Trying To Get A Handle On The New Mexico Drought

I was trying to get a better feel for the New Mexico drought by plotting up annual precipitation, for a station in the Albuquerque area, in particular.  Here is a plot for COOP station #290234, which is the Albuquerque International Airport COOP site.  It has had a continuous annual record since 1949.

Even though the recent Southern, Southwestern, and Great Plains drought seems to be easing somewhat - happily, it's raining again in Arizona and Texas - if anything, it's getting worse in New Mexico. My impression is that the current drought is unprecedented in my lifetime. Massive dieback of vegetation is inevitable, given the current, brutal reality.

And the data seem to bear that out. The last two years are worse than 2001 - 2003, or any other individual year since I was born, in 1956. Nevertheless, just before my lifetime, there was a damned-hard, seven-year period from 1950 - 1956, that was even worse. So, as bad as things are now, they are not as bad as they could be.

Comparisons are useful. In 2006, I visited Chinchilla, Queensland, Australia, and marveled at the utter wreck of the nearly-dry Condamine River. At the time, most of Australia was locked in an epic drought (which, with recent La Niña conditions, has eased dramatically, except in Southwest Australia, near Perth). Here is what I posted then:

In 2006, the town of Chinchilla, Queensland, AU, out on the Warrego Highway in the agricultural district of the Darling Downs, had just 174.0 mm (6.85 inches) of rain, the lowest annual rainfall ever measured in 117 years, demolishing the previous annual low record of 302.9 mm (11.93 inches) in 1922, and barely making a quarter of the average annual rainfall of 668.6 mm (26.3 inches).

What most impressed me most was that 6.85 inches was less than the annual average rainfall of arid Phoenix, Arizona (8.29 inches), and completely inconsistent with the practice of just about any kind of agriculture.

And yet, for the last two years, the rainfall in Albuquerque has been well below those xeric levels. And we have entered a third calendar year too, with the driest months upon us, right now. All I have to say is, we'd better have one hell of a monsoon this summer.

Elsewhere, climate scientists have noted that, droughts aside, there seems to be a long-term increase in precipitation in the American Southwest. Anthropogenic Global Warming is the likely underlying cause!