Climate Central: Early this week, when Colorado State Climatologist Nolan Doesken toured an area of southeast Colorado hit hardest by the drought of 2012, he was greeted with a vast expanse of parched farmland that had turned into a moonscape with almost no vegetation.
That area along the Arkansas River hadn't seen much rainfall in nearly three years, a long dry spell broken recently by a series of torrential downpours, leaving the moonscape even more surreal.
"Some of that moonscape was standing water from...