It was a summer when the hot air seemed to cling to your skin, dragging your ankles toward the baking pavement, drowning your lungs as you sucked in moist gulps.
The sun was relentless. On Saturdays, neighborhoods were strangely devoid of kids’ voices or bouncing basketballs, silent as everyone huddled behind their curtains over air conditioning vents.
Did it seem like the hottest summer you ever spent in Macon?
Depending on how old you are, it was.
The only hotter summer on record, in terms of mean temperature or average high, was in 1954, according to David Stooksbury of the University of Georgia. An associate engineering professor, Stooksbury served as Georgia’s state climatologist until recently.
But it wasn’t just hot. It was a double-whammy of heat plus drought -- in fact, Middle Georgia’s fifth drought (of at least the “moderate” level) in 15 years.
Remember how the last drought was hailed as a record-breaker? That one ended just three years ago.
Frequent repeated droughts can make the effects of each subsequent drought worse. Experts say this pattern has created holes in the tree canopy and long-term drops in some aquifers that can’t be recovered by normal rainfall. And if frequent droughts continue, scientists say drier weather -- perhaps partly caused by global warming -- may eventually become Macon’s new norm.
All of Middle Georgia is now in an extreme drought, with rivers and aquifers running low, according to Stooksbury. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack declared an agricultural disaster in all but nine Georgia counties. Wells are running dry and wildfire risk is extreme.
Stooksbury says the drought and higher-than-average temperatures are unlikely to end soon. A La Niña weather pattern over the Pacific Ocean is expected to bring warm, dry weather through the winter, when Middle Georgia normally experiences most of its rainfall. (This is also what happened for much of last winter.)
“For the Macon area, this is starting to get close to droughts of record,” Stooksbury said. The state’s worst recorded drought was between 1924 and 1926.
Middle Georgia has been in a drought for about a year. But the previous several years were wet, with Macon receiving 105 percent of its normal rainfall.
“It gave us something in the bank last year,” Stooksbury said. “But we’ve been to that ATM too often. ... It’s usually in that second year (of drought) that we really start seeing some major water resource issues.”
Current conditions
Stooksbury said Macon received about 8 inches of rain during the three summer months, more than 3 inches below the norm. That made this summer Macon’s 11th driest in the last 81 years. The average high temperature between June and the end of August was 5.2 degrees hotter than usual, at 95.8 degrees. Laura Belanger, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Peachtree City, said Macon sweltered through 82 days when the temperature hit 95 degrees or higher, tying a 1954 record.
But that’s not the whole picture, because summer heat started early, with May setting a series of daily temperature records for Macon.
For the last six months, from March to the end of August, Macon’s highs were hotter than in any year since record keeping began, Stooksbury said. The average high was 87.8, he said. And rainfall was more than 8 inches below normal during the same period, making it the second-driest year after 1997.
And if you look at the past 12 months? Macon received just 31.85 inches of rain, only 70 percent of normal rainfall.
“That means for the past year, you’re more than a foot below normal,” Stooksbury said.
Before some areas received rain this month, many Georgia rivers and streams were reporting daily record-low flows. Among these were Murder Creek near Eatonton, the Flint River near Griffin, the Oconee River near Dublin, and Turkey Creek near Byromville.
Major reservoirs, including Lake Lanier on the Chattahoochee River, are dropping to a level that limits boating and makes swimming areas unusable. During the last drought, which ended in 2008, plummeting Lanier levels caused a water crisis in Atlanta and further ignited water wars with Alabama and Florida over use of the river system.
Groundwater levels hit, too
Groundwater levels are reaching record lows in the coastal plain, with record low monthly groundwater levels in the Upper Floridan aquifer in Laurens and several other counties, according to a news release from Stooksbury.
“The good news about Georgia aquifers is that they recharge very quickly,” he said in an interview. Many of them can recover by March after normal winter rains.
However, repeated droughts can create a cumulative downward trend, said John Clarke, assistant director of the Georgia Water Science Center for the U.S. Geological Survey.
“The rate of the drop accelerates during drought, and it won’t recover and you’ll have a net deficit,” he said.
Aquifers closer to the surface can refill more quickly, he said.
Middle Georgia counties sit over several aquifers, mostly the Cretaceous in the northern portions and the Upper Floridan south of the fall line.
The Cretaceous aquifer is deeply buried. A Twiggs County monitor shows the Cretaceous there has dropped by 8 feet since the late 1970s, Clarke said. Cretaceous levels in Johnson County have dropped about 20 feet since the early 1980s.
The Middle Ocmulgee Water Planning Council heard reports this summer that many residential wells in Pulaski County are dropping or going dry.
Well drillers have also been busy in Dooly County, said Chuck Ellis, a UGA cooperative extension agent. He said conflicts have arisen between farmers and their neighbors over who might be at fault for failing wells.
“Is it because of the farmer, or is it because in this dry situation the well might not be deep enough to start with?” Ellis asked. “It’s hard to know. ... Different wells are at different depths in different aquifers.”
Farmers have had to irrigate during the entire growing season this year, which is unusual, Ellis said. He said 20 to 25 percent of the county’s entire cotton crop had to be destroyed because of the drought.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture disaster designation will allow Georgia farmers to apply for emergency loans and other federal assistance because of the drought and heat.
Tree canopy
Karol Kelly, Bibb County’s cooperative extension agent, said she has received many calls from residents whose oaks and other trees are turning brown. She said the best approach is a combination of mulching plus watering trees deeply once a week.
Droughts often weaken shallow-rooted trees such as cherries, tulip poplars, dogwoods and maples first.
But Joe Burgess, a forester for the Georgia Forestry Commission’s community forestry program, said the repetitive droughts are now beginning to harm larger trees.
Especially in cities, older trees are losing large, high branches and becoming more susceptible to diseases and insects, he said. Urban trees tend to already be at higher risk, because the heat island effect deprives them of rain and soils are more compacted.
Many of these trees date to the last major urban tree planting effort to a century ago, Burgess said. Their age intensifies the effects of drought. As these large trees drop out of the landscape, the heat island effect worsens and the cost of air conditioning homes and managing stormwater goes up.
Plus, “A lot of folks look at those trees as being emblems of the community character,” he said. “Twenty-five years from now when most of these 100-year-old trees are gone, the community is going to look significantly different.”
Camp Bacon thinks the drought is what killed a 90-year-old oak tree in his Kingsley Drive backyard this summer.
“We really considered it one of the assets of the house,” he said. First a primary branch died, then the tree shed its leaves, and finally the rest seemed to die overnight. The stump that remains is 4 feet across.
Bacon said he has noticed a dozen or so other old oak trees that have died this year in the countryside around Macon.
Macon already lost many “overstory” trees to the 2008 tornadoes, Burgess noted.
“Macon took a large hit to some really significant trees that provided a lot of canopy,” he said. “It’s 15 years before the trees you put in begin to function in a way that replaces what was lost.”
Climate change
When you have regular droughts or ones over a 15-year span, when does it stop being an abnormal weather pattern and become your new climate?
That’s a tough question to answer. Stooksbury said this weather pattern is similar to one Georgia experienced from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, so it could be part of a periodic cycle.
Or it could indicate the new direction the Southeastern climate is headed. Climatologists won’t be able to tell for about 10 more years.
“Our computer models don’t help us on this,” Stooksbury said. “That’s one of the frustrations. The computer long-term climate models for the Southeast are all over the place. Some have us wetter, some drier. Some have us wetter but with much more variability.”
Marshall Shepherd, director of the Atmospheric Sciences program at the University of Georgia, pointed to Columbia University research after the drought that ended in 2008.
“The frequency and perhaps intensity of droughts is consistent with what models say would occur with climate change,” he said.
“There is likely some shift in our climate that is occurring and creating new norms,” said Tom Mote, head of the UGA Geography department. “(The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) recently released its new 30-year climate normals, and ours are now warmer and drier than they were.”
But Mote and Shepherd also noted the decade of similar Georgia weather in the 1920s and 1930s.
Last week, the nonprofit Climate Communications released a report summarizing recent scientific studies about the connections between climate change and extreme weather events, including both droughts and floods in the Southeast.
Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote in an e-mail that although La Niña is causing the Southeast’s current dry conditions, climate change is worsening such extremes.
Droughts are intensified, last a bit longer and lead to heat waves, wrote Trenberth, who shared the Nobel Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. On the other hand, in places where it rains, those rains are heavier and more intense, causing flooding as seen recently in the Northeast, he said.
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index, a measure of the percent area of the country experiencing extreme climate conditions, was nearly four times the average value during summer 2011, according to the NOAA.
To contact writer S. Heather Duncan, call 744-4225.
