As Minnesota gets warmer, what’s the effect on drought?

It’s been hot in Hubbard County, and farmer Joe Morgan has noticed.

“It was relentless,” he said. “It was like three weeks of being in the 90s, and that puts a lot of stress on the plants.”

The northwestern Minnesota county has been in a severe drought since June, and it’s affected Morgan’s business, Midheaven Garden. Last week, he showed up to the Red River Market in Fargo without any lettuce, since it was too hot to plant them in the ground.

That’s despite his farm being covered in ways to fight against rapid shifts in the weather. He irrigates his crops when they’re too dry and grows many of them in greenhouses to extend their growing season and protect them from the elements.

At the same time, greenhouses can get hot very quickly, so he’s planning to buy covers to shade them.

“Every year you’re trying to make improvements,” Morgan said. “One of them is just to purchase items to act as an insurance policy, to try to have less of a gap. Because two weeks without head lettuce, people are expecting me to have an item … and I want to be dependable and serve my customers.”

Morgan grew up farming this land with his parents and six years ago, after careers in cabinet making and operating heavy equipment, he decided it was time to return. But, farming, he said, is different than when he was a kid.

“It’s just bigger extremes,” he said. “If we get rain, we’re going to get a lot of rain in a little bit of time, and then when the heat comes, it comes in a big shot. It’s just higher fluctuation than I remember as a kid.”

In Minnesota, climate change is already making the state warmer and wetter, meaning higher temperatures and more rainfall, on average. Experts say it’s not clear what that means for the future of drought in Minnesota.

“In order for you to develop drought, you really need a lack of precipitation and warmer temperatures,” said State Climatologist Luigi Romolo. “That’s the perfect recipe for drought. With the models telling us that it’s getting wetter and warmer, we don’t really have a good sense of how drought might change in the future.”

More rain helps ease drought, but warm weather draws more water from plants, soils and bodies of water, drying out the landscape.

“If the increase in precipitation can’t offset the demand that’s created by the increase in temperatures, then what we’re going to see is more frequent drought and more intense drought,” Romolo said.

As Morgan has already noticed on the farm, climate change is expected to change the nature of precipitation. According to the University of Minnesota, the state is seeing more intense rainfall events than ever before, but is also expected to see longer dry spells and rapid transitions between the two.

“The best thing that folks can do is to come up with drought plans that might take into account all different kinds of possible scenarios,” Romolo said.

National study calls for new drought frameworks

Across the country, climate change is already making drought more difficult to assess and project, because it’s creating new normals, according to Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan.

“In the 50s and 60s and 70s, the climate was not changing very quickly, so the statistics of what happened in the past were a good guide to what would happen in the future,” he said. “But now, with human-caused climate change, things are changing really fast, and the statistics are changing.”

That was the impetus for a year-long study conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and chaired by Overpeck.

The 200-page report contains many recommendations for federal agencies on how to better monitor and model drought. For modeling, the report recommends a two-pronged approach. For short-term assessments, it recommends using recent baselines of about 30 years to determine whether there’s a drought.

But long-term drought assessments are trickier, because that involves factoring in changes to many variables — including temperature, water demand and soil moisture — that will be affected by climate change and figuring out what those changes mean for drought.

“We just want to make sure that our models not only get the temperature well, but they also are able to forecast how precipitation is going to change, and how the combination of temperature and precipitation is going to end up giving us what we’re dealing with on the land surface or in the rivers,” he said. “So there’s some new science and continued scientific research that needs to take place.”

This matters because decisions need to be informed by the frequency and severity of drought. For example, Overpeck said major public safety issues, such as forest fire management, depend on understanding current and future drought conditions.

“We want to be able to give forest managers a better indication of what that situation is going to look like by year going into the future, and then allow the forest managers to come up with strategies for treating the forests either through prescribed burns or thinning, or just letting the fires burn,” he said. “Those are the big choices going into the future.”

Decisions about drought today

Parts of Minnesota have been in drought for months and a small part of the state entered extreme drought this week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor map released Thursday. That drought extends into North Dakota, which recently announced a drought emergency.

The Red River forms the boundary between the two states, and the Red River Basin Commission nonprofit helps facilitate cooperation between stakeholders who depend on it for business or drinking water. But the available models can make it hard to make decisions.

“At the end of the day, drought projection is notoriously poor,” said Executive Director Ted Preister. “Projection of when a drought is going to come, or going to be alleviated, or how long it will keep going, is still a lot of guesswork. So, the basin commission, we advocate for not waiting for that.”

He said if rainfall gets rarer but more intense, greater investment will be needed to capture water where it falls. That includes building more reservoirs.

“That means you have to have a whole bunch of these retention facilities scattered everywhere, so that if it’s a very small, localized nine inches, you can capitalize on that because you have something in the stream that will grab that water and set it off to the side,” he said.

That will be expensive, he said, and at the same time, attitudes need to shift about how water is used by cities, farmers and others in the basin.

“Everybody that is using and counting on water needs to think about, ‘How do we be more efficient with every drop?’” he said.

Some businesses are more impacted by drought than others. Andrew Johnson owns Pelican Paddle Company, which rents kayaks for use on the Pelican River in Pelican Rapids.

But the business has been unable to operate for four weeks because of low river levels. Summer is when kayaks are most in demand, but for the past few years, low precipitation has meant frequent pauses. That’s prompting tough questions about the future.

“It’s hard to rely on something and then you can’t make full pass at it through the summer,” he said. “It’s definitely something we’re thinking might not be viable long term.”

Minnesota’s future

It’s not yet clear how drought will change in Minnesota. But Overpeck said the American Southwest may be a glimpse into the future. The region has been in a historic multi-decade drought.

“The worsening drought situation out there is a canary in the mine shaft for us here in the Midwest because we are going to have really major problems with our forests, with our agriculture, as the climate continues to warm,” he said.

Overpeck said how bad drought gets in the Midwest depends on a variety of factors; not only the variables he hopes get incorporated into new models, but also the decisions people make.

“It’s going to be a really hard situation,” he said. “And the public might agree that it’s a hell of a lot smarter just to try and work harder to stop climate change because it’s climate change and the burning of fossil fuels that’s making it so much worse.”