds true it may become a year with a lot of water damage/flooding in these regions.
Let's hope for the best though.
I agree that we should hope for the best. We should prepare for the worst too since the updated models are indicating that the super El Nino event is very likely. People across the region that will be affected can expect an unusually wet and hot end to the year. We have time to prepare.
There won't be much we can do about soil absorption since keeping your yard watered will also cause runoff if the soil is saturated.
We just need to follow the common sense guidance to avoid driving into flooded underpasses and do not drive past barriers. Remember that at night it will be difficult to spot flooded sections of highway due to reflections so you will be dependent on center lines and painted markings and if they disappear it could indicate water depth sufficient to obscure them. Hydroplaning is a serious concern so drive more slowly and remember that if you begin to hydroplane you need to keep your wheels pointed in the direction that you need to travel and let off of the accelerator. The pooled water and sudden decrease in speed will put your tires back on the road surface so your vehicle will zip off in the direction that it is pointing. Check your tread depth before autumn and replace your tires if they are worn.
Carry a rain slicker or poncho with you in case traffic conditions force you to stop due to accidents or water across the roadway. You'll be a lot more comfortable dry than wet.
I intentionally bought property with a house that is on a hill with drainage away from the house so flooding isn't something that I worry about. I know that most other people will have to deal with flooding, especially around here where there are so many new construction issues - new concrete driveways, asphalt streets, and channelized creeks. Places that have never flooded in the past could flood now due to loss of open ground to home construction.
I am a couple decades into restoring my place to native prairie grasses, wildflowers, and trees so my place manages rainfall as it always has. I don't have much soil to absorb the rainfall though since I live on a limestone outcrop with poorly developed soils.
I hope people around here will follow guidance and be safe and use common sense when the rains come. I'm ready with my 4x4s to drag them out of their situations if they need a hand though.
> Carry a rain slicker or poncho with you in case ...
Add a pair of rubber boots and a walking stick. The latter both to check the depth of water, and to brace yourself when there's bad footing or flowing water.
Some odd comments on this. It's not a matter of debate, wheat futures reflect this.
It seems to be a double whammy on the wheat side. Lower planting this year combined with drought suppressing these smaller crops. Wheat down 35%, Corn down 6% but Soy beans looks to be up due to lesser reliance on fertilizer.
Real question is how will next years crop handle the supply constrains due to the Straight (outta) Hormuz lock down.
USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought - https://www.agweb.com/news/usda-projects-smallest-us-wheat-h...
Wheat Acreage Continues Decline as Producers Find More Lucrative Crops - https://www.proag.com/news/wheat-acreage-continues-decline-a...
> wheat futures reflect this.
In what way? Wheat hasn't even returned to early 2025 price levels yet. It is up relative to where is has been recently amid what were very low prices, but still have a long way to go to get where things had been through much of the 2020s.
Some odd comments and voting patterns on a lot of things. It's getting weird around here.
Well, it's a weird site. Most of my interactions are through the /active page or specific search terms. When I started to do that in about 2021 it certainly made it a lot easier to find what I as curious about.
Unfortunately, what I wanted to know also changed, in that I now use the site to keep tabs on the thoughts of folks are or who fund and work for hard-right technocrats.
There are, of course, many other folks on the site.
At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places: folks who, for instance, think Peter Thiel is of course quite sane and probably not trying to figure out a way to kill vast chunks of us off (and that it would be a reasonable thing if he were).
> At the same time, the US techno-fascists both have an outsized influence on our lives and it's much harder to find their voices in other places
Big Tech social media are perfect platforms to drive people and society apart. Yesterday suddenly Youtube passed a vid [0] through the algorithmic filter bubble they feed me, showing Marco Rubio (or a deepfake version?) spew divisive misinfo about Macron and France. Most telling that none of the comments had a critical word on Rubio. Only Rubio fan comments behing highly critical of Europe and the EU.
Big Tech social media is pure poison to healthy society in how it insidiously spreads misinformation and propaganda to targeted audiences.
[0] No URL. I don't want to give this clicks, but the shorts vid ID is pgvVw5bZWiA
By divisive you mean lies and venon? Maybe we should stop using euphemisms.
Yes, lies and venom. With 'divisive' I was also thinking of the new US national security policy that calls for driving the EU apart into individual vasal states, and Rubio doing that dirty work in the vid, shielded by algorithms.
I’m not sure I understood you correctly.
You think critics of Thiel are the techno fascists?
Indeed you read that backwards. He's saying that Thiel supporters and apologists can be found on HN more easily than on other sites. I'm not sure what to make of that claim though - he doesn't (or rather the events related to his companies that make it to the front page don't) seem very popular around here to me.
Scarecrowbob misused a colon, which I think is why you interpreted their post the way you did. But from the other context of the post, they clearly think the opposite.
he's not talking about his critics but his supporters & people like Thiel.
I think they are saying they want to track the ideas of people who support techno-fascists like Thiel and who don't think that ideology is insane, and that it can be difficult to find them online
Too late to edit, but based on the reply’s I got I didn’t interpret the comment incorrectly. Seems like it’s time for bed then.
I would say there was a marked turning point of weirdness right around jan 31 2025
It should be pretty obvious that any major social media website is fully botted these days. News is coming out how reddit, twitch e.t.c. are full of fake accounts. This site is no different. Try to say something negative about Apple products and you get instantly downvoted.
Which comments?
Yea but see, that disagrees with my feelings and my political cult leaders stance, so it must be incorrect. And if you are stating obviously wrong things then you are a seditious liar.
/s for anyone who doesn’t understand the mockery
I occasionally check out the map on the drought monitor website. The current map does not look significantly different than maps I have seen over the past 10 years.
The areas of extreme drought may change each year, but the total area affected seems rather ordinary to me.
Duration, duration, duration.
The US southwest is now in the longest period of severe drought in at least 1200 years.
And we're still selling what little water we have to foreign & domestic corporations for a fraction of what residential citizens pay.
We are also refusing to maintain critical water-system infrastructure, setting ourselves up to lose critical water storage capacity [1].
We can get fined for washing our cars at certain times (although it's rarely enforced), but nobody ever turns the screws on the business machine.
[1] https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/north-county/plan-f...
Exactly. I feel like people forget about statistics and trends when it comes to the climate.
Nearly every long term trend and statistics shows climate and environmental conditions getting worse, and it's almost solely due to human activity.
Cherry picking short term events isn't useful, especially when the climate getting worse often means an increase in the duration between normal events and an increase in extreme weather.
not including California? The California drought recently ended and now all the reservoirs are quite full.
So that‘s „making Amerika dry again“ trump is promising?
In some places not strictly in drought the water cycle is still completely messed up. A few huge winter storms make up for lack of precipitation in the rest of the year and then promptly melts off. So the yearly average looks good on paper but it's dry as hell in summer/fire season with no snowmelt throughout the year.
In Europe drought is measured from the amount of water at different depths. I would be surprised it’s different in the US.
As a kid in the Midwest (Minnesota) we'd get tons of snow and it would hang around until June or July since snow is such a good insulator - the big piles wouldn't melt I mean. Last time I remembered this happening maybe was 2005.
Now it snows, melts, gets cold, repeats and we don't really get any build up except maybe a big storm leaving enough for a week or two.
computah, build 200 more data centers
Related:
USDA Projects Smallest US Wheat Harvest Since 1972 Due to Plains Drought
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134993
Dry here (southern IL). 12 years ago spring would be cool, drizzly, cloudy. Now (past 3 years) it's warm, dry, sunny. Periodically we get this big wind that lasts for a couple days.
I hope people will not buy into that weird conspiracy theory about the destroyed weather radars in Iraq and its consequences
I have not heard of this one but I am intrigued.
Always interested to see how creative people can be in trying to fit the undefinable and uncontrollable world into a narrative box.
Yeah, right. Hope people won't believe that weird conspiracy theory about how the government can change weather and has had the technology for years.
They've been doing it for a hundred years what they can't do is change back the weather.
“The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.”
"Drill, baby, drill"
Title is somewhat incorrect: more than 60% of the U.S. is facing drought, making it overall the worst in decades. The data do not show that the drought in each area is the worst in decades.
Just a reminder from January: "California completely drought-free for 1st time in 25 years after winter storms"
https://abc7.com/post/california-has-zero-areas-dryness-firs...
> "California completely drought-free for 1st time in 25 years after winter storms"
California is like 5% of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states.
Just because it is out of a drought doesn't negate the article.
Oh weird, everything must be fine then, I still see snow sometimes even!
I think the “first time in 25 years” bit reinforces the idea of persistent drought being a problem.
The drought map used here is partly subjective opinion.
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx
> Who draws the map?
> Meteorologists and climatologists from the NDMC, NOAA and USDA take turns as the lead author of the map, usually two weeks a time. The author’s job is to do something that a computer can’t. When the data is pointing in different directions, they make sense out of it.
> How do we know when we're in a drought?
> No single piece of evidence tells the full story, and neither do strictly physical indicators. That’s why the USDM isn’t a statistical model
Doesn't seem like all climate scientists are fans of it either. From a 2022 critique of a news story also based on this map:
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-large-portion-of-w...
> The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year.
> There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.
cliff is an expert but also famously sort of a "climate contrarian" and his takes are regularly cited by climate skeptics and conservative irritants here in the PNW. just noting his takes don't exist in a vacuum.
Contrarian experts are really important imo, and I don't think their efforts should be devalued just because nuts might be attracted to them. As long as they're properly engaging in the scientific method I reckon that they're perfectly fine to quote.
So? You’re trying to engage in tu quoque without saying it explicitly. If you think the argument is wrong, make a counter-argument. Don’t just say that the arguer hangs out with people you don’t like.
Cliff in an expert, he worked in the Obama administration on climate, and unsurprisingly, he is being cited for having opinions the support the thesis of the article.
FWIW you can go back and look at historical data rather than rely on a snapshot of 2022 written in April.
Basically it’s complicated. Some areas did experience extreme droughts that year and others faired well.
BPA was able to lever up their reserves early due to those same forecasts which allowed them excess supply to sell when other utilities experienced extreme heat (drought) and couldn’t produce enough.
> Notably, Bonneville was able to offer much needed support to other Pacific Northwest and California utilities during late-summer heatwaves and scarcity events. Our hydropower operations planners and traders positioned the power system to maximize supply, enabling us to deliver significant amounts of power across the West to help keep the lights on during a string of energy emergencies.
https://www.bpa.gov/-/media/Aep/finance/annual-reports/ar202...
I like the map. It's usually on track but sometimes it's quite a bit off. I've seen it say drought when it's been wet --maybe just not as wet as usual. It also doesn't indicate when above average and I do not think it averages precip out when a wet week was extremely wet and the next one dry. It'll say it was dry last week. In other words you could have cumulative average precip but it's only counting last week's precipitation.
And a lot of hard work, sounds like: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/AbouttheData/DroughtCla...
> [Authors] bring together the physical climate, weather and hydrology data and reconcile that with local expert feedback, impact reports and conditions observations. The author is also responsible for weighing different indicators based on what’s most appropriate for a particular place and time of year. In the West, for example, winter snowpack has a stronger bearing on water supplies than in the East
It also sounds like that old adage of - All models are wrong but some are useful. Alas, we probably only know how useful they where afterwards.
It is, and the subjective assessment component is a black box. That said, the USDM has many other components that are objective, so it's far from being a subjective measure -- I would argue that the Fed Funds rate, for instance, is determined far more subjectively.
Also, there just isn't a more objective measure of drought out there, let alone a fully objective measure.
Also also, it's unclear to me that this black box is being gamed any harder than most other black boxes in our system. If you want to game agriculture, you game the farm bill.
i think calling it "subjective opinion" is kind of disingenuous. it is a subject matter expert interpreting the data. there is a vast gulf between that and someone else simply offering their opinion on the matter.
"Subjective" and "objective" are well-defined terms. Perhaps this misleads the reader about expertise, but it is not objective.
I worked in weather for TV as a technician and I was lucky enough to work with meteorologists. I thought they were high priests in the church of science, however, I detected a gambling mentality going on.
I was just surprised at how subjective their work was, with differing opinions regarding the big picture depending on whom you asked and what their background was, as in university, whether they had worked for the navy or whether they had worked for the government.
The big surprise of the gambling mentality reminded me of people that dedicate their lives to losing as much money as possible betting on horses. These people know the form, the weather and so much, yet they do their own bets.
It was kind of the same when working out what the weather would be in Springfield tomorrow. Would it just be cloudy or actual rain? That would be a 'bet'.
The next day the observations would come in and the meteorologists would either win or lose their 'bet'. The guy who has been to Springfield and knows the local geography well would have his own reasons for his 'bet', whereas the guy who was more interested in long term storm development would have another rationale for his 'bet'.
Then there would be 'wrong all the time me', able to look at the low level cloud from contrails (which are really huge in some wavelengths on the satellite pictures) to assume rain every day.
Hence climate and weather is highly subjective even if it is highly educated and vastly experienced professionals that are interpreting the data.
There is also the additional issue of computer models constantly chasing global changes. About 10-15 years back I used to talk with folks that worked on weather modeling and they were in a state of frustration in that as soon as they could make models that could work on older data sets to do reasonable predictions, the global weather patterns had change just subtly enough that it made them just kind of average on forward predictions.
This was right before GPU compute started to become a big thing, I do wonder if they now use machine learning models on these to speed up model iteration? I would hope so, but even then there is the human factor as you said. Eventually someone has to make the call on what the data shows and how to present it to the world.
Eric Berger has had very informative articles over the years about the science of forecasting.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/the-us-weather-model... (2016) {hard to believe this one is 10 years old}
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/11/googles-new-weather-... (2025)
Soon USA will bring democracy in exchange for water.