Heavy storms delight Utah water officials

Heavy storms at the end of March are promising to save northern Utah's spring runoff, which was starting to look a little iffy.

"We just keep dumping the snow in the mountains," exulted Mark Eubank, chief meteorologist for KSL-TV. "To me, this is like the old days."

In the past, the period March through May was the wet time of the year, he added. Utah would receive a great deal of its snowpack, and therefore the spring runoff, during those spring months. But in the recent years of drought, the snowpack did not accumulate then.

In fact, when 2004 began, the snowpack seemed certain to end the drought, then in its sixth year. But March was unseasonably warm and dry, and the snow evaporated without doing much to help the parched reservoirs.

That dreary pattern threatened to reassert itself — until the last week of the month.

"It's looking great," Eubank said, referring to wet storms that have been sliding across the northern part of the state.

But in some parts of Utah, he said, the snow is piled so high that concerns are surfacing about possible flooding when it melts.

Salt Lake residents may awaken today to find snow down to the level of the Great Salt Lake, he said Tuesday afternoon. A storm was "just blasting across the Wasatch Front, and I can see storminess all the way out to Elko (Nevada) on the radar."

In some places in Utah, the snowpack is higher than it was in 1983, "which was the big flood year," said Linda Cheng, meteorologist at the National Weather Service office on North Temple.

Asked if the runoff looks good, she replied, "Right now it does, but we have to see how the April storms go."

Randy Julander also doesn't want to declare the drought over, at least not yet. As the snow survey supervisor for the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salt Lake City, he is watching for definitive figures.

But he will say this about the possibility that the dry period is ending: "I will sit back with my feet on my desk, with a nice cold lemonade on my desk, and dream about water running down rivers."

A Deseret News/KSL TV poll shows a large majority of Utahns agree that the drought is a serious problem, and a majority say it has caused them to try to conserve water.

Utah's snowpack is looking "much better" than a week ago, Julander said. "We've seen increases of about 10 to 15 percent" just from the recent storms. "And it's not over."