Oklahoma's Drought Is Bad, But Certainly Not Our Worst

I was looking at the drought map the other day, and it got me thinking about not only how much we need rain, but how common being dry around here is.

Oklahoma has always been a little weird when it comes to rain.

You can have a trend of thunderstorms continuously dump rain in one part of the state, while the rest of us keep getting nothing. I see big thunderhead clouds every few days in SWOK, but nothing ever comes of it. Then it seems like every other day I get lightning and storm alerts on my phone that's still stuck on my northern OK hometown.

We're still waiting on our turn, and we're not alone.

A whole lot of Oklahoma is still dry, with more than a fifth of the state now classified in that "exceptional drought" status. But even the counties that are getting regular rains are still somewhere on that drought spectrum.

It's rough, yeah, but we've seen worse.

2011 Oklahoma Drought

That was the year we all took the heat personal. The drought started the previous fall. The spring rains were rather light, and then the summer made things miserable.

Southwestern Oklahoma had its driest June on record that year, and I'm surprised people have already forgotten about it.

The 2015 drought was another scorcher, until things flipped and gave us our wettest year in Oklahoma history.

It's weird how that all works out. Feast or famine weather.

Late last night, as the storm alerts fired off across North-Central OK, I got curious and started looking further back at our past droughts.

What we're living through now is nothing compared to the 1950s.

Oklahoma's five driest consecutive years happened from 1952 through 1956.

Crops failed, heat and insects piled onto the problem, and the drought became one of the defining weather events of that era. And just like the early 2010s, the rains came in 1957, which turned out to be the wettest year in Oklahoma's recorded history at that point.

Drought And The Dust Bowl

This might surprise you, but even my own Oklahoma-born nephews have no idea what the Dust Bowl was. Did our schools stop teaching that? It was the worst of the worst for Oklahoma.

The drought of the 1930s lasted most of that decade, and most Oklahomans have the images of those famous dust storms burned into our brains.

Here's the big takeaway. As bad as our drought is, it'll break. The rains will come, just not as fast as we all wish. There are some good chances of rain in the most affected areas of the state tonight and tomorrow. We're just on whatever weather cycle this is. We've been there before. It never lasts forever.

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