IARN — Drought conditions have worsened in Iowa.
The latest US Drought Monitor released Thursday morning showed drought has expanded across 96 percent of Iowa. State Climatologist Dr. Justin Glisan says it’s the largest drought coverage area in the state since September of 2013.
“Where we saw the biggest expansion was in that D1, or moderate drought, category,” Glisan said. “We had the existing region in central Iowa, and we have seen an expansion of that D1 into eastern and now into southeastern Iowa. Then we’ve also seen a slight expansion of D1 in some south-central counties where we saw D3 back in 2018.”
“If we look at the worst category that we have across the state, which is D3 extreme drought, we had a slight movement of that down into a southern Iowa county, but not a huge expansion of that D3, which is good news,” Glisan continued. “Looking at D2, we had a slight expansion of five percent. Basically, this was into the upper northwest counties of the state of Iowa.”
Glisan says it’s been a tough year for Iowa farmers as they have experienced a combination of widespread drought and the devastating derecho storm event from August 10th that damaged 14 million acres of Iowa cropland.
“This is not the ideal circumstance that we were looking at considering the excellent planting window that we had back in April,” Glisan said. “Conditions were looking good and then we just dried out.”
Glisan adds that short-term weather outlooks into early September indicate that some help could be on the way as the state has higher probabilities of cooler and wetter conditions. He says the seven-day precipitation forecast also shows a chance of widespread rainfall across the state.
The latest US Drought Monitor for Iowa can be viewed at the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network website.
