This striking precipitation map from NOAA (via Jeff Masters) in this cross post from ClimateBites make two points:

1) in 2011, most of the U.S. suffered either extreme drought or extreme precipitation, breaking many records.

2) Artful use of color can breathe life into climate graphics (which tend to be rather dull), drawing the viewer in and making key information jump out.

On the science:   I would appreciate help correcting/revising the 6th paragraph that begins, "After fast evaporation parches the South..."     It's oversimplified, and I know :)

http://www.skepticalscience.com/2011s_wettest_and_driest.html

Make sure that the graphic is on its own line, otherwise the text will wrap unfavorably to the eye (like it is right now with the leading picture).

That's probably my fault - I may have accidentally deleted a line when resizing the picture (it was too large and stretching the page).

Alex -- Thanks.   I put an extra line back in, and made a few other minor tweaks (spacing, etc.)    Should look OK now.  

Dana, I'm sure some links to SkS pages would be appropriate; feel free to add (you probably can spot them better than I)     Also, if it gets to be too many links, I can get rid of some of the existing links, some of which are redundant.  (I just cut/pasted from the post at CB).

Cool. Better remember to link to this because I've got a blog post coming up explaining the 'wet gets wetter, dry gets drier' phenomenon. Yooper sent me a modeling study (Seager [2011]) which indicates this is going to progressively get worse throughout the 21st century. So those 'potholes' and 'speedbumps' in sea level rise are likely to get larger too.

Oh, and here in New Zealand we just had our wettest December on record. January seems to be shaping up the same -an intense 'water bomb' is headed our way right now. 

I like it.  I would also recommend removing a lot of the white space between some words and punctuation, but otherwise it looks good.

white spaces gone, Alex.    Thx again.   

Hi Dana -- Please remind me:   Do I need to do something else to move this into the queue?   Or do you just take it from here?   Thx

Nope you're all set Tom.  I'll just publish it tomorrow.

Thx!

Dana -- if it doesn't mess up your queue, would you please hold this post for another day -- say Thursday.   I'm still trying to get some confirmation of the accuracy of the passage on the connection between SW drought and NE heavy precipitation.    Didn't hear from any SkSers so I'm querying other colleagues.

No problem Tom, we can publish something else tomorrow.  Let me know when you're ready to go.

OK -- its' ready.   Just got the "sign off" from two colleagues, one a climatologist, the other a meteorologist, so I'm good to go.    I think SkS's credo that "it's more important to get it right, than to get it fast" is right onl