central texas drought

when i moved to austin from boston last fall, i knew i was making a big change in a lot of ways, including climate-wise. boston varies wildly, with icy winters, wet, sloppy springtime, hot, buggy summers, and autumns marked by red-gold leaves and crisp, dry air.
austin, i knew, would be much hotter. i wasn’t likely to see more than the faintest traces of snow, but it’d probably be pretty pleasant biking all winter long. summers – stretching from may to almost october – would be hot, hot, hot, starting in the 80s and climbing the thermostat to rest around 100 degrees in august. winter coats would be a thing of the past, but so would frozen nights huddled in a drafty apartment. air conditioning would become a life-saver, and evenings would be cooler, and would find me on my bicycle in austin’s quiet nighttime streets.
what i didn’t realize was that i was moving to a part of the country that had been experiencing drought conditions for the past year. in fact, austin itself has been experiencing an extreme to exceptional (the two worst drought categories) drought since the day i rolled in to town last august. it shows – june normally has an average high temperature of 91, but it’s been hitting 96-100 almost every day this month. normally, we’d get almost 4 inches of rain in June, but we’ve barely hit 6/10″ so far. The Austin American-Statesman has an interesting interactive drought map.

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