Bitter Lake, South Dakota
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Most sandbags have been emptied after floods along the Mississippi River receded after their surge this spring. But in northeastern South Dakota, there's a flood that hasn't receded - for nearly a decade now! Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Water has been inundating the four hundred square mile area in South Dakota since 1993. Unfortunately, there's nowhere for it to drain, because it's a closed basin. Correspondent Curt Nickisch files this report on how farmers there are coping.

Farmer Dave Jorgensen stands on his front steps to survey his land. Ten years ago Bitter Lake was two miles away; today it's lapping into his yard. Now fish swim where his cattle used to graze.

JORGENSEN: There's pelicans, there's a muskrat! Sitting right there by the yard. There's an egret. Mudhens, they come swimming right up the doorstep.

This switch from barn cats to muskrats was precipitated by a climate change - the region has seen generally wet winters and cooler summers for about twenty years now. Skip Vecchio of the U-S Geological Survey co-authored a hydrology study of the closed basin, the upper part of which is pocked with depressions.

VECCHIO: For most of the 1900s, the natural condition of that basin is for those potholes and lakes to be essentially dry, or maybe they'll hold water during spring runoff and then dry out. So there's a lot of potential in that upper basin to store water.

The potholes had been filling since the late 1970s; then the record 1993 flood pushed the water into the rest of the basin. The lakes there have been gobbling up tens of thousands of acres of farmland ever since. Vecchio says now that increased precipitation over the last twenty years has flooded the basin, it could take even longer to dry.

VECCHIO: The only mechanism for removing water from the basin is through evaporation into the atmosphere. It will take many years to reduce the moisture in the basin to levels where it was, say, in the early 1990s.

That might be too late for farmers like the fifty-six year old Dave Jorgensen to return to their fields.

That's correspondent Curt Nickish from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, supported by the National Science Foundation.