Is the Dust bowl a drought?

Answer 1

NO! that's why it's called the dust bowl, because all there was....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................was DUST!

Answer 2

The Dust Bowl in the U.S. was the result of severe drought exacerbated by unwise land use in the South Plains area. Vast areas of naturally occurring drought-resistant grasses had been plowed under to make farmland. When the drought hit, unprotected soil simply blew away. Impoverished farmers were forced to seek employment elsewhere. In response to the disaster, the Federal Government created National Grasslands to reestablish and protect native plant cover to prevent a disaster on such a massive scale from happening again.

Answer 3

Answer 1: What caused the "dust bowl" of the 1930s had less to do with the amount of rain that fell, and far more to do with farming methods of the previous decade, and what said methods did to the soil which made it so that there ended-up being so many dust storms when drought conditions set in.

The great, flat, western prairies of the US and Canada have always been semi-arid, meaning that 20 inches or less of rain per year tends to fall on them. Such annual rainfall amounts, though, are only averages, over time; and so there are some years where much more than 20 inches fall, and some where where much less than 20 inches fall. And every few years a drought sets in where virtually no rain falls. That has always been the way it is in the wester prairie; it's the way things normallyare there.

In terms of weather, nothing really very different from normal happened during the so-called "dust bowl" period of the 1930s. In terms of weather, all that really happened during the dust bowl was one of the normal, periodic, cyclical prarie drought periods. Nothing unusual.

However, because of the way the land was farmed in the 1920s and the very early 1930s, the land's ability to withstand a normal period of drought, without great dust storms occuring, was severely compromised.

During that period of the 1920s and very early 1930s, there happened to be one of the normal periods of higher-than-average rainfall; and at that time, also, new and better farming equipment (motorized tractors, plows, discs, combines, etc.) became available to farmers so that they could be more efficient, and farm even more land than they had been able to farm before, using horse-drawn farm equipment.

The higher-than-average rainfall caused farmers to become overconfident in the land's ability to be farmed, over time; and the new farming equipment allowed them to deep-plow more new topsoil than ever before, thereby destroying vast amounts of the virgin grasses which naturally covered said topsoil. The root systems of such grasses held moisture, and also helped to hold the topsoil in place even during normal periodic drought conditions, and also during the huge wind storms that were commonplace on the prairie, regardless of rainfall amounts.

The farmers also didn't know that farming in such semi-arid places required of them that they rotate their crops and allow their fields to occasionally be fallow a bit more often than farmers do in places where more rain could be counted on every single year (like in most of the midwest). They also didn't realize that they needed to plant cover crops whose roots would hold the soil in place like the grasses had previously done; or that they shouldn't cut down all the trees which could help to block winds. By the mid-1930s, more land which had previously been covered by the aforementioned virgin greasses has lying bare, deeply plowed, with no cover crops to hold the soil in place during winds.

So, then, at that time, along came a normal cyclical period of drought where virtually no rain fell in some places, and 15% to 20% less-than-normal rain fell in others. Since only around 10 to 20 inches of rain fell, on average, throughout the semi-arid great western prairies back then, a decrease of 15% to 20% during prolongued drought conditions is a lot: reducing the average, each year by only the seemingly small amount of only about 1 or 4 inches of rain annually; but reducing the accumulated amount, over time, by 10 to 40 inches over a decade. The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that the actual deficit over the decade of the 1930s was closer to 50 to 60 inches.

That, then, is the answer to the question: The most rain they got during the dust bowl was pretty much none in someplaces on the great western prairies; and between none and no more than around 80% to 85% of normal amounts in the rest; translating to maybe zero to 5 annual inches of rain in some places, to not more than 10 to 15 inches in others... for a whole decade!

With so little (or even, in some places, almost literally no) rain, the soil dried-up; and with no root systems from native virgin grasses -- or even cover crops -- to hold either moisture, or the dirt in place, the normal wind storms could easily kick-up more dust than ever before in the history of the prairies! Because there was just so, so, so much of this kind of uncovered and bone-dry soil, the normal prairie wind storms were able to pick-up vast amounts of dust and blow them across the prairies and even further eastward, across the midwest and even all the way over to the Atlantic Ocean.

The skies were literally blackened with dust; and some more than 100 million acres of land were affected inthe Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and in parts of Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas.

So, then, the answer to the question is that the most rain they got during the dust bowl was pretty much none to no more than 10 to 15 inches (from 0% to no more than 80% to 85% of normal), depending on where on the great western plains one is talking about, for an entire decade, thereby causing unbelievably dry conditions in an already semi-arid (fairly dry) place...

...however, because of the way the farmers had so damaged the natural landscape during the previous decade with their new and more efficient tractors, plows, discs and combines; and because they weren't using crop rotation, fallowing, cover crops and tree-planting methods to keep the land from turning to dust during drought periods, and then picked-up and carried away by normal prairie wind storms, the factors uniquely combined to create the largest natural disaster in the US in over 350 years, at that point.

Lack of rainfall, then, wasn't really the problem. The great western prairies experienced that every few years as part of the normal routine of things there.

The real problem was that,

• more efficient farming (which allowed farmers to farm more land); combined with,
  
  
• farmers ignorant of how to farm in semi-arid places (and so they didn't rotate crops and periodically fallow land, or plant cover crops and trees), and,
  
  
• their being bolstered and becoming over-confident by a decade or more of above-average rainfall prior to the 1930s; plus,
  
  
• the farmers' using their new equipment to more efficiently destroy larger amouns of the normal ground cover of natural virgin grasses, and their root systems *which both held moisture, and held the soil in place),

all combined so that when the normal period of drought came, the land dried-up and turned to dust which, in turn, was picked-up by the normal prairie wind storms and was blown across the prairies, and the midwest and eastern United States, all the way to the Atlantic ocean, causing skies that were sometimes so full of dust that the sun couldn't peek through.

Rainfall -- or lack of it -- played a surprisingly small role; and the drought conditions at the time were, in fact, quite normal.