Is Drought Denial a Thing Now?

Photo by StateImpact Texas

Mysterious messages about the drought popped up around the UT campus Thursday evening.

Yesterday evening on the way home from work, the above note was found on the windshield of one of our cars. Another was found on the car of a KUT News reporter, our local radio partners.

Since we’re never ones to let a good tip go unnoticed, we did some Googling on the note. And if you follow the clues and look up those daily climate reports from the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (ABIA) weather station, you find that…

There was 0.01 inches of rain recorded there in September, a big departure from normal. On each of the days listed on the note, there was no rain recorded. On average, ABIA gets about two-and-a-half inches of rain during that month. So to correct our tipster: the drought was in no way “neutralized” in September, though recent rains have allowed much of  Travis County to move from “exceptional” and “extreme” to “severe” drought .