Rainfall in eastern Nebraska provides slight drought relief

Significant rainfall over the past few days has provided some drought relief to eastern Nebraska.

According to the National Weather Service, the Lincoln area saw nearly 2.3 inches of rainfall on Saturday and more than an inch total from Sunday-Monday.

That helped to reduce drought conditions in Lancaster County, as well as much of southeast Nebraska, according to the latest Drought Monitor published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

But areas of the state where the drought is the worst – mainly western Nebraska and the Panhandle – saw very little rain, with a tenth to a half inch in most places.

“In powerful contrast, intense convective activity generated a sharp corridor of heavy rainfall across eastern portions of Kansas and Nebraska,” U.S. Drought Monitor authors Rocky Bilotta and Tsegaye Tadesse wrote. “Totals in this localized zone rapidly climbed between 2.5 and 5.5 inches, with departures ranging between 1.5 to over 4.5 inches above normal, resulting in improvements to moderate (D1) to exceptional (D4) drought in Nebraska and moderate (D1) to extreme (D3) drought in Kansas.”

Taylor Nicolaisen, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Valley, said southeast Nebraska has done pretty well in terms of precipitation in the past few months.

“The northeastern corner of the state's still too dry, still running behind schedule for precipitation. So kind of a split story there, down the half of the eastern side of the state,” Nicolaisen said.

The eastern side of the state is seeing drought conditions ease up. It’s seeing drought levels from abnormally dry to moderate, based on data from the Drought Monitor.

That story is the opposite for the rest of the state, with 95% of Nebraska still facing drought conditions.

“We’ve actually been running ahead of normal for precipitation based south of Omaha,” Nicolaisen said. “We've run ahead of precipitation if you look at it over the last 30 days, or the last 60 days, 90, 120 days, regardless of how you look at it, areas south of Omaha have been doing well for precipitation, and then the rest of the state's the exact opposite.”

Nicolaisen added that the lack of precipitation in the winter is typical but much worse than normal.

“Those drought conditions really expanded over the last six months or so,” Nicolaisen said.