The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although battered by Trump administration attempts to impose massive staff and budget cuts on the agency, nevertheless continues to publish critical climate information, including some dire drought warnings in the spring outlook published March 20 by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
About 40% of the contiguous 48 states are currently in some stage of drought or abnormally dry conditions, and those are expected to persist in the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest and Southern Plains, according to the March 20 bulletin.
In the past two weeks, water officials in the West warned that, despite near-average snowpack in some parts of the Colorado River’s mountain watershed, the river’s flows are expected to drop below normal, exacerbating tensions between water users in the region. In New Mexico, water experts said the Rio Grande is likely to dry up completely in Albuquerque as early as June. A 2024 study explained how global warming drives a cycle that leads to measured flows in Western rivers and streams being consistently lower than predictions based solely on snowpack measurements.
Other recent research suggests drought risks in North America have been widely underestimated by major climate reports, as rising global temperatures bake the moisture out of plants and out of the soil itself. Annual cycles of decreasing winter snow followed by extreme heat are pushing “a global transition to flash droughts under climate change,” a 2023 study concluded.
The continuing budget resolution passed by Congress March 14 reduces NOAA’s operations, research and facilities budget by 11% from the previous year, and according to congressional sources, it stripped away some of Congress’s budgetary oversight privileges. That could enable the Trump administration to zero out budgets for programs and offices within NOAA and use its ocean and climate budgets as a slush fund.
I had the Covid shots too. They all had powerful side-effects. My whole life, I've never been able to catch measles. I didn't get sick from Covid. I probably won't die from measles now either. That's right, they took away muh Freedumb!