http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83650&src=eoa-iotd

As of May 6, 2014, half of the United States was experiencing some level of drought. Nearly 15 percent of the nation was gripped by extreme to exceptional drought. For the Plains and the Southwest, it’s a pattern that has been persistent for much of the past several years.

The map above was developed by the U.S. National Drought Monitor, a partnership of U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It depicts areas of drought in progressive shades of orange to red. It is based on measurements of climate, soil, and water conditions from more than 350 federal, state, and local observers around the country. (NASA also provides experimental measurements and models to the drought monitoring effort.)

In a May 6 summary, Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center wrote of the Plains States:

Kansas continues to set the edge…