The last three months mark the second driest spring on record in the Town of Normal.
State climatologist Trent Ford with the Illinois State Water Survey said, as of Wednesday morning, the town has received 4.3 inches of rain since April 1. Only 1992 was drier, he said.
Bloomington has recorded the fifth driest spring on record.
Ford said longer-term projections show more rain in the forecast, but that's no guarantee.
“On the two-to-four-week outlook, the models have been painting wetter conditions pretty much throughout the last six weeks and they’ve been missing. It doesn’t mean they will miss on July,” Ford said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
Ford said he's encouraged to see more consistent rain chances day-to-day through this weekend, adding the next several weeks will be a critical time for crops to survive what is considered a severe drought.
“We’re right against it now where we do need this rain. We cannot go into a very dry pattern over the next three weeks akin to what we have seen over the (last) three,” Ford said.
Illinois' corn crop is doing worse than the crop farmers grew in 2012, when Illinois suffered one of its worst droughts in decades.
The weekly crop survey from the U.S Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service showed 26% of corn is rated good to excellent, compared with 38% in late June 2012.
Ford said one key difference is the 2012 drought started later in the year and lingered deep into the summer. It's not clear whether that will happen this year.
The severe drought that blankets much of central and northeastern Illinois comes two years after McLean County suffered heavy flooding.
Ford said climate change has generally made Illinois warmer and wetter, but it also has led to wider variability in precipitation.
“These sorts of extremes moving from wet to dry are something that ... we are seeing models project in the future,” said Ford, adding it's too soon to say how much climate change may have impacted the current drought.
