March 1st Drought Monitor

The graphic above, snipped from the March 1st Drought Monitor, shows the area remaining in Arizona/New Mexico which is still suffering level 3 intensity of hydrologic drought. If you watch the 12-week animation at the Drought Monitor, you can see it shrinking shrinking shrinking until in fact it covers just us. That bright red spot seems likely to disappear by the March 8 report or the March 15 report. Indications are everywhere that we have had a very wet (and usefully effective) winter. Is the drought over? Not an answerable question long-term. (Perhaps not likely.) But certainly things are better for now.
      The Weekly Snotel Snowpack and Precipitation Report, as of Monday, February 28, 2005, shows the Snow Water Equivalent for the Sangre de Cristos at 148% of average. The New Mexico Reservoir Storage Graph shows that the State reservoirs have vastly more water than last year (that's not hard!) and are filling back up (albeit slowly in the case of Heron and El Vado; Abiquiu is at 106% of average). The municipal reservoirs in Santa Fe Canyon are at 76.2% of capacity, with a daily inflow of 5.77 million gallons--and the snowpack hasn't really begun melting yet. (We are still under a Stage 2 Water Alert, three-times-a-week watering, not that you're probably having to water very often right now.)
      The March 4 Hydrologic Outlook from the National Weather Service in Albuquerque says "The first 2 months of 2005 have been the wettest start to any year on record in Albuqueruqe...Santa Fe...Farmington..." (etc.) and "Flow from streams originating in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico and feeding in to the Rio Grande should range from 110 percent to as much as 140 percent of normal." (Zowie.)