For first time in 17 months, no longer ‘exceptional’ drought in Nebraska

Southeast Nebraska has seen over six times the amount of snowfall compared to this time last year. Because of the track of recent winter storms favoring eastern Nebraska, there’s been more widespread snow across the state through mid-January.

Through January 14th of last year, most of southeast Nebraska had only seen about 1-3″, a far cry from where we are at now. There was a sharp gradient between eastern and western Nebraska, with parts of the Sandhills closing in on 4′ of snow.

We have yet to see an update for the drought monitor from UNL that takes the moisture from BOTH winter storms into account. Updated maps come out each Thursday, so the latest map came out on January 11th and only includes the moisture we saw from round one early last week.

From that round alone, Nebraska no longer has exceptional drought anywhere for the first time in 17 months. The last time Nebraska had no areas of “exceptional” drought was end of July 2022.

That is a one-class improvement, with extreme drought still between Grand Island and Lincoln.

We’ve still got a long way to go, but all of this recent snow is sending us in the right direction. Watch for another map to be released this Thursday, here.

Meteorologist Jessica Blum 
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