Drought Deepens Across Texoma in Latest Federal Monitor Update

Drought deepened again across the North Texas and southern Oklahoma country that takes in Texoma, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor map released Sept. 17. The map placed much of northern Texas and western and southern Oklahoma in the two most severe categories on its scale, extreme and exceptional, and reported widespread deterioration across the South.

That map covered conditions through Sept. 15 and was still the most recent one posted as of Sept. 18. Its regional finding does not assign a single drought category to all of Cooke County.

The Monitor's Sept. 8 assessment set out what was driving the slide: temperatures running roughly five to 15 degrees above normal across western and northern Texas and much of Oklahoma, with rainfall deficits widening. That assessment reported soil moisture and streamflow declining across the region, and agricultural drought impacts it described as widespread.

How long it holds is a separate question from what the map shows. The Drought Monitor describes itself as an assessment of recent conditions rather than a forecast. NOAA's September seasonal assessment anticipated hot, dry weather over the southern Plains into at least late September, then drought improvement or removal later in the year as El Niño raises late-autumn rainfall.

USDA's May 5 drought-disaster designation list named Cooke, Grayson and Montague counties as contiguous counties, an administrative status separate from a county's Drought Monitor severity rating. Under USDA's current Livestock Forage Disaster Program guidance, eligible producers may qualify for a two-month payment when severe drought, the D2 category, holds for seven of eight consecutive weeks.

The National Weather Service office serving North and Central Texas said in its September update that prolonged heat and dryness had erased much of the improvement from an exceptionally wet late spring and early summer. Set its late-June map beside its early-September one, the office said, and drought covers nearly all of the 46 counties it forecasts for. The Weather Service counted a dry spell at DFW through Sept. 5 that tied the seventh longest in its records, and Waco had recently gone about six weeks without measurable rain.

NOAA reported no measurable rain in Dallas between July 15 and Sept. 15, a stretch that normally brings more than four and a half inches. Oklahoma City had taken less than a third of an inch since July 18, against roughly seven inches normally expected. Across most locations from central and western Texas through Oklahoma and on into Arkansas and southwestern Missouri, NOAA's September assessment found conditions had fallen two or three Drought Monitor categories in four weeks. The federal drought dashboard put about four-fifths of Texas in moderate or worse drought on Sept. 18.

This has not been one unbroken slide. NOAA's May 19 update traced the agricultural drought in Oklahoma and northern Texas back to August 2025, described intensification through winter and early spring, then documented rainfall relief across the eastern Southern Plains. The earlier phase came due at harvest. About seven in ten acres of Texas winter wheat were abandoned and nearly half of Oklahoma's, NOAA reported, with the regional production shortfall topping $1 billion.

Drought was not worsening everywhere. The same weekly map documented rain-driven improvement in eastern Kansas, eastern Nebraska, eastern South Dakota and parts of the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies.