What Utah’s drought, reservoirs look like now after ‘unexpectedly great’ water year

SALT LAKE CITY — Jesse Stewart said he finds himself already thinking about how to possibly manage controlled reservoir releases sometime in the near future, as Utah’s 2024 water begins.

It’s an issue that Stewart, Salt Lake City Public Utilities deputy director, couldn’t have imagined dwelling on about this time last year when the state’s collective reservoir system fell to about 43% of capacity at the start of the 2023 water year. However, he and many other water managers are in a new position because of how prolific the 2023 water year was.

“It’s much better than last year,” he told KSL.com Monday. “There’s much more water in our reservoirs.”

Utah’s mountains collected, on average, about 39.7 inches of precipitation during the 2023 water year, a span between Oct. 1, 2022, and Saturday. That is about 136% above normal and the most since 2011, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service data.

The National Centers for Environmental Information is scheduled to release a report next week that will show how well valley areas did, too. That said, it listed the 2023 water year as being on pace for the state’s 17th-wettest on record after August.

Salt Lake City, where Stewart helps manage water, collected 18.09 inches of precipitation during the 2023 water year. It’s the city’s 39th-wettest in nearly 150 years of National Weather Service data collecting.

As a result of all the precipitation, the state’s reservoirs — excluding Lake Powell and Flaming Gorge — are now about 76% capacity at the beginning of the 2024 water year that began Sunday, per the Utah Division of Water Resources. It’s not just 33 percentage points higher than this time last year, but also 21 percentage points higher than the median average heading in a new water year.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Drought Monitor — which listed all parts of Utah as being in moderate drought, including more than half of the state in at least extreme drought before the 2023 water year — now lists less than 5% of Utah in moderate drought, while another 18% is considered “abnormally dry.”

But while water managers are now thinking about how to balance more water to a mostly full reservoir system, they and state drought experts acknowledge that Utah’s water issues are far from solved.

An ‘amazing’ water year

After years of severe drought, spurred by the state’s driest calendar year on record in 2020, Utah’s water odds started to change just before the 2023 water year began. More than a quarter of Utah’s mountain precipitation during the 2022 water year came in its final three months, helping it end closer to the state’s 30-year normal.

The wet trend then carried over into the start of the new water year. These summer and fall storms didn’t help reservoirs much, but they did improve soil moisture conditions, a key component toward a successful spring snowmelt, said Laura Haskell, drought coordinator for the Utah Division of Water Resources.

Then came the snow. Winter storm after winter storm produced a record-setting 30-inch statewide snowpack, nearly 6 inches above the 2021 and 2022 peak collections combined. The snowpack also melted in a way that Utah avoided massive widespread flooding, and many of the state’s reservoirs completely filled up even with controlled releases.

The water year ended on a strong note with another healthy round of monsoons in August and September. When all was said and done, Utah’s mountains collected, on average, 11.3 inches of precipitation more than the previous water year, and 15.3 inches more than the year before that.

“It was unexpectedly great,” Haskell said. “We had hoped for a good water year, and we got an amazing water year. It made a big turnaround in our water situation.”

Utah’s water outlook moving forward

Yet experts say water is still a concern. Both Stewart and Haskell point out that last year’s gains pale in comparison to the water year deficits dating back to 2000, the start of the “megadrought.”

The impacts of these series of droughts are why large-scale lakes and reservoirs remain nowhere near objective goals or capacity. For example, Lake Powell remains at 36% of capacity, while the Great Salt Lake‘s levels are close to 6 feet below what scientists call the lake’s minimum healthy level.

The U.S. Drought Monitor’s map also notes that there are long-term drought impacts all over Utah, even in areas no longer listed in drought. This is why experts hope that the 2024 water year will continue Utah’s wet trend.

It’s already off to a solid start, providing some mountain snow and more valley precipitation during its first week. However, it remains unclear how an El Niño oceanic pattern, forecast to last through at least the start of the 2024 calendar year, will affect Utah’s upcoming winter.

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center lists Utah as having “equal chances” for a wet, dry or near normal end of meteorological fall and start of meteorological winter in its current long-range outlook.

“Unfortunately, we can’t order weather … so it is a little bit of a wait-and-see,” Haskell said.

In the meantime, experts urge Utahns to continue to find ways to be more efficient with their water use and consume less. While there’s not enough statewide data yet to know how residents responded to the 2023 water year’s moisture, Salt Lake City Public Utilities officials say preliminary data shows that water consumption is down 4% this year compared to the three-year average. That means those who use the city’s water have continued to cut back what they use even in a wet year.

Utahns should expect to see messaging tied to water conservation moving forward, though, largely because there’s no way of knowing when severe drought conditions will return.

“It was one good year in a series of drought years,” Stewart said. “We’re not necessarily out of a drought.”