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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah's unusually wet summer did not maintain any staying power into fall, with the state picking up just 20 percent of the average precipitation during the first full month of the new water year.
October turned out to be among the driest and warmest recorded at Salt Lake City International Airport, and some areas — such as Tooele County — received just 3 percent of average precipitation.
The good news, according to the latest Utah Water and Climate report released Wednesday, is that hydrologically speaking, the state is not in that bad of a condition — at least not yet.
Stream flows are near or above average, and soil moisture is well above average in northern and central Utah and nearly normal in southern Utah.
Those moisture-laden soils, according to the report by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, means they will be well-primed for runoff should the state get a healthy snowpack.
The other morsel of optimism contained in the Utah Snow Survey report is reservoir storage that is higher than last year due to the rainy late summer: 76 percent of capacity across the state.
"We are really pleasantly surprised at the rebound in our reservoir levels," said Randy Julander, Utah Snow Survey supervisor.
"With these two critical components, it sets us up nicely. Hopefully we get a really good snow year this year because we are due," he said.
Water managers are hopeful that November, however, does not deliver a repeat performance of October when it comes to precipitation totals.
As the next few weeks bring the ski season closer to its normal launch the week of Thanksgiving, the basins are staring at accumulation totals that look like this:
- Bear River, 36 percent
- Ogden-Weber, 15 percent
- Provo-Jordan, 21 percent
- Tooele-Vernon, 3 percent
- Southwest Utah, 5 percent
Julander said having a bad October is not cause for undue concern — it really does not set the state back much — but it does mean the coming months need to deliver strong snow totals.
Following a 2010-11 snowpack accumulation season that saw snowpack at 145 percent of normal in the mountains east of Salt Lake City, the state plunged into drought for two consecutive years. Last year ended on "average," but water managers were hoping for more snow and rainfall to pump storage reservoirs even higher.
Utah's western desert remains in moderate to severe drought, as well as portions of southeastern Utah, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
