May 2026 Obs/Discussion

[kdxken]

13 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Man the drought talk is out of control. Everything is pretty much at normal levels like the Quabbin. The same areas in supposed moderate drought. 

Stupidest thing I've ever seen.  Only thing I can think of is they're going by what we've had recently not what was there to begin with.

[CoastalWx]

20 minutes ago, kdxken said:

Stupidest thing I've ever seen.  Only thing I can think of is they're going by what we've had recently not what was there to begin with.

It seems to be heavily weighted on what has fallen. Mother Nature doesn’t care if it was dry in the fall. We had enough precip in the winter to help fill the rivers and reservoirs since the ground does not absorb anything that time of year. 

[weatherwiz]

49 minutes ago, CoastalWx said:

Man the drought talk is out of control. Everything is pretty much at normal levels like the Quabbin. The same areas in supposed moderate drought. 

Some people must think we live in the Amazon or something. You'd think we're supposed to average like 70+" of rain a year

[jbenedet]

Another nice day 70 in view

[Layman]

That warm day last week flipped the switch here and all the birds flew in. We were waiting for the hummingbirds and orioles to arrive and they did en masse. 
Caught this neat dark copper oriole coming in for a snack this morning:

[Typhoon Tip]

Fwiw, the US drought monitor folk derive their assessment as a hybridization of empirical data, together with 'expert opinions'.   It's referred to as a "convergence of evidence" approach ...but, the opinion end of it does offer a subjective implication, granted.    

According to drought gov source, the empirical data input come from pretty basic metrics.  Soil moisture, water levels in streams and lakes, snow cover ...  seasonal melt water runoff ..etc., in aggregate.   

Those are used by USDM then homogenized together with the human/expert layer.  That layer comes from both meteorologists and climatologists of the NDMC, NOAA and USDA, who take turns as lead author of the maps we see on the web site.  I dunno... if it is worth it to folks who "don't believe" the product is correct, maybe these organizational reps can be contacted.       

 

[Baroclinic Zone]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

Man the drought talk is out of control. Everything is pretty much at normal levels like the Quabbin. The same areas in supposed moderate drought. 

You wanna talk drought, just look what’s going on in the southwest. That’s a pretty dire situation there. Glen Canyon Dam is getting down to water levels where it will no longer be able to make electricity.

[WxWatcher007]

Isn’t drought severity relative though? Our location makes it exceptionally difficult to sustain the kind of droughts we see in the west, but that doesn’t make a bad drought here any less bad relative to what’s normal. At any rate, I think there’s been substantial improvement from where we were last year.

[Typhoon Tip]

Interesting... out of raging nerdiness I decided to ask AI ...

ME: " ... yeah, I was dancing in my mind around this being sub-strata ... in other words, deeper integral than just the recency of surface - which probably is a combination of just having exited melt/thaw season, combined with lighter recent rain fall events. The only thing/concern I'd add is that we seem to be getting a lot of those yellow and orange pallets painted over our area, every spring, yet the summers don't really turn out to be terribly arid. It does at least lend to the notion that the subjective side of the debate "might" be tending to over-assess?

AI:  That's a sharp observation, and it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.

What you're describing is essentially a systematic seasonal bias — if the D0/D1 classifications reliably appear over New England every spring and then fail to materialize into actual summer drought conditions, that's a reproducible pattern. And reproducible patterns in an assessment tool are worth scrutinizing.

A few honest candidate explanations:

The melt/thaw transition problem. You've already identified it intuitively. That window between frozen ground releasing and vegetation fully activating creates a misleading deficit signal — water is moving through the system but not in forms the indices capture cleanly as "recharge."

The Atlantic moisture factor. New England's summer precipitation regime is substantially fed by Atlantic systems and convective activity that are genuinely hard to forecast into the spring assessment window. The USDM isn't a forecast — but its classifications influence public perception as though they are.

The structural bias possibility. The USDM methodology was largely developed around and weighted toward interior continental and western hydrology — where snowpack-to-summer-water relationships are far more deterministic. Applying that same framework to a maritime-influenced region like New England may be a genuine methodological mismatch.

That last one is the most interesting and probably the least discussed. Your region's hydrology just doesn't behave like the Colorado River basin, and if the expert judgment layer is anchored to indices that assume it does, you'd expect exactly the pattern you're describing — chronic spring over-assessment that summer rainfall quietly corrects.

That's not a trivial critique."  

That's an interesting though by the AI, we should perhaps consider product bias over mid and western continent.  Although, that would be pretty dumb come to think about it, to then out of box that for New England.  hm

[dendrite]

1 hour ago, CoastalWx said:

It seems to be heavily weighted on what has fallen. Mother Nature doesn’t care if it was dry in the fall. We had enough precip in the winter to help fill the rivers and reservoirs since the ground does not absorb anything that time of year. 

Last 20 years have been way above the long term average too. So it’s not like being a little BN with the newer norms is a big deal.