Missouri is almost completely in drought and Iowa is almost drought-free. The top and bottom of the Mississippi River has had high streamflows this month, but about a quarter of gauges throughout the basin show below-normal flow.
That’s according to the new Mississippi River Basin Drought and Water Dashboard.
Dozens of metrics are used to determine drought and that can make it complicated to measure and track. But it’s a bit easier now thanks to the new government dashboard, which tracks drought across the Mississippi River Basin.
“Drought doesn't obey county or state boundary lines,” said Kelsey Eigsti, who co-led the tool’s development out of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “It crosses regions and so being able to look at that broader regional context is really important for communicating about drought.”
The river is one of the world’s busiest commercial waterways and provides drinking water to more than 50 cities. Two years ago it hit historically low water levels, which caused commercial ships to run aground and lowered the river’s water quality.
That was the impetus for making a dashboard that provides past, present, and predicts future drought conditions across the basin.
Users can view data for the entire basin, zoom into smaller sub-basin regions, view original data sources, download map images with custom boundary lines and otherwise customize the data to communicate the state of drought in the basin.
The dashboard is a multi-agency collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Geological Survey and state and local partners.
The new tool was announced to the public Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative and is online now at www.drought.gov/watersheds/mississippi-river-dashboard.
The data it uses already exists: for example, it has a section of current drought conditions in the basin, which it pulls from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a nationwide tool to assess dry conditions. But the dashboard gathers data from scattered sites in one place for the first time.
“There's a lot of data out there,” said Sean Duffy, executive director of the Big River Coalition, which represents the Mississippi River navigation industry. “We want it more streamlined. We want it where it's easier to understand, so a 12-year-old can understand it and to put it into one website, instead of having to glean it from 10 or more, which often still happens.”
Eigsti said the dashboard is primarily aimed at drought communicators — such as local governments and journalists — but was also created with decision-makers in mind. A separate tab on the website has educational information on the impacts of drought.
Missouri State Climatologist Zack Leasor said the new dashboard makes his job of drought assessment and communication easier.
“This is the entire hydrologic cycle,” he said. “You've got precipitation, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, and then lots of hydrologic data as well. So kind of a one-stop shop here.”
Leasor said having access to basin-wide data at his fingertips is useful because how those metrics look in one area can have downstream — and upstream — effects to the rest of the region.
“Impacts don't always align exactly where the drought’s occurring, especially when we talk about economic impacts and large-scale hydrologic impacts,” he said.
Those impacts can be significant.
For example, when water is low, it can degrade the river’s water quality. In the lower Mississippi, low flows can cause saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to run upriver, causing issues for people who depend on it for drinking water.
To mitigate those impacts, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sometimes constructs an underwater barrier to stop saltwater intrusion. That had to be done in 1988, 1999, 2012, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
The barriers, along with low water levels more generally, can slow down barge movement on the river.
Approximately 175 million tons of freight are moved on the upper Mississippi each year, according to the National Park Service.
“The Mississippi River is the primary transportation mechanism for agricultural products from the central United States to the rest of the country, the rest of the world,” said Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon. “When the river is running low, barge traffic is limited or potentially shut down completely, and makes it quite challenging for producers to get their products to market.”
Duffy said low — and high — water events have been happening more frequently. But communicating these trends, which he refers to as increased “climate variability,” to people in the navigation industry can be challenging. He’s hoping the easy-to-use dashboard, which he helped beta test, makes communication easier.
“There are very few people that really look at the water and understand the system and the places where you're exposing your king,” he said. “The channel is king, and everything we do is to try to protect it and keep everything moving.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
