It's been a dry couple of months in Massachusetts. Most of the state, including western Mass., is in a Level 3 or "Critical Drought"— one step above an "Emergency Drought."
The Massachusetts Drought Management Task Force is scheduled to meet Thursday morning and make recommendations about the current drought level. Representatives from the state's emergency management agency, the departments of Agricultural Resources, Fish and Game, Fire Services and others are part of the task force.
Vandana Rao, director of water policy at the Executive office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, co-chairs the task force. She said the data on precipitation "is pointing to some of the lowest we've ever recorded in many stations across the state."
She said any precipitation is "extremely welcome."
"We want these rainfall events to be not just single burst events, but something sustained and slow over a stretch of time so that the water gets the opportunity to really seep into the ground and start to replenish our various systems," she said.
Michael Rawlins, the associate director of the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said some cities and towns have had the driest "meteorological" fall on record — from Sept. 1 until Nov. 30.
For instance, Amherst was the driest its been since records were first kept in the 1890s. Westfield and Greenfield also have had record-setting dry weather. Pittsfield and North Adams have had the second driest fall in decades.
Rawlins said in many places, it was also warmer.
"When we have warmer than normal weather combined with drier than normal, that leads to enhanced evaporation and drying of the surface. And that's what's led to these brush fires across New England," he said.
But this past winter and early spring the region had record wet weather.
Rawlins said most climate change models say winters will get wetter and that flooding and extreme precipitation are more of a concern in New England, than the recent dry periods.
He characterized the recent dry weather as more of an anomaly.
"However, we have seen some pretty rapid swings back and forth between dry and wet. In recent years, the term 'weather whiplash' is often used, and that could be related to climate change and changes in the behavior of the jet stream," he said.
Looking ahead, the federal Climate Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA,) said New England could have warmer than average temperatures this winter.
