Drought designation lingers for Flathead
Defying a cover of wet snow and slush, Northwest Montana is still in the midst of its worst drought in more than a decade.
The United States Drought Monitor has designated much of the region — an area centered on Lake County but including large chunks of Flathead, Sanders and Missoula counties — as under an “extreme drought” for more than six months.
Published weekly as a collaboration of federal agencies and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the report classifies drought levels based on up to 50 separate criteria, from snowpack and overall precipitation to crop conditions and satellite imagery.
One of five gradations of drought level, “extreme drought” generally means those indices are in the third or fourth percentile. Put another way, they would only be sustained three or four times in a typical century.
About a fifth of Montana was classified as such last September, but that share has since shrunk to just 3.5 percent.
The last time the designation persisted for such a long time was from July 2003 through March 2004, said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the university’s Drought Mitigation Center. Since then, Flathead County has only reached such dry conditions once.
“The question that’s come up [is] the last few months have been favorable, we’ve seen some snowfall, how can we be in this drought?” Fuchs said Thursday. “We look at impacts. If there are still low reservoir numbers, low rivers and streams, we know that some of those levels haven’t responded yet.”
River and stream gauges operated by the U.S. Geological Survey show most of the flows in the region at or above normal for this time of year, and precipitation so far this year has been only slightly below average.
Still, an extra shot of snow might be needed to overcome last year’s deficit. The Flathead Valley registered just over two-thirds of its typical precipitation in 2015.
And high-elevation snowpack monitors show those water futures still lagging behind, with the Flathead River basin currently at 85 percent of its normal snowpack and the Kootenai River basin at 84 percent.
This time last year, none of Montana was within drought conditions, and only 3 percent of its overall area ranked as “abnormally dry.” But whether the current deficit portends a fire season similar to last year’s is far from certain.
“We’ll have to watch how the end of the season goes, and the longer we have cold temperatures that keep the snow season going, that’s going to be a positive,” Fuchs said. “If we see things warm up the rest of the winter, it’s going to be more of a question mark how much relief we’re going to see.”
El Nino is likely to play a role. Last winter’s wimpy finish coincided with the system’s development through last year, which typically brings warmer, drier weather to the Northern Rockies.
Bob Nestor, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Missoula, said the global weather system is currently very strong, but expected to begin subsiding by the end of spring.
“Last year was interesting, how everything just kind of cut off in mid-January it seemed like,” Nestor said. “But as we get into the spring months, April and June are typically our wettest months of the year, and there have been years when we’ve had twice the normal rainfall following a strong El Nino.”
The key word at this point in the year, he said, is “potential.”
“I put very little faith into what’s happening in the winter months, as far as snowpack,” Nestor said. “But this year in Northwest Montana, as of right now, if we have a lower snowpack and a quick melt in the spring, the potential for a wildfire season is there.”
Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.