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The One Minute Geographer: Precipitation Change
The climate is a-changin’. This map showing precipitation increase and decrease from 1991 to 2020 is worth thousands of words but the One Minute Geographer will rise to the challenge by focusing on just three takeaways:
1) Much less rainfall and many pockets of drought from the Rockies and westward. And not just the Rockies, but also the high plains of the southern Great Plains in west Texas. The most severe example is Arizona and its Colorado River basin. The Colorado basin is the driest it’s been in 100 years and maybe in the last 1,200 years. Lake Mead, created by the Hoover Dam along the Nevada-Arizona border, has dropped 120 feet in 15 years.
2) Drier in the Southeast, mainly in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. North Carolina’s severe drought during 2007–2008 made national news with 2/3 of the state suffering a Category 4 drought (the highest level); 80% of state residents under various water use restrictions, and a half-billion dollars’ worth of agricultural losses.
3) In the rest of the Lower 48, most of the East and the North, and especially — let’s call it the Upper Midwest — much more precipitation. Wisconsin for example had devastating, historic-level flooding in 1993 and 2008. The pattern starts with heavier than usual snowfall (because of more winter precipitation) and quicker thaws in spring…
