Baraka in the White House
2-Terms of Kombat
Sometime around April, Texas Governor Rick Perry came up with an ingenious idea to help relieve the state of months of pitiful-to-nonexistent rainfall. He suggested Texans pray for it.
Four months later:
Now, Texas isn't necessarily known for receiving copius amounts of rain - particularly in the arid western half of the state where droughts are more often the rule than the exception - but this is frustratingly ridiculous. I live in the perpetually humid asscrack that is the coastal Southeast portion of the state and we haven't seen significant rain of more than half an inch at a time since October.
October 2010.
Every day is the same. Wake up to temps that barely cool below 80 anymore even after 12 hours of darkness and by 9 am there's not a cloud in the sky and the sun is roasting our parched hardpan well on its way past 100 degrees. There's so much moisture in the air you can sweat buckets by doing nothing under the shade of a tree and yet not a drop of it condenses and falls from the clouds that aren't even there anyway.
It's been like this for so long that water is being leeched from everything: the ground, the trees, buildings, and other things you didn't even know held moisture until they crack and burst in the heat of the day. Our lakes our drying up and sprouting grassy sandbars. Time.com summed up the situation here nicely:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2087489,00.html
The reason for this drought? High pressure. Persistent high pressure that has dominated the region's weather pattern now for longer than anything I can remember in my 25 years in this state. We were actually giddy when Tropical Storm Don turned up in the Gulf of Mexico and seemed to consider setting its sights on the upper Texas coast, knowing full well the Gulf was warm and vast enough to feed a category five hurricane. We looked with envy toward Corpus Christi, the seeminly go-to place of landfall for every minor storm that the eastern Gulf plays host to. We should have known better though, no amount of precipitation lasts long under an umbrella of hot dry air as frustratingly resilient as this one.
I know we're not the only state suffering under these conditions, so for those living through the drought of 2011, how's your neck of the woods holding up?
Four months later:
Now, Texas isn't necessarily known for receiving copius amounts of rain - particularly in the arid western half of the state where droughts are more often the rule than the exception - but this is frustratingly ridiculous. I live in the perpetually humid asscrack that is the coastal Southeast portion of the state and we haven't seen significant rain of more than half an inch at a time since October.
October 2010.
Every day is the same. Wake up to temps that barely cool below 80 anymore even after 12 hours of darkness and by 9 am there's not a cloud in the sky and the sun is roasting our parched hardpan well on its way past 100 degrees. There's so much moisture in the air you can sweat buckets by doing nothing under the shade of a tree and yet not a drop of it condenses and falls from the clouds that aren't even there anyway.
It's been like this for so long that water is being leeched from everything: the ground, the trees, buildings, and other things you didn't even know held moisture until they crack and burst in the heat of the day. Our lakes our drying up and sprouting grassy sandbars. Time.com summed up the situation here nicely:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2087489,00.html
The reason for this drought? High pressure. Persistent high pressure that has dominated the region's weather pattern now for longer than anything I can remember in my 25 years in this state. We were actually giddy when Tropical Storm Don turned up in the Gulf of Mexico and seemed to consider setting its sights on the upper Texas coast, knowing full well the Gulf was warm and vast enough to feed a category five hurricane. We looked with envy toward Corpus Christi, the seeminly go-to place of landfall for every minor storm that the eastern Gulf plays host to. We should have known better though, no amount of precipitation lasts long under an umbrella of hot dry air as frustratingly resilient as this one.
I know we're not the only state suffering under these conditions, so for those living through the drought of 2011, how's your neck of the woods holding up?
