Updated drought map shows worsening conditions in Northeast as fire danger persists

Dry conditions in the Northeast are worsening, creating a scenario for fire danger in the region to persist, an updated map from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows.

The worst of the drought conditions are located in a large swath of West Virginia, several counties in South New Jersey and three counties in southwest Pennsylvania -- all of which are in extreme drought, according to the Drought Monitor.

Most of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and West Virginia are in severe drought, the map shows.

The drought situation the Northeast is currently facing was strongly propelled by the lack of precipitation in October, Samantha Borisoff, a climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University, told ABC News.

Major cities like Philadelphia, Newark and Washington, D.C., are among the regions experiencing long periods without measurable precipitation, Borisoff said.

"October was the all-time driest month on record for a handful of states," Borisoff said. "The I-95 corridor in particular was exceptionally dry."

Some rain was expected to fall in Pennsylvania and South Jersey on Thursday, but no precipitation made it to the rest of New Jersey, New York City and most of New England -- all regions in desperate need of moisture following an extremely dry fall.

Since the start of September, an area from about Baltimore up to Boston is lacking anywhere from 6 to 9 inches of rain, Borisoff said.

"It's going to take multiple slow, soaking rain storms to really dig out of these deficits," Borisoff said. "Right now, the next seven days [don't] look too conducive to getting much precipitation."

The dry conditions will lead to continued elevated wildfire risk in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont as relative humidity drops to 15% in some of the regions. Fire danger will increase even more in the Northeast starting on Friday due to continued low humidity, warmer temperatures and higher winds, forecasts show.

The Jennings Creek Fire, a massive fire burning in both New Jersey and New York, is the largest fire in New York state since the Roosa Gap Fire in 2008. In the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, the Fire Department of New York was battling an extensive brush fire that broke out on Wednesday afternoon.

The New Jersey Forest Fire Service has experienced a 1,300% increase in firefighter response, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told reporters during a news conference on Wednesday. Since early October, the state's fire service has responded to 500 more fires than in the same period last year, Murphy said.

In New Jersey, the Keetch-Byram Drought Index (KBDI) is currently 748 out of 800 -- the highest they've seen in the 118-year history of the forest fire service, Greg McLaughlin, chief of the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, told reporters on Wednesday.

Mandatory water restrictions could continue to roll out as the lack of precipitation continues. The restrictions will be a short-term solution to the problem, Eran Friedler, head of the Grand Water Research Institute at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, told ABC News.

On Wednesday, New Jersey American Water, the largest water utility in the state, issued a statewide mandatory conservation notice. All customers across the state are requested to limit all nonessential water usage by pausing all outdoor watering until spring and to conserve as much as possible indoors.

The state of New Jersey raised its drought level on Wednesday from a drought watch to a drought warning, with Murphy asking residents to take water conservation seriously. He warned that mandatory restrictions could be imposed if people didn't do the right thing.

Regions that rely on the replenishment of reservoirs by precipitation could start to issue more mandatory conservation measures as the drought persists, Borisoff said.

Advocating to the public can be an effective way to ease drought conditions in the region, Friedler said.

"Actually telling the people the situation is harsh and they have to take harsh measures could be very, very effective," he said.

Climate change may be playing a role in the extreme dry conditions, Murphy said.

A new study by UCLA found that human-amplified climate change and higher temperatures are turning some ordinary droughts into exceptional ones.

While the overall long-term trend in the Northeast points to wetter conditions, warmer-than-normal temperatures, which the region has experienced so far this fall, could lead to extreme periods of dryness, Borisoff said. The warmer temperatures can increase evaporation rates, leading to conditions drying out faster, she said.

"We had a handful of sites across the I-95 corridor that recorded their highest maximum temperature for the month of November," she said.

ABC News' Matthew Glasser, Max Golembo and Dan Peck contributed to this report.