WEATHER: Driest Fall

Last week the weather news was askew:

¶ With phenomenally low water in the Mississippi, salt water from the Gulf of Mexico backed no miles up to New Orleans, where fishermen caught sea trout and pompano, and people's mouths puckered at the brackish water in city mains.

¶ "Green winter, many deaths," sages quoted in Minnesota. No snow to speak of had fallen, and Minnesotans still watered their lawns after one of the driest Novembers in memory.

¶ Low river stages in New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, TVA's area in the South cut down the hydroelectric power supply, sent steam-plant output soaring. TVA with all its dams, had to turn on fuel burning plants which it took over from Commonwealth & Southern last summer.

The why of all this the U. S. Weather Bureau explained last week. The U. S. in 1939 had two "extended droughts," one in the spring and an even worse one in the fall. (A fairly rainy summer saved most 1939 crops.) Reported was "the driest fall of record," a severe case of spotted drought (see p. 39) affecting 97,000,000 U. S. acres.