The US Drought Monitor is released weekly and provides an analysis of drought conditions. The featured image displays the week to week change of the drought monitor product over Iowa since January 2000. Drought is classified from a D0 to D4 category. The length of the arrow represents the areal change in combined drought categories. For example, if the entire state went from a D0 to D1 category then the arrow would be one unit long and in red. In this case, the unit length is shown on the y axis as one year. The bottom row of arrows are those for 2012 and clearly show the degrading drought situation that occured during July. The last three weeks of October 2012 have seen some improvement, but there is still a ways to go.

Voting:
Good = 18
Bad = 12

Tags:   drought