Pennsylvania Drought

September 26, 2000  Rainfall levels more than 3 inches above normal

PHOENIXVILLE — If rain is the tears of angels, heaven needs some mood-altering drugs.
The borough has already had more than its annual September dose of rain and October may prove to be even worse.

By: JASON B. McKee, Phoenix Staff Writer 

Scott Wendt, meteorologist for the Weather Channel, said the area has been subjected to more than 7 inches of rain this month alone.
“And that is 3.85 inches above normal,” Wendt said.
As of Tuesday, the region was also more than 4 inches of rain over the annual precipitation of 31.5 inches.
He added that those numbers would likely increase before the month is over..
“It looks like there’s a possible tropical storm headed your way on Monday (Oct. 2), but that may or may not happen,” Wendt said.
Wendt openly admits that predicting the weather is less than an exact science.
“It’s really tough to say where the storms are headed,” he said. “Even at the hurricane center, they don’t do a good job.”
Without “steering winds” that drive the hurricane in a steady direction, Wendt said there is little technology can do to predict a storm’s movements.
“Without the steering winds, it’s a total crap shoot,” he said.
Wendt said we may be in for a brief dry spell, starting Wednesday.
“Tomorrow (Wednesday) through the weekend looks pretty dry,” he said.
Weather through the rest of the week is expected to range from sunny to partly sunny skies with high temperatures ranging from the high to low 60s.
But the most important thing: after Tuesday, there is no rain predicted at least through Saturday.
After that, we may be in for another tropical storm pushing moisture up the coast and into the borough. October is being called “above normal” for precipitation, according to Wendt.
“It’s pretty much looking normal right now through December,” he said. “But October is being called above normal for precipitation.”
That precipitation usually comes during hurricane season, Wendt said. Hurricanes form in the tropics and push moisture up the coast, resulting in rainfall for our area. He said the above average rainfall is no indication of what the winter will be like.
“It’s just hurricane season,” he said.
©The Phoenix 2000

  08/30/2000

Grasshoppers chewing up what's left of crops after drought's ravage

By Steven H. Lee / The Dallas Morning News

A drought is one thing. But a drought with a plague of grasshoppers is ridiculous.

"Here in the midst of a disaster, you don't know whether to laugh or cry, but you might as well laugh," says Crowley rancher John Merrill, who ran fewer yearling cattle this year than normal – and was forced to sell them sooner – because the combination of drought and an onslaught of the forage-feeding insects laid his pastures bare.

Around his house, grasshoppers have stripped his shrubbery.

His daughter brought him 36 guineas to patrol his yard and eat the insects. The birds do little but make a lot of noise.

The Texas Agricultural Extension Service now says that, on top of $595 million in drought losses so far this year, grasshoppers have caused $190 million in damages to pastures in portions of Central and East Texas.

The estimate represents the costs of replacing forage and applying insecticides across 21.5 million acres roughly bounded on the west by Interstate 35 and the south by Interstate 37, in addition to the counties of Hamilton, Comanche, Erath, Coryell, Hood and Bosque.

So, why this locust-like invasion?

"Drought conditions offer luxury accommodations for grasshoppers," says Dr. Carl Patrick, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

With little moisture, there's less fungal disease that normally controls the grasshopper population. Plus, mild winters mean that temperatures haven't been cold enough to kill eggs deposited in the soils of pastures and cropland.

The result has been mesquite bushes with branches lined solidly with grasshoppers – and even gap-toothed ears of corn because the insects in some cases have disrupted pollination. Elsewhere, they've feasted on the leaves of cotton plants.

It's been a particular problem during the last three years of successive droughts.

"I've heard comments from county [agricultural] agents that we've never seen this many grasshoppers, and these are people who have been in the business for 20 years or more," says Dr. Mike Merchant, an urban entomologist with the extension service in Dallas.

"They are voracious," he says. "They will strip shrubs and small trees, not to mention vegetable gardens."

Extension officials say that damages to crops are more difficult to quantify.

But they estimate that across the same region, farmers treated 85,000 acres of corn, cotton, sorghum and soybeans with insecticides at an estimated cost of $680,000.

Farmer Ben Scholz of Wylie treated about 100 acres of corn for grasshoppers beginning in June – and estimates that the insects alone reduced his yields by an average of 30 bushels, to about 60 bushels an acre from a potential 90 bushels an acre.

"We had a lot of ears that looked like someone had pulled teeth," Mr. Scholz says, referring to missing kernels.

Over that 100 acres alone, the reduced yield meant lost income of $6,000.

Plus, he had to spend $3,000 on insecticides and has been out another $6,000 to $8,000 to spray his cotton.

Those unexpected costs only serve to squeeze margins tighter, with commodity prices at depressed levels.

"I think I can break even, but as far as realizing any benefits from the farm, forget it," Mr. Scholz says.

Luckily, he adds with a chuckle, he's got an off-farm job.

At Mr. Merrill's ranch south of Fort Worth, the double whammy of drought and grasshoppers means that the rancher will be unable to run cattle this winter.

"I've lost that income completely," he says.

With a yearling operation, he buys calves and grazes them on grass before selling them to feed yards.

This year, he had to cut back on his number of calves and sold early.

And the situation in his yard is another problem altogether.

He theorizes that the guineas haven't done their job because they're not hungry enough.

"My wife feeds them too much," Mr. Merrill says. "I want to leave them lean."

TIANJIN, China - When people living along the Duliujian look out across the once-broad river these days, it is often with tears in their eyes.

The reason is not sorrow. The tears are caused by toxic fumes from chemical-plant wastes that still are dumped into the riverbed even though there is no longer any water to flush them away.

"The smell in the morning is so terrible that people burst into tears," said Li Jianping, who runs a small restaurant on the river's bank. "Sometimes they can't open their eyes."

The loss of the crucial water source on the southern edge of Tianjin, an industrial city of 9 million people in northeastern China, has had a devastating impact on the local agriculture and tourist industries. And the drying up of the polluted Duliujian in the last two years is just part of a much larger problem.

China is running out of water, and much of the remaining supply is so polluted by human and industrial wastes that it is unfit for consumption or even irrigation.

More than half of China's cities have serious water shortages. More than 80 percent of its rivers are so foul that fish cannot survive in them. About 700 million people - more than half the population - drink contaminated water that does not meet minimum drinking standards, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

"Water is China's No. 1 environmental problem," said Sheri Liao, who heads one of China's few independent environmental groups, Global Village.

Lester Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit environmental research group, said in an interview that China's worsening water shortage has global implications: The rapid and irreversible fall of the country's water tables could soon mean rising food prices for the entire world.

That's because China's water shortage will prevent it from growing enough food to feed its increasing population and meet higher expectations as living standards rise. The government already has abandoned its long-standing policy of remaining self-sufficient in grain, conceding that demand increasingly will exceed domestic supply.

Brown argues that China's fast-growing economy will allow it to outbid other countries for food, creating competition that will raise prices and create food shortages in poorer countries.

Chinese academics and government officials have long criticized Brown, arguing that he wrongly portrays China as a threat to the rest of the world. They say that China can increase food production to meet its growing needs, but that because its arable land is limited, buying part of its grain on the world market is a better strategy.

Brown estimates that by the year 2030 China will import more than 200 million tons of grain per year, an amount equivalent to the current total of world grain exports. But he said the disruptive effects on global food markets will be felt much sooner.

What gives Brown confidence in his grim predictions is a growing body of evidence that China's water shortage is quickly reaching a crucial juncture. As the population has more than doubled to 1.25 billion in the last 50 years, water consumption has soared and thousands of lakes, rivers and reservoirs have been drained.

Depleted surface water has led to more dependence on underground supplies. But those, too, are running dry.

Fifty years ago, according to environmentalist Liao, well diggers on the Beijing plain typically had to drill 15 feet to reach water. Now, they have to go down about 150 feet. Some experts have begun to warn that China eventually may have to relocate its capital unless Beijing's chronic water shortage can be alleviated.

Roughly the same rate of water depletion suffered by Beijing has occurred across northern China. A survey two years ago by China Agricultural University in Beijing indicated that the water table under much of the North China Plain, which produces about 40 percent of the country's grain, had fallen an average of about five feet per year during the previous five years.

Water experts disagree on how much water remains in China's aquifers. But there is no disagreement over the fact that the aquifers eventually will run dry if China continues to pump more water out of them than nature restores. Once that happens, agricultural output will plummet, because 70 percent of China's crops rely on irrigation.

The draining of aquifers already is so substantial that many surface areas of China, including the eastern suburbs of Beijing, are sinking. This week, the director of the Shanghai Water Supply Administration told the China Daily newspaper that Shanghai, China's largest port, also has been sinking, largely because too much underground water has been used.

After decades of denial, the government has begun to acknowledge the problems. It has begun investing in new water-treatment facilities and has launched numerous conservation and cleanup campaigns.

But those efforts have not kept pace with the creation of wastes. The Washington-based World Resources Institute recently estimated that more than 30 billion tons of urban sewage are discharged each year into China's rivers, lakes and seas, and that less than 2.7 percent of it receives any treatment.

Such massive waste discharges have turned most of China's surface water sources into toxic soups spiked with large quantities of parasites, bacteria, viruses, acids, alkalis, nitrogen, phosphate, phenols, cyanide, lead, cadmium and mercury.

One survey found that more than half the urban river sections in northern China failed to meet even the lowest water-quality standard, Grade 5, indicating the water is unfit even for treatment or irrigation. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Western diplomat who studies water issues in China described sub-Grade 5 water as "so bad you shouldn't put your hand in it."

Most underground water also has been poisoned, because the surface contaminants seep into aquifers.

And the worst is yet to come, because water use and water pollution are both rising.

This year, the wastewater produced in China "could double from 1990 levels to almost 78 billion tons," according to a recent report by the World Resources Institute.

ELVERSON - It was just about this time last year when high heat and lack of rain began what Pennsylvania officials called the worst agricultural disaster in the state's history.

It's a bit different this June.

"We thought that, with all the rain, we wouldn't have any problems this year," Nelson Beam said at his home south of Elverson, looking out on a crop of winter barley too damp to harvest.

Instead of heat-scorched and rain-parched fields, he said, "we're all fighting the mud and the slugs."

In northwestern Chester County, where he farms about 750 acres to feed his hogs and beef cattle, Beam ticked off his troubles:

Slugs are shredding the corn in his low-lying fields so badly that he had to replant around June 5 on ground planted on May 5.

Army worms have wiped out the corn in one of his high fields.

Weevils devoured the first of several consecutive crops of alfalfa that he grows for hay.

"This year," he said, the weather is providing "an ideal environment for multiplication of the pests."

Beam is one of many farmers in the state who lost an estimated $500 million to $700 million during last year's drought between June and August.

Crop losses averaged about 50 percent in Chester County, 54 percent in Bucks County, 66 percent in Montgomery County, and 68 percent in Delaware County, according to the state Department of Agriculture.

It appears to be a different story this year. The National Weather Service recorded 14 days in May with at least 0.01 inch of rain and nine days with 0.10 inch or more at Philadelphia International Airport.

For the week ending June 11, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reported only "3.9 days suitable for field work," while "soil moisture was rated . . . 25 percent surplus."

In other words, muddy.

Last week was worse. "Frequent rains kept most farmers out of their fields this past week," NASS reported on Monday. "There were 2.0 days suitable for field work."

Joyanna Kopp, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, said that farmers at her agency's meetings across the state have not been discussing the weather and its effects on their crops, as they did during last year's drought.

But, she said, "it's a little early to tell."

Karl Valley, chief of the division of plant protection in the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, said he was not aware of conditions across the state, but noted that "rainy weather is ideal for slugs and snails."

Beam, 37, a farmer for much of the last 25 years first with his father, Omar, and then with his wife, Marilyn, is well-qualified to observe, "There are no two years that are ever close to being alike. . . .

"Oh, well," he said with a laugh, "that's farming."



Remember how bad it was?

On June 10, 1999, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection declared a drought warning for 47 of the state's 67 counties, including Philadelphia and its suburbs.

The warning asked for voluntary reduction of water use by 10 percent. It was short of the drought emergency that was declared in July, along with water-use restrictions.

Though April and May rainfall had been only a bit less than normal, a DEP spokeswoman noted that the state had lacked the above-normal spring precipitation to counterbalance a yearlong shortfall.

By the end of June, there were only three days with more than 0.1 inch of rain. And on June 22, air temperatures started rising, with highs in the 80s.

It only got worse.

The high temperature in Philadelphia was 90 or above on 20 of the 31 days in July, with only three days of rain.

By Aug. 13, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had declared the state an agricultural disaster area.

The next day, the first rain of more than an inch since May finally hit.

Too late. Much too late.

"A drought like this comes along only once in a lifetime," said State Rep. Raymond Bunt (R., Montgomery), chairman of the House Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee.

"It'll make you cry," he said after visiting 55 counties to assess the damage. "I don't know how these people can recover."



Nelson Beam survived.

"We averaged about 70 bushels" of field corn per acre last year, he said. "On a normal year, we're in the 125-to-130 range."

That 70-bushel yield was so good that he qualified for little of the federal disaster relief that saved other Pennsylvania farmers whose crops had withered to gaunt husks.

But last week, the drought of 1999 finally bit Beam in the wallet.

After buying feed through winter as usual to supplement the grains that he had grown himself, he emptied his silos last week of the last of those homegrown grains.

And instead of being able to feed his livestock with last year's crops until this year's crops are harvested, Beam last Wednesday headed toward Palmyra, in Lancaster County, to buy corn grown last summer on more fortunate fields in Ohio.

"It's only now that I see the financial impact of the drought," he said.

But for weeks, Beam has seen the impact of this spring's rains.

"We have never had bug problems like we had this year," he said, as he walked into a replanted field where most corn was only ankle high, some only breaking ground. "See how the slugs riddled that corn?"

And he tore off a shredded leaf and held it to a healthy one.

"See that little white bugger?" he said, pointing to a speck of a slug.

"We have replanted" before, he said, but "never for slug damage."

Friday, June 16, 2000. 

WASHINGTON - So, you thought it was hot this spring. But did you realize it was that hot?

Spring 2000 was the hottest on record for the United States, the National Climatic Data Center reported today.

The center said that the meteorological spring - March through May - averaged 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit across the United States. That's 0.4 degrees warmer than the previous record, set in 1910.

The agency also noted that the United States experienced the hottest January-May in 106 years of recordkeeping, a report sure to stir the debate over the potential threat of global warming.

But the same findings didn't hold true for the rest of the world, with colder than normal waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean holding down readings so that the globally averaged temperature was 0.07 degrees below normal for spring.

Climatologist Jay Lawrimore of the data center said he is reluctant to blame global warming directly for the unusual heat in the United States.

"However," he added, "there is the possibility that there is some impact from global warming and it is amplifying the normal oscillations in our climate."

It's unusual to have every state above normal for a season, he said, noting that ordinarily some states are above normal, some near normal and some below.

In addition to topping the 1910 record for spring warmth, 2000 was 3.3 degrees above average for the period, according to data compiled by the data center, located in Asheville, N.C. The center is part of the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The agency said that every state in the continental U.S. was warmer than normal during spring, with Texas experiencing its hottest spring on record.

It was the second warmest spring in New Mexico and more than 20 additional states ranked within the top ten warmest spring seasons on record

For the five-month January to May period the nation's average temperature was 48.5 degrees. The old record of 47.4 degrees was set in 1986.

In the Northeast, it was an average of 46.8 degrees this year. The normal is 44.4 degrees.

The heat contributed to worsening drought conditions in many areas of the country, the agency noted. Parts of the Southeast, Midwest and Southwest are under severe to extreme drought, causing crop damage and creating the need for water rationing in many areas.

It was the third driest January-May period on record for Florida, eighth driest for Mississippi and tenth driest for Louisiana, the report said.

Looking ahead, Lawrimore said, "there's really not a lot of hope this summer ... we are expecting a continuation of above normal temperatures and not enough precipitation to actually bring much relief. There might be a tropical system that could being relief to the Southeast, however, then you have the problem of flooding," he said.

While many areas were extremely dry during the first five months of the year, the Northeast recorded above normal moisture.

Thursday, June 8, 2000.     top of page

© 2000 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Dire climate forecast for the century

Drier, hotter weather could prompt major ecological changes

By H. Josef Hebert Associated Press

WASHINGTON, June 8 — Alpine meadows will disappear, along with many coastal wetlands and barrier islands. Cities will be hotter and more humid. Ski runs will be scarcer, the demand for air conditioners will increase and scientists will have to combat a likely resurgence in insect-borne diseases such as malaria. This is the weather forecast for the late 21st century, when average U.S. temperatures will have risen by 5 degrees to 10 degrees.

Four years in the making, their report, called "Climate Change in America," reflects the most ambitious attempt to gauge the impact of climate change on America. It will be released next week and later presented to Congress, which asked for the assessment a decade ago. The Associated Press obtained a late draft of the report's overview summary.

STARK PROJECTIONS
"Based on the best available information, most Americans will experience significant impacts" from Earth's warming, the report concludes. Among the findings:

 • Entire ecosystems may shift northward as temperatures increase.

 • The Alpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains likely will disappear.

 • Forests in the Southeast may break into "a mosaic of forests, savannas and grasslands" and sugar maples could disappear from Northeastern forests.

 • Ocean levels will rise, causing wetlands, marshes and barrier islands to disappear or — when the geography allows — be force inland.

 • The Great Lakes are predicted to decline because of increased evaporation causing yet different problems.

 • Some coastal cities, faced with sea level rise and more frequent storm surges, may have to redesign and adapt water, sewer and transportation systems. The study does not attempt to put a cost to such improvements.

  Monday, June 5, 2000    top of page

 GROVE HILL, Ala. - The soil, usually so dark, so fertile, so forgiving - and the very reason this part of Alabama is known as the Black Belt - has all the texture and compassion of a linoleum floor.

The grass, which should stretch like a lush, ankle-high emerald carpet, instead sprouts as a brittle yellow buzzcut that crunches underfoot like cereal.

And farmers such as H.D. Paul - a white-haired cattleman with a full tank of resolve and little patience for hyperbole - find themselves searching for superlatives to describe the drought that for two years now has slowly withered away acres of their livelihood.

"If it's ever been worse than this, I can't remember it," Paul said the other day. "It's so dry here. We need some serious rain."

That is true for more than just Paul's corner of south central Alabama. As much as a quarter of the nation is being parched by a drought so prolonged and severe that it has prompted federal climatologists to issue their first-ever drought forecast, warning of a serious risk of continued wildfires and the potential for crop losses in the millions.

Meteorologists with the National Weather Service have predicted severe-to-extreme drought conditions in most regions of the country: here in Alabama, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida and Georgia; through Arizona and Texas; and across the nation's midsection, in Montana, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana.

Lesser drought conditions have been forecast for South Carolina and even parts of Hawaii.

New Jersey and Pennsylvania are under drought advisories, which caution people to use water sparingly. But the Philadelphia region's reservoirs are in decent shape - helped, ironically, by a previous weather disaster: the rains of Hurricane Floyd.

In states such as Georgia, which today begins a daytime ban on lawn-watering and car-washing in 15 counties, and Alabama, where such restrictions are still voluntary, the drought's intensity has surprised some forecasters.

"Once every 20 to 50 years you'll have a drought this severe for this time of year," said Doug LeComte, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center. "We've already seen some serious impacts, and if it persists into the summer, the effect would be ever greater."

Some experts warn that last month's stubborn New Mexico wildfires, which consumed more than 47,000 acres and about 200 homes, and equally persistent blazes that continue in central Florida, may foretell a summer in which waterless wildlands become tinderboxes. By one count, more than a million acres have been burned in more than 40,000 fires - already up a third from last year's total.

The drought has persisted for two years in some parts of the country. Weather officials point to a La Nina weather system that has roiled in the Pacific Ocean for those years as the cause of the bleak conditions. La Nina, which is associated with cooler-than-average temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, affects weather worldwide. This one is described as the most persistent La Nina system in a quarter-century.

In much of the United States, that has translated into higher-than-normal temperatures, which in turn quicken the evaporation of rainfall, standing water and soil moisture.

As a result, meteorologist LeComte said, some states, Louisiana among them, have received about 20 fewer inches of rain than expected over the last two years. Some areas here in central Alabama, state officials say, are short of their usual rainfalls by 11 inches or more.

LeComte said there may soon be a respite. "La Nina will gradually go away in the next few months, and a neutral system will move in," he said.

Also, he said, seasonal rains will soon begin in some regions. And what's expected to be a busy Atlantic hurricane season began last week.

"There is hope," LeComte said.

But it's found in small quantities in areas affected as severely as central Alabama.

H.D. Paul need only walk over the worn patches of grass on his farm and the surrounding pasture to see how bad things have gotten.

"Look right yonder," Paul said, pointing at a stand of skeletal, foot-high, reddish-brown pine saplings he had planted last year on the land he has worked here in some way or another for most of his 67 years. "That's dead. . . . That one's dead, too. Lot more's going to be dead before it's all over."

Known by many in these parts as "Big Daddy," Paul is one of the most respected cattle ranchers in this section of central Alabama. And while his deliberate gait may betray his age, he still has the same sturdy frame as when he was sheriff of Clarke County, nearly four decades ago.

The other day he piled a visitor into his pickup truck and took a spin through the rolling pastures where he keeps about 300 head of cattle. With a half-dozen Styrofoam cups strewn on the dashboard and Rush Limbaugh on the radio, Paul angled down a craggy red-dirt road and turned off into a field where some of his Brangus stock - a jet-black breed that's part Brahman, part Angus - sat under the shade of an oak as wide as the Logan Square fountain.

Here, the grass looked almost green. "But it's got no juice in it," Paul said, alighting slowly from the truck's cab. "If you were to light a fire, all of this would go up. All of it."

No grass also means no food for the cattle. He's kept them going by setting out bales of hay, and by digging into his stores of winter feed.

"I figure I've got about three weeks left," Paul said of the temporary food supply. "Then, I'll probably have to sell them. But there will probably be so many people like me trying to sell, they won't have any value."

Still, he knows he's luckier than some. Farming is most certainly his love, but not the only source of his livelihood: He owns a used-car dealership, Action Auto Sales, and has pursued other ventures (for a time, he made church pews) to bolster the books.

Of his cattle, Paul said, "I do this for fun. I can stop whenever I want to." He sounded suspiciously like someone on a smoke break talking about his Marlboros.

Paul worries about friends who rely exclusively on their row crops and whose soil has gotten so rough and impermeable that they may not be able to plant in time for the harvest. "Some of us have got it real bad," he said.

As Big Daddy steered his truck out of the pasture, he was asked about La Nina.

"People talk about that, [and] the greenhouse effect, I don't know," he said. "I just think there's a higher power behind this."

Higher, yes, but also, this baked region hopes, merciful.

  Tuesday, May 2, 2000    top of page

In Fairmount Park, the river drives are coursing through jungly foliage. In ball fields and back yards all over the region, the grass is growing thick, wet and wild. The reservoirs are brimming.

So why are the entire states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey under drought advisories?

After being singed by a sudden and ferocious drought last summer, state officials say they are taking no chances.

Although recent evidence might argue against it, the people who monitor the water levels and atmospheric patterns hold that drought can occur precipitously and remains a threat.

"Atmospherically, it's possible," said David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist.

The remnants of Hurricane Floyd emphatically doused last year's drought, but Floyd followed one of the driest periods on record.

Groundwater supplies in the Northeastern United States are notoriously volatile, said Joe Ostrowski, a National Weather Service hydrologist. The hilly terrain and rocky soil let rainfall run through the system.

And perhaps surprisingly, April was not that rainy. It rained frequently, and that kept the ground wet. It was cloudy, and that kept water from evaporating. But while the clouds have been plentiful, rainfall was 15 percent below normal.

Philadelphia's April rainfall has been slightly below normal.

Even heavy rains now are no guarantee against drought. "Two months from now, you really can't see any influence," said Ostrowski, who works out of the weather service office in State College. "The soil has such short memory. It's got good porosity. We just have very good draining soil."

The government's Climate Prediction Center forecast calls for drier-than-normal weather through July, and as of last week, drought conditions covered about half the nation, edging as close to Philadelphia as the Maryland panhandle.

What's more, broad changes in sea-surface temperatures in the North Pacific Ocean, identified in the last five years, could have long-term effects on the nation's rainfall.

Of more immediate significance, however, is the water-temperature profile in the tropical Pacific, said Vernon Kousky of the Climate Center, which is outside Washington. Sea-surface temperatures have been significantly cooler than normal, a condition known as La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, when the waters are warm.

Springs tend to be rainy in this region during La Nina, and that has been the case this year. Kousky said that trend could persist despite the climate center's long-term forecast, which was based on computer models.

"This could be one of those cases where the models aren't doing a very good job," Kousky said. The models, he said, foresaw "a fairly dry pattern. We aren't seeing that."

If it seems as if it was raining every weekend, it was. One weekend it even snowed. Meteorologists say it is common for the atmosphere to get stuck in such ruts. Storms tend to move in 3- to 3˝-day cycles. Thus, midweek rain is often followed by weekend rain. Measurable precipitation has fallen on half the days in April.

The ground has stayed so moist that it has basically been too wet for city contractors to cut the grass in Fairmount Park, park spokesman Tom Doyle said. "They have been holding off because every time they head out, it's raining," he said.

The foliage is so robust this time of year that it has a voracious appetite. "With the growing season, all the trees, the grass, the flowers, they're all drinking the water in the ground," said April L. Hutcheson, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.

"If you don't get a continual flux of these storms, that rapidly dries things out," Kousky said.

With the notable exception of the deluges from Floyd, the region has been in a generally dry period for about two years, Robinson said. The second half of 1998 marked the driest six months on record in New Jersey, he added.

It is impossible to predict whether drought will return. Drought tends to take hold insidiously, like age, but some promising forecast clues are emerging, said Michael J. Hayes of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb.

In the last five years, researchers have concluded that the North Pacific is subject to broad temperature swings that play out over 20- to 30-year periods, a phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. In ways not fully understood, those cycles affect the severity of winters and droughts in North America.

After a 20-year period of generally warmer-than-normal conditions, the Pacific waters have cooled considerably since mid-1998, according to data published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The cool phases correlate with dryness in the Southeast and Northwest.

No clear PDO impact on the Northeast has been identified, researchers say. But around here, the searing dry spell that led to last summer's drought began right around the time the Pacific cooled down. The two-year period of 1998-1999, when precipitation was 22 percent below normal, was the driest since 1964-1965.

That period coincided with the last cool phase of the PDO. So did another dry spell in 1954-1955.

For now, New Jersey and Pennsylvania environmental officials are pursuing courses of least regret. Both states have posted advisories - a drought warning in New Jersey and a drought watch in Pennsylvania - that have the same practical effect.

They are asking consumers for voluntary reductions in water use, just in case the rain decides to stop.