Drought Seen Through March

With a new forecast out Thursday for a warm, dry spring, it appears a few December storms haven’t been enough to rescue New Mexico from deepening drought.

With 93 percent of New Mexico currently in severe drought conditions or worse, federal forecasters said they expect drought conditions in the state to persist at least through the end of March.

“We’ve continued to deteriorate despite the four recent snow events we’ve had,” said National Weather Service forecaster Chuck Jones, said during a meeting Thursday of New Mexico’s state-federal Drought Monitoring Working Group.

Jones and his colleagues offered up a grim litany of statistics. The last 24 months have been the driest and warmest such stretch in New Mexico since weather record-keeping began in the late 1800s, and reservoirs on the Rio Grande, the Rio Chama, the Pecos and the San Juan River are all well below normal for this time of year.

“It’s not good,” Jones said.

The four storms New Mexico has seen this month have turned the state’s snowpack, which provides water when it melts in spring, from abysmal to merely bad. Snow measurement stations in the Upper Rio Grande Basin have just 67 percent of their normal snowpack for this time of year. In the headwaters of the San Juan River, snowpack stands at 70 percent of average.

“The last couple of weeks have helped, but not enough,” Jones said.

Part of the problem is dry ground left from two arid years, which makes it that much more difficult for snowstorms to help us catch up.

“It’s still a case of trying to build a base and get up to where we should be on top of very dry soil,” said Weather Service hydrologist Ed Polasko.

That means the winter of 2012-13 is starting off in worse shape than the two previous drought years, Jones said.

Worse than the current conditions, though, was Thursday’s forecast. Through at least March, according to the latest federal forecast, odds are tilted toward warmer and drier than normal conditions across New Mexico.

In preparation for a possible third consecutive year of drought, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has warned agencies that depend on water from the federal San Juan-Chama Project that they could see the first water supply curtailment in the project’s history next year. That would reduce water available to Santa Fe, Albuquerque and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.
— This article appeared on page C1 of the Albuquerque Journal