MINNEAPOLIS — Pete Boulay, a climatologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, misses the part of the job where he goes out and measures snow on the ground.
"There's still five inches," he said Thursday morning as he plunged a ruler into the snow. "We were looking at pretty rough shape until that that storm happened. And we'll take moisture any way we can get. Even snow is fine by us."
He says the updated drought monitor is a pretty picture to him. Boulay said it's the first time you won't see a speck of red marking extreme drought anywhere on the map since last summer. Now, most of the state is marked as abnormally dry.
"A good chunk of Minnesota was under a moderate drought, including the Twin Cities," said Boulay. "And what this did was basically cut the drought in half."
Minnesota is in a better place drought-wise than it was this time last year, which is especially important for the state's trees.
Lee Frelich is the director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology. He said normally this time of year, snow would run off into lakes and steams because of the frozen soil. That won't happen this year.
"The snow, as it melts, it can soak into the ground and it'll saturate the top foot of the soil," said Frelich. "(Trees) need it really, really badly. Because waking up into another spring under severe drought would be really bad."
Frelich said trees have been stressed from drought conditions from the past three summers.
"It takes trees anywhere from a couple of years upwards four or five, six years, sometimes depending on how severe the damage is to recover," he said.
So as we soak up the sunshine, Minnesota will soak up the snow.
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