Lake levels still insufficient as drought comes to end

After an intense six-month dry spell, Collin County is officially no longer in a drought.

The area’s water woes, however, aren’t over yet.

The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor lists Collin, Dallas and Denton counties as some of the first in Texas to escape the state’s historic year-long drought pattern.

Ted Ryan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth, said November and December rain events sufficiently boosted soil moisture to allow for runoff as January dumped an unusually heavy 6 to 7 inches of rain on the region.

North Texas is still not completely out of the woods yet. It is still surrounded by drought to the south, west and east, and many of the area’s reservoirs are still not up to capacity despite the additional runoff, Ryan said.

“Drought is not necessarily one local event site to site,” he said. “It’s a regional event. Regional rainfall dictates how much rainfall is in the regional reservoirs.”

The forecast for the area calls for slightly below-normal precipitation this fall, and while no drought is forecasted through April, drought conditions could easily return if spring and summer rain levels fall well below normal patterns, Ryan said.

“We still need to remain aware that it’s not necessarily gone for good,” he said.

The area of North Texas no longer affected by drought is small compared to the state as a whole. Large swaths of south, central and west Texas are at “extreme” or “exceptional” drought levels, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, and conditions in the vast majority of the state are set to “persist or intensify,” according to the U.S. Seasonal Drought Outlook.

“It’s really just kind of a localized or very regionalized ending,” Ryan said. “This rain has just been kind of lucky to keep falling over us, but the drought continue across the state.”

Denise Hickey, a spokesperson for the North Texas Municipal Water District, said while the additional rainfall is encouraging, lake levels are still too low for the area to be considered out of the drought, at least from a reservoir perspective.

Lake Lavon, the district’s primary water source, is currently at 76 percent of its conservation level and has not been since May 2010. While the rainfall has caused the lake to raise more than 6 feet since December, the reservoir drought will continue unless additional rainfall puts the district’s lakes at or above conservation levels, she said.

In addition, Lake Texoma is still offline due to the presence of zebra mussels, an invasive species that could be transported to other lakes if pumping from that lake was to occur. The district is still working with the Army Corps of Engineers to find out when it is safe to pump. It is also working on building a pipeline that will carry water from the lake directly to the district’s Wylie treatment plant, though that project is still on a fall 2013 timeline.

“While Texoma is offline, we will remain in some stage of our drought plan, because that makes up 28 percent of our supply,” Hickey said, “so it’s important that while we still have all this rain that we’ve had, we still need to extend the available supplies because Texoma remains offline.”

The U.S. Drought Monitor measures drought by total rainfall and soil moisture and is mostly used to measure meteorological and agricultural drought conditions, Ryan said.

“As far as the hydrologic drought, that’s not over until we can get the water levels where the local officials are comfortable with easing water restrictions,” he said. “Then we can finally say we’re out of the drought.”

The National Weather Service forecasts a 50 percent chance of thunderstorms Friday and a 60 percent chance of storms Friday night. No precipitation is forecasted through Monday.

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