Drought takes hold across Illinois

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — It’s official.

“This is a drought now,” said Dr. Trent Ford, Illinois state climatologist.

The June 8 U.S. Drought Monitor map showed the bulk of Illinois in drought, ranging from the least-severe “Abnormally Dry” category to “Severe Drought.”

“It came on fairly quickly. We had a period of two to three weeks when we just didn’t get any rain at all. We had typical May temperatures and then it got hot for a week or so,” Ford said.

The dry conditions stretch back to April, with cities from Chicago to Champaign reporting record dryness in May.

“Going all the way back to April and really, back to Easter, has been very dry. The city of Chicago got less than an inch of rain for the whole month of May. Champaign-Urbana, in April and May together, got something like less than four inches of rain, which made it the eighth driest April-May period there,” said Ford.

While rainfall has been sparse since April, the impacts to plants only started to show up recently, said Ford.

“We are just starting to see the impacts. Lawns, gardens and young trees are beginning to show stress. We are really starting to see it in some crops as well. Soybeans and corn are showing the stress of not having enough moisture,” said Ford.

The lack of moisture since early spring has been exacerbated by summertime high temperatures in May and early June.

“The early onset of summer heat is something we have seen in recent years. Last year we saw it in early May. Setting aside the public health concerns, for agriculture, when we see highs in the upper 80s and low 90s, it’s not all that stressful — as long as we have the moisture. It can be more impactful and cause more damage when we don’t have that moisture in the ground and that’s what we are seeing,” Ford said.

But there could be some relief on the way, even though it may not be enough to break the drought for everyone.

“The good news is that it looks like we are at a really unusual pattern in general, let alone for this time of year. We’ve got troughing down to the south and the southwest and there’s actually riding up in the northern tier of the U.S. and Canada. It’s giving us a really unusual pattern. As we move toward the June 15 and 16th time frame, we do start to see potential a northwest flow potentially setting up across the Midwest,” said Joseph Cooper, meteorologist and co-owner of central Indiana-based Thermodynamic Solutions, a weather consulting and forecasting service.

That pattern could bring a mixed bag of good and bad news for anyone needing rain.

“It’s bad for the sense that could be the classic summertime severe weather pattern, where you have a northwest flow and you see these clusters or lines of thunderstorms that develop and bring hail and damaging winds and some tornadoes locally, a pretty isolated tornado threat probably. On the flip side, they do bring very beneficial rain. The hope is that we change the pattern up and we start to see widespread precipitation chances,” Cooper said.

While that changed pattern likely won’t be enough to lift areas, especially those in moderate to severe drought or teetering on the edge of those more severe drought conditions, completely out of drought, it could bring some help for parched crops and pastures.

“Is it going to be that everybody is going to get a bunch of rain and take us completely out of the drought? Probably not. But I think at least areas in Indiana and Illinois and across the Midwest could start to see better chances of rainfall and thunderstorms,” Cooper said.