Too much and not enough: The battle of drought and deluge across the US

The year 2022 has been one full of bitter irony as some regions across the U.S. experienced record-shattering rainfall totals while others faced stark water shortages amid an intense drought.

By Dec. 20, about 74% of the contiguous U.S. was abnormally dry or in drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. While not ideal, the percentage is down from 85.3% during the week of Nov. 1 -- the largest swath of the U.S. to be affected since the launch of Drought Monitor in 2000.

Drought conditions kept a particularly tight grip on the West, with California, Utah and Nevada seeing at least 40 consecutive weeks of moderate to exceptional drought statewide throughout the year 2022, all while straining the lifeline of river systems that wind through the region such as the Bear and Colorado rivers.

The progression of drought conditions across the U.S. from the first week of January 2022 to the last week of December 2022. (U.S. Drought Monitor)

At the end of 2021, The Salt Lake Tribune asked AccuWeather mapmakers, whom the paper partners with, to redraw the Great Salt Lake.

"Our maps stay the same for the average level of the lake, and as a news organization, it doesn't make sense anymore," Grant Burningham, managing editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, told AccuWeather National Weather Reporter Bill Wadell last November. "We know the lake is smaller. We know it's about half the size that it used to be, and we have a chance to raise awareness nationally and locally when hopefully there are still some things to do to change the course of the lake, which, right now, frankly, is in a death spiral."

The retreating shores of reservoirs like Lake Mead yielded sunken vessels and human remains this year as water levels dropped to new lows, threatening to dip below active pool levels.

"Our water management systems such as dams may no longer be suited to the new climate which includes larger swings between wet and dry years projected," Dr. Danielle Touma told AccuWeather via email. Touma is an advanced study program postdoctoral fellow who works with scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Colorado University. Her research includes human activity on characteristics of extreme climate events, with a focus on extreme fire weather and extreme precipitation. "This is very concerning to me since that is what we depend on for storage and management, especially in the western U.S."

It's not just rain that this region needs, but snowfall as well to build up the snowpacks in the mountains that feed the rivers throughout the year. Rain may bring temporary relief, but the mountain snowpack acts as an investment in the rivers' wellbeing.

"While heavy precipitation events are becoming more intense, they are often falling as rain and not snow, and leading to flash flooding but not necessarily alleviating drought conditions," Touma said.

Water rights, or the allotment of water from the rivers, were also revisited when the Bureau of Reclamation asked the seven states in the Colorado River Basin -- California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming -- to create a long-term plan by mid-August to cut water use. A projection from the Department of the Interior had estimated Lake Mead's water level would fall below 1,050 feet by January -- the threshold required to declare a Level 2 shortage, out of a scale of 1 to 6, with Level 6 being a water shortage emergency. As of Dec. 29, Lake Mead's water level was 1,044 feet.

This will be the lake's first Level 2 shortage and will require Arizona, Nevada and Mexico to take water cuts -- with Arizona facing the largest cuts of about 21% of the state's yearly allotment of river water.

"The Colorado River System, which feeds more than 40 million people across the western states, is dangerously low, and we're looking at water cuts to federal allocations of that water across Arizona and Nevada," George McGraw, CEO of DigDeep Right to Water Project, told AccuWeather. "Everyone's worried about what this historical drought is going to do, first of all, to availability and then the things like agriculture and public health."

The nonprofit focuses on bringing running water to communities across America and is the parent organization of the Indigenous-led Navajo Water Project, which is described as a community-managed utility alternative for the Navajo Nation.

McGraw estimated about 30% of Diné homes on America's largest Native American reservation lacked running water, with residents relying on bottled water or hauling containers of water from spigots at schools or a truck stop.

"Surface water resources on Navajo are disappearing," McGraw said. "More than 90% of them have disappeared over the last 100 years because of climate change and that's making it harder and harder for people to make do and it's making our work harder, too, as existing water systems fall offline because the groundwater that was supporting them is no longer there or the water table has fallen so low that wells can no longer pump it."

The water rights provided to states and portions of Mexico surrounding the Colorado Basin are quantified by acre-feet in the 1922 Colorado River Compact to determine how much an entity may take from the river. However, the Navajo Nation was never included in this agreement, even when the Supreme Court's 1908 Winters vs. United States decision established the nation had rights to as much water as was needed for self-sufficiency from rivers that pass through the reservation. The wording was vague, and the amount was not quantified as it was with the states and Mexico's portions.

The Navajo Nation expands across 27,413 square miles, the largest Native American reservation in the U.S., and as it stretches from portions of northeastern Arizona to northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah, several legal battles have arisen over the quantity of water the nation has a right to from the Colorado River. The infrastructure bill passed in 2020, while not necessarily settling these cases, will provide infrastructure funding for the nation, however.

Phillip Yazzie waits for a water drum in the back of his pickup truck to be filled in Teesto, Ariz., on the Navajo Nation, on Feb. 11, 2021. A massive infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed this week includes billions of dollars to address long-standing issues with water and sanitation on tribal land. (AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca, File)

"If you look at the way our country built infrastructure over the last 100 to 150 years, it was never built to serve everybody," McGraw said. "It left out some rural populations, especially rural populations of color like Indigenous communities or Black and Latino farm-working communities. We have to work hard to right those historical injustices and make sure these communities get the same level of investment in things like water and roads and power, that other predominately white communities -- sometimes right next to them -- got. So that's the original set of circumstances that we're dealing with that are being exacerbated by climate change now."

Places outside of the West haven't escaped the drought's heavy hand either. The scarcity of snowfall in the Mississippi River basin, which extends from Montana to northern Texas to states in the mid-Atlantic before draining out in Louisiana, during the winter of 2021 to 2022 sparked water level and supply chain concerns along America's second-largest river.

A boat navigates the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, Oct. 11, 2022. The unusually low water level in the lower Mississippi River has caused some barges to get stuck in the muddy river bottom, resulting in delays. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

"A lot of the water that you see on the lower Mississippi River, it originally starts as a snowflake in Montana," Micheal Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition, based in Ankeny, Iowa, told AccuWeather in an October interview. "It just continued to compound, and of course, summer we didn't get much rainfall, so now we're in the situation we're in today."

That situation included barges running aground earlier that month as water levels dropped to some of their lowest in the river's history. One river gauge at Osceola, Arkansas, 35 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, reported a water level of 11.6 feet below "low stage" on Oct. 17. That surpassed the gauge's lowest water level record of 10.3 feet below low stage from July of 1988, according to records from NOAA.

People walk to Tower Rock, an attraction normally surrounded by the Mississippi River and only accessible by boat, Oct. 19, 2022, in Perry County, Mo. Foot traffic to the rock formation has been made possible because of near-record low water levels along the river. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

As the West and Plains dealt with pressing drought, other parts of the U.S. saw historic rainfall and flash flooding, including the Ohio Valley and Southeast.

In an analysis conducted by Climate Central of 240 U.S. locations, 147 of them had at least one 24-hour rainfall event totaling 2 inches or more, many of which were concentrated in the Southeast, south-central and Ohio Valley regions.

Six of these locations had 24-hour rainfall amounts that surpassed 6 inches, including two that had been in the path of Hurricane Ian, which delivered 7.72 inches and 6.67 inches, respectively, to Orlando and Sarasota, Florida, on Sept. 28. The other events happened throughout the summer, with Birmingham, Alabama, receiving 6.97 inches and experiencing significant flash flooding, Laredo, Texas, receiving a record-breaking 6.82 inches on Aug. 15 and Beaumont, Texas, receiving 6.20 inches on July 1.

The last event was in St. Louis, which received 8.64 inches of rainfall on July 26, causing historic flash flooding that would accumulate into a 1-in-1,000-year flood event.

The "1-in-1,000-year" chance doesn't mean that this kind of flooding event can only happen once every 1,000 years, but rather there's a 0.1% chance of it happening every year. This past year saw five such flood events from late July to late August.

"Imagine you're at a craps table, and you're throwing the dice and trying your luck," Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the National Resource Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, told Wadell in August. "If the weather in that analogy are the dice, what climate change does is it loads those dice and makes events more likely, that in the past we would have considered unlikely if not impossible."

Since a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme precipitation, according to Climate Central. A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in September found significant shifts toward higher daily precipitation intensities, particularly in the central and eastern U.S. as far back as the 1950s.

The other four 1-in-1,000-year flood events occurred in Dallas on Aug. 22, southeast Illinois on Aug. 1, Death Valley on Aug. 5, and Eastern Kentucky on July 28. The flooding in Kentucky led to the deaths of at least 40 people. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear described the event as "one of the worst and most devastating events" in the state's history, and the economic toll also reflected a high cost.

Members of the Winchester, Ky., Fire Department walk inflatable boats across flood waters over Ky. State Road 15 in Jackson, Ky., to pick up people stranded by the floodwaters Thursday, July 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Timothy D. Easley)

Devastating flooding overwhelmed Death Valley National Park in California a few days later when the park received nearly a year's worth of rain on Aug. 5. A weather station at the location had initially measured 1.46 inches of precipitation after heavy rain, but the total was later recognized as 1.7 inches, shattering the previous record of 1.47 inches of rainfall. The normal yearly rainfall for the area is 1.90 inches. There were no fatalities, but debris buried roughly 60 cars and stranded some 1,000 people at the park.

The flooding that swept away homes and roads near Yellowstone Park in June didn't qualify as a 1-in-1,000-year flood event, but it was a 1-in-500-year flood. Heavy flooding and rockslides forced over 10,000 visitors to evacuate as the park closed for the first time in its history due to flooding.

Among the structures swept away by the floodwaters was Carbella Bridge, which was at the Tom Miner Basin off of U.S. Highway 89. Video of the floodwaters thrashing and washing over the bridge went viral, and footage showed the moment the structure was pulled from the ground and swept downstream.

On June 14, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte declared a statewide disaster due to the crisis, stating that rapid snowmelt and heavy rains had led to flooding that was leaving residents without power and water services. Mudslides created an additional problem by wrecking roads and blocking travel in and out of the park.

A home on the banks of the Yellowstone River was pulled into the water on Monday, June 13, 2022, as record flooding prompted officials to shut down Yellowstone National Park. (Parker Manning)

Mudslides caused additional hazards in September when the leftover moisture from Tropical Storm Kay aided in generating storms over Southern California, combining with the 2020 El Dorado wildfire burn scar to create the hazard.

"Wildfires modify the landscape by burning vegetation, making soils hydrophobic (water repellent), and creating a layer of ash and debris on the ground," said Touma, who has analyzed extreme precipitation events that follow wildfires. "This preconditions the area during a heavy precipitation event and can lead to debris flows or flash floods."

In some cases, less than half of an inch of rain is enough to prompt a mudslide, according to the National Weather Service. The locations of Riverside and the city of San Bernardino -- west of the El Dorado fire burn scar -- recorded just under an inch and nearly two inches of rain, respectively. Closer to the burn scar in the mountains, the communities of Oak Glen and Yucaipa in San Bernardino County, California, were warned to evacuate and shelter in place as the rain fell.

By the end of the year, the economic cost from both the drought and deluges across the U.S. made it onto NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information list of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. The drought conditions, listed under Western/Southern Plains Drought and Heat Wave, amounted to $9.3 million with a noted 117 fatalities across Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon and Texas due to excessive heat conditions. The summary also noted the record-low water levels at Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake and how drought conditions were continuing to impact agricultural crops and feed costs for livestock.

Meanwhile, the flooding sparked in Kentucky and Missouri by the same weather system was the only billion-dollar flooding event in 2022, totaling $1.2 billion, according to the NCEI. The costs stemmed from damage to thousands of homes, businesses, vehicles and infrastructure in both states, though the majority of the fatalities were recorded in Kentucky. Over 600 helicopter rescues plus additional swift water rescues via boat were required to evacuate people from the rising flood waters.

While not all rare flood events are due to extreme amounts of precipitation and not all extreme precipitation events lead to devastating flooding, Touma added that a greater frequency of extreme precipitation means that there could be more damaging floods in general.

"This is especially true for areas that can swing from extremely dry to extremely wet, and therefore can lead to things like debris flows or flash floods, like California, or places where snow may be melting faster due to warming in future years," she said.

Want next-level safety, ad-free? Unlock advanced, hyperlocal severe weather alerts when you subscribe to Premium+ on the AccuWeather app.AccuWeather Alerts™ are prompted by our expert meteorologists who monitor and analyze dangerous weather risks 24/7 to keep you and your family safer.