Kansas Geological Survey Kansas Droughts: Climatic Trends Over 1,000 Years

Environmentally and economically, drought is one of the most costly natural disasters in North America. Yet it rarely gets the same public attention that other, more spectacular, natural disasters receive. While tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes leave behind well-defined swaths of devastation in relatively short order, droughts whittle away at water quality and quantity, topsoil, crop yields, and other natural and socioeconomic resources over months and years, even decades. In any given year, drought conditions of some degree are occurring somewhere in North America. For 1988—midway through a three-year drought in the central and eastern United States—the estimate of national drought damage was a recor