Water + Weather for August 2024

Transcript

Dr. Mark Wentzel - Hydrologist, Texas Water Development Board

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Texas Water Development Board's latest Water and Weather report. I'm Dr. Mark Wentzel, a hydrologist in the surface water division here at the agency. And today, we're going to have a special episode for you we're calling our summer soliloquy-a look back on summer 2024 and a comparison to the last 25 summers in Texas. For this edition, we're at the Tom Miller Dam, an LCRA facility here in Austin, Texas.

A couple of caveats as we get started. First off, we're going to define summer as the months of June, July, and August, following the pattern of the National Weather Service. Now, when we take those three months of data and average things together, it covers up a lot of variability that we might see in individual months. For instance, in 2024, June was well-above normal in temperature, July was well-above normal in precipitation, and August was both hotter and drier than normal. And that gets lost when we average everything. Second caveat is we're looking at statewide conditions, so that means that at any individual city, county, or climate region, things could be quite a bit different. And finally, we're going to do our comparison over the last 25 years, data from 2000 to 2024.

In comparing summers, we're going to look at something that I call the summer misery meter. And in that, we've got four factors. The first is temperature. The higher the temperature, the higher the misery. Second is precipitation. And for that, the lower the precipitation, the higher the misery. Third, we're going to look at drought area across the state. And with that, the larger the area, the higher the misery. And finally, we'll look at surface water supplies. And for that one, the lower the supplies, the higher the misery. Something to keep in mind--temperature and precipitation only depend on what happened in this particular summer, while drought area and surface water supplies may be impacted by what happened in the previous spring or even in previous years.

Let's take a closer look at temperature and precipitation in summer 2024. This past summer might have seemed cooler than previous summers. In fact, it was cooler than 2022 and 2023. But when we look at the entire 25 years of data going back to 2000, this summer was actually the fourth hottest summer in that time period. Only 2011, 2022, and 2023 were hotter. As we look at precipitation for summer 2024, things were right about normal. In the last 25 years, we've had 12 wetter summers and we've had 12 drier summers. Now, of course, when we look at temperature and precipitation averaged across the entire state, we don't get the picture that you're going to have at the local level. For instance, in this past summer, West Texas and north Central Texas were both well-below average in terms of precipitation and much hotter than normal.

As we look at the average area of the state impacted by drought during the summer, 2024 was an improvement from previous years. That's been influenced quite a bit by a statewide drought that has been going on since fall of 2021. During the summer of 2022, 88 percent of the state was in drought. That declined somewhat in the summer of 2023, down to 45 percent of the state in drought. And in 2024, it improved a bit more, down to 28 percent of the state in drought. That's still quite a bit more than the summer of 2021, the last time we weren't in a statewide drought, and only 6 percent of the state was in drought for that summer. Overall, 2024 was the 17th largest drought area for the summer in the last 25 years.

As we look at surface water supply conditions across the state, summer 2024 was also an improvement on recent years. This past summer, we averaged 77 percent of capacity in our water supply reservoirs, a significant improvement from 2022 and 2023, when we averaged 73 and 74 percent of capacity. We're still about 7 or 8 percentage points below normal for this time of year. In fact, it's the ninth worst water supply conditions that we've had in the last 25 years.

When we put all four of those factors together, how does the summer of 2024 compare to the last 25 summers in Texas? Turns out, 2024 was middle of the pack, about the 12th most miserable summer in Texas during that time period. That's quite an improvement from 2022 and 2023, which were, respectively, the second and third most miserable summers in the last 25 years. In fact, they were only exceeded in misery by 2011, which was the summer that had the worst drought conditions in Texas history.

Well, Labor Day is considered the traditional end of the summer season, and this year it brought some much needed and much welcome rainfall across most of the state. I hope you got some rain in your area. That concludes the report. And until next time, I hope you stay healthy and safe.

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