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Drought a
significant
problem
By Gerald Ochs
Rappahannock News Writer
Forecasts by various federal agencies show it unlikely that our region will benefit from significant improvement in the level of precipitation through the spring of next year.
Although the United States Drought Monitor, the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAAi, the National Weather Service, and the Climate Prediction Center all seem to agree that Rappahannock County and its-neighbors will not be subjected to an increasingly severe drought, neither do they anticipate any long-term return to normal conditions.
The U. S. Drought Monitor’s March 19 map shows that we are on the boundary of the severe and extreme drought line.
Although the return to near-normal precipitation conditions is expected to continue through the spring of 2002, NOAA says that the drought is so, severe that months of normal-to-abovenormal precipitation are necessary to end it.
Unfortunately, climatological predictions show precipitation trends that are slightly above normal only through June, and then return to a normal-tobelow-normal state through October or November of this year.
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