Matt Makens

Drought will remain a significant factor for many on the Plains through April
and the months ahead, meanwhile plentiful snowfall will benefit the Western U.S.
and Northern Plains.

Let's start with the current drought monitor, released today.

Exceptional Drought conditions, the warmer color, covers parts of Nebraska,
Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

That's a snapshot of conditions during the past week. Here's how some of those
values have changed during the past month.

Although drought does remain in the West and on the Northern Plains, those areas
have had improvements. Areas where we've watched the drought expand are the
Central and Southern Plains, East, and Florida. Values for drought growth in the
Pacific Northwest are expected to increase through the next few months.

Since drought values are largely tied to soil moisture, let's look at those
current values. The soils in the West are WET! But, such a large swath of the
Central U.S. is in a really tough spot. Winter wheat and pastures here are not
in good shape.

The outlook for soil moisture is as follows, but pretty much keeps the current
theme going with soil issues from Central to Southern Plains through July.

What can be used to offset these soil moisture issues is spring runoff, so let's
see what the outlook is in that regard.

The snow cover right now is shown here; what a "long winter" the Northern Plains
have had with lots of snow (two to three feet sit on the ground in a lot of
areas).

Snow is impressively persistent for the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest, areas
that remain in drought - how can that be? Soils here are frozen, and until thaw
that ground is not very efficient at absorbing moisture. The soil was quite dry
prior to freeze, so remains quite dry despite all that snow. What melts here
will go largely toward runoff. I'll show you the flood outlook for this spring
in a moment.

I want to address all that snow sitting in the mountains. The amount of water in
the western basins exceeds 200% in a lot of cases.

More specifically, many snow measuring sites in the Colorado River system are
snowiest on record. I plotted the historic ranking of stations across Utah and
Colorado here.

With that kind of snow, runoff will naturally be higher than normal in the
Colorado system. However, contribution that will go toward the Missouri,
Arkansas, White, Red, or Rio Grande systems will not be as noteworthy.

The soil moisture issues on the Plains don't appear to get any help from surface
water streamflows this year, either. So a complicated and snow drought recovery
for those areas.

Turning to the melt: The flooding concerns from spring melt will be highest in
California, and along the Colorado system - mostly the higher streams and
rivers. The capacity for the Colorado is quite low at the moment so they'll be
able to prevent downstream flooding.

For the Missouri and Mississippi it'll likely come down to how rapidly thaw
occurs. If they get hit with a streak of heat, flooding will be quite a concern
for lower parts of the Missouri and higher parts of the Mississippi. 

You've probably already gathered that the months ahead will have a mixed bag of
challenges, from drought to flooding. The outlook for the month is a bit
different than what we just went through in March. 

We are dialing down some of the precipitation for the West. 

What's persistent from March will be the cooler than normal temperatures for the
northwestern corner of the country.

Drought impacts ahead, spring runoff a factor