Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods are near the top of most everyone's list of dreaded weather-related disasters. Some areas of the globe are especially prone to these phenomena and endure them year after year. For example, tornadoes all too often pound America's heartland, however, they're rare in other areas of the world. Hurricanes are unheard of in Europe and South America, but they regularly lash parts of North America, Africa, Australia and Asia. Fortunately, no hurricanes have struck the US mainland since 1999 - more about this later. Flooding from monsoon rains in late spring and early summer is a sad fact of life in places like India and Bangladesh. Interestingly, the continent known to have the worst weather in the world, Antarctica, is not susceptible to hurricanes, twisters or floods - at least not now. However, if global warming predictions come true, flooding may be a mega problem in the Antarctic as well as in low-lying coastal zones all over the world.

Perhaps the biggest weather-related news this summer has been the killer floods in Europe, China, and India. In late July and early August much of central Europe was crippled by terrible flooding, the worst in centuries along stretches of the Elbe and Danube rivers. Flooding has claimed more than 1,200 lives in China and left more than a million people homeless in the past 2 months, primarily a result of torrential rains in the Hunan province of southeastern China, where the Xiang and Zi rivers peaked close to their all-time highs. In India, Nepal and Bangladesh, prolonged monsoon rains have left at least 1,000 dead and perhaps several million homeless. In parts of Nepal, it was the heaviest rains in at least 25 years.

While it has been too wet in parts of Europe and Asia, it's been awfully dry in parts of the US this past year. In fact, over 50% of the country has experienced drought conditions. In the Middle Atlantic region, for instance, the drought of the past 12 months isn't the worst on record (1930 was much more devastating), but it's one of the worst in the past 100 years. For the 5-month period from October 2001 through February 2002, precipitation was only about 30% of normal in the Washington/Baltimore area. Typically, when a region endures rainfall shortages of 60% of normal for several months, a drought exists. One popular measure of drought severity is the Palmer Index, which is based on effects of rainfall, evaporation and transpiration, runoff and groundwater storage. If the Palmer Index is below a value of -4, it's an indication that extreme drought is being experienced. This year is the 8th time since 1885 that a value of -4 has been reached in the Washington/Baltimore area.

One of the reasons why it has been so dry in the Middle Atlantic region this year, and why the water table is still low despite recent heavy rains, is because not one hurricane or tropical storm has brought substantial precipitation to the US Atlantic coast in the past 3 years. Despite the fact that we don't want destructive storms like hurricanes to hurl themselves against our shores, we can use the rain that accompanies them.

In an area like Washington, where the population is increasing and the urban area expanding, even when annual rainfall is normal, there's simply more people sucking on the straw, and the water table is bound to fall. During the first 3 weeks of August, the maximum temperature in suburban Washington DC averaged over 90 degrees F, and in many locales there was no rain. When hot, dry weather like this persists, the water table can fall nearly as fast than the value of my World Com stocks. In some places in the Middle Atlantic region, as of a few weeks ago, the water table was 4' below normal levels. Many farmers have been forced to drill new wells, and to pay for the drilling, they've had to auction off their cattle.

The water supply is an issue in numerous US cities, municipalities and rural areas too, but for many parts of the world, it's a desperate problem, especially in a drought. More water than ever before is being taken from the ground for irrigation, drinking and industry, and not all of this water can be replenished. Of course, as a result of irrigation, it's possible to feed most of the world's 6 billion people. Sure, our old planet is mostly water, but 99.9% of it is either salty sea water, locked up in ice sheets or too far underground to retrieve, and like a lot of things, the Earth's accessible fresh water is hardly ever found where it's needed most. Even when it's readily available and in close proximity, it all too often beomes polluted.

Droughts are perhaps the deadliest and cruelest weather phenomenon. Whereas hurricanes and tornadoes are analogous to heart attacks in humans; they do their damage fast, droughts are more like a cancer; they cause suffering over extended periods of time. This year, droughts on virtually every continent have withered crops, burned forests and or depleted water supplies. In many countries, failure of a single crop may lead to famine. If drought in the US and elsewhere is as severe next year as it has been in 2002, it's unlikely that those nations that have traditionally been able to export much of their grain, such as the US and Canada, will be able to continue to meet most of the world's needs. According to the USDA, the global grain harvest this year will be approximately 1.8 billion tons, and world consumption is forecast to be near 1.9 billion tons. This means millions of people will likely go hungry. The drought conditions this year may not abate sufficiently next year to make prospects any brighter in future years, and with global population increasing over 200,000 people per day (about the population of Richmond, VA), and with few new agricultural lands available, catastrophic loss of live could result if dry weather persists in the world's major agricultural areas for several consecutive years.

It's not all that unusual that droughts have occurred this year in areas not too far removed from where flooding has been prevalent, and it's not uncommon for droughts and floods to happen on multiple continents in the same year. This has happened in the past with or without El Nino or La Nina or the world-wide warming of the past several decades. If our climate warms up even more as predicted in future decades, it's not really known whether or not this will negatively or positively affect the global distribution and supply of water. But one thing nearly for sure is that there will be a lot more people on the old Earth in the coming years, and Mother Nature isn't likely to grant us anymore water.

For information about the Earth's fresh water see the National Geographic Magazine for September 2002. For information about drought in the Washington DC area see the Washington Post article in the Outlook section for Sunday, September 1, 2002 entitled "Dry, Dry, Again," and the Science Question of the Week for September 23, 1999 and April 25, 2002.