At the same time rainfall is slaking drought in the Pacific Northwest, the southeastern quadrant of the United States faces intensifying drought, with the worst conditions in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and eastern Tennessee. Georgia’s state agriculture director, Gary Black, is to take part in a rally to “discuss the drought facing Georgia’s agricultural community and to pray for the rain Georgia so desperately needs” on Monday.
Northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama have recorded their driest 60-day periods ever, says the weekly Drought Monitor. “Streamflow conditions continued to drop across much of the region and drought-related impacts are being observed in the agricultural sector.” All of Alabama and Mississippi, 72 percent of Tennessee and 58 percent of Georgia are in drought.
A Chicago commodity analyst said the Southeast often is an incubator for drought that moves into the central United States, where corn and soybean production is concentrated.
Georgia state climatologist Bill Murphey told the Macon, Georgia Telegraph that parts of the state have been in drought for half a year. Rainfall in Macon is 11 inches below normal for the year and the deficit in counties in northwest Georgia is as large as 16 inches.
A La Nina weather pattern is developing, which typically means drier conditions for the Southeast, said Murphey, The fall months normally are dry in the region. “On the near horizon, I don’t see anything heading into the first week of November,” Murphey told the Telegraph. “In this pattern is when things get really bad, unless you get prolonged rain or a stalled system.”
Streams and small rivers throughout Alabama “have dried up ompletely or been fragmented into smaller patches of intermittent water flow due to the extremely dry conditions experienced this year, and especially over the past month when large swaths of Alabama have seen little or no precipitation,” says the news site AL.com. Mitch Reid of the Alabama Rivers Alliance said, “We’ve got streams … that are literally dry hiking trails with dead fish just littering the stream bed.”