Abysmal may be the best description of the spring runoff, with no part of the state retaining more than 50 percent of the typical snowpack for this time of year.

For some places, "it's a new record-low snowpack," said Randy Julander, snow survey supervisor with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salt Lake City.

In southeastern Utah and on the Sevier River runoff area, the snowpack now is as bad as in 1971. Elsewhere, it's as bad as it was in 1977, "a nasty, nasty year, and we'd rather forget it," Julander said.

In 2005, the Snotel measuring station at Midway Valley in Iron County — a tributary of the upper Sevier River — had 14 feet of snow around this time of the year, making it difficult to reach the station. "This year we just walked right over there," he said.

Most of Utah's drinking and agricultural water is impounded during the spring runoff. With little runoff, the state goes into drought-like conditions. Reservoirs may not all fill, and farmers may find themselves unable to plant as many crops as they'd like.

Already, four weeks early, the runoff has peaked in several places, and without raising streams and rivers by much, Julander said.

Only the Bear River basin tallied as much as 50 percent of the usual snowpack for this time of the year, he said during the meeting Monday in offices of the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District. By today, he predicted, that basin also would be below 50 percent.

Hardest-hit area is southeastern Utah, where only 2 percent of the typical April 9 snowpack is left.

"This is shades of 2004," he said, referring to the last bad drought year. "We're tanked, and it's heading south."

Not only was the winter snowpack skimpy this year, he said, but warm weather started the snowmelt earlier than usual. Further precipitation can't add to a snowpack that's gone.

Julander explained that some snow courses are bare at 8,000 feet elevation, and some are disappearing at 9,000 feet. That adds to the runoff rows, as water from higher snowpacks will have farther to run before reaching a stream, river or lake; the farther it travels, the more chance water will be absorbed in the ground or sublimated into the atmosphere.

"Camp Jackson (San Juan County) lost its entire snowpack," he said. But water scientists "didn't see a wrinkle of a steam flow response." The water had soaked in or evaporated before it reached streams.

The Bear Lake system needed a snow accumulation of 200 percent of normal during March in order to bring its snowpack back to typical levels before the runoff, he said. Instead of that scenario during March, usually the state's snowiest month, "we lost 30" percent.