Dorothy, From watching how the jetstream, I think it has persistently come close enough to your end of Oklahoma that you get the gray, gloomy clouds on the edge of the cold fronts that are dropping snow and ice north of you. Way down here in southern OK we've had more sun than last year, but in the last week or so, the sun has become increasingly rare. Keith, You're welcome. I'm getting pretty concerned about y'all up there in central OK. This is the driest I remember seeing your part of the state in winter in several years. I understand exactly what you did and why. I'd probably do exactly the same thing if I was a dry as you are. When my soil gets so dry in drought periods that rainfall or sprinkler irrigation rolls downhill on the surface of the ground and isn't even absorbed, I know I've waited too late to start watering. I think it is always better, even (maybe especially) in winter to water the dry ground. If it gets too, too dry and planting time is approaching, it can be hard to keep the soil moist enough for seeds to sprout. The big mistake I made in one dry spring (may have been 2003 or 2005) is that I planted and watered sparingly waiting for rain to fall to give the seeds and plants more water. Well, rain never fell and by the time I realized that I should have been watering more heavily to get them off to a good start, the were pretty stunted and pathetic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it made me a better gardener in succeeding dry years. Don't even mention those photos of those big old black clouds. They are fascinating but in a horrifying and very scarey type of way. I hope and pray we've learned enough about conservation and no-till commercial farming that we never put ourselves in that predicament again. Can you imagine the mass hysteria, especially on the part of the media with its 24-hour-news-cycle nowadays if we had something like that occurring? If you haven't read the book about the Dust Bowl days that I've linked below, I highly recommend it. I reread it once every 2 or 3 years to remind myself of how bad it was and what all those folks went through. We throw the word "diaster" and "catastophe" around pretty loosely nowadays, but those people who endured the Dust Bowl years really lived through a catastrophe and it lasted for years. Some of the old-timers here have told me stories about what it was like here in our county, and it wasn't pretty. One of them lived on land adjacent to ours and she tried to explain what it was like to have the big clouds of dust ruin the laundry you'd just washed, or blow through the cracks in walls, etc. into the house and cover everything with a fine layer of dust. She was a very small child then so I'm not sure how much she remembers directly and how much she remembers from hearing her folks talk about it later on their lives. I just can't imagine what it was like to endure 8 long years of catastrophe. My dad did tell me about the pure agony of watching crops fail over and over, which was a disaster for folks who essentially raised all their own food. So, if couldn't grow a crop, you couldn't eat. One thing that sticks in my memory from photos of those days is just how painfully thin everybody was. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: The Worst Hard Time

I'm starting some tomato seeds on Feb 3 and some on Feb 11. I start a little early for Tulsa, and use a portable 8' x 6' greenhouse thru most of March to get me to planting time. For those wondering about February's weather, there are several indications that the bitter cold may be coming back in the 10th-15th range and may last a while. It's hard to tell whether the core of the coldest air will slide down the Plains and make a direct hit on us, or if it will slide more toward the SE. This cold air that's building now in Alaska and NW Canada may end up being colder than what we had earlier this month. If the airmass turns out to be that cold, I think it's more likely to come straight down the Plains than to get deflected eastward. We'll see. Trying to accurately predict the weather 3 weeks from now is a fool's folly, really. But the ingredients are coming together for some really cold air to move down into the U.S. eventually. I just wanted to put that out there for everyone to be prepared. Winter is not over. Lee

Amy, I know! I'm so excited. I feel like it means the Spring garden will have a chance, because if we still were red, it was going to be an awful Spring. We haven't been red in a while, but even once we had rolled back to only Severe drought, I felt like the Extreme drought could come back any time, so making it back to Abnormally Dry just puts more distance between us and the really bad stuff. I'm happy for everyone else who has had drought improvement, whether it means you're yellow or some other color. Now, we need to put our heads together and Think Positive for good rainfall in western OK because those areas are too dry---dangerously dry and we know that their droughts and winter fire season are a bad combination. I haven't posted this map in a while. It is the one that shows how many days it has been since any given OK Mesonet station has recorded a mere 0.25" in rainfall in one day. Look how good most of it looks---and look how bad things still are for most of western OK. I cannot even imagine what it would feel like to be one of the people for whom this number is 155. Consecutive Days With Less Than 0.25" of Rain in 24-Hr Period Rainfall here always seems to come in extremes---too much at once, too little at once, too early to help with the garden, or too late to save the garden. For western OK, I'd say it mostly the rainfall is too little, too late for the winter wheat crop and that's bound to hurt. Dawn

at about 4:30, the office windows turned dark like the sun was setting On Monday afternoon at about 5 pm it got really dark- as if it were about 20 minutes post sunset - then the tornado sirens sounded. That initial storm skimmed just north of my neighborhood, with strong gusts and just a sprinkle of rain here - the tornado touched down about 12-13 miles north of me. It was "only" an EF 0, thankfully. The next wave of the storm brought back the wind, and drenching rain that lasted longer - needed so badly in my neighborhood, we are having a localized drought. We didn't lose power from those storms, but did the next morning. Don't know if that was from storm damaged trees, or just a squirrel with a death wish. I thought it was odd to spin up such a storm, since although humid, it hadn't been nearly as hot on Monday as many other days recently. But, atmospheric conditions were just right I guess.