US Drought Monitor and Summary for Oct. 31 2017

In southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana, a conundrum exists between the depiction of very dry conditions at 60-days versus excessive wetness at 90-days from Hurricane Harvey’s rains and subsequent flooding. For now, the 90-day wetness won out over the 60-day dryness in southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana due to the significant surpluses in this area at 90-days and beyond, near-normal USGS stream flows, and wet subsoil moisture – hence no D0 designation (yet). In western sections, a dry week in Texas and Oklahoma was enough to expand D0 across parts of southwestern, west-central, and extreme southern Texas and north-central Oklahoma, along with some small areas of D1 and D2 increases. Northeastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma remained the same after improvements last week from beneficial rains. In addition, the remaining areas of the southern Plains were status-quo even with this week’s dry weather due to decent rains during the past 1-2 months, although well-below-normal temperatures also helped. Read the full summary at http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/.