California needs much more to beat effect of three dry years Kettleman Hills, near Kettleman City, CA, May 2007. A few native shrubs are visible, with no other living plant life for miles. Craig Dremann

By Mark Grossi, mgrossi@fresnobee.com
and John Holland, jholland@modbee.com The Sierra Nevada snowpack has improved. Waterfalls are starting to thunder in Yosemite Valley. A spring storm adds to the bounty. It’s time to celebrate the end of the state’s three-year drought. Right? Wrong. The El Niño-powered winter apparently was not a droughtbuster — even though some reservoirs may fill and rainfall totals are above average in two-thirds of California’s major cities, including Modesto and Fresno. “We needed a snowpack about 120 percent of average to make up for the last three years,” said Maury Roos, a hydrologist for the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re somewhere around 100 percent.” Today is considered the end of the rain and snow season. April and May storms might add a little to the total, but the biggest months likely have passed. The drought has reduced soil moisture in the watersheds, state officials said, so some of this year’s snow will melt into the ground rather than run off into rivers and reservoirs. … It’s a different story in western Fresno County. Westlands Water District farmers probably will idle about 250,000 acres, about the same as last year in the 600,000-acre district. “Agriculture will have another year of record acres unfarmed,” said Westlands spokeswoman Sarah Woolf. State climatologist Mike Anderson said the state has had one-year reprieves in the middle of six-year droughts during the past century. “An average year, like this one, is better than a dry year,” he said. “But California’s water system is too complex to understand just by looking at one year or just the snowpack.”

Despite the rain, drought lingers