Northwest warm weather downside: drought worries

Through his hotel window in one of the state's top winter playgrounds, a man who roams the state measuring Washington's mountain snows saw little beyond a brown sea of dirt and mud.

"There's not a flake of snow on the ground except up high," Scott Pattee, a water-supply specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said as he looked out a window Tuesday in the outdoor hamlet of Leavenworth. "And right now, the long-range forecast looks terrible."

Snow levels at large ski areas from Mount Baker to Crystal Mountain are just slightly below normal. But Washington's warm winter means the snows at lower elevations that help power Northwest rivers and streams through summer are down to between half and 75 percent of average.

And that has farmers, biologists and power planners scrambling to prepare for a potentially topsy-turvy year.

At Seattle City Light, forecasters were counting on tens of millions of dollars in revenue from the sale of surplus hydropower to California. Instead the likelihood of less water flowing in streams statewide has cut City Light's annual power-sales revenue projections from $120 million to about $60 million.

The drop-off in expected power sales translates to an overnight 7 percent cut in yearly revenue — most of which is tied to fixed costs, city officials said.

"I don't want to be an alarmist, but for us it's a serious situation in terms of our revenues," said Suzanne Hartman, communications director for Seattle City Light.

At this point, the lower snowpack isn't expected to affect drinking-water supplies in the Puget Sound region. Seattle gets its water from reservoirs in the Tolt and Cedar river watersheds.

The snowpack varies widely across the state.

It's about normal in the Olympics, 50 to 75 percent of average in Central Puget Sound, and slightly worse in Eastern Washington than in Western Washington.

The state's weather dilemma this year is not an unusually dry winter. November was wet and December was dry, but precipitation was above normal again in January, said Ted Buehner with the National Weather Service.

The difference this year is that winter temperatures — except for December — ranged from 2 to 11 degrees above normal.

That has melted snow at trailheads months early, prompted the early arrival of spring songbirds, and spurred endangered Oregon spotted frogs to release eggs weeks before they usually do.

That warm weather also has water experts around the state planning for the possibility of drought.

It's too early to say how far and wide any water problems could reach. In 2005, mountain snows in early March were in far worse shape than they are today, but heavy late spring rains erased any real threat of serious drought.

This year's El Niño pattern complicates the picture, by decreasing the odds of April showers or a cool late spring.

"The one month and three-month forecasts have Washington in the bull's-eye for both warmer and dryer-than-normal weather," said Kurt Unger, a water specialist for the state Department of Ecology.

In the meantime, experts are planning ahead.

Already, Unger is identifying river basins where the state might need to buy water rights from farmers to keep rivers flowing cold and fast enough this summer to support fish.

Gov. Chris Gregoire on Monday urged the Legislature to set aside about $4 million to potentially help farms and fish in areas that might experience drought conditions.

At the Corps of Engineers, water planners are evaluating how much water they'll be releasing into the Yakima River — and how much less water farmers will be able to count on than normal. That announcement, by law, can't come before March 10.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is querying its regional experts to see where hatcheries might face water shortages and if there are wildlife that might face trouble if rivers remain low.

Later this week, water experts around the state will meet in Olympia and begin talking about whether to recommend the governor declare a drought emergency.

But even then, their answer could simply be: Let's wait and see.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com