ST PAUL, Minn. — As the sun beats down on Minnesota and heals us of our winter blues, state climatologists are seeing yellow on Minnesota's drought monitor.
"It is cause for concern and it is worthy of noting as abnormally dry," said state climatologist Luigi Romolo.
This comes despite Minnesota having the third snowiest winter on record and record flooding in some regions of the state.
"Even when you are fully recovered, it's only four to six weeks of dryness to start drying things out. If we don't start getting some wet stuff on the ground, we can certainly start slipping back into drought regardless of how wet our winter was," said Romolo.
"A lot of that water ran off into the rivers and now is in the Gulf of Mexico," said KARE 11 Chief Meteorologist, Belinda Jensen.
This is why experts say the summer months are most critical to avoiding extreme drought conditions, similar to what we've seen the last two summers.
"May and June are our wettest months and that is when we really need those rains for all, of course, the gardens, and the farms and the farm fields and we didn't get it in May that's for sure, we were two inches plus behind for the month of May so that is why the abnormally dry area of Minnesota in the last 7 days doubled up to 65% of the state now," explained Jensen.
The recent stretch of days in the upper 80s and 90s isn't helping say some experts.
"You've got more evaporation, more water transpires out of the plants and so you have to make up that demand by increasing the amount of rainfall," said Romolo.
As the sun's rays point to hotter days ahead, all hope isn't lost.
"Eighty-four counties are still drought-free, anything can happen over the next two weeks, we could recover from that pretty quickly," explained Romolo.
Experts say it's too early to tell if things will get worse, but we need an inch of rain a week for us to maintain and for drought conditions not to worsen.
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