ESS Professor Explains the Environmental Impacts of NY’s Drought on Fox Weather

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Science Michael Finewood, PhD, appeared on Fox Weather to discuss the environmental implications of New York’s drought.

On what we can expect going forward, he said, “We’re not really anticipating a lot of rain, so we’re still going to be dealing with these drought conditions probably at least for the near future. As you pointed out, it’s a historic drought right now. October was the driest month that we have on record I think since we’ve been taking records since the late 1800s. New York has declared a drought watch and New Jersey a drought warning. So, I think we should anticipate that these conditions will be hanging on for a little bit longer.”

When asked about the potential of future weather changes reversing the effects of the drought, he replied:

“Even if we have some rain, we are probably seven to ten inches behind where we should be at this point, so even just a little bit of rain in the coming future is probably not going to be enough to pull us out of this. Some of our reservoirs are at 50% capacity; our ground water levels are really low and they are continuing to drop. I don’t think it’s going be something like we are going to have a [rain] event and then be out of this drought. We should be anticipating, even with some wet weather events, that we will continue to be in this drought.”

He also spoke on the relation of climate change to this event.

“I’d have to be remiss if I didn’t make this connection to climate change. With higher temperatures along with increasingly extreme weather events like this drought, we should expect that, while in the past, they were much more rare, we should expect now that they are going to be much more frequent, happening much more regularly, in a way creating a new normal for us. So, even while we can look at the historic record, to try to make some judgment on what we can expect coming, there’s a lot of uncertainty because of the impacts of climate change.”