Reservoir storage well below average as Northeast drought continues

AccuWeather

Rain and snow have made a little dent in the drought throughout the Northeast, but not enough to stop key coastal regions from reaching severe drought status.

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00:00Recent rain and snow in New York State is helping with the drought, but we are certainly not out of the woods just yet.

00:07And we want to give you a little context as to where do we stand, how are we doing, and well, what's the prognosis here moving forward.

00:14And if we look first at the drought, this is probably the worst news of all.

00:18Looking at the drought monitor, you can see that we have seen the drought expand.

00:22And we're in the fourth shade in the city of Philadelphia and into most of southern and central New Jersey.

00:27We've had extreme drought in progress. Boston also in there, all the way west into the Worcester Hills.

00:31Now, if we look just at the past 30 days compared to average, you can see we're still running dry in the past 30-day window.

00:40But there are pockets where we've actually seen some progress.

00:42In fact, parts of Ohio and West Virginia that have seen the most severe drought earlier in the year,

00:47you're actually doing a little better than normal just looking only at the past 30 days.

00:52That means you're still deep in the hole, but we're beginning to make small steps in the right direction.

00:56But still, we've had a dry month, but at least we're not tremendously dry for the past 30 days.

01:01We're in the lighter shade of yellow, making maybe a little bit of minor progress,

01:06although still we're drier than we should be just for the past 30 days.

01:09This graphic here has various reservoirs that feed the New York City drinking water.

01:15And some of that also comes from rivers, but here are some reservoirs.

01:18And you can see compared to where we should be, compared to average for this time of the year,

01:23we're at 83.2% of average for the Pipactin Reservoir.

01:26But look at the Schoharie Reservoir, only 7% of normal, so it varies quite a bit.

01:31And the Croddon system there is still about 16.5% below normal.

01:36This graphic is interesting to me. Last year was the blue line. We were above average all year.

01:40The average year is gray. You can see we hit a low point around Halloween most years.

01:45This year, we really dropped hard, but we've actually begun to see a tiny, tiny step of modest improvements here.

01:51And hopefully that will continue here as additional rain moves in with this next system.

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