Lake Powell slipping below 2006 levels

Lake Powell is like the proverbial glass of water. It's either half full or half empty, depending on how you look at it.

At the moment, it is almost exactly half full, measuring by capacity. Its storage on June 30, the end of the water year, is predicted to be 48 percent.

Metaphorically, the giant reservoir in southern Utah and northern Arizona is half empty because it still hasn't recovered from the drought that started in 1999. And it's half full because, according to federal experts, reservoirs like it are helping Westerners through the dusty years.

Tom Ryan, hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Upper Colorado Region, pointed out that a scant spring runoff this year means the enormous reservoir will be about 94 feet below its full level on July 1. At 3,606 feet above sea level, that's around five feet lower than it was at the same time the previous year.

"The good news is we've got a lot of storage (water) in the Colorado River system, designed to carry us through droughts like this," he added. "The system's working as intended. We're weathering a very severe, multiyear drought."

Lake Powell is among a multitude of rivers, lakes and reservoirs throughout the West that are experiencing a snowmelt season that is far skimpier than normal.

According to a water supply update from Reclamation, "Nearly every Western basin registered a decline in snowpacks with significant melt-outs." It cited the Natural Resources Conservation Service, another federal agency, as saying the losses were greatest in the Southwest and in central Oregon, "where snowpacks declined more than 30 percent."

It cited Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California and eastern Oregon as having "extremely low" snowpacks. There, it adds, "some sites ... had already melted out" by April 1.

"This is also true in California's Sierra Nevada and should result in a very poor spring and summer stream flow and runoff," it said.

Fortunately, it added, reservoir storage is above average in California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Washington "and only slightly below normal in Oregon and Utah, providing some cushion from the expected poor 2007 stream flow and runoff forecast."

Arizona, Montana, New Mexico and Wyoming reservoirs are below their normal level, however.