You know it's dry when Sunbelt retirees start watering the cactus.
When mountain lions emerge from the pinion scrub of the Sonora Desert to lap greedily from chlorinated swimming pools.
When a wall of wildfire 10 miles wide blackens a swath of Nebraska prairie as big as Rhode Island, stampeding cattle and forcing the midnight evacuation of a ranching town.
When Roman Catholic priests and Baptist preachers hold separate prayer vigils in withered cotton fields and cracked, sage-choked reservoir basins, raising their arms to beseech the same clear blue heavens for rain.
And this was supposed to be an easy year.
After all, the record El Nino of 1998 is long gone. However, scientists say 1999 is shaping up to be another year of unpredictable, destructive, weather.
Portions of the South and Midwest slowly are being strangled by a spotty, but tenacious, drought that has been spreading for several months.
In Texas, Gov. George W. Bush declared a state of emergency in 170 of the state's 254 counties.
Not to be outdone, his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, declared his own drought emergency April 13 and ordered the National Guard to help combat red-alert wildfire conditions for the second consecutive year.
No one is certain how much worse it will get.
It's been so dry that recent blizzards and thunderstorms have not been enough to slake the drought in many areas. Long-range forecasts by several federal agencies agree dryness could persist throughout the Sunbelt and portions of the Midwest into the summer.
"When we get into a drought, we don't know how long it will last," said climatologist Kelly Redmond of the Desert Research Institute of Reno, Nev. "You can't predict something well if you don't know why it happens."
Part of the problem is the difficulty of analyzing what isn't happening in the atmosphere.
Drought is the absence of storms, a lack of rainfall. A standard definition is a 30 percent drop in precipitation for three consecutive weeks.
Studies of climate trends spanning the past 10 centuries indicate that immediately following El Nino episodes, North America suffered cataclysmic droughts that would make the Dust Bowl look lush.
We're overdue, scientists warn. And impacts could be worsened by record high temperatures in the 1990s some believe are the result of global warming caused by human activities.
This year, climate experts blame conditions on the opposite of El Nino - La Nina.
Both phenomena in the Pacific conspire with the atmosphere to disrupt storm patterns around the globe.
But La Nina is generated by cold water rather than warm, and it occurs less frequently and predictably.
In 1997-98, El Nino nearly submerged southern California in storms and mudslides, while delivering copious rains to Arizona that nourished the best wildflower bloom in a generation. At the same time, Texas and Florida sizzled with disastrous results.
When the record El Nino finally collapsed, the climate pendulum swung into a cold-water La Nina.
Now the southern states generally are drier than normal, especially Arizona and New Mexico - no wildflowers this year.
But, to forecasters' consternation, Texas and Florida remain dangerously dry again.
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