Dry times have far-reaching consequences
BOISE – Idaho hydrologists say the state’s 2005 outlook for water is “deteriorating.”
Ron Nova, general manager of Schweitzer Mountain Resort above Sandpoint, said Wednesday that this winter is already one of the worst on record.
Just four of Schweitzer’s six lifts will run this weekend. Skier visits are running at 48 percent of average because, according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service, “winter is nearly nonexistent across the Pacific Northwest.”
Snowpack above Idaho’s Lake Coeur d’Alene is at 50 percent or less, the fourth-worst winter in four decades.
It’s little different elsewhere in Idaho.
The service’s water-supply specialist, Ron Abramovich, says the likelihood is growing that the February-through-April period will be warmer than average, making chances of a sixth year of drought greater in a state where lack of moisture has intensified water disputes and hurt the economies of resort towns such as Sandpoint.
“It’s pretty thin,” Nova said Wednesday. “It affects business throughout the region, no doubt.”
Stream flow forecasts for the state remain in the 60 percent to 80 percent range, according to a conservation service report issued Wednesday, making spring flooding unlikely.
The Weiser, Payette and Boise river basins received the least amount of January precipitation, and reservoirs in central and southern Idaho – in the state’s most important agricultural region – are near minimum levels.
“Most notably, there’s no low-elevation snowpack over a large portion of the state,” Abramovich told about two dozen water scientists and professionals at a meeting of the Idaho Water Supply Committee meeting in Boise.
There was below-average January precipitation in every region of the state except for Bear Basin in Idaho’s extreme southeastern corner, where 112 percent of the average fell.
Dry times have had far-reaching consequences.
Claims by the Twin Falls Canal Co. and six other Magic Valley canal cooperatives that their water has dwindled by as much as 30 percent in two years helped prompt them to ask for their full allotment of water rights last month – a move that could shut off thousands of other water users and cost the state economy millions of dollars.
Still, the long-term forecast offers some reason for optimism.
El Nino, the weak, warm ocean current off the coast of South America that’s been sending storms to Southern California but leaving North America’s northern reaches high and dry, appears to be waning.
The temperature in the Pacific Ocean warmed all through last summer and early winter, but now that’s reversing itself.