Drought

Lake Mead saw a slight uptick in August after hitting a new low again in July. The graph clearly shows that the wet season, if we can call it that, is roughly November through March. Unfortunately a good year doesn’t even get 20 feet dating back to 2012. Lake Mead …

The Bloomberg article The End of Snow Threatens to Upend 76 Million American Lives by Baker et. el. (8/3/2022) has some excellent graphs, such as the one copied here, and overview of the water issues in the west. The West’s mountain snowpacks have shrunk, on average, 23% between 1955 and 2022. By …

Lake Mead water levels continue to drop. At the end of May it was down to 1047.69 feet, which is a 13.8 foot drop since my post on April 25 with the end of March height. The west continues in drought according to the Drought Monitor. What about electricity generation? …

Most of the western half of the U.S. continues to have various levels of drought (see U.S. Drought Monitor) and Lake Mead has reached a new low. The graph here is from the data on the Lake Mead at Hoover Dam, End of Month Elevation (feet) page by the Bureau …

About two months ago I had the post How low is Lake Mead?  The graph in the post was the yearly minimum end of month elevation. In this post we have a closer look at the end of month elevation since 2011. The last month in the data is July …

From the climate.gov article Western Drought 2021 Spotlight: Arizona by Tom Di Liberto (7/29/2021): Looking back even farther by using a drought indicator known as the Standardized Precipitation Index, the current drought in Arizona is also the worst on record back to the late 1800s. Going back even farther than …

The Bureau of Reclamation posts the end of month elevation for Lake Mead dating back to 1935. I created the graph of minimum yearly end of month elevation starting in 1940 since Hoover Dam was only created in 1935. Here is the R code to create the graph including importing …

The United States Drought Monitor provides weekly updates of drought in the U.S. Maps such as the one here can be downloaded. For classroom use there is a data page where full data sets can be downloaded including GIS data. There is also an interactive time series graph.

The United States Drought Monitor is your source for drought information. Starting with the main graph, copied here, you can select regions and then down to state levels. From the data tab you can select time series graphs, download tabular data by selected region, as well as obtain GIS files. …