Continued (and welcomed!) improvements in drought over the past week with the amount of Texas in drought dropping to 36 percent and state-wide reservoir storage rising to 70 percent full. Nevertheless, reservoir storage is still more than 13 percentage points less than normal with much of the western half of the state seeing little recovery.
Some notes from Dr. Wentzel:
· The most recent map from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows conditions as of Tuesday, March 24th. Last week, the state had more areas of improvement than degradation. However, Exceptional (D4) Drought did expand in the Panhandle and was up about 1/3 of a percentage point statewide. Other statewide drought statistics showed improvement. The area of the state free of drought impacts (None) climbed more than 6 percentage points and is now almost half the state. The area of the state in Moderate (D1) or worse drought dropped more than 3½ percentage points and is now about 36 percent of the state.
· Statewide reservoir conservation storage was up 300,000 acre-feet in the past week, almost 1 percentage point. That extends to a 5 weeks run of improvement in statewide reservoir conditions that has taken us from 65 percent full on February 22 to just under 70 percent full on March 26th. Current storage is 5½ percentage points better than this time last year. Even so, storage is still about 13 percentage points below what is considered normal for this time or year.
· As of Thursday, March 24th, conservation storage was up in 7, unchanged in 1, and down in 1 of 9 climate regions with reservoirs across the state. The North Central and South regions had the largest gains, up 2.1 and 1.8 percentage points, respectively. The Trans Pecos was down 1.8 percentage points. All other changes were less than ½ a percentage point.
· Conservation storage (as a percentage of capacity) increased in 10 of the 20 municipal reservoir systems that we track across the state, remained unchanged in 9, and decreased in 1. Dallas had the largest gain, up 4.1 percentage points. Four additional systems had gains of more than a percentage point (Fort Worth, Waco, Temple-Killeen, and Corpus Christi). The only declining system was Abilene, down 0.1 percentage points.
· The Seasonal Drought Outlook from the National Weather Service looking out to the end of June remains the same as last week. That outlook calls for significant reduction, but not complete elimination of drought conditions in Texas during that time.
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