In Montpelier last weekend, residents lounged on the Statehouse lawn and bought gelato from a table set up outside Chill. Burlington’s North Beach had so many people enjoying the warm weather that it led others to complain about the crowds.
Rivers typically rush with April showers and snowmelt during springtime, creating a playground for recreational paddlers. But this year, kayakers have been searching far and wide, sometimes traveling out of state, to find whitewater.
Dairy farmers are beginning to wonder if they’ll be able to feed their cows, having used much of their reserve crops during a dry fall.
The warm, sunny and, most importantly, dry weather is unusual for Vermont Aprils — and it’s leading experts to worry about the long-reaching implications of a drought that’s lingered since June and could last through the coming summer.
Most of the state is classified as “unusually dry,” and large swaths of the state are in “moderate drought,” according to the United States Drought Monitor. While this week’s rain will help, it won’t reverse the trend.
Vermont’s rainfall totals have been far below where they normally are. Oliver Pierson, program manager for Vermont’s Lakes and Ponds Management and Protection Program, said last month was the second-driest March in 21 years. Burlington data show that the city has received 24 inches of precipitation since June, compared to an average of 31 inches for that time period since 2000.
A rainy end to the week has boosted water levels in some rivers, Pierson said, but Lake Champlain’s levels are still 2.4 feet below average for this time of year, and will require “well above average” precipitation to reach an average water level for April and May.
Vermont’s average rainfall is 3 inches in April, and 4 in May. Data from the Burlington Airport shows less than an inch of rain fell on Thursday and Friday, while another half-inch, at most, was expected over the weekend.
Pierson said most of the snowpack that boosts lake levels has already melted.
“Typically the snow melts a bit later, and we get this big pulse of water flowing into Lake Champlain from many tributaries from really early March until May,” he said.
A snow stake atop Mount Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak, showed 11 inches of snow on April 15. According to an average calculated using nearly seven decades of data, snow typically reaches the 11-inch mark at the end of May. On average, Mount Mansfield holds around 68 inches of snow in mid-April.
Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, the Vermont state climatologist, said the shortfall in precipitation was only a starting point.
“You’ve got rainfall. You got air humidity. You’ve got temperatures if they’re high. You’ve got what your soil is doing, what your lakes are doing,” she said. “I like to call them Rubik’s cubes, where you got to have all of those pieces to actually get at what’s going on. When you see this whole big word ‘drought,’ underneath it there’s so many different pieces to go into it.”
Increasingly dry, windy air has sucked moisture out of the ground and led to a rare wildfire warning. The air has not been this dry in decades.
“As the land itself dries out because we’re not getting rainfall, if the air is also dry, then we have this higher potential for having wildfires either spark and or continue to burn,” Dupigny-Giroux said.
She said we need to rethink the way we imagine drought. “Because we live in a humid climate, we think it’s abnormal,” she said. “It’s not.”
“It might look like when your lawn dries out, and it looks like it’s burned to a crisp, and you have to go and irrigate at night. Or if you’re driving down Route 7, and you go like, ‘that corn looks kind of stunted and short, and you got some little black ears.’ Or if you’re a bass fisher, and you want to go out in the lake, and you’re like, ‘there’s nothing nibbling today, where’s all the fish?’” she said. “So the way that drought looks in the state of Vermont is very, very different from the mental picture that we have in mind.”
Painting rocks
Tony Shaw, an avid outdoorsman, said kayaking is the perfect mud season activity — it bridges the winter sports season and the hiking season. Come spring, he used to drive all over the state looking for whitewater, but new online tools with readings from river gauges have eliminated that need. Now, as soon as the ice melts, he’s prowling websites with current readings of water levels.
“You just have to be ready,” he said. “It’s fleeting. And by the middle of April in Vermont, most of the snow is gone, so you’re depending on some rain to fall.”
Lately, water levels in his favorite Vermont spots have been too low to attempt. On a recent weekend, he drove several hours to New Hampshire’s larger mountains, which have maintained a heftier snowpack that’s still melting.
Shaw, who’s based in Williston, often paddles with friends on the lower Mad River, which holds water reasonably well and is short enough to tackle after work. Usually at this time of year, the lower Mad River is rushing at a rate of around 500 or 600 cubic feet per second. But now, it’s closer to 200 cubic feet per second, less that half of normal.
“We would all be really happy on the Mad at 500 or 600,” he said. “We can get down the Mad at 300 or 400. Anything under 300, and you’re leaving a lot of red and orange and yellow plastic on the rocks.”
The Mad River is Shaw’s backup — reliable when other streams are running dry. When it’s low, nearby streams are often even lower.
“There hasn’t been much boating going on,” he said. “We tend to stay home when we’re going to just paint rocks all day.”
As summer reaches its peak, Vermonters may start to notice other effects on getting in the water, Piersen said. “Dock access levels are set up with certain lake levels in mind,” he said.
Low water levels could combine with rising temperatures to make the water much warmer than normal, which could lead to algae blooms on the surface and oxygen depletion in the deeper parts of lakes, he said.
Even if rainfall helps recover part of Vermont’s missing water, the long period of drought will have long-ranging implications for crops, particularly apple trees and Christmas trees, Dupigny-Giroux said.
While kayakers will walk away from a dry season with some disappointment, farmers have more at stake.
John Roberts, executive director of the Champlain Valley Farmer Coalition, said right now, farmers aren’t panicking, but they’re definitely hoping for rain. Specifically, they need days of gentle, soaking rain — not quick downpours, which run off quickly and don’t have a long-lasting impact on soil.
“The worry is, are we going to get the adequate rain for when they make their first cutting of hay or silage in mid to late May and early June?” Roberts said. “You know, April showers bring May flowers. Well, we haven’t had too many April showers yet.”
Farmers can plan ahead if they anticipate a dry summer, such as planting drought-resistant crops.
“You certainly need to be thinking way ahead,” Roberts said. “You’ve got to order these seeds. You don’t just have them at the seed store. Now’s the time to think about making those plans, just in case.”
Farmers with limited acreage, and who can water their crops, might fare OK if this summer is dry, he said. Farmers with 100 acres of corn would face more problems. Irrigation systems are expensive, and tracking down a water source could be impossible.
“An inch of water per acre is 27,000 gallons of water,” Roberts said. “Where are you going to get that water from? Not very many farmers have access to that kind of water.”
Peter James, a manager at Monument Farms Dairy in Addison County, said he’s already used up his reserve feed to get through a dry summer and fall.
“If this continues, and you can’t really replenish your reserves, it could be a tough season,” he said.
James said farmers are already looking to import feed from other areas of New England and as far away as Wisconsin. But those places are dry, too. Federal relief became available in November for farmers through a drought-related natural disaster designation, but James said funding doesn’t help if feed isn’t available.
“The financial help was very appreciated,” he said. “But you’ve got to be able to buy the feed.”
Roberts said that, if Vermont gets enough rain in the coming months, farmers could be OK. But if this summer is as dry as last?
“It’s gonna be grim,” he said.
One small positive: The dry ground is efficiently soaking up manure right now. Farmers with reserves from the winter can spread it in areas that are normally saturated with water.
Along with farming, the drought may have affected another of the state’s prominent products — maple syrup. Tim Perkins, director of the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, said the haul from this year’s maple season is estimated to be only 60% to 70% of the yearly average.
It’s unclear how, and how much, droughts can hurt maple production. But early research suggests that a dry summer and early fall results in a lower sap sugar level, meaning that producers have to boil more sap to get the same amount of syrup, Perkins said.
And of course, the drought has affected the state’s water supply for home and industrial use. Many of Vermont’s reservoirs are in drought areas, and the water table for wells and springs has been low as well.
Steven Owen, owner of Fresh Water Haulers in the Champlain Valley, delivers water to refill dried-out wells. He said the business has seen a steady uptick in those requests for the past six years. “It gets worse and worse each year,” he said.
“There’s normally another month of mud season,” he said. “Other than some back roads being rough, it’s been pretty dry.”
Jeff Williams of Spafford and Sons in Jericho has noticed an increase in both total well replacements and requests to deepen existing wells to find more or better quality water.
Williams has been in the business since 1980, and he’s seen worse droughts, particularly in the early 2000s. But if this drought continues into another year, he said, “it could be a fairly significant event” with impacts three to five years in the future.
He admitted that the dry weather, though “unfortunate,” has been good for business. “Since we cleared the first Covid shutdown hurdles, there’s been a significant amount of work to do,” he said.
Another positive to the drought: road conditions. Amy Tatko, a spokesperson for the Vermont Department of Transportation, said via email that Route 108 through Smugglers Notch — impassable during the winter — opened early this year, on April 13. In the past four prior years, it opened in early or mid-May.
The drier conditions may have also reduced pothole spending, Tatko said. The department has spent $280,000 on potholes so far this fiscal year, compared to $600,000 the year before and more than $1 million the year before that.
“This makes sense, as a pothole is made when water enters the road sub-base through cracks, goes through freeze/thaw cycles that pop out the asphalt, and then vehicles drive on it, breaking it up and leaving a void known as a pothole,” Tatko said via email.
The future
It’s tempting to blame the latest long period of drought on the nation’s leading cause of weather frustration: climate change. But the link is far more complex than other weather phenomena, such as hurricanes, Dupigny-Giroux said.
Scientists are still calculating the footprint of climate change on weather patterns, she said. But “there are different characteristics in how it intensifies,” she said.
Vermont as a whole is actually getting wetter, historical federal data show. It’s had fewer periods of drought since 1895, with 2005 to 2012 being abnormally wet years.
However, just because the trendline is going up doesn’t mean Vermont won’t experience drought, Dupigny-Giroux said. “Climate variability is these ups and downs in the cycle. … You’re still going to have these ups and downs around that trend line,” she said.
“Climate change is not only an increasing trend line. Climate change is also increasing variability in terms of those peaks and troughs,” she said.
Vermont gets 3 inches of rain in an average April and just 4 four inches in May. Pierson said it’s crucial for the state to have at least average rainfall in the coming weeks, which will likely be an indicator of summer conditions.
“That’s the 20-year average precipitation,” he said. “We would need to meet or exceed those values to just be at that average and be inching up in the right direction.”
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April 18, 2021 at 11:15PM
https://vtdigger.org/2021/04/18/dry-air-fewer-crops-and-painting-rocks-how-the-drought-is-hitting-vermont/
Dry air, fewer crops and ‘painting rocks’: How the drought is hitting Vermont - vtdigger.org
https://news.google.com/search?q=dry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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