HAYS — Even for a perennially dry region like western Kansas, this year sticks out.
Barely any rain. Temperatures that bake the soil into a cracked, parched mess. And forecasts that don’t offer much hope of relief.
This summer in Dodge City ranks as its 5th hottest on record. And this year is the southwest Kansas city’s 12th driest in history going back to the 1870s.
And Dodge City is merely one hot, dry spot in a state that’s only occasionally found itself this warm and parched.
Drought currently covers nearly three-fourths of Kansas. And roughly one-third of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought — the highest levels on the U.S. Drought Monitor scale.
But is 2022 one of the worst drought years in the state’s history? It depends on how you look at it.
“It is bad, but it’s not near as bad as it has been,” National Weather Service meteorologist Jeff Hutton in Dodge City said. “It’s been far, far worse than this.”
That doesn’t mean 2022’s drought hasn’t had grave consequences. The timing and location of some of this year’s harshest conditions devastated crops, as western Kansas wheat farmers saw earlier this summer.
But dry, hot weather is nothing new in this semi-arid part of the world. And experts like Hutton and Kansas State University meteorologist Chip Redmond said frequent breaks in the heat and timely bits of moisture have kept 2022 from surpassing the records set by the most extreme years in Kansas history.
That illustrates the complexity of trying to compare one bad year with another.
“We can look at basic statistics, such as average monthly precipitation and temperature and their departure from normal,” said Redmond, who manages K-State’s Kansas Mesonet climate monitoring system. “(But) that doesn’t tell the whole story.”
Based on historical data, he said, the years that top the charts for drought and heat in Kansas history came during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — particularly 1934 and 1936 — and then in 1956, 1974, 1976, 1980, 1983, 2000 and 2011-2012.
1. Dry spells
Rainfall totals this year are several inches below normal across Kansas. Hays has received around 9.5 inches of precipitation so far in 2022. That’s roughly half of the 18 inches it can usually expect to bank by this time of year.
Hutchinson has seen fewer than 14 inches of precipitation when it’s supposed to have more than 22 inches. Only 6.5 inches have fallen on Scott City — way less than its usual 15 inches.
