Drought now covers 88 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s update released Thursday, Sept. 24, leaving just 12 counties statewide drought-free. Extreme Drought, the second-worst category the monitor tracks, expanded from eight counties to 10 as Brunswick and Greene counties crossed that threshold for the first time this year. Severe Drought climbed from 23 counties to 25 over the same week, concentrated in the northern Piedmont and eastern parts of the state.
Brunswick and Greene tip into Extreme Drought
The Drought Monitor ranks conditions on a five-step scale, from D0 (Abnormally Dry) through D1 (Moderate), D2 (Severe) and D3 (Extreme) up to D4 (Exceptional), the category reserved for the rarest and most damaging droughts. North Carolina had no counties officially rated D4 as of Sept. 24, but the state’s worst-off counties in the northern Piedmont were already brushing up against that threshold weeks earlier in the season.
The Sept. 24 update put the full county breakdown at 10 counties in Extreme Drought (D3), 25 in Severe Drought (D2), 36 in Moderate Drought (D1) and 17 rated Abnormally Dry (D0), a total of 88 counties touched by some level of dryness. Brunswick and Greene joined eight counties already sitting in Extreme Drought, a category the monitor reserves for conditions serious enough to cause widespread crop and pasture losses and to trigger water shortages and restrictions.
In the state’s High Country, conditions held roughly steady, according to the Sept. 24 report. Watauga, Ashe, Alleghany and Wilkes counties remained in Moderate Drought, while Avery and Caldwell stayed Abnormally Dry, a pocket of relative stability inside a statewide trend that has otherwise been worsening for weeks.
A year-long drought that keeps finding new counties
North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality has tracked the slide for months. Its Sept. 4 report already listed Guilford, Rockingham, Caswell, Person and Granville counties in the state’s two worst categories. Klaus Albertin, chair of the North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council, said at the time that the forecast called for continued hot and dry conditions over the following week and that the council expected the drought to worsen again.
It did. By Sept. 17, parts of Guilford and Rockingham had reached Exceptional Drought, the monitor’s worst rating, and dry conditions had spread into the Coastal Plain around Wilson, Wayne and Duplin counties and into western counties including Cherokee, Haywood and Swain. Barrett Smith, a Drought Management Advisory Council member and senior service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Raleigh, offered a rare note of possible relief, saying the weather pattern was “shifting toward a more active and moisture-rich setup through the end of September and into early October.”
Statewide conditions had not caught up to that forecast by Sept. 24. Two more counties still slid backward into Extreme Drought instead of improving, and the Severe Drought count grew by two as well, suggesting any wetter pattern Smith described was arriving too slowly, or too unevenly, to reverse the week’s numbers before the map was drawn.
Eighty-eight counties, one weekly map, and a narrow drought-free strip
The U.S. Drought Monitor, a joint product of the National Drought Mitigation Center, NOAA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, updates its map every Thursday. The Sept. 24 release, with data valid as of 8 a.m. Sept. 22, is the most current snapshot available and stays in effect until the next map replaces it on Oct. 1, well after this report publishes.
Just 12 counties, mostly along the western edge of the state and scattered pockets elsewhere, remain entirely free of drought designation. The North Carolina Drought Management Advisory Council, the state body that reviews the Drought Monitor data alongside stream flow, groundwater and soil moisture readings each week, has met regularly through the year to weigh whether conditions justify formal water-use restrictions in the hardest-hit counties.
Farmers in the newly downgraded counties face the most immediate exposure. Extreme Drought conditions typically mean significant crop and pasture losses, mandatory water restrictions in some municipal systems, and rising wildfire risk in the driest soils — consequences that fall hardest on the Piedmont and eastern counties where this week’s category shifts concentrated, and on the row-crop and livestock operations that depend on late-season rain to finish out the growing year.
Whether the 88-county figure grows again next week depends largely on whether the wetter pattern Smith flagged actually arrives, and how much rain the Piedmont and eastern counties bordering the Exceptional Drought zone can pick up before the Oct. 1 map is drawn. Guilford and Rockingham counties, already in that worst category as of mid-September, will be the first places the next map either confirms as still deteriorating or shows some relief finally reaching.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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