Off to a good start
Storms bring needed moisture to region, but the key question is: will it be enough?
By Larry Meyer
Argus Observer
Friday, December 28, 2007 11:32 AM PST
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| Jay Chamberlin (right) is interviewed below Owyhee Dam during the celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Owyhee Project July 14. Chamberlin said he is cautiously optimistic about the prospects of having enough irrigation water for the next growing season. |
NYSSA — With one storm after another dropping moisture across the region, the water year appears to be off to a good start, but some locations are still below normal for rain or snowfall, and it may take a whole lot of precipitation to deliver runoff this spring at the proper time.
“It’s a great start,” Owyhee Irrigation District Manager Jay Chamberlin confirmed Thursday. Chamberlin said the region is typically recording 5 to 6 inches of moisture per storm with some areas gaining 6 to 8 inches.
“We got real dry,” Chamberlin said.
More good news was released by the National Weather Service recently. The service predicts plenty of moisture through January.
Forecasts call for above normal moisture for all of the Northwest region for January, Larry Holt, forecaster with the weather service in Boise, said. That includes all of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.
“We’ve got to get storms coming up from the south, from Nevada,” Chamberlin said.
How the storms come through is result of the arrangements of the mountains and the position of the jet stream, he said.
“It is better to get storms out of the southwest than out of the west,” he said for the Owyhee drainage.
Still, even those storms rolling out of the southwest or the west may not drop moisture in a uniform pattern.
While the Jordan Valley area may record 6 to 8 inches of moisture, over just to the east at South Mountain — a major contributor of water in the Owyhee watershed — may only capture 5 to 6 inches.
In the valley, Chamberlin said storms tend to go south around Homedale and north to Ontario and Weiser.
“Nyssa is in a real dry zone,” he said.
The season, though, is shaping up to be a good one, Chamberlin said.
“The first part has been good,” Chamberlin said. “We don’t want it to shut off.”
As far as storage, the useable amount in the reservoir as recorded by the United States Bureau of Reclamation is more than 171,000 acre feet, putting current storage at about half of what is needed for a full season of proper water delivery.
The halfway mark right now is about where it needs to be, Chamberlin said.
To meet the 4 acre feet provided to growers in a normal growing season, storage needs to be about 350,000 acre feet, and 400,000 acre feet pretty much guarantees that mark, he said.
“The key factor (for spring runoff) is spring rains,” Chamberlin said, which flushes out the snow.
“You have to have something to flush out. You need some snow,” he said.
