Drought continues across the KVOE listening area, but National Weather Service meteorologist Chad Omitt says there are some signs the current weather pattern is breaking down — albeit slowly.
Most of the KVOE listening area, including Emporia, is now in severe drought — which covers all of Lyon, Coffey and Osage counties, as well as most of Coffey County and the southeast corners of Morris and Wabaunsee counties.
Extreme drought essentially stretches from Madison to just south of Eureka. Exceptional drought is across the southern quarter of Greenwood County.
After the hard freezes Tuesday and Wednesday, including the record low temperature Tuesday morning, grasses are officially cured — meaning they are dry and dormant. Looking ahead through the winter, Omitt says the season is the driest time of the year for Kansas so we likely won’t emerge from drought until spring 2023 at the earliest. The hope now is that we get average or near-average precipitation so the current drought doesn’t deepen through the winter.
Most of the public attention on the reasons behind the drought have been focused on La Nina, a weather pattern involving cooler surface waters in the Central Pacific Ocean than normal, but Omitt says several “oscillations” — or shifts of atmospheric pressure between the North Pole and mid-latitudes — may have more to do with the current dryness than La Nina, even though the Central Pacific will be cooler than normal for the third straight year.
