 And thank you all for letting me come here today to speak a little bit on this topic. I am filling in this morning for Dr. Adnan Acutes, the North Dakota State Climatologist. But occasionally when he finds himself predisposed, I do get tasked with coming out to topics like this. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about the drought which really started in 2020 and is still going plenty strong, especially here in Western North Dakota. And then we'll talk a little bit about the outlooks going forward. So here's the U.S. Drought Monitor, most recent as of last week, Thursday. And I'm using the national image here to give us kind of a perspective of where we stand with respect to the drought nationwide, okay? We oftentimes get a little bit focused in on our own problems, but we have to remember a lot of times here in North Dakota the last several years, we've been trying to import hay. And this map right here will give you kind of an idea of where maybe you would wanna start looking for some of those other resources. If you've already tapped out your local regional resources, if their issues are the same as yours with drought, you may not wanna go there. So we see drought across the United States. This is one of the largest extents of drought in the continental 48 since the inception of the drought monitor in 2000. So there we have the current drought. Here's the last couple of months change map. You see a little bit of improvement in central and eastern North Dakota, not so much here in what I like to refer to as the desert Southwest, okay? So it's not been quite as nice out here. So here's the drought map for North Dakota as of last week. A lot of times we don't see a lot of changes in our drought status during the wintertime. But this year we've been pretty proactive in recommending changes, especially east of the Missouri, because out east of the Missouri, it's a very different story. They've had an awful lot of moisture this winter and they're sitting on a normal to maybe even slightly above normal snowpack the farthest you go in the state. So it's quite a bit different. So we have seen a lot of improvement, but nonetheless, a lot of times what I refer to this as a very tenuous hold on an steady improvement. So how did we get here? Now, when we look at way back in 2020, these are statewide average precip totals with respect to their normal. And you can see for months, statewide we were consistently below normal. And that's how we got ourselves dug into a pretty significant drought back in the last 18, 24 months. And it wasn't until just this past August where we finally saw one above normal month and then again in October. Those two months right there are largely the reason why Eastern North Dakota has had significant improvement on the drought monitor, even though we haven't seen it out here in the state, in the Western part of the state, because those two months are where we've had above normal moisture and it's kind of an advantageous time of the year when you start getting moisture in late August and again in October. That is some of the moisture that will oftentimes soak into the ground and be there next spring for next year's growing season. So record breaking 2021 drought with a little bit of a historical perspective. Again, this was the very first of many months of the increasing drought. This was March of 2020 where we first introduced D zero or abnormally dry up in the Northwestern part of the state. And coincidentally, that's where today some of the harshest drought conditions still exist is up in Williams and Divide County. Then later on in 2021, we saw the earliest onset of D four drought in a given calendar year. A lot of times we'll see D four kick in July, August in that ballpark. But in 2021, it kicked in quite a bit earlier and we saw introduction of D four all the way back in early May. Farmers were planting crops into dust. Okay, I saw incredible dust storms driving between Bismarck and Minot, driving East from Bismarck along highway along I 94. It was just remarkable that farmers were optimistic enough to go out and put pretty significant investments into the dirt that was out there and was very dry. Then again, the largest extent of D four on record was also in 2021. Now, when I talk about on record here, this is for the US drought monitor. The US drought monitor came around in the year 2000. So we only have roughly 22 years of record so far for this depiction of drought. The longest lasting D four on record here in 2021 from May through October, five months of D four drought. That's pretty significant. It really drives things out. And that was 22 weeks. That was exactly double the previous record for how long we had experienced D four continuously in North Dakota. So pretty significant. The largest extent of D one on record, we at one point had at least some form of drought, which includes D one up through D four covered 100% of North Dakota. And again, while the record's not very long lasting, this is a pretty significant event. So here's another way to take a look at it. And this is doctor accuses graphic where he takes and he plots based on this mathematical equation pretty simple. You take the area of your drought times its designation where there's D zero D one. And then you add it all together to give you this value that you can then plot. And so when we look at it like this year, we get kind of a severity feeling for how severe has the drought been, right? Has it been worse than before? And of course with the peaks, it sure seems like the most recent drought was one of the most severe on record. A lot of ways to look at the same exact topic, but there's no way to do it. Here's another way to do it. And that's to do the calculus and add up the area underneath the curve. So not only did we have an intense drought, but the duration, including the intensity are now making the most recent drought the most significant one we've seen in a long time, okay? No way to shake it other than if we were to take roughly that calendar year, we could easily have dropped that into the drought of the 1930s and it would be worse than probably eight out of 10 of them. Eight out of 10 years. So pretty significant drought going through 2021. Record dryness associated with March. Here we look at rankings from NCEI. That's the National Center for Environmental Information. Some of you may have also known them under their old moniker National Climatic Data Center, but they take all the pre-SIP data and they combine it from North Dakota and then they do rankings for them. 127 years on record goes all the way back to about 1895. And you can see based on the month of March, for two months, three months, four months, all the way down to eight months, it was the driest on record. So again, we can easily take that year and slide it into the drought of the 1930s and actually have a worse outcome. Same thing with April, same exact story. Two month all the way down to nine month driest on record. So here's the nine month SPI. That's where you take your pre-SIP that you received and you divide it by the standard deviation for your annual precipitation. And when we do this, we get these ratios that go from, they were from about negative two up to about a positive two. And when you get negative, you're a long ways away from your normal when it comes to pre-SIP. And so that's what we're seeing here is a plotting of our drought with respect to pre-SIP and we're down here in rarefied territory, again, with the 1930s. Record drying us in March, again, based on the SPI, the highest ranking ever recorded was the negative 3.09, again in 2021. So what you're getting here is kind of beaten about the head and shoulders with the most recent year was easily by many metrics, one of the most significant droughts we've ever seen for its duration. Again, in April, there we are again with the SPI negative 2.95 outranks every other year. Other two that weren't even that close, 2.15, still a fair ways away. So the heat is not helpful either, okay? Along with the lack of moisture, 2021 ended up being quite warm. And we look at this, remember I was telling you there was about 127 years of data or 125 years, there we go, 127 years of data and look at all these rankings here, the desert Southwest here, all the way through roughly Bismarck area and over into the Jamestown neck of the woods, the warmest on record. So not only did we not get a lot of moisture, but we turned around and sent that moisture back up into the atmosphere just as fast as we possibly could with all that warm weather. Now that's a little bit in the past, okay? That goes into early part of July, August of last year, then we start seeing some improvement, okay? So when we look at this graphic here, we can see from three months from October to December, again, these are NCEI rankings and now they're not so terrible, right? They're at 122nd wettest on record, right? 97th, that's not terribly bad. We saw a pretty fair amount of moisture across much of North Dakota during this time period. And same thing over there was six months from July to December. Now, I'm gonna be the first to tell you, if you're out there planting grass, if you're planting wheat, crops, any kind of thing, any kind of forage, you know, you're planting that in May, this was too late to help. There just was no assistance for people when it came to the drought. Does it break the streak? Yeah, it sure does. Did it help people's bottom line? Not very much. Pastures were already beaten down, native prairie and all of our forage was pretty much shot by the time we got anywhere near the October timeframe. And by then, most years in October, our native vegetation has gone dormant because we've already hit our first hard-killing frost. And when that happens, for respect to the drought, it doesn't do any vegetation any good, but it does put that rainfall received in October into the ground. And that's been one of the kind of silver linings of all this. So here's the last 30 days pre-sip, nothing real special here. What we see on the right-hand side, that's percent of normal. And I'm gonna be the first to admit, I work for the National Weather Service. Our AHAPS pre-sip graphs always take a little bit off the top when you look at them, okay? Just because it says 200% to normal, doesn't mean you actually got 200% normal. The algorithms on these can be a little skewed at times, but nonetheless, it shows a very healthy pre-sip pattern over most of the state, the exception being Mount Trail, Williams Divide Counties, okay? So lots of improvement there. Current snowpack, okay? I always look at snow. I don't care usually how deep it is unless I'm shoveling, but what I do care about is how much water is inside that snowpack because eventually that's gonna melt and it's either gonna end up in the ground as soil moisture available for the next growing season, or it's gonna run off, fill some of our stock dams, fill some of our water supply reservoirs, okay? So when we look at snow water equivalent here, well, we're over here. There isn't much snow in the ground around Dickinson is there. Now, there's a little bit hidden out there in some of the draws and the coolies and the badlands, but there just is not a lot of water sitting on the ground right now. I think our co-op observers in the western part of the state are averaging about a third of an inch right now when they call and report to us. So not a lot of water out here. We get east of the Missouri and not very far east. We start running into a fairly decent snowpack, okay? You get up by steel, get over towards Jamestown and out into the Red River Valley. Increasingly, they get closer and closer to normal and above normal as you head east. So here's just some real quick DOT webcam pictures from across the state. Again, as you see here in the desert southwest, Bowman, Flasher, not a lot of snow on the ground, but as you get to the very southeastern part of the state, it's the frozen tundra, okay? That's the nicest way to put it isn't it, Miranda? So very big difference as you go from west to east across North Dakota right now. Now, when we start talking about droughts to North Dakota, just because it's dry doesn't mean it's all bad, right? A lot of people like dry weather. It's a good time to go fishing. I don't like fishing in thunderstorms. However, droughts always have a dollar value associated with them. And when we start looking at the droughts, some of the historical occurrences here, we're looking at droughts that cost anywhere from 250 to $500 million in 2012. These are actual values that are assigned, some through NDSU extension, some through State Department of Emergency Services, North Dakota Department of Agriculture. They tally up their impacts. And so far, I've not yet seen a number for 2021, but I'm gonna hazard a guess. It's gonna dwarf all the runs up ahead of it. It has no choice to, I think, at this point. So economic impacts are not trivial when it comes to droughts in North Dakota. So real quickly, let's take a look forward and see what the outlooks have for us, okay? Should we be optimistic or should we be pessimistic? So here's the soil moisture. Remember I was talking about that rainfall and stuff that came last October? These are soil moisture maps, satellite generated. So we look at the surface, which is four centimeters, about an inch and three quarters, not a lot. When we look at that, or I'm sorry, 10 centimeters, about four inches, when we look at the surface soils, they tend to react very quickly after you get a rain. And then again, when you get some warm weather, they dry out. So we're seeing pretty dry soils here in the Southwestern part of the state. As we go farther East, a lot of very normalish to maybe even a little bit of wetter than normal soils in the Northeast. But as we get down in the root zone, this is where that water from October is now being stored. It's down that depth, it's 20, 30 inches that depth and it's there and it's available, okay? If the plants can get the roots down there this coming spring. So a little bit of optimism here with regard to the root zone soil moisture. I like to see this a little bit higher as we go into spring, but for the time being, I'm kind of hanging my hat on some of this greener values to the longer term. So here we'll look at the eight to 14 day outlooks. When I put this presentation together, eight to 14 day outlooks, actually it was this coming weekend, okay? So this is what we were, and Megan, so I forgot to introduce, I brought with me a meteorologist who also works a lot with climate. So if any of you have really tough questions, I'm gonna send you over to Megan Jones' direction, right? And she'll be able to answer them for you. So we were, Megan and I were used as we drove out this morning and they're still pretty accurate. We are looking at below normal temperatures and above normal precip opportunities going through this coming weekend. There is a good shot for more of this freezing rain through today. And then as we get into Friday and Saturday, there's a better chance for actual snow. So we might get a few inches of snow and some water out of the weekend here. Okay, weeks three and four, this takes us out to the middle of March. Well, if you like fair weather, you're probably not gonna like this. It's gonna stay kind of cool. We're getting into the middle of March. I'm not talking 20 below, okay? As we get into the middle of March, our normal daytime highs are right around 30 degrees. So this here is mostly indicative of temperatures that will probably be in the highs and the mid to low 20s for the day. Nighttime lows around five, 10 degrees. So that's what we're kind of looking at going into the middle of March. Climate prediction center has put us in what we often refer to as the dreaded equal chances category. Equal chances simply means there is no major climate driver that is pushing us to believe it's gonna be wetter than normal or cooler than normal. So literally EC means it has an equal chance of being above normal, near normal, or below normal for precipitation in this case. One month outlook. We're starting to look out a little bit farther. And here, once again, we're pretty solidly locked into that equal chances category. We just don't have a big climate driver right now that is pushing us into a belief that it'll be cooler or whether the normal or even above normal. Looking a little bit longer term, just a little bit disconcerting. The seasonal temperature outlook has a large portion of the United States as warmer than normal. And this goes from March, April, and May. So three months combined. And a lot of us up here in the Northern Plains stuck in that equal chances designation, but this large warm signal does have me a little bit concerned because it's carried out not just for March, April, and May, but May, June, July. We see the same thing, except it expands up into the Northern Great Plains. We start seeing maybe some dryness creeping in from the West. And then again, for July through September, I'm feeling kind of left out on this one, being in equal chances. The rest of the country is going to be with a strong possibility of above normal temperatures. And then here with a slightly below normal chance for precip as well. So right now, if a person were to summarize that, we're looking at probably another warm and most likely dry-ish. I won't say drowdy, but I will definitely say dry-ish kind of summer is what the outlooks kind of are calling for. So in summary, it's been dry, right? And no matter how we shake it, it's been record-breaking dry at some points in time. Even if the current trend is one of continued improvement from about Kidder County West in the Southern part of the state and then the Northern part of the state from about Ward County West, that grasp on improvement is very tenuous, okay? It won't take much for that to slip and we start seeing degradation again, especially if we get into March and early April and we're still not receiving moisture out here. We're gonna be behind the curve when we get into May and June, when our growing season really needs that stored soil moisture. So tenuous at best for our improvement, anywhere west of, like I say, Kidder County or Ward County in North Dakota. Right now, there's no drought-busting monsoon in view, but that being said, if we get anywhere near normal for an extended period of time, there will be at least a perception of improvement, okay? And one of the reasons why I'm gonna say perception here is because I think some of the impacts from the last two years, okay, overgrazing. I'm not here to knock farmers and ranchers. They have cattle that gotta eat, right? They put them out in the pasture and if they overgraze that pasture, they do damage not to just that season, but the following one, okay? As the plants will start out behind the curve ball, even if they get near normal moisture, the vegetative cycle just won't allow it to kick in and be robust like they were hoping for. So impacts, a lot of those impacts, regrettably are going to persist well into the spring, unless we get that, again, near normal pattern for an extended period of time. So with that, are we taking questions? Okay, the question here is, how do I collect and measure snowfall or water equivalent in that snow? And that's a great question. That is one of the most difficult meteorologic measurements known to mankind, especially when you live in the Northern Plains. Like you said, the wind pushes your snow all around, okay? The easiest way to do it is to go out, you know your place, you know your property, find a place on your property that is not sheltered nor so wind-blown that all the snow will get pushed away. I'm kind of fortunate and I have a lot of trees at my house and a large opening in it, okay? And I just know that that's the most representative spot possible. So I will go out and I have a long walking stick. Actually, it's a piece of copper pipe that I've incremented on it in inches. And I'll go walking along and I'll go four, seven, six, and I'll take a mental average of how much snow is on a given area, okay? Once I decide six is my mental average for it, then I'll go get a four-inch standard rain gauge, okay? If you've never seen one of these, they're four inches in diameter, they have a centered tube that water goes into, so it kind of magnifies easy for measurement. Well, take that four-inch tube and a spatula, right, because this is high-tech. Take that four-inch tube out, remove everything from the inside, gently push it down into the snow, and I'll use a spatula to catch all that water, all that snow. Turn it upside down, bring it in the house, and I'll cover it with cellophane, okay? Saran wrap, whatever you wanna use. Let it melt, and then once it melts, all you have to do is pour it into that center tube. Takes a little bit of time, but it's conceptually not difficult. And then if you're really feeling energetic, you'll do that two or three times, and then you'll take an average of that. But yes, snow, by far, one of the most difficult things for us to measure at the National Weather Service. And we have co-op observers all over the state trying to do that for us.