Portions of North Texas are now three feet (one meter) behind on precipitation for the past 24 months.  The drought in this area is critical, as is the fire danger, and yet El Paso and other portions of West Texas continue suffering devastating floods at the hands of the monsoonal flow.  This state is really getting its butt kicked by the weather.

Regrettably, even significant thunderstorms are nothing more than light bandages on a gaping wound.  As many climatologists and meteorologists have made clear, it will take a tropical system — a hurricane if we’re lucky — to really break the drought, and only then if it brings to North Texas drenching rainfall.  We must honestly hope for dangerous flooding in order to recover even partially.  Area lakes are suffering as closures become more common, and some are nearing 20 foot (6 meter) deficits.  Fresh water is a growing concern.  Long term forecasts show continuing lack of appreciable precipitation and higher than normal temperatures.  To abuse a cliché even though I loathe hearing them, for us, there’s no hope in sight.

Here’s a brief video of a thunderstorm as it moved through a wee bit earlier today.  With a record setting heat wave this year and the last several weeks nothing less than 80°F (27°C) at night and well over 100°F (38°C) during the day, and that representing just a portion of the awful heat we’ve endured since April, the cool refresh of a thunderstorm in the middle of the afternoon is a welcome respite.  We’ll take more, please.  A lot more.  We are expecting torrential downpours overnight.  Again, we’ll take as much as we can get.

Don’t expect much from this.  It’s simple.  With thunder rolling in the background, a steady rain falls on the canvas of the bushes that surround my patio.  I can’t make clear how exciting that visual is for those of us living in this hell.

An entertaining side effect of this is how these brief showers cause some of the birdseed to take root and grow.  What sprouts doesn’t last long.  Within a week, the little plants wither and die under the onslaught of the burning sun and lack of water.

[let me say yet again how degraded the WMV file appears to be compared to the MOV and AVI formats; yes, the AVI file is the original (raw) data, so it should be better than the other two, but so much of the clarity, color, and sound depth is lost in the WMV file compared to the other two; not only does its color seem washed out, but the thunder is almost laughable compared to the others; it’s really a pitiful comparison that one would hope embarrasses Microsoft, yet it does not]