Snowpack is looking a bit skimpy

After two years of good winter snowpacks, Utah may be facing a relatively skimpy runoff this spring, agreed experts at a briefing Tuesday.

Also, one of the experts pointed out that as far as snow levels are concerned, Utah has experienced no evidence of global warming. If global warming does hit here, he said, nobody knows whether that would be good or bad for the state's water supply.

Of 13 snow basins throughout the state monitored by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, none had the average snow coverage for Jan. 16. Water content of the fields ranged from a low of 52 percent of normal at the Price-San Rafael river station to 93 percent for the Green River.

"The whole state looks about 70 to 80 percent" of normal for this time of year, Randy Julander, snow surveyor for the National Weather Service's Salt Lake City office, said Tuesday at the meeting of the Utah Water Users Association in the service's offices, 2242 W. North Temple.

Utah has "not a lot of good news as far as the snowpack is concerned," he said. Some areas, like the Uinta Basin, "really took a dive" after the season started.

"Bear Lake hasn't really come back to anything like a normal situation," he said. The lake dropped during six drought years before the past couple of years of good runoff.

In an interview following the meeting, Julander explained, "It's not nearly as good as it was last year. But we're not in a complete state of panic yet.

"That'll come next month," he joked.

With 2 1/2 months of winter snow accumulation still to come, he said, the state's winter and spring weather still could go either to a wet or dry system. It's still possible that a good runoff may occur.

"The level of concern is certainly starting to increase, and we don't see anything coming on next week, weather-wise. Looks cold and dry."

Brian McInerney, hydrologist with the National Weather Service, said, "Things are just looking tough. ... We do not have the snowpack at this point" that water experts would like.

"It's unfortunate. We've had two years of water supply meetings where everybody's been a happy guy," but now things are looking gloomier, he said.

A silver lining is that the state's large reservoirs seem generally to have good storage. "We're really sitting kind of good," said Ed Vidmar of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.