Record-breaking March heat worsens Arizona drought outlook
Joe Duhownik
PHOENIX (CN) — The hottest March in Arizona history undid the progress made by an exceptionally wet fall season, leaving climate experts with little hope looking into the summer.
Each of the Grand Canyon State’s 15 counties recorded its highest March temperatures on record, which in Phoenix soared to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and broke 15 daily temperature records. In Lake Martinez, 30 miles north of Yuma along the Arizona-California border, a high of 110 degrees on March 20 set the record for the hottest March temperature in the United States.
In an Arizona Drought Monitoring Technical Committee meeting held Tuesday morning, State Climatologist Erinanne Saffel said some areas of the state hit temperatures in March that shouldn’t have been reached until May.
Heading into the new year, Maricopa and Yuma counties both experienced their wettest fall seasons on record, and experts were cautiously optimistic that above-average soil moisture would mean more snowpack would runoff into groundwater aquifers. But the precipitation didn’t carry over much.
“Everything shut off in January,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark O’Malley said Tuesday. “We have been suffering for the past three months.”
Precipitation levels across the state fell sharply after December. And because this has been the warmest start to any year on record — temperatures floated around 10 degrees above average for the entire month of March — very little snowpack accumulated.
“Now we’re sitting basically with almost no snow on our mountains,” O’Malley said. “The situation is not good going into the summer.”
O’Malley said the soil across the state is extremely dry and forests are primed for fire.
The extreme swings in short-term weather patterns paired with an overall upward trend in heat and dryness underscores a larger climate trend across the Southwest. Though many state experts describe the last 31 years as a long-term drought with a clear beginning and foreseeable end, others say the region is undergoing a permanent aridification.
O’Malley said there may be a silver lining this summer.
If sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific remain warm, that could increase the probability of hurricane activity, which would import moisture to the Four Corners region during the latter half of the monsoon. The increased moisture wouldn’t increase surface water supply, but may improve soil moisture going into the next winter.
“We’ll see if this comes to fruition,” O’Malley said. “It’s something to hope for, but overall it’s not a great situation as we continue to tumble further back into drought.”
As interstate negotiations over future cuts to Colorado River allocations remain stalled, reservoirs continue to dwindle. Lake Powell sits at just 25% capacity, with Lake Mead at 33%, just 200 feet from reaching deadpool, at which the Hoover Dam would lose hydroelectric power and water would be cut off from millions of Americans.
The Arizona Department of Water Resources’ models suggest the entire system will drop to 23% of capacity by the end of 2026 unless significant cuts are made by all seven states that feed off the Colorado River Basin.
James Heffner, a senior hydrologist at the department, said the dry start to the year did nothing to help overall aquifer levels.
“No basin was spared,” he said in the meeting. “As a seasonal outlook, it’s essentially more of the same.”
In November, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs’ drought interagency coordinating group recommended that the state remain under current drought emergency declarations, which have been in place since 1999 and 2007.