From Deseret News archives:
Utah's reservoir levels low
Dry spell plus hottest July on record don't help
"Summertime rainfall isn't involved in the numbers," said Brian McInerney, hydrologist for the Salt Lake National Weather Service center. "If we look at the precipitation for this water year, it's 10 to 25 percent below normal, but it's the snowpack and runoff that really matter."
McInerney said summertime rain doesn't add much to that already stored in reservoirs.. Most of the rain just runs off and goes away.
"If you look at the water conditions, 2007 had a healthy beginning," said McInerney. "The two reasons we are down is that we just went through an intense period of dryness, and last winter we only had an average of 50 percent the normal snowpack and runoff."
McInerney compared the Utah weather as the extreme opposite of Texas this summer.
"While they were measuring (water) in feet," said McInerney, "we were looking for a cloud in the sky."
Both areas had prolonged weather patterns that kept repeating themselves, but McInerney warned against drawing any conclusions about the weather patterns being a result of global warming.
"We just can't say yet," he said. "Scientifically, we don't have enough data yet to draw any conclusions. Analysis shows we've had patterns like this before in the '70s and off and on as far back as records have been kept."
McInerney believes one thing the data do seem to support is that Utah is likely to continue patterns of high temperatures and dry conditions interrupted only by occasional rains.
"When the rains do come, it's likely to be the heavy rainfall we've been seeing causing all the flooding around the state," he said.
McInerney would like to see all of Utah get a nice gentle rain.
"We'd like more rainfall," he said. "It reduces the fire danger and relieves demand on the stored water, and it's just more enjoyable when the temperatures are in the 70s instead of up around 100 degrees."
E-mail: dramsay@desnews.com
