Dry winter unlikely to hurt farms, but next year is another story

Boaters on Bear Lake may see their best water of the summer during the Memorial Day weekend, although the lake will begin to drop after that, along with most of the other reservoirs in the state, according to a snowpack report presented to legislators Wednesday.

The only "saving grace" for this summer's water availability is the current healthy levels of many reservoirs, said Randy Julander, the snow-survey supervisor with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salt Lake City.

Statewide, reservoirs are 65 percent full, Julander said during a report to the Natural Resources Interim Committee. Even better, many of the major reservoirs and lakes in northern Utah are pretty much full. That means that agricultural production will probably not suffer this year, but the state will not be able to recover as readily from another dry winter next year.

The biggest problem is that there is very little water left in the mountains to maintain those levels. The Bear and Provo River basins are "days away" from having all of their snow melted. The Virgin, Escalante, Dirty Devil and Tooele-Vernon River basins are all essentially finished with snow melt.

The only river basin with a snowpack of higher than 50 percent of average is the Beaver River basin in southwestern Utah.

Another problem is that the warm temperatures throughout the spring did not keep the soils properly saturated, so more of the melting snow has absorbed into the soil instead of becoming run-off.

"At a time when we should be melting snow and moisturizing soil, we are already dry," Julander said. "This means it is going to be an extremely dry summer."

If the trends continue, he predicted that it would mean drought conditions this summer that rival or exceed the conditions during 2004. That year was the last of a six-year drought period, which ended with two spectacular water years in 2005 and 2006.

"It appears we are now going back into a drought," he said. "And we not just going into it, we are going into it with a vengeance."

Stream flows will also be a problem, as many of the state's primary rivers could be operating well below their average capacity. The hardest hit will be in the southern portion of the state, especially the Virgin River.

---

E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com