People are approaching this Independence Day with mixed feelings.

One of the bullseyes marking the nation's driest areas is Bartow County, Georgia, where extreme drought has kicked up buckets of dust and left cattle pastures bare. Across the South, the drought has ravaged the pastures where cattle and other livestock feed. Pasture and range conditions were in even worse shape in Virginia, where 71% of the land is in poor or very poor shape. The combination of dry weather and intense heat can create drought conditions relatively quickly, resulting in a "flash drought." Mark Svoboda, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, was looking for a way to describe the rapid onset of that drought and came up with "flash drought," he recalls.