The U.S. Drought Monitor added Extreme Drought, its D3 category, to the North Woods of Maine in the update released on Nov. 5, with data valid as of Nov. 3. The map’s authors, Brad Pugh of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center and Curtis Riganti of the National Drought Mitigation Center, tied the upgrade to 28-day streamflows in the lowest 5th percentile. Dry conditions also expanded across the Lower to Middle Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, the Mid-Atlantic and the rest of New England.
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The picture was not uniformly dry. Across the southwest quarter of the country a very wet fall kept erasing short-term drought, and the same weekly summary reported improvement from the Southwest and Great Basin through Texas, the Great Plains and the Upper Mississippi Valley to Florida. Alaska and Hawaii were drought-free. The split between a soaked West and a thirsty East is what makes the Maine change stand out on the national map.
Streamflow records behind the D3 upgrade in northern Maine
In the national summary for the Nov. 3 map, the authors wrote that D3 was added in the North Woods “because 28-day streamflows are in the lowest 5th percentile,” partly due to incomplete recovery from the 2025 drought. A one-category degradation also reached parts of northwestern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, the Finger Lakes region of New York and New England more broadly, while coverage held steady in Delaware, Maryland, southern New Jersey and West Virginia.
Local records show how thin the margin had become. A drought information statement from the National Weather Service office in Caribou, issued on Oct. 22, described a water resources drought and listed preliminary low-flow records: the St. John River at Nine Mile ran at its second-lowest level since 1950, the Mattawamkeag River its second lowest since 1934, and the Aroostook River at Masardis its second lowest since 1957. Flows were expected to keep falling without rain.
Year-to-date rainfall was lagging too. Houlton had received 71.1 percent of normal precipitation, the fifth-driest start on record there, and Bangor stood at 76 percent of normal. Those deficits stack on top of 2025, which is why a few dry autumn weeks pushed gauges to the bottom of their ranges so quickly.
From a coastal patch of D3 to a larger share of the state
The Caribou statement placed Extreme Drought only in coastal Hancock County, from Mount Desert Island to Castine, covering 4.64 percent of Maine as of the map then in force. The Maine page on Drought.gov, which reflects the Nov. 3 map, now lists 8.5 percent of the state in D3, 51.5 percent in D2 and 39.9 percent in D1. Every part of Maine, 100 percent of its area, is in drought, and about 1.3 million residents live in affected areas.
The monitor itself is a partnership among the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NOAA and NASA, according to its About page. The monitor’s current map page showed the map released on Thursday, Nov. 5, with data valid at 7 a.m. EST on Nov. 3, so the North Woods upgrade describes streamflow and rainfall through Nov. 3 rather than anything that fell afterward.
Mississippi Valley deficits and the mid-Atlantic spread
The fastest deterioration in the South was in the Lower Mississippi Valley, where the summary describes rapidly intensifying drought, 60-day rainfall deficits above 4 inches and temperatures 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal since early September. Mississippi reported poor to very poor pastures and dry farm ponds, and D2 to D4 coverage in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee was judged consistent with soil moisture and SPEI data.
Not everything there worsened. Southwestern Tennessee and northern Mississippi improved by one category, while northeastern Tennessee slipped by one. The remnants of Hurricane Vance, a Pacific storm, soaked western and central Texas and moved those areas up a category.
Southwest relief and the November outlook
The wet side of the map owed much to a low-pressure system over Halloween weekend. Over 60 days, precipitation ran 200 to 400 percent or more of normal across southern California, southern Nevada and most of Arizona and Utah, and a one-category improvement stretched from Arizona north through Nevada, Utah and southeastern Idaho. In the authors’ words, “short-term drought has ended for the Southwest and Great Basin,” though long-term drought persists in parts of those areas.
The summary’s own outlook called for a drier, more typical fall pattern from Nov. 5 to Nov. 9, with a cold front bringing more than an inch of rain from the coastal Mid-Atlantic to southeastern New England, and a possible atmospheric river on the West Coast from mid-November. Elsewhere the summary reported small improvements in Montana, steady conditions in the Pacific Northwest and much of California, and an improvement across the western third of Oklahoma, with more changes possible there the following week. Whether any of that rain reaches the North Woods will help decide whether the next map adds more D3 or holds it, since the Caribou statement had warned that flows would keep dropping without rainfall.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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