Jeff Basara, associate professor, School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, said he hopes his prediction for 2018’s weather is wrong.
“I hope that I am dead wrong,” he said. “I hope in six months you can come back and say that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I’ll be happy.”
Basara spoke at the Western Kansas Forage Conference Feb. 21 in Garden City, Kansas, and expressed his concern for the western portions of the plains states and the possibility of their current drought conditions persisting. The eastern side is starting to see more of an influx of water leading to precipitation events.
“Portions of Texas and Oklahoma today are very wet,” Basara said. “The further west you go into the panhandle regions and into western Kansas, I have significant concern.”
To decide what 2018 might be like, Basara looked back at historical data from periods in time when conditions were the same. He also said “known knowns” have to be understood as well as the unknowns.
“I think when it comes to weather, climate in the plains of the U.S., I think there are unknown unknowns,” he said. “We haven’t yet begun to ask some of the relevant questions about what drives some of the processes.”
Some of the known knowns in the Great Plains are the “usual suspects”—violent thunderstorms, hail, high winds and tornadoes.
“I think if you’re in agriculture that ‘d’ word is kind of an important word—the drought,” Basara said. “That usually comes with heat and wildfires especially if it’s in the warm season in the summer time.”
Other areas could be dealing with excessive rain or flooding simultaneously with areas suffering from drought and wildfires.
“You can kind of have all things going at once,” he said. “And that’s one of the great challenges—dealing with our very dynamic weather system here in the Great Plains.”
Basara said climate is the synthesis of weather and it’s what happens over the long term.
“We average it out and it kind of gives us an idea of what we should expect,” he said. “In some ways it’s a known known about a typical environment. If you live in the Great Plains you know that typical is not a word that you can use to describe weather or climate.”
Drought is common in the Great Plains, but there are also periods when there’s more than enough precipitation. These are called pluvial and while that doesn’t mean flooding necessarily it does mean periods of above normal precipitation.
Pluvials get little attention by both definition and nature. During the 30s, 50s and other times of drought, there was recovery in the pluvial years like the 40s or the 60s, Basara said. Major recovery could be seen in rural areas following the drought of the 30s and it was a critical factor for re-establishing water resources.
“These pluvial periods are pretty important across the region,” he said. “This is an unknown known. This is the climate of the Great Plains and this is the challenge for anybody who lives here.”
There will be times of well below normal water resources in terms of precipitation. There’s going to be times of recovery and where significant impacts of precipitation are seen and above normal water resources are available in the region.
“But there’s almost always drought at some point in time throughout the Great Plains and at the same time, it changes, it morphs, it evolves, it grows, it decays,” he said. “It’s a feature that is challenging to deal with especially from a predictability standpoint because not every drought is the same.”
Basara said meteorologists, farmers and ranchers know all about the dynamic weather and climate variability and how it can change based on season or even daily. He believes the precipitation variability is increasing.
“Whenever we look at it from the dry side, or from the wet side, or combined, we look at the Great Plains precipitation variability as increasing,” he said. “We haven’t even looked into the future. We’re just looking at the past into the present.”
Basara looks to his reliable information to show how the precipitation variability is increasing. This doesn’t mean it won’t rain during the middle of a drought; it could.
“But when we look at this from a climatological standpoint, something is happening in the region from a precipitation standpoint and that variability is increasing,” he said. “So it’s already a highly variable system and now the variability is increasing with time.”
There have been increased oscillations between drought and pluvial periods—sort of flipping the switch back and forth between wet and dry. The region is going through one of those switches now. How long it will stay—whether months or years—is yet to be determined.
“We’re already dry and concerned as we go into the summer period because once we end up in a dry period we persist into those,” he said. “There are those larger still global processes and they flip the switch as well, signaling the significant increase precipitation.”
Basara sees the impacts of weather on a daily basis and its obvious to him the impacts of these changes in precipitation have on agriculture.
“This is something we deal with in the Great Plains, this increased variability is going to have an increased impact on agriculture, he said. “So for those like yourselves that are dealing with this, you have my sympathies. I don’t know what else to say. I hate to be the bearer of bad news.”
Basara does see a bright spot though with the changes.
“At least on the other side we see that increased frequency of excessive precipitation,” he said. “So it’s not just the dry, but it’s also the wet. That does have some positives that go along with it.”
Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].
