I was really hoping the D-4 category would be some other part of SW OK, but we got less than a tenth of an inch from those storms last week so I'm not surprised it's here. I'm barely over the line into D-4, so I guess it could be worse. Grandfield hasn't had a tenth of an inch of rain in 167 days! Leslie

Bumping this down the page. A new map comes out today and we'll see if drought conditions are improving, worsening or staying the same across the state.

Sheri, I'm excited to hear you're getting some tomatoes because you have had such tough weather there this year (as always). There's a new water monitoring feature on the OK Mesonet map today. It could be that it has been up for a while and I didn't notice, because I've been too busy canning to do much else, but I saw it this morning. I'm going to link it below. I think we will find it helpful. It is supposed to show us how much of the water present in the specified soil depth is available to our plants. We may be able to use this map to track and understand soil moisture levels in the same way that you and I have been using the KBDI to understand how dry our soil is. Of course, this will be most effective for any of us only if we have the same type of soil found at our local Mesonet station, but at least it gives us a rough idea of whether there's any actual moisture available in the soil. I hate to hear that your KBDI is so high this early in the year. You have the kind of KBDI I normally see here in the fall after a long, hot summer. Y'all need rain, rain and more rain! One year (I think it was 2008) we started having awful grass fires that moved fast and were hard to control in September, and what sticks in my mind is that those fires started up when our KBDI was 535. FYI--after my KBDI hits 500, I find it really hard to keep enough moisture in the soil to keep the plants happy. Once we hit 600 it is not just hard, but almost impossible. Mulching will help, but rain would help more. Yesterday I found a 1-1.5" wide crack in the soil in my garden when I was harvesting pole beans and yardlong beans. I couldn't believe it. We have had 7" of rain lately (between about May 29th or 30th and June 11th, though none since then) and still the ground is cracking. If I were you, I'd keep watering too for as long as the tomatoes keep coming. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: 4-Inch Available Plant Water

Pat, La Nina ended several months ago but its dryness did serve as a 'set up' for the weather we're exepriencing now. When it ended, I was hoping for a quicker return to normalcy, to the extent that Oklahoma weather ever approaches anything resembling normalcy. We are in what is considered a neutral period in the ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation). Both El Nino and La Nina will influence our weather patterns during the period when they are active, and I often base planting decisions on the knowledge that an El Nino or a La Nina are occurring (when they are occurring) but they're only one of myriad influences on the weather patterns we have here and their influence can vary depending on other things that are going on. In my county we have drought at least 8 summers out of 10 and sometimes every summer....it is just that in rainier summers the drought will persist for a few weeks instead of a few months. This year reminds me a great deal of both the summer of 2003 (my county had less than 19" of rainfall that year) and the drought of 2005-2006, which I think had hotter weather than 2003 and more rainfall in each year, but not significantly more rain and not well-distributed rainfall. For example, we thought our 2005 drought had broken when we had 9.25" of rainfall in one day in April 2006, but by late June, all that moisture was gone, it was in fact only a distant memory, drought had returned and wildfires were occurring. The 2006 drought was horrendous and for us it didn't really, truly end until the floods began in 2007. I don't know how much this is true of the rest of Oklahoma because I've only lived here, but it seems like we rarely have normal, moderate weather, only extreme weather. We tend to be extremely dry for long periods of time and then suddenly we'll be extremely wet. The drought of 2003 really ended for us beginning in May 2004 when maybe 6 or 8" of rain fell in that month, but then it really and truly ended for sure when we had over a foot of rainfall in June. A foot of rain! You can't do much with that much water in such a short time except stay out of its way. Suddenly, plants that had struggled to survive in rock-hard, heavily-compacted clay, were sitting in water for weeks and weeks and weeks. Growing up in Texas, I was well familiar with the old folk saying "it takes a flood to end a drought" and I thought I knew what it meant. Then we moved to Oklahoma, and I quickly learned that both the droughts and floods we had experienced in Texas were child's play compared to what we experience here. However, since that time, a recurring drought pattern in Texas has been harder on them, especially last year and this year, than it has been on us here and has been much worse than anything I remember in Texas. I do remember 1980 was a horrible, dry, drought year in Texas but I don't think it was a dry as this year...although likely it was hotter. Fort Worth had well over 60 days of high temps at or over 100 degrees in 1980. Since moving here 13 years ago, I've observed a general trend of more extreme swings from hot/dry to wet and back again. Look at just this year in Oklahoma: many areas had record snowfall in the winter and quite a few recorded their coldest temperatures ever. Then we had an abrupt swing to hot temps...some of us were below freezing and snowy for 5 consecutive days and then once we warmed up, we went from below-freezing daytime highs one day to the upper 70s the next and the snow quickly melted. That's not typical. We had extreme hail over and over, and several outbreaks of very strong tornadoes. Some folks in eastern and northeastern OK had several weeks where they had up to 6 or 8 or 10" of rain in one week while the rest of us went up to a month with no recorded spring rainfall. How odd is that? Many parts of the state have had extreme drought and extreme wildfires. It is only July! What other 'surprises' does the weather hold for us this year, or maybe we're all past the point of being surprised? We've had some peculiar weather since moving here. For example, even though I grew up only 80 miles south of where I live now, I'd never experienced thundersnow or derecho winds until we moved here. Oklahoma is just full of surprises, and they aren't always pleasant surprises. I love this state and its people with my whole heart, but the weather can be quite vexing. Dawn