Drought increases, relief late in November?

So far, November has gotten off to a dry start around the ArkLaTex. It’s been more than a week since most of the area has seen measurable rainfall.

The newest Drought Monitor was released today and shows an increase in drought conditions over mainly the western half of the area. You can compare last week’s Drought Monitor with this week’s above.

It could be a while before we see some beneficial rainfall. Models continue to show that 10-day rainfall across the area will probably be less than 1/4″. It could be more than two weeks before this pattern changes. The good news is that the latest run of the 45-day EPS ensembles shows that we should see an uptick in rain across our area during the last half of November and early December.

You can see that rainfall potential is looking pretty uniform across the area, as we should see amounts from now through December 21st in the range of 5.25 to 5.75″. While that is still around an inch below normal for the upcoming six-week period, it’s an improvement on what we have seen over the past few weeks and will see over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!