After a dry summer and despite a few recent rainy days, Connecticut is experiencing an increasingly dry autumn, with areas of the state ranging from abnormally dry to extreme drought conditions. Mike Dietz, UConn extension educator and Director of the Connecticut Institute of Water Resources, spoke with UConn Today about the current drought and how it is impacting homeowners and local water resources.
How long has the current drought been going on, and how bad is it?
We measure the water year from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 each year, and as of right now for this water year that just finished, we were about six inches behind for the whole year, which isn’t a huge deficit but most of that deficit came in the last few months.
We had a wetter than normal fall in 2019, then winter was fairly dry, then we had a little rain in the spring, followed by two really dry periods this summer, with the driest being the most recent one. Having that hit right now and the time of year when the evapotranspiration is high — where plants are pulling water out of the ground and transferring it to the atmosphere — that is what really brought water levels down to these record low levels in our streams and rivers.
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