KU researchers say it's still too early to panic about drought conditions

LAWRENCE -- Kevin Price knows this year's drought has been difficult for farmers, but he remains optimistic.

"Kansas is so unpredictable that we can look like we're on the ropes right now but we could get two weeks of solid rain and be back in business," said Price, associate director of the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program at the University of Kansas.

Price, who also is a professor of geography, leads a team of KU researchers who combine remote sensing technology, weather maps and highly detailed satellite imagery to chart vegetation patterns across the state and beyond. By detecting the amount of chlorophyll in plants that reflects light back to the satellites, they are able to assess vegetation conditions based on the amount of plant "greenness" they see.

They issue the GreenReport, a set of four color-coded maps that detail vegetation conditions in areas as small as 250 acres. The report can compare current conditions with maps of the same area from the previous week, the same time a year ago or even an 11-year average.

This time of year is always tricky for researchers because snow reflects light into the remote sensor and covers the green vegetation. They won't have a definitive answer on the effects the drought has had on vegetation until the end of March, at the earliest.

Still, they can get some sense of the drought's effects by looking at the vegetation patterns they charted at the end of last fall's growing season.

"It's a general rule that the plants that grow this spring are highly dependent on the moisture they received during the fall," Price said. "When you don't have enough rain during the fall season, plants are weakened by not having sufficient moisture needed to produce and store carbohydrates in their roots, so the next season when they start growing again it has a severe effect on them."

The fall greenness levels were particularly low for counties in the northwest corner of the state, Price said, but he'll wait until the spring growing season starts before sounding any alarms.

"It's just too early," he said. "Greenness levels are the key indicator for drought. We're not looking at rainfall -- we're looking at how the vegetation is responding to the environmental conditions affecting their growth."

Part of the reason Price refuses to write off the entire upcoming growing season is that some crops, particularly wheat, still are capable of rebounding.

"Wheat is resilient," he said. "We will not know if there is going to be a poor wheat yield until much later in the spring, even though it started off slow because of a lack of moisture in the fall. It can rebound quickly in the spring if we get sufficient moisture."

Of course, Price said, researchers can't predict rain, but they can determine whether the land conditions are favorable enough to make the most of rain.

"All we can tell you is, of the rain that fell, was it just enough to wet the top of the ground and dry off real quickly or was it actually soaked into the ground in a way that it can be utilized by the plants for growth and the production of green plant tissue," he said.

According to preliminary reports, Price said, it looks as though we should have a normal level of precipitation this spring.

Although this marks the second year in a row with drought conditions, Price said two years are not enough to call it a trend. In fact, things could change overnight.

"It depends on what the moisture does from this point on," he said. "In Kansas, anything is possible when it comes to the weather."