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http://www.azcentral.com
Wet week means little for drought
Robert Anglen
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 7, 2004 12:00 AM
It rained on Phoenix's parade. It doused candles at the Desert Botanical Garden. It turned weekend duffers into waders and watered down Tempe's art festival.
But as wet as it was this weekend, the rain and snow that fell across Arizona had little impact on the state's nine-year drought.
"It has been a nice storm. But the real screaming message is that we have been in a drought for nine years," said Tony Haffer, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service in Phoenix. advertisement
He calculated we would need three times normal rainfall, or about 25 inches in one year, to even begin talking about the drought's end.
State and regional climatologists agree. Although the storms are part of a pattern that has delivered more rain than usual this fall, it does not signal the drought's end or even that Arizona is in for a wet winter.
In fact, forecasterssay the clouds will melt away into above-average temperatures by the end of the week. And they expect it to stay that way for at least 10 days.
"Call it a regime change," said Doug Green, Weather Service science officer. "Toward the end of the week, there is going to be a nice, warm bubble of air above us."
The storm dumped 0.72 of an inch of rain at Sky Harbor International Airport from Saturday through Monday. Average for the entire month of December is 0.92 of an inch.
In addition to soaking the Valley, the three-day outburst dumped 7 inches of snow in Flagstaff.
The rain and snow have certainly helped jump-start the season, but most experts say it is too early to judge the impact that all of that water will have on the drought.
Although this has been a wetter-than-average fall, Phoenix is still more than an inch below normal for the year: 7.14 inches this year compared with the 30-year average of 8.29 inches.
"This is helpful," Green said. "But in the longer term, we're still a long way out."
He pointed to autumn 2000, when 3.71 inches of rain fell in October. A month later, the rain was down to half of normal. December had zero rain, and the rest of the season was average.
"It turned out to be average. Not superwet, not superwarm, not supercool," he said.
The drought is also measured by looking at the Colorado River system and the amount of water collected in reservoirs from Arizona to Wyoming.
Kelly Redford, regional climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, said rainfall and snow totals are way above average in the lower states, anywhere from 100 percent to 300 percent of normal.
But north of Interstate 80, which cuts across northern Utah and Nevada, totals are down, he said.
"They have had a slow start in the north," Redmond said.
Regarding the drought, the most important aspect of early rain is that it saturates the soil so the ground won't drink the runoff when the snow begins to melt.
"Soils have been very, very dry," Redmond said. "The moisture has not run into the river. It has reduced the amount of runoff . . . into Lake Powell and Lake Mead."
He said the region needs several good storms over the next few months before even thinking about an end to the drought.
Closer to home, the latest storm dropped almost an equal amount of rain on the Salt and Verde rivers, which are estimated to be at 44 percent of capacity. Lake Roosevelt, the largest lake on the Salt River system, is at about 29 percent of capacity.
Although forecasters called the weekend storms a good start for the season, the weather did not exactly warm the hearts of holiday revelers at local festivals.
"We lost the candles," said Patty Wilson, spokeswoman at the Desert Botanical Garden, where the rain turned a luminaria show into a pulp of extinguished candles and paper bags filled with sand.
"It's happened once in 27 years. Maybe twice," Wilson said, adding that two weekend shows were canceled.
Wilson said the show will continue until Dec. 23.
The rain also kept some visitors away from the F.Q. Story Historic Home Tour downtown.
"We actually had about half the people we normally do," said Sharon Honeycut, event planner. "It did affect us. We had about 1,300 people."
But local shopping centers didn't mind the wet weather.
"We love the rain," said Veronica Lovesy, marketing vice president of Westcor, which owns nine regional malls and 20 shopping centers. "I'm sure the rain didn't hurt us at all."
