The southwestern figure describes a failed wet season rather than a dry spell. The National Integrated Drought Information System reported that southern and southwestern areas received less than 20 percent of normal rain from mid-May through mid-July, a shortfall of 3 to 6 inches [5]. A place short by more than four fifths of its normal rain has a normal for that window of at most about 3.75 to 7.5 inches [3], and rain that actually arrived amounting to no more than a quarter of the shortfall: under 0.75 to 1.5 inches across two months [2].
The composition matters as much as the total. Extreme drought at 44 percent of the territory, inside a footprint where roughly three quarters was at least moderately dry, means close to 59 percent of the drought-affected area sat in the extreme class rather than at its edges [1]. Heat pushed the same way. San Juan logged one of its warmest Julys on record [6], and streamflow fell to record lows in waterways including the Rio Fajardo in the northeast [7]. None of this was foreshadowed by the early part of the year: late winter and early spring were wetter than normal across the U.S. Caribbean, according to the NIDIS report [18], and the island normally enters its wet season in May [17].
A drought class does not tell you when the taps come back. Rationing has been in effect in several municipalities since early August, according to news reports cited by NASA Earth Observatory [10], and observers have pointed to infrastructure as a factor worsening the shortages [11]. The U.S. Drought Monitor, produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with the USDA, NOAA and NASA [15], grades moisture conditions. It is not an inventory of stored water, and it does not count what a distribution network loses on the way to a household. Both of those decide a rationing schedule.
The reading the evidence supports is narrow and firm: the shortfall is quantified, and its end date is not known. The August assessments date the deficit precisely but do not indicate when rain returns. For anyone with water in their cost structure on the island, the operating input for the rest of 2026 is the allocation in front of them, not the seasonal outlook behind it.
