The U.S. Drought Monitor mapped the statewide drought situation for Dec. 6 and Dec. 13. Good luck spotting the differences.
If you enjoyed last week's game of "spot the drought map differences," this week's will be especially challenging.
So set the clock to 30 seconds (no cheating!) and look at the two maps to your right, or the larger versions below!
First, last week's from Dec. 6:
And now, this week's for Dec. 13:
30 seconds are up! If they aren't, I want you to stop looking anyway, because I'm afraid that both I and the U.S. Drought Monitor are playing a cruel joke on you for even asking.
Gary McManus, associate state climatologist with the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, said they requested no changes to any of the drought classifications statewide because there was not significant rainfall, nor anything to worsen the drought conditions.
Now I feel guilty about my cruel joke, so here's something much cooler:
This is from our Tulsa World weather page (which you can view
here), which has a really cool radar displayed. This particular image is from just before 5 p.m. on Nov. 14 when some isolated showers moved through the downtown area.
I have not seen a radar image like this before, but as noted in a previous blog, the radar image has been known to deceive you when it comes to precipitation (read more on that
here).
Tulsa National Weather Service meteorologist Karen Hatfield assures me that we aren't getting hurricanes or just spiral storms in the Tulsa area. She said it appeared to be a momentary problem with the radar image itself.
"Each ring is indicative of an elevation angle of the radar beam in the volume scan," writes Hatfield. "I'm not sure if you're looking at just the lowest elevation angle there or if it is composite reflectivity, but I'm guessing it's composite since the rings wouldn't appear that way on just the lowest elevation angle."
Apologies again for the U.S. Drought Monitor tease, but at least our drought isn't getting worse statewide.
--Althea Peterson
