Current Impacts
To see or report current drought impacts, please visit the Drought Impacts Toolkit, where you can find impacts from media in the Drought Impact Reporter and from citizen scientists and other volunteer observers under Condition Monitoring Observations.
Historic Impacts
No two states have the same experience during a drought. Below are examples of some of the impacts experienced in Virginia in the past. The process for developing this example impact table is described in Noel, M., Bathke, D., Fuchs, B., Gutzmer, D., Haigh, T., Hayes, M., Poděbradská, M., Shield, C., Smith, K. and Svoboda, M., 2020. Linking drought impacts to drought severity at the state level. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 101(8), pp.E1312-E1321. doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0067.1. To view a more complete record, and to filter impacts by drought severity, sector and season, check out the interactive State Impacts Tool.
Category | Examples of historically observed impacts |
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D1 | Corn yield is low; soybean, cotton, hay and pastures are stressed |
Fire danger increases; burn bans begin |
Voluntary water restrictions are requested; river water levels are lower; streams are dry |
Wildlife eat crops |
D2 | Fire frequency increases |
Hay and pasture supply is low; cattle are weaned early; producers are feeding livestock supplemental hay and baling corn for feed |
Mandatory water restrictions are implemented; reservoir levels are low; water table is dropping |
D3 | Cattle are sold; hay is extremely scarce |
Lakes are nearly dry |