Document text
Winter remains drier than normal But it�s much too early to call this a drought By Bill Kettler January ended just like November and December � dry. Like most of the Northwest, the Rogue Valley will head into the last weeks of winter with below-average snowpack in the mountains. At the end of the month, snow in the Siskiyou Mountains above Ashland held just 43 percent of the average water content there at this time of year. But it�s been far worse in past years. Steve Johnson, of the Rogue River National Forest, said it�s still too early to talk about a drought this summer because big winter storms often dump tons of snow on Southern Oregon in February and March. "I know people want to bring up the �D� word," he said, "but there�s still plenty of time to get 80 or 90 percent of our annual average." January brought no help to a winter that started dry and continued to get drier. The snowpack at the end of December measured 50 percent of average. Snow survey data from across the Northwest shows many watersheds have no more than 70 to 90 percent of their average snowpack. Data from the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service shows the Rogue-Umpqua basins as a whole have 59 percent of their usual average. Medford�s precipitation figures for the past three months reflect the scarcity of rain. For the three months that ended Wednesday, Medford measured just 3.22 inches of rain � slightly less than the average for the single month of November (3.23 inches). January ended with exactly 1 inch of rain at the Medford airport, just barely beating December�s figure by two-hundredths of an inch. The three-month total is just 34.8 percent of the average total of 9.24 inches. January�s meager total far exceeded the monthly totals during dry winters in the 1970s and �80s. The driest January in Medford�s recorded weather history came in 1984, when just .19 inches of rain fell. Johnson said this year�s snowpack looks deep compared to January 1977, the driest year on record, when there was 10.5 percent of the average snowpack. "We�ve all become very used to these good years," he said, noting that it�s been eight or nine years since the snowpack was substantially below average. "This is nothing like it was in 1977." The Associated Press contributed to this story. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.