SALT LAKE CITY -- Top of Utah residents worried about shoveling snow can rest easy for the foreseeable future, but water managers are looking very anxiously at the clear blue skies and warming temperatures.
"It took a pretty dire year to get us thinking whether we were going to fill our reservoirs or not," said Tage Flint, executive director of the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District, "but we're here."
That doesn't mean water users will have to ration water this summer, yet.
"We'll likely be asking for compliance to standard water conservation practices," he said.
Flint was reacting to reports from the U.S. Weather Service and the National Resource Conservation Service on the progress of this year's water year, which began Oct. 1.
He said he started this winter confident because of higher-than-normal holdover Oct. 1 in his reservoirs, but now he's concerned whether all of them will fill. At least seven, he said, may not.
"We always worry about East Canyon and possibly Pineview," he said. He is already taking steps to hold back water used for power generation, fearful of a bad runoff year.
The measurements of how much water is in Utah's snowpack are dismal and getting worse.
The percentage of water in the Wasatch Mountains compared to average, is dropping every day, mostly because it is supposed to be snowing and hasn't been. The longer the mountains go without new snow, the worse the situation gets.
Randy Julander, snow survey supervisor for the NRCS Utah office, illustrated his talk on the odds of various parts of Utah reaching normal water supplies with doom-and-gloom pictures, such as a penguin jumping off a cliff into the mouth of a killer whale.
The Bear River drainage, which provides water for farmers and ranchers in Box Elder and Cache counties, is currently at 59 percent of normal. The Weber River drainage, which extends to Park City and waters all of Weber County and parts of Box Elder and Davis, is at a slightly better 65 percent.
In both cases, he said, the chance of weather patterns changing enough to bring either basin up to normal is dismal, 3 percent in the Bear and 8 percent in the Weber.
"Every day is another stinking day of sunshine is how we look at it," Julander said.
Another complicating factor is dry soil, he said. Snow melting on dry soil soaks in instead of running off, and the soil in Utah's mountains is "drier than we've seen in the last five years. What this means is, 60 percent snow pack is not going to give you 60 percent runoff."
Weather Service hydrologist Brian McInerney said precipitation all over the northern half of Utah has been below average all winter, and the short-term outlook is "probably one of the grimmest we've seen."
No storms of any note are expected through this coming weekend, he said.
A few storms have managed to push up from the south, he said, but a high pressure ridge has been sitting over the state like a dam, keeping snowstorms away.
He said in the last several years, Utah winters have been marked by unexpected and occasional large storms, not a long spell of predictably wet weather.
"Last year in March we were melting, and we were really worried," he said, "and then we got 14 feet of snow at Alta.
"Is that going to happen this year? If you were going to bet on it, I'd say not, but that's how the storms have been coming."
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