Dry, Drier, DriEST

 We've been in a real drought, though for some reason I haven't heard the term used much on the news. Perhaps some of that is because precipitation can be very localized, especially with thunderstorms. There is a citizen-science project, cocorahs, that collects local precipitation reports daily from a network of volunteer reporting stations. There is a station just down the street from me, and I'm the backup reporter when the principal is away. So I'm very familiar with the data and invested in it. 

Over the years, I've accessed the data and put it into my own formats for visualizing it. Making data tell a story is one of the things I like to do. So of course I spent a little time during these dreary but not very rainy days taking a look at where we are.

This chart shows the cumulative precipitation by year.
2018 was the wettest year, 2007 the dryest - SO FAR.

 

We are in an historic drought. "Historic" refers to the fact that precipitation so far this year has been consistently among or at the lowest of our records, which date back to 2006. Yikes! I knew it was bad, but not this bad. 

This shows the same data as above, but only through June.
You can see 2023 is right at the bottom.

Sadly, I have not been very good at watering this year. I have containers I water regularly, but I haven't watered plants in the ground very often, not even those I planted this year. Rain or my watering from here on out will be only of marginal help - most plants that needed to grow in the spring cannot adapt to put on a growth spurt in the high summer. The one exception is annuals, which are opportunistic and more likely to be able to grow whenever conditions are favorable. This would include vegetables, and many weeds.