Just ugly: New Mexico has the worst drought conditions in the region

Jan. 27—New Mexico has not bounced back from the blistering it took from an exceptionally hot and arid summer and fall.

Andrew Mangham, senior service hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said New Mexico is experiencing the worst drought conditions among Southwest and Mountain West states — Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and California.

"Arizona is nipping at our heels, but New Mexico is seeing more extensive and more severe drought than those states," Mangham said. "Go back to July. That was just ugly with how hot and dry it was. We are just trying to recover from a hot, dry summer, a hot, dry fall and a winter that got a late start."

He noted, however, that the state may be about to turn a corner to some relief.

"I'm optimistic by nature. I tend to look for the silver lining," Mangham said. "In the last week of December, and from then on, we have seen several repeated rounds of moisture.

"The Climate Prediction Center is pointing to more wet conditions over the next few weeks, and some (weather) models are pointing toward wetter-than-normal months ahead. It's hard to hang your hat on what's going to happen, but I think we are heading to a pretty wet late winter and early spring."

A little better

Mangham is a member of the New Mexico Drought Monitoring Workgroup, representatives of state and federal agencies who participate each month in a phone conference to assess the extent of drought in the state and produce a map that reflects those conditions. State climatologist Dave DuBois moderates the phone-in session.

The January drought map that came out of the Workgroup's meeting last week is little changed from the December map. It shows that slightly more than 72% of the state is in severe drought, the third-most serious category. That's down from 82% in December.

"The current map shows fairly minor improvements, mostly in the northwestern part of the state," Mangham said. "We have had decent precipitation across the north. The southeast is missing out and the southwest is missing out."

Up north, there are swatches of extreme drought, the second-worst category, in San Juan, Rio Arriba, Sandoval, Santa Fe and San Miguel counties.

Down south, however, extreme drought stains Hidalgo, Grant, Luna, Doña Ana, Otero, Lincoln, Chaves and Eddy counties and leaks into Catron, Sierra, Lea and De Baca counties. Exceptional drought, the most serious category, is in parts of Hidalgo, Grant, Otero, Luna, Eddy and Chaves counties.

"There has been improvement in soil moisture in the northern part of the state, particularly the northwest, in the last three months but especially in the last six weeks," Mangham said. "In the north, it is wetter more than dry. The rest of the state is neutral or leaning toward dry."

Let it snow

New Mexico got off to a slow start on snowpack this winter, but Mangham said it is starting to charge up pretty good now.

"The Upper Rio Grande Basin is filling up rapidly," he said. "It is at 105% of normal, and it generally peaks in mid-March to late-March. The Jemez River Basin is at 130% of normal and the Pecos headwaters at 115% of normal. The Pecos snowpack doesn't peak until the end of March."

But if you think that suggests a robust water supply for the irrigation season, which starts in March, don't get too excited. Mangham said that while all runoff is good, the runoff most important to New Mexico is from snowpack in the San Juan headwaters in Colorado.

"It's less of a rosy picture in Colorado," he said. "The San Juan headwaters snowpack is 70% of normal. They may have more snow than we do, but looking at it as a percentage of normal, that's not good. The projections of water supply are not that great. We want to see storms tracking north. We need to see it snow up in the San Juan Mountains and the southern Rockies.

"But basically, it's too early to tell. We have plenty of winter to go."