A statewide drought that has affected Martha’s Vineyard since last summer was declared at an end this month by the Massachusetts Drought Management Task Force.
“Drought conditions have ended for now,” Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) Director Samantha Phillips said in a statement. In addition to state and federal officials, the task force also includes public health and safety professionals.
In July and August, the task force declared the entire state at level two for significant drought, according to drought status maps on the mass.gov website.
The cooperative weather station in Edgartown, which reports its observations to the National Weather Service and the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University, recorded a combined total of just two inches of rain for the two-month period: .51 inch in July and 1.49 inches in August.
After September, when the Edgartown weather station recorded 1.78 inches, the state kept Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod and Nantucket at level two while the rest of southeastern Massachusetts, including the Charles River basin, were declared areas of critical drought at level three.
The north and west areas of the state also remained at level two in September with the exception of the Miller River basin, in north-central Massachusetts, which was moved to level three.
October brought more rain to the Vineyard, with the cooperative weather station recording 4.39 inches — more than all the rain that fell during the previous three months combined, and the highest total since May’s 4.6 inches. The state task force responded by lowering the Island, and Nantucket, to level one for mild drought.
The Cape and much of southeastern Massachusetts remained at level two in October, as did the Nashua River basin near the New Hampshire border, while the rest of the state joined the Islands at level one status.
By the end of November, when the Vineyard weather station saw 3.2 inches of rain, the entire state was declared at level one.
A stormier December brought 8.2 inches of rain to the Vineyard, with statewide totals of 5.67 inches of rain plus 13 inches of snow leading the task force to classify all of Massachusetts drought-free this month.
In all of 2020, the Island received 41.5 inches of rain, compared to 58.6 inches in 2019, according to the weather station data, which give the Vineyard’s average rainfall as 46.94 inches. Snowfall in 2020 totaled 6.2 inches to 2019’s 8.2 inches.
Last year’s dry months meant more irrigating had to be done at some Island farms, but Simon Athearn of Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown said the extra work paid off.
“We had to put more effort into each crop by irrigating so often, but the yields were phenomenal across the farm this year,” Mr. Athearn told the Gazette Monday. “We broke production records on many to most crops.”
Others, notably pumpkins and hay that grew in less well-irrigated fields, did not fare so well, he said. A below-average pumpkin harvest was sold out before Halloween, and the farm needed to purchase hay for its livestock.
Mr. Athearn added that farm workers did not need to hand-prime the irrigation systems with more pumps of the lever than in other years, suggesting that the water table beneath the fields had not receded.
While Massachusetts may no longer be officially drought-stricken, Cornell University’s Northeast Regional Climate Center warned last week of “pockets of moderate drought persisting in northern New York, parts of Vermont and western New Hampshire and areas of abnormal dryness lingering in those three states as well as in Maine.”
Four per cent of the Northeast remains in a moderate drought and 17 per cent of the region is abnormally dry, according to the center’s website.
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