A month after flooding, Iowa is in ‘Drought Watch’ following dry May

About a month after the Mississippi River flooded parts of Eastern Iowa, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources has placed the entire state in a “Drought Watch” following a dry May, according to a water summary update released Thursday.

In accordance with the new Iowa Drought Plan, the state’s drought regions are assigned one of four drought levels in the monthly water summary update: Normal, Watch, Warning or Emergency. The levels are established using current precipitation data, the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor maps, and historical streamflow and precipitation comparisons.

Last month, Iowa’s drought status as a whole was labeled Normal. Continued dry conditions led to a level upgrade. Iowa only saw 2.54 inches of rain throughout all of May — marking 52 percent of its typical precipitation.

That has left almost 99 percent of Iowa in some level of dryness or drought, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report released Thursday. Most of the state falls into the abnormally dry or moderate drought categories — the next highest levels after normal conditions.

Only small sections of northern and central Iowa received above-average rainfall totals. Southwestern Iowa, on the other hand, bore the brunt of the dryness, only receiving 35 percent of its typical precipitation and experiencing its 12th driest May on record.

With the lack of rainfall, Iowa’s soil moisture levels decreased considerably over the last month. The northwestern corner of Linn County saw a noticeable decline, along with south-central Iowa. Stream flows are also decreasing, particularly in southern Iowa.

Drought conditions spread so far and so quickly in May that Iowa experienced a flash drought — a rapid intensification of drought due to below average precipitation and abnormally high temperatures, winds and radiation. Those conditions are expected to continue throughout the Corn Belt into the third week of June.

However, there’s still hope to conditions to level out.

“June is generally the wettest month in Iowa,” the Iowa DNR said in a Thursday news release. “If the state experiences normal June rainfall, the downward trend in conditions could be turned around.”

Brittney J. Miller is the Energy & Environment Reporter for The Gazette and a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: (319) 398-8370; brittney.miller@thegazette.com