Snowpack approaching record low

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

Snowpack in Montana's mountains is meager and getting thinner, causing irrigators, anglers and river floaters to look to the high country with concern.

The snow is shallow enough that it's approaching the record low set in 1977, said Roy Kaiser, water supply specialist for the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.

"It's all the (high) temperatures we've seen, the chinooks, the not freezing at night," Kaiser said.

As of Monday, snowpack in the upper Missouri River drainage was at 81 percent of average and upper Yellowstone drainage was at 74 percent of average, Kaiser said Thursday.

Averages are computed from 30 years worth of data collected from 1971 to 2000.

Other parts of the state are doing even worse.

Statewide, average snowpack totals only 61 percent of average, and in the Sun/Teton/Marias drainages it is only 52 percent of average.

"That's the worst in the state," Kaiser said.

"We have some sites that are already melted out," Kaiser said, and some on the west side of the Continental Divide are approaching that condition, with record low amounts of snow.

Regionally, the Jefferson drainage had 76 percent of average snowpack, the Madison had 85 percent and the Gallatin had 82 percent.

The Smith River had only 72 percent of average.

Much of Montana is in its seventh year of drought.

So far this winter, Kaiser said, things are shaping up comparably to 1988 and 2001, both low-snow years that preceded summers filled with wildfire.

A website hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted in December that western and southwestern Montana would need 100 percent to 125 percent of average precipitation in the next six months to end current drought conditions.

So far this winter, conditions are well below average, and a lot will have to fall by April to raise the levels to anything close to average.

In past years, a number of state streams have been closed to angling because of drought. Irrigators have voluntarily cut back in some cases, while in other places there wasn't enough water to go around. Some streams were dewatered.

There are dozens of snowpack monitoring sites around the state, and about one third of them operate electronically.

Kaiser said all the sites will be checked manually at the end of the month. When that data is compiled, it could show a difference of 5 percent to 10 percent from what the electronic data shows.

Reader Comments