La Nina Drought Punishes Sunbelt

You know it’s dry when Sunbelt retirees start watering the cactus.

When mountain lions and other skittish wildlife emerge from the pinion scrub of the Sonora Desert to lap greedily from chlorinated swimming pools and fountains.

When a wall of wildfire 10 miles wide blackens a swath of Nebraska prairie the size of Rhode Island, stampeding cattle and forcing the midnight evacuation of a ranching town.

When Catholic priests and Baptist preachers hold prayer vigils in withered cotton fields and cracked, sage-choked reservoir basins, raising their arms to beseech the same clear blue heavens for a drop of rain.

And this was supposed to be an easy year.

After all, the record El Nino of 1998 is long gone. But scientists say 1999 is shaping up to be another year of unpredictable, destructive weather conditions.

Texas, Florida Declare Emergencies

Portions of the South and Midwest are being strangled by a spotty but tenacious drought that has been gripping parts of the nation for several months.

In Texas, Gov. George W. Bush has declared a state of emergency in 170 of the state’s 254 counties. His order comes nine months after a 1998 drought cost his state $10.4 billion in agriculture losses alone.

His brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, declared his own drought emergency on April 13 and ordered the National Guard to help combat red-alert wildfire conditions for the second consecutive year.

By the weekend, gusty winds fanned flames across 6,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of nearly 1,000 residents across Florida. In Port St. Lucie, 60 houses burned; fire reduced one neighborhood to ashes and a few charred refrigerators.

“It’s all or nothing,” said Mark Svoboda, a forecaster with the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. “For some places, the dryness has become an intense event.”

No one is certain how much worse the drought will get.

It’s been so dry that recent blizzards and thunderstorms have not been enough to slake the drought in many areas. Long-range forecasts by several federal agencies agree that dry conditions could persist with a vengeance throughout the Sunbelt and portions of the Midwest until July.

“When we get into a drought, we don’t know how long it will last,” said climatologist Kelly Redmond of the Desert Research Institute of Reno, Nev. “That’s because we don’t have a good handle on why drought occurs. You can’t predict something well if you don’t know why it happens.”

Part of the problem lies in forecasters’ difficulty in analyzing what isn’t happening in the atmosphere.

Meteorologists can spot thunderstorms, blizzards and tornadoes on the electronic horizon of their Double Doppler radars. Those events behave according to a logic that is becoming more apparent every year.

But drought is the consequence of an accumulation of nonevents--the absence of storms, a lack of rainfall. A standard definition is a 30% drop in precipitation for three consecutive weeks.

“It’s the dog not barking in the night,” Redmond said. “It’s too many nice days in a row. By and by, you notice that something hasn’t happened in a while.”

Like rain.

Once established, drought is likely to persist for months or years. Increasingly, scientists are looking into the past for clues as to when droughts start and stop.

Studies of climate trends spanning the last 10 centuries indicate that immediately following El Nino episodes, North America has periodically suffered cataclysmic droughts and wildfires that would make the Dust Bowl look lush.

We’re overdue, scientists warn. And its impacts could be exaggerated by record high temperatures in the 1990s that some believe are the result of global warming caused by human activities.

“We’re heading into a very, very dangerous situation,” said University of Arizona tree-ring expert Tom Swetnam. “It’s really off the scale.”

This year, climate experts blame conditions on the opposite of El Nino--La Nina.

Like its surly weather twin, it too is generated by a continent-size pool of water in the equatorial Pacific that conspires with the atmosphere to disrupt storm patterns around the globe.

But La Nina’s characteristics are the opposite of El Nino’s. Its waters are cold rather than warm, and it occurs less frequently and predictably.

In 1997-98, El Nino’s waters simmered at a record 9 degrees above normal. It left Southeast Asia and Australia parched and decimated fisheries along the Pacific coastline from British Columbia to Chile. At the same time, it nearly submerged California in rain and mudslides while delivering copious rains to Arizona that nourished the best wildflower bloom in a generation.

But Texas and Florida sizzled with disastrous results all summer.

When the record El Nino finally collapsed, the climate pendulum swung into a cold-water La Nina in the Pacific.

It has reversed conditions in Asia, bringing chest-high flood-waters to India. Forecasters expect a vigorous hurricane season in the Caribbean this fall too.

In the United States, La Nina has pushed the jet stream north. Weather patterns cleave the nation roughly in half, tracing the Interstate 80 corridor between New York City and San Francisco.

The southern half of the country generally is drier than normal, especially Arizona and New Mexico--no wildflowers this year. But to forecasters’ consternation, Texas and Florida remain dangerously dry again despite the switch to La Nina.

Circumstances north of I-80 couldn’t be more different.

In Washington, Mt. Baker is poised to break the all-time North American snowfall record of 1,122 inches, or 93.5 feet of cumulative snow, that fell at Mt. Rainier during the winter of 1971-72.

Reservoirs are brimming, and downstream communities and farms face late-spring flooding.

“We’re fat with water,” Redmond said, gazing out his window at the Sierra swaddled in a deep, white, icy blanket. “But the further south you go, the worse it gets.”

Drought Closes Ski Resort Near Tucson

You don’t have to remind George Davies.

Brown slopes on Mt. Lemmon near Tucson forced the manager of Ski Valley to close the two chairlifts serving the nation’s southernmost ski area for the first season in its 40-year history.

A foot of snow on April Fools’ Day only aggravated matters; it was too skimpy for skiing, but it closed the only road to the city.

“I plan on one bad year in every five years,” Davies said. “But I never thought that I would have a zero year.”

Thirty miles and 6,000 feet downhill in Tucson, conditions have been remarkably dry even for the desert oasis.

The April Fools’ storm sprayed more than an inch of cold rain on the city and surrounding rangeland. Until then, the area had received 0.01 inch of moisture since autumn. Precipitation remains 80% below normal.

Temperatures as high as 90 have driven early-season water consumption to midsummer levels.

Similar conditions grip cities across the nation’s southern tier, including Albuquerque, El Paso and San Antonio. Even humid Houston has been relatively dry.

In San Diego, entrepreneurs have suggested bringing supertankers full of fresh water from the Pacific Northwest.

Naples and other Florida cities are debating water restrictions. Birds and other wildlife in the Everglades National Park are suffering in a parched ecosystem that already is the subject of an intensive restoration after decades of water diversion by Big Sugar and other farm interests.

Tucson is especially vulnerable.

Its water utility started in the 19th century by delivering bags of spring water by burro to the barrios and mining camps. The city continues to suck water from its desert aquifer to irrigate thirsty golf resorts and subdivisions much faster than sporadic storms can replenish it.

“We have no place to go for more water,” utility director David Modeer said. “La Nina complicates everything we’re doing. If the summer monsoon is late, we’ll have a real problem meeting demand.”

Circumstances are no better for farmers.

In Texas alone, last year’s El Nino cost farmers and their suppliers $10.4 billion, and 10% of growers went bankrupt.

Many regions across the state--including areas near Abilene, Big Spring, San Angelo, Lubbock and Midland--received below-average rain this winter, and spring rains have been spotty.

Farmers are planting seed in case the rains return, but it’s a make-or-break year for many. The same is true for crop processors and farm suppliers. A Littlefield, Texas, cotton mill laid off 500 workers in March.

“It’s all bleak,” said Texas A&M; economist Carl G. Anderson. “Farmers aren’t very mobile. For them, it’s a very slow process, but it becomes overwhelming.”

Thousands of Fires Since February

The drought is raising immediate dangers too.

Thousands of forest and range fires have been sparked since February, prompting federal officials to redeploy crews, tanker planes and funding from the wet North to the dry South.

In Florida, where 500,000 acres were roasted last summer, 1,650 wildfires have burned more than 35,000 acres and dozens of homes so far this year.

With humidity levels dipping to a desert-dry 20%, the state’s index of fire potential has soared above 600; 400 denotes significant danger.

“We’re in very dangerous, high-burn conditions,” said state fire services Deputy Chief Frank Pocica.

And the danger is spreading. This month, fires forced Georgia to evacuate campers from Stephen Foster State Park and briefly close a major highway north of Atlanta.

Hundreds of residents in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina were evacuated as fires burned 4,000 acres and a pair of vacation homes.

In central Nebraska’s sandhills, the second largest wildfire in state history consumed 78,000 acres of prairie on March 19-20, killing one firefighter and hundreds of cattle. The town of Thedford was evacuated as the fire licked residents’ doorsteps.

On Feb. 9, a rare midwinter grass fire northeast of North Platte, Neb., scorched 15,000 acres.

The most ominous fire zone is the Four Corners states--Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

Arizona’s mountain snowpack is 97% below normal in some ranges. Residents of isolated but congested cabin communities are jittery after receiving unprecedented midwinter fire warnings.

“Should a conflagration occur, it would be impossible to evacuate people except by helicopter,” said Mt. Lemmon real estate broker Dick Bloomfield. “There are many places that you can’t get in with a firetruck.”

The losses would run deeper than just cabins. Forests are choked with so much dry fuel that a wind-swept inferno would incinerate all plant life. When rains return, soils that took 100,000 years to accumulate would be flushed into streams, carving gullies 40 feet deep in moments.

Fire experts have documented that over the last 1,000 years, huge wildfires burned during dry La Nina episodes that immediately followed wet El Ninos. Some of the worst years: 1575, 1748, 1851 and 1879.

It’s a natural cycle, but the added risks of 100 years of fire prevention efforts and population growth mean the ecological and economic costs of wildfire this year could be among the highest in the last millennium.

“Thousands of firefighters could slow it down here and there,” said Swetnam, the University of Arizona tree-ring expert. “But some of these forests that burn may not come back.”