A lot of color on the Drought Monitor map right now, to get a description of that, I turn to Corey Davis, Assistant State Climatologist from the State Climate Office of North Carolina. What are you seeing right now, Corey?
“Well, Mike, you know, this is the time of the year that we usually look for the color on the trees. But instead, we are seeing the color on the Drought Monitor map. And the big story this week is that both in North and South Carolina, that entire two state region is now in at least abnormally dry conditions, with pockets of moderate drought popping up and expanding this week. So even across parts of western North Carolina, the places that had 15, 20-plus inches of rain from Hurricane Helene just six weeks ago, they are now back to the abnormally dry level. And you wonder, how on earth could that happen? And you just read the reports that are coming in from folks that live in those areas, they’re saying how a lot of those small creeks and streams are already dropping now below their normal levels. We’ve seen a huge drop off this week in stream flows along the Pigeon River. Again, this is one of those rivers that had surged well above its flood stage during Helene, and now it’s down to just the fifth percentile of flows, so almost just a trickle of water running through there in a lot of places, the ground is now dusty. When you think about how much mud had built up and caked on in those flooded areas, that’s now just a dusty paint, a painting of mud, essentially in western North Carolina. So again, an amazing turnaround just six weeks after that record flooding, but when those areas have seen pretty much no rain since the storm, it actually makes sense why they have slipped into dryness so soon.”