Several rounds of summer rain brought Nebraska back from the brink of severe drought

When 84 percent of the state was in some level of drought earlier this year, Nebraskans were preparing for more drought-related crop losses or a record wildfire year. But consistent and timely rains from Mother Nature have charted significantly wetter conditions as summer wraps up. Nebraska Public Media's Jackie Ourada checked in with National Drought Mitigation Center Climatologist Brian Fuchs about how drought conditions have changed.

Ourada: Just a few months ago we were begging for rain, and now it seems we might have just a little bit too much of it in some areas. Can you walk us through how drought conditions look now across Nebraska compared to earlier this year?

Fuchs: Back in the spring, we were really dry, and we had been dry since the previous fall. So, we've kind of turned the page, so to speak. And this has been one of our wetter summers that we've seen, probably since the 2019 summer, on the cusp of all the big floods we had that year. So this has been a wetter year, and just looking at it from a drought condition... At the start of the calendar year, we had 84% of the state in drought, and now we're only at 24% so having a wet period during the wettest time of the year, climatologically speaking, has done a lot of benefit for our state.

Ourada: With the National Drought Mitigation Center, you speak a lot with people in the agricultural sector and people who are out here experiencing and living with drier conditions, wetter conditions. What have you heard from them in the past few weeks, the past month, about all the precipitation we've received recently?

Fuchs: Yeah. A couple things come into place. The wet summer, for the most part, has been very beneficial for ag production. We've seen good estimates of what corn and soybeans will come in for this year, and so those numbers are encouraging. What we have heard in the last month or so is some of the wetness has definitely been problematic as far as disease, especially in corn crops and even on the soybean crops — causing some some fungus and different conditions on those that will start impacting the yields. It is kind of the case where too much water has led to some other types of problems, not drought related, but definitely production related. I think the other thing that's quite encouraging, and something that we did not see at all last fall, is these rains that we're getting now into September and until we freeze up in December, that is water that's going to really replenish the soil moisture. That really helps going into the next production year, we kind of bank on that moisture that's getting added into the soil profile right now as the crops are done using it and we're finishing out that production year, we're kind of replenishing those soils, which will be very helpful going into the next production year in 2026.

Ourada: Looking west, our neighbors in Colorado and Wyoming — they're seeing severe, extreme, even some exceptional drought on their western sides. How does that impact us? Or does it impact us when it comes to drought?

Fuchs: This time of year, it's not as problematic. We really watch our western neighbors in the wintertime, and we know that the water that comes down the Platte River goes into Lake McConaughy, goes into the Republican River Valley. All of those originate out in Colorado and Wyoming. So we really pay attention in the winter and what their snow numbers look like, and how that snow accumulates this time of year when they're not sending a lot of water down the Platte River. So yes, we understand it's dry. The one thing that does cause me some caution, I guess, in saying that, is if they are depleting a lot of their reservoir water this time of year because of that dryness, they're going to refill those reservoirs next spring before more water gets sent down the Platte River. If those reservoirs were stable to mostly full, then we would know next spring that most of that water would get shipped right down into Nebraska, and they wouldn't be holding as much back. That's what we really need to pay attention to. It's more of a water supply and water availability type of question with how those areas impact our state.

Ourada: How does the outlook look for the rest of this year?

Fuchs: We have a couple different outlook products that we look at. One goes through the month of September, and then the other one will take us through the end of November, and both of those projects are showing some of this improvement in the state that that we have been seeing and anticipating. Going forward, it does look like, though, that as we go further into fall, that some of that drought that's really been popping up in the Rocky Mountains is going to start kind of edging its way eastward and even to some of these areas of the Panhandle and and maybe even to southwest Nebraska that haven't currently been in drought. We're going to continue to see drought persisting in those areas.

Ourada: All right, we'll see what comes next. That's Brian Fuchs with the National Drought Mitigation Center here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Thanks, Brian.

Fuchs: Happy to do it. Thank you.