Will the snow be enough? Drought expert explains impact
Mar 9, 2022, 5:30 PM | Updated: Jun 19, 2022, 9:33 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah needs a lot of snow and wet weather this month to make up for a very dry start to the year. So, it’s good to see snow falling, and especially piling up in the mountains.
Utah has a good start to March water-wise after a very poor start to the new year.
January and February delivered the driest start to a year on record in Utah, which only intensifies the drought. The state is finally getting some snowstorms, and they need to keep coming, or Utah will start the summer with less water in its reservoirs than last year.
Utah needs a very snowy March to get the snowpack back to average before it peaks in early April and starts to melt.
“It’s been nice. We’ve had some storms,” said Laura Haskell, drought coordinator for the Utah Division of Water Resources. “We’ve seen about an inch of water averaged across the state. Some areas more, some areas less. It has helped.”
Utah added very little snowpack during January and February.
But, it’s gaining again.
“Fortunately, it was cold enough that we did not start losing snowpack. That was good news,” Haskell said.
On Wednesday, several critical drainages in the state moved back above 90% of normal, into the green adding five to 10 percentage points since last week.
“With the drought conditions last year, we would love to see really great snowpack way above average. But, at this point we’ll settle for typical for average,” Haskell said.
If Utah snowpack gets back up to average over the next few weeks, reservoirs could recharge to where they were a year ago… about 65% of capacity statewide. That’s the problem. The state needs above-average snowpack and runoff to start refilling the reservoirs which have been dropping for several years
“Our reservoirs are about 10% lower than they were this time last year. We used a lot of our reservoir storage last summer because we had dry conditions. That’s what they are designed for, but they do need to be replenished.”
Fortunately, soil moisture is good, which contributes to an efficient runoff, and delivers the greatest amount of water to the reservoirs.
“The snowpack that we have should make it more to the streams and reservoirs than we saw last year. So, that’s good news.”
Haskell said Utah would need about four more storms like this to get us back to normal snowpack for the year.
