View photo/Chris McLean Water spills from the bottom of the Pueblo Dam Monday. The flow management program, set up under 2004 intergovernmental agreements, maintains 100 cubic feet per second through the city.

Snowpack down, but not out for 2010

It’s still early. Besides, 2009 was the seventh wettest year on record.

By CHRIS WOODKA
Special to The View

Last year was the seventh wettest on record, but 2010 is starting out relatively dry.

The good news is that it’s too early to even try to predict what could happen.

Precipitation for 2009 totaled 15.83 inches at the Pueblo airport, where official records are measured by the National Weather Service. It was the wettest year since 1990, but not even close to the 23 inches that fell in 1957.

That left Lake Pueblo nearly full, area rivers and streams running at or above average and parts of lawns still green - greenish, maybe? - despite weeks of subzero temperatures.

Snowpack, which supplies most of the area’s water, is a different story, however. After a strong start in October and November, the moisture in the snowpack has dwindled to just 89 percent in the Arkansas Valley and 83 percent statewide, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Early snowfall totals mean little to the eventual water availability, because it accounts for only about 25 percent of the season total at most sites. The heaviest snowfall usually occurs in March and April.

In the Colorado River basin, which supplies water imported to the Arkansas River basin, snowfall is only 80 percent of average.

“After the last big storm, I think we added about 7 inches on the ground,” said Roy Vaughan, manager of the Fryingpan-Arkansas Project.

Storms over the holidays dropped larger amounts both north and south of Pueblo along the Front Range.

The Arkansas River is flowing strongly above Lake Pueblo largely because of water being moved from Turquoise and Twin Lakes into Lake Pueblo in anticipation of bringing over water through transmountain tunnels in late springtime. At Wellsville, the river’s flow was 560 cubic feet per second and nearly half of that is Fry-Ark Project water.

Vaughan is expecting Lake Pueblo to fill this spring as water is moved, winter water is stored and Colorado Springs maintains its account through exchanges. That could mean some water stored in excess-capacity accounts could spill. Aurora’s account would be the first to spill.

Reclamation is working to relieve the pressure on storage space, however. Irrigators were told in October there is little chance the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District would approve carry-over from winter water this year, meaning the remaining water stored in 2009 has to be out of the reservoir by May 1.

“We’ll be meeting with the main water users in the next few weeks to see if we can keep things moving,” Vaughan said.

Through Pueblo, more water is coming into the river via Fountain Creek than from Pueblo Dam.

The flow management program, set up under 2004 intergovernmental agreements, maintains 100 cfs through the city, with about one-third of that coming through the fish hatchery.

This Natural Resources Conservation Service snowpack telemetry map shows the percent of historical average that Colorado mountain basins reported through Monday.

Meanwhile, Fountain Creek was discharging 136 cfs - almost three times the median average - that is largely effluent from Colorado Springs and other urban areas in El Paso County. Under court decrees, Colorado Springs stores water in Lake Pueblo against its Fountain Creek return flows as a way to reuse transmountain and fully consumable native water.

Long-term climate forecasts by the NWS show that likely temperatures and precipitation this spring in Southern Colorado will be slightly above average because of El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Drought Monitor shows Colorado relatively untouched by drought.

The winter months - from December to February - are typically the driest for Pueblo, with less than an inch of the 12.39 inches of average annual precipitation falling in that period. The largest single-day precipitation in January was 0.68 inches from 10 inches of snow on Jan. 8, 1891. The largest single-day snowfall was 11.6 inches in 1990.

The warmest January day on record for Pueblo was 81 degrees on Jan. 2, 1997. The coldest: 29 below zero on Jan. 28, 1948.

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