Little Help for Watersheds in the West

By Kirk Johnson

New York Times

DENVER , April 24 — The West’s already stretched water supplies received no relief in March, as near-record high temperatures and below-normal precipitation wilted crucial watershed lands from the Pacific Northwest to the Sierra Nevada and the deserts of New Mexico .

Mountain snows melted and evaporated away with the wind and heat, leaving places like the Salt River and Verde River Basins in central Arizona with only about 30 percent of their historic average spring runoff. Runoff from the Colorado River that feeds Lake Powell , the reservoir that straddles the Utah-Arizona border, was projected to come in at 53 percent of average.

In the drought that began in 2000 across much of the West, (with 2005 being the odd, near-normal year) 2007 is promising no relief: better than some years, but with no clear turning of the corner, either.

“We always like to be optimists, and we were, and then comes March,” said Kip White, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which manages dams and reservoirs in the West.

Hydrologists say the dry heat of early spring this year echoed what happened last year. The snows were there, and then abruptly they were not. In the Southwest and in central Oregon , 30 percent of the snow pack — the crucial element for downstream water supply — melted in just that one month, according to a water supply report issued on Tuesday by the bureau.

But reservoir storage levels for drinking water and irrigation in California , Colorado , Idaho , Nevada and Washington were above normal for this time of year, according to the report, partly because of wet conditions last fall that built up a reserve.

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Source:  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/us/25water.html?_r=1&oref=slogin