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Sunday, June 30th, 2013

72 Percent of West Now in Drought

Author:    
Source:     Elko Daily Free Press
Publication Date:     29-Jun-13
 Link: 72 Percent of West Now in Drought
Stephan:   Several readers in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas have written to tell me that the temperatures there have reached sustained levels they have never seen before. I wrote my first book in Tucson and Flagstaff, Arizona, and worked in the Libyan/Egyptian desert for some months, so I have at least a sense of what 114ºF is like. But 119º, it must be like going out into a oven. The impact this will have on both agriculture and water is going to be profound. And two SR readers who are also climatologists wrote to tell me this is just the beginning.

A record-breaking heat wave intensified drought conditions in much of the West during the past week, with 72 percent of the land area in the 10 Western states now in drought conditions, according to the latest update to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The worst impacts of the drought are concentrated in the Southwest: New Mexico, Texas, Southern Colorado and the western parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska all contain land that is under extreme or exceptional drought. The hot weather – Denver had its earliest 100-degree day on June 12 – served to exacerbate existing drought conditions and helped fuel deadly wildfires in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oregon. In California, 2013 has been the driest year on record to date, and the lack of rainfall is making the state more vulnerable to wildfires.

‘The overall pattern of hot and dry conditions, combined with year-to-date below normal precipitation, led to continued deterioration of pasture and rangeland conditions across Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico,

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