I'm not a climatologist, i'm adequate at reading a weather map, but, it strikes me that
Kansas, Oklahoma, and chunks of Nebraska, Texas and New Mexico are in a full bore
drought and Dust Bowl.
I made a kind of off the cuff comment about Kansas in a dustbowl and a comment
followup included this video
and all i could think was
I had seen some news blips that some fellas farm had blown some 200 miles east
and that farmers in TX and Oklahoma were slaughtering cattle because they
couldn't afford to feed them.
but what hit my radar was dozens of cars getting wrecked in a dust storm.
April showers?
Not in Kansas this year.
In fact, there has been precious little precipitation of any kind in Wichita in 2014. Just one year – 1936 – has had a drier opening four months since such record keeping began in 1889.
The 1.99 inches of precipitation recorded in 2014 was “topped” only by the 1.54 inches recorded in 1936, which turned out to be the heart of the Dust Bowl.
Several incidents from recent weeks around Kansas have resembled scenes from the Dust Bowl era:
• A 30-year-old Great Bend man was killed on April 28 when his Cadillac Escalade ran into the back of a semi that had stopped on U.S. 56 in Barton County west of Great Bend after several accidents were triggered by blowing dust and near-zero visibility.
• Vehicles in the ditch along U.S. 56 appeared stranded in drifts in late April – but they were drifts of fine dirt, not snow.
• Highways in northwest Kansas also were shut down in late April due to poor visibility caused by blowing dust.
Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/...
Let me get this right, Kansas is a half inch above the heart of the dust bowl?
That means reduced wheat, reduced Corn, reduced soy, expensive beef,
and the water levels are so low in wichita falls they are going to be recycling
toilet water to drink.
That's not going to be cheap.