From The Greeley Tribune (Eric Brown):
On paper, northern Colorado’s recovery from months of drought appears to be nearly complete. The plethora of moisture in recent weeks has put precipitation and snowpack figures in the South Platte River basin above average and, collectively, reservoir levels are getting close to normal. According to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor, northern Colorado is no longer in a “drought” — being labeled instead as “abnormally dry.”
However, that doesn’t mean everything’s quite peachy keen for the area’s farmers. “Things are greatly improved, but we’re not home yet,” said Gus Sidwell, who grows corn and alfalfa near Gill. “We’re probably only at first base at this point.”
Many northern Colorado farmers today have far more water to work with this year than they thought they would back in March and April. But, depending on how much water they own, they might not have enough to finish off their crops in August and September — late in the growing season, Sidwell said. He and others say they’ll still need rain, or cities to lease out some of their excess water — maybe both. “If we don’t get that, we’re looking at only partial production,” Sidwell said. “We’ll have to let some acres go.”
Greeley Water and Sewer Department Director Jon Monson, said leasing water to agriculture will be discussed at the next Greeley water board meeting, on June 19, but said there’s no guarantee they’ll decide to release more water to agricultural users. Cities own the majority of the region’s water, leaving a number of farmers and ranchers to depend on renting water from those municipal neighbors to grow what’s needed. In most years, they can do that. But cities this year have so far been holding on tight to their water supplies.
Until April, snowpack, precipitation and reservoir levels were far below average, and city officials at the time were wanting to use any snowpack there was to refill their high-mountains reservoirs — after having depleted them during the drought of 2012.
In recent weeks, though, snow and rain has arrived. As of Saturday, snowpack in the South Platte River basin was 153 percent of average, according to a report from the Natural Resources Conservation Service released Wednesday. That’s the fourth-highest mark for June 1 during the last 25 years.
The NRCS report also noted that, thanks to cooler than normal temperatures in the mountains, that snow is melting slowly — meaning the abundance of snowmelt will be flowing into farmers’ irrigation ditches later in the growing season. And reducing farmers’ dependency on irrigation water right now is the fact that the ground is moist.
In the Greeley area, for example, precipitation in 2013 was 9 percent above average through the end of May, according to numbers provided by the Colorado Climate Center in Fort Collins.
Doug Rademacher, a farmer near Platteville, said he had to start irrigating his crops last year in April, because of how dry it was at the time. In the first week of June this year, he still hasn’t had to irrigate his corn, sugar beets and others crops he planted this spring. The increase in snowpack, slow snowmelt and abundance of moisture in the ground are no doubt good. But, like Sidwell, Rademacher said rain or renting water from cities will be needed to fully finish off his crops.
A water meeting that will have large implications is that of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which oversees operations of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, the largest water supply project in northern Colorado. Since the C-BT project went into use in 1957, the Northern Water board has set a quota every year in April to balance how much water could be used through the upcoming growing season and how much water needed to stay in storage for future years. The historic average for the C-BT quota has been just above 70 percent. This past April, the Northern Board set the C-BT quota at 60 percent, because of low reservoir levels and limited snowpack. As they often do, board members will consider increasing the quota at their June 14 meeting.
But, like Monson, Brian Werner, a spokesman for Northern Water, said there’s no guarantee they’ll be releasing more water to help agriculture. “Everyone is still watching things really close,” he said.
From The Mountain Mail (Peter J. Goetz):
Delayed snowpack peak, cool weather and continued wet weather patterns in the northern part of the state have contributed to a delay in snowmelt and eased some of the strain on water supplies in northern Colorado. However, it is unlikely that the southern part of the state will see much relief from drought conditions this year, Natural Resources Conservation Service officials said Thursday.
Snowpack reading as of June 1 is 93 percent of median statewide, Randy Randall, acting USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service state conservationist, said. “This respectable percentage is due mainly to the generous amount of snow that remains across northern Colorado. In contrast, the snowpack in the southern portion of the state is nearly depleted even at the higher elevations,” Randall said.
Current streamflow forecasts for the Upper Rio Grande and combined San Juan, Animas, Dolores and San Miguel basins call for well below average flows this summer.
Late-season snow accumulation in April and early May considerably improved the water supply outlook in the northern basins of the state. Forecasts for the Colorado and South Platte river basins still generally call for slightly below average flows this season but have improved considerably from predictions earlier this year.
At this stage in the melt season, high-elevation temperatures will play an important role in how rapidly snowmelt will occur in the northern basins, Randall said. Water managers can monitor these temperatures using data from the automated SNOTEL sites in their watersheds.
From the Associated Press (Nelson Harvey) via the Aspen Daily News:
Flows in the Roaring Fork River basin may have already peaked for the year, according to some hydrologists and forecasters with an eye on the watershed. Still, there’s a chance that warm weather in the coming weeks could bring a second peak, pushing levels slightly higher than they were on Thursday, May 27, when a gauge on the lower Roaring Fork River near Glenwood Springs recorded a flow of 3,394 cubic feet per second (cfs)…
If May 27 does turn out to be the date of peak flows on the Roaring Fork, it will be one of the earliest peaks since record keeping began on the river in 1907. In only three years — 1964, 1967 and 1992 — did the Roaring Fork River peak before that date…
Flows so far this year have been significantly higher than they were during the historic drought of 2012. That year, the river peaked in early June near Glenwood Springs at less than 2,000 cfs…
On the Fryingpan River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork, flows were averaging about 110 cfs on Monday. Engineers with the federal Bureau of Reclamation are required to release at least that much water from the Ruedi Dam at this time of year, to insure the health of fish and other organisms in the river.
Ruedi Reservoir is expected to get within “a few feet” of filling by around mid-July, according to Kara Lamb, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Reclamation. As of Monday, the reservoir was about 75 percent full. It holds a maximum of just over 101,000 acre-feet of water.
Lamb said engineers typically divert about 48,000 acre feet of water each year to Colorado’s eastern slope, though a series of tunnels upstream of the reservoir known as the Frying Pan-Arkansas Project. So far this year, she said, engineers have diverted about 14,000 acre-feet.
From The Wall Street Journal (Mark Peters):
Some communities in Texas are down to 180 days or less of supply, while areas of rural New Mexico have been drilling deeper wells to keep taps running. Officials here in Wichita are looking at big-ticket items such as a pipeline and the reuse of wastewater because a reservoir that supplies nearly two-thirds of the city’s water was forecast until recently to run dry by fall 2015.
National data show a six-state region that also includes parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma remains extremely dry, even as parts of the Midwest and Great Plains have come out of last summer’s historic drought, with states such as Iowa and Illinois dealing with floods this spring.
A three-month forecast released Thursday by the National Weather Service predicts the drought will persist, or even intensify, in many areas already facing extreme conditions, while the drought in more eastern sections of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma will ease further.
And while the effects on agriculture—from crops withering to ranchers struggling to find grazing land—have garnered much of the attention, public water supplies in some areas of the country face increasing challenges as dry conditions drag on.