With Friday's rain, it's easy to forget that Maine is in a drought. But the latest report from the U.S. Drought monitor shows that 100% of the state is still in moderate, severe or extreme drought conditions.
At the final Maine Drought Task Force meeting of the year on Friday, state officials, stakeholders and researchers reported a mixed bag of updates.
Areas of extreme drought had stretched across the state in November; now, they've receded to a smaller area down Maine's southern coast.
Watershed levels are still much lower than they should be heading into wintertime, said officials, and rivers and wells are running low across the state — over 540 households currently have dry wells, up 42 since last month.
Though Friday's storm may have a small but positive impact in southern Maine, the ground in northern Maine is already frozen, which means the rain won't be able to replenish groundwater.
"Getting an inch of rain one day in December is not going to get us back even to where we should be," said Nick Stasulis of the U.S. Geological Survey.
"If we look back to the beginning of the summer, I think some parts of the state were a foot of rain below normal. In a part of the state that might only get 40 or 50 inches of rain a year, that is very significant," he said.
And even if Maine does get a lot of snow this winter, officials say an above average snowpack still won't move the needle.
"Wintertime rains aren't always beneficial for groundwater conditions, especially because we can't guarantee that that water is going to make its way down into the aquifer if the ground's frozen," said Stasulis, who is also par of Maine's Drought Task Force.
Stasulis said Maine was in the same position going into winter last year, and what we're now starting to see is a multiyear drought.
