The rains last weekend did bring some improvements to parts of North and South Carolina. For details, we now turn to assistant state climatologist Corey Davis from the state climate office of North Carolina, and some areas like my Franklin County in North Carolina saw some pretty heavy rains, and some other areas got even more. What’s the result of that that you’re seeing, Corey?
“Well, Mike, you know, we talked earlier in the week, whenever we see at least two inches of rain in a week, the usual rule of thumb is we can see a one category improvement on the US Drought Monitor map, and that pretty much held true over the past week, like you said, Franklin County, and then getting out into parts of Hertford County, the Roanoke Rapids area, and then out in Rocky Mount those areas all had some pretty decent rainfall totals over the past week. So they have now gone from being in moderate drought back to just being abnormally dry. And then looking a little bit further south, we’ve had places like New Bern that had been in severe drought, they are now back to just the moderate drought category. And right along the coastline, places like Jacksonville and Myrtle Beach South Carolina have all seen improvements from that moderate drought level back to abnormally dry as well.”
We saw that in eastern North Carolina, but western North Carolina, South Carolina, not as much improvement, right?
“That’s right, not much rain at all last week in those areas. So we’ve actually seen an expansion of severe drought conditions in those areas. And especially the farmers out there are really starting to feel it now, hearing that they’re expecting major crop losses, major pasture losses in those areas, because they’re now going on two months without seeing really any decent rain in some spots. So we’ve been talking mainly about those drought impacts in the eastern part of the state, but now that dryness is hitting the western part of the state pretty hard as well.”
When we talk about D3, that’s extreme drought, right? Can you define what that actually looks like?
“Well, we can see it in ag reports, both now and the last time we had D3 in eastern North and South Carolina, which was back in 2011 we talked about D2 the severe drought stage, usually corresponding to more widespread crop losses, and D3 is just even more widespread losses than that. For instance, back in 2011 farmers in the Wilmington area area reported that their corn crop, they only expected to harvest about 20% of what they usually did. Now, there is some good news with the recent rain, and that’s that at least the soil moisture levels seem like they’ve recovered pretty well. Of course, this was not in that D3 area, but in other spots that have been in severe drought. I think there’s still hope for some of those crops that may be missed out on the rain in the last month. You know, the soybeans, I think they may still be able to salvage a decent harvest later this growing season.”