Arkansas no longer in drought, national center says
Last updated Friday, January 12, 2007 8:01 PM CST in News
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LITTLE ROCK -- As looking out a window this weekend might indicate, the drought that bedeviled Arkansas farmers and water-supply agencies for nearly two years is officially over.
Eight inches of rainfall could reach most of Arkansas, especially north of Pine Bluff, according to forecasters with the National Weather Service in Little Rock. The weather service office in Tulsa, Okla., is also calling for rain and ice, possibly creating flood worries in the northern half of the state. Southern Arkansas is expected to get less than three inches over the holiday weekend.
The rain might dampen spirits through Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but it has also extinguished drought discussions.
After spring 2005 saw much lower-than-usual rainfall, the water shortage intensified later that year, with a drier final three months than any October-December period on record at the National Weather Service office in North Little Rock.
Then-Gov. Mike Huckabee urged Arkansans to pray for rain just over a year ago, in a Jan. 9 proclamation.
At its peak, the drought prompted at least two Arkansas cities -- Fort Smith and Conway -- to seek alternative sources for their water systems as reservoir levels declined. Many farmers had to tap already-endangered underground water sources for irrigation of their crops, raising their production costs as they paid to operate the pumps.
Many hay crops were ruined in 2005, and livestock ranchers said herds were stressed from lack of water.
But after a dry winter last year, the situation began to ease with rain during the spring, and 2006 ended with near-normal rainfall totals in much of Arkansas.
Now, the latest Drought Monitor map produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb., shows only an "abnormally dry" area -- not considered drought conditions, just a bit on the dry side -- in the state's southwest, and a tiny swath of far northwestern Benton County in the state's northwest.
The Drought Mitigation Center is operated by the University of Nebraska, not the National Weather Service. But the weather service is one of several agencies that contributes to analysis of dry conditions at the Nebraska center. The federal agency's web sites relating to drought include links to the drought center's web pages -- along with disclaimers that the weather service doesn't run the center, and doesn't explicitly endorse its views.
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