06/06/05 Rain curtails drought?, Part one

Today, the Bureau of Reclamation is scheduled to release its latest update for water forecasts for the Yakima River Basin of Washington, considered one of the hardest hit for potential drought in the Northwest. But some junior water rights holders in the Yakima Basin may have had some expression of joy when the Bureau last month increased its forecast for available water supply from thirty-four to thirty-eight per cent. And while that is still sixty two per cent less than normal years, in this potential drought year, farmers and ranchers in the Yakima Basin will take any increase they can get. But what really had producers in that area, and really all ag producers across the Northwest excited was the reason for the increase in the water supply forecast & an unusually wet month last month. ROSS: May has been really a great month for rainfall. We're at two-hundred to three-hundred per cent of normal across most of the area in May. Now the bad news is it's May. It's a drier month usually. Most of that gets generally absorbed into the ground quickly and used up by all the plants that are starting to come to life and really never gets realized in our streams per se. And according to meteorologist Charles Ross of the National Weather Service, it is going to be the precipitation of the coming months, and not other water supply factors, that will determine just how much the Northwest will be impacted by potential drought in the form of available water late in the summer and early fall. ROSS: Given the snowpack that we had and the precipitation, the early thaws that we saw, the loss of snow, we are looking at generally under seventy-five per cent of stream flow volumes all the way through September to last through the summer for all of our water bodies around here. So with blessed rains of late April and May helping to alleviate drought impacts so far&meaning the extent has been reduced from extreme drought projections to between moderate to severe drought & what are the chances of similar rains coming this summer and keeping the drought at bay even more? ROSS: Given some of the rain and maybe a little bit of the short term weather forecast there's some hope of minor, and I say that strongly, minor improvements coming over the next month to the drought but really it's a little late. So what does the term "minor improvements" mean, and will that help alleviate drought effects on farmers and ranchers, as well as the region as a whole? Ross and others will expand on their projections in our next program.