Drought in the Northeastern United States has decreased

As climate change continues to affect the U.S., many regions throughout the country, especially the West, are experiencing more drought.

But over the past century, the Northeast has experienced something different—less frequent and less intense droughts because of increased precipitation, according to a new Dartmouth study.

The findings are published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology.

As Earth gets warmer, there is more energy available to evaporate water from plants and soils. If there isn’t more rainfall to cover that water loss, more drought will occur.

“In the Northeast, we have warming temperatures, which means we lose more water from the surface, but we have also had increasing precipitation,” says lead author Jonathan Winter, an associate professor of geography and director of the Dartmouth Applied Hydroclimatology Group, whose work has explored extreme precipitation changes in the region. “It’s a tug-of-war between how fast precipitation is increasing and how fast evapotranspiration—the loss of water from plants and soils—is increasing.”

The research team assessed changes in monthly drought from 1901 to 2022 across the Northeast—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia—using temperature and precipitation station data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

To examine changes in drought across the region, the team analyzed the intensity, frequency, variance and duration of drought. Using temperature, precipitation, radiation and soil data, they calculated the Palmer Drought Severity Index—a metric used to measure drought.

The researchers compared their results with the U.S. Drought Monitor—a weekly map identifying areas in drought—which is used to determine crop insurance payouts.

They also compared their findings with changes in soil moisture. Given that soil moisture measurements across the region are limited, the team used modeled soil moisture, which blends a climate model with observational data.

The findings show that across all months, drought was 59% less frequent and 19% less intense from 1984 to 2022 compared with 1901 to 1983. Results were similar in the warm season (June–November), when drought has the largest impacts; warm-season drought frequency and intensity decreased by 56% and 16%, respectively.

The results also demonstrate that as of 1984, the Northeast was statistically wetter relative to the earlier period.

Swings between monthly wet and dry events have not changed, demonstrating that the Northeast has not experienced more “weather whiplash,” or alternating floods and droughts.

To determine the potential drivers of reduced drought, the researchers ran their analysis again but fixed temperature at historic levels while allowing precipitation to increase, and vice versa. They found that precipitation increases are responsible for the observed reductions in drought.

“As long as increases in precipitation continue to outpace increases in evapotranspiration, more drought in the Northeast is unlikely,” Winter says. However, climate models vary on whether this trend will continue in the future.

“The Northeast has always had, and will continue to have, droughts,” says co-author Erich Osterberg, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences. “A year ago, over one-third of the Northeast experienced severe or extreme drought, with major impacts on farmers and water supplies.”

“The good news is that these damaging droughts have become less common and less severe due to more rainfall,” Osterberg says. “The bad news is that the higher rainfall has increased the frequency and impacts of severe floods.”

The researchers hope that their findings can help inform climate change adaptation and water management decisions.

Janelle Wargo, Guarini ’25, and Justin Mankin, a professor of geography, also contributed to the study.

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