From the Continental Divide east, much of Colorado is in some form of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Lincoln County, southeast of the Denver metro area, is even experiencing dust storms.
“I think that it’s concerning when we start to see conditions getting warm so early,” said Deborah Bathke, climatologist with the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and contributing author at the National Drought Mitigation Center.
“When we’re depicting drought conditions on a map, we look at more than just precipitation. We look at temperature, at soil moisture, at stream flows and other variables. Even if you were to make up the precipitation amounts, if you have high enough temperatures you still could have a persistence of drought conditions,” she said.
But the white capped mountains illustrate a different story.
The state’s snowpack is sitting at 125 percent of normal -- above average for this time of year. Although Colorado hasn’t received much snow since January, what is on the ground isn’t melting. It all has to do with temperature. Along the Front Range and plains, temperatures have soared to record highs -- but in the mountains, temperatures are staying cool enough to keep the snow on the ground, especially at night.
“We really don’t start to see significant snow melt in the mountains until you have several days of back to back temperatures that are well above freezing,” said Brian Domonkos, snow survey supervisor with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. “In most cases we’ve had nighttime temperatures below freezing, and many of those nights have been successively below freezing. And that usually preserves our snowpack, especially in times as early as we are in the year where the solar radiation isn’t quite as strong as it is in May and late April.”
The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center’s latest report shows a neutral outlook for precipitation through May, coupled with higher than average temperatures. That means that the state has an equal chance of getting above or below average snowfall. Those conditions could mean an early snowmelt, but Domonkos isn’t worried yet.
“Traditionally, March and April are some of the wetter months of the year [for Colorado], especially in the South Platte River Basin,” he said. “We do hope to see precipitation, hopefully at least normal if not better. We don’t want to have extreme one way or the other.”
But the drought in the eastern half of the state could continue. Another report from the climate prediction center shows a continuation of drought conditions through May -- and that worries Bathke.
“When we take a traditionally wetter month like March, and we start getting some of those precipitation deficits,” she said, “those get harder and harder to make up as we move later into spring and the summer."
