I was working with one of my daughters on her schoolwork yesterday, and to complete the assignment we looked up the month of March from 2019 till this year to compare precipitation amounts recorded on our farm’s weather station. Precipitation recordings can be seen on the graphs below as the vertical blue bars reaching up. Each month has a different scale as the software adjusts it for relative size on the page. In other words, 2019 and 2023 both have similar scales and are showing the greatest amounts of measurement. As there were freeze cycles on some days, this does not show actual precipitation days as such, but it does show what was collected.
2019
2019 did not show a lot of precipitation. Two years prior to this was an El Nino spring, and a couple of feet of snow settled onto the ground all at once, leaving our farm with a very high water table. 2019 was not just a low year for precipitation, but one of several drought years.
2020
While 2020 had more precipitation days recorded, the scaling is lower, and there was little but often.
2021
2021 was a true drought year. It would be followed up by 2022 and in combination these years would seriously hurt not just us, but the whole of the western United States.
2022
2022 was definitely a drought year, and it was all the talk. Rivers like the Colorado were running low, and usage agreements of the past were called into question.
2023
This spring has shown a serious amount of increase in precipitation days, and in the amount collected each day as the scale reaches up to 0.50″ in order to show the higher amount collected on each bar than previous years excepting 2019 which has a scale that goes to 0.60″.
It is easy to want to complain about the high-water table this year, but remembering the previous years, and having no occupied basement under our house, we are getting by at the moment. The old root cellar is cause for concern, so we are not free to just enjoy the gross amounts of water surrounding our house. Given the choice, I would rather close that old root cellar off for good and fill it up. But those are our problems, and not the problems of the greater world around us, and the troubles that the drought has caused are far worse.
So there we have it. Some cold hard facts about what the climate has been like for the past five years, from dry in March, to almost torrential. I picked March because Springtime in the Rockies. Spring is when the winter gloom lifts, and with the changes of the weather snow tends to fall in abundance. Some of our earlier years here in Southeast Idaho saw some serious rainfall in the summer. The last few years have been dry, but given the uptick in spring snow, I wonder if we will also see rain coming down again as before? Summer is not far off, and we’ll soon know. This may be an important year to put in a garden, if the ground out there ever dries up enough that I can till it without losing the tractor into a quicksand-like bog.