The U.S. Drought Monitor's weekly update, released April 15, held sixty-one percent of the Lower 48 in moderate-to-exceptional drought — the same reading the paper carried as its Saturday account of the worst American drought since the Dust Bowl. [1] The March Palmer Drought Severity Index value from the National Centers for Environmental Information, posted April 8, remains the highest March reading since 1895, when the series began. [2] Earth Day is Wednesday. The two calendar days between Sunday's number and Tuesday's federal observance are the runway the administration has to respond to the data it repealed the endangerment finding over in February. [3]

The hold is the story. A week-over-week change of zero on a metric that moved up 1.6 percentage points the previous week and 11.3 since mid-March is not relief. It is pause inside a trajectory. [1] The Drought Monitor's severe-to-exceptional bands — the D2 through D4 categories that translate directly into reservoir restrictions, rangeland loss, and fire-weather posture — covered more than a third of the country as of April 7, a jump of five percentage points in seven days. [4] Yale Climate Connections, reading the same NOAA data the paper cited Saturday, noted that only twelve other weeks in the Drought Monitor's twenty-six-year history have shown this extent of national dryness. [4]

The Palmer reading is the comparison that matters. The index has disadvantages its authors acknowledged in 1965 — it weights soil moisture heavily, it uses a conservative method for estimating how much water the air will pull from plants. Those disadvantages push the number toward understatement, not overstatement. [2] The fact that the conservative instrument — not the flash-drought indices that climate scientists prefer for a warming world — has reached its modern extreme is the signal. Six states experienced their worst March drought on record. Twenty-two others experienced a top-ten March on record. Only Michigan ran above average. [4]

What arrives Tuesday is a question of observance, not measurement. The White House's 2025 Earth Day statement was that "Trump follows science." The February 2026 repeal of the EPA's endangerment finding — the 2009 ruling that gave the agency the legal authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — removed the federal regulator's primary tool for acting on the Palmer reading. [3] The number will be the same on Wednesday. The framework for responding to it will not be.

Climate Prediction Center outlooks through July show continued drought expansion across the Southern Plains and Southwest, with improvement limited to the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Ohio Valley. [5] The Palmer Index has one more monthly release before the summer fire season; the Drought Monitor will post a new weekly reading Thursday. Earth Day falls between them.

-- DARA OSEI, London