It's Dry Out There: What one of the driest winters ever means for Arizona

This episode was recorded the week of April 7, 2025. We discussed the possibility of Tucson hitting 100 degrees that week, which did end up happening.

Transcript

Christopher Conover: Welcome to The Buzz. I'm Christopher Conover. This week, how a dry winter will affect Arizonans. To say the recently ended winter was dry would be a bit of an understatement. The Tucson area experienced its second driest winter ever, with about a quarter of an inch of rain. That's roughly one tenth of the area's average. And mountain snowpack isn't proving much better. For instance, the eight and a half inches of snow seen in Flagstaff this winter is about one sixth of its usual total, tied for the third lowest snowfall total. So how are dry conditions going to affect Arizona as temperatures warm? We start today's show with Kevin Strongman. He's a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Tucson.

Kevin Strongman: It was definitely dry and it was very warm. We actually ranked one of the driest winters for southeast Arizona, and it was definitely above normal temperatures throughout the December, February, including January as well.

Christopher Conover: Because of our water issues, everybody always pays attention to snowpack. As you just said, it was dry and warm down here. Northern Arizona, was drier than normal, and the snowpack is low. So what does snowpack tell us about, if anything, what's coming for the rest of this year?

Kevin Strongman: Yeah, we know that the snowpack was super low, so it was not even great, maybe, like, a few inches, maybe a foot, if you're lucky, in the high peaks of southeast Arizona and up to Flagstaff. But since it all dried out in a basically that lack of water, given it's a dry winter, and so we know that six of the 15th wettest monsoons occurred after the top 10 driest winters. So we had that La Nina effect right there. So La Nina, you know, influences more of a drier winter, a warmer winter as well. So we had that nudge with us. And so it definitely influences that monsoon could be definitely be a wet one at this point.

Christopher Conover: Okay, you just made most of our listeners celebrate with the caveat of, it's April. We're not quite sure, but you made them all celebrate. And that kind of led into my next question with, you know, conventional wisdom amongst people on the streets, those of us who are not meteorologists say, "Well, boy! It's been a warm winter. Summer is going to be brutal. At least we may hopefully get a good monsoon. But temperature wise, is there any correlation between warm winters and brutal summers?

Kevin Strongman: Initially, there's not much research to get into that. I don't know off the top my head, but we know that it's gonna be pretty warm, pretty hot in June. So that's that, you know, we creeping from, you know, May. We usually see the 90s, and starting the hundreds, we'll definitely see probably getting up to hundreds a lot quicker. And as lots of people say, more painful.

Christopher Conover: Sometimes the summers, yeah, they get a little painful. And this week, I've seen predictions of maybe 100, the ice on the Rillito River may be breaking this week. Is this early for such high temperatures, you know, being up in the 90s and early April?

Kevin Strongman: Yeah, we definitely don't see hundreds. Usually about May, early May. That's when usually you see the hundreds come through. We do see sometimes, you know, the records come up, creep up a little bit. But this the first time we'll see the earliest occurrence for Tucson. So this week, so this Friday, we'll see the first 100. The last time that actually happened was on April 19 in 1989 so that was the earliest occurrence ever. So it was definitely rare, and you know, alarming, gonna see? Okay?

Christopher Conover: You teased us with good, potentially good monsoon coming, but then you said, earliest ever, one hundreds this week. I think you've read depressed everybody, What? What? What is the forecast for southern Arizona as we start moving towards summer, what? What do we think summer is going to be like?

VIEW LARGER Tucson officially reached 100 degrees on April 11, 2025, setting a record for the earliest date with triple digit temperatures.

AC Swedbergh / AZPM News

Kevin Strongman: So beginning up to summer, we'll definitely be leading to dry, warm temperatures getting to up to hundreds. But as we get to June, there's actually indication of maybe we'll actually have a good monsoon start. So actually start on time for us, instead of usually, you know, early July, so maybe June, June 15, when the monsoon season starts for us, defined by National Weather series. So actually, might see rain maybe by earliest, June 15, or a little earlier. So that's early indications, but it's still way out. Actually, we'll see that.

Christopher Conover: That's all good news, because I've always said, you know, the monsoon tends to start right after the fireworks end on July 4, as you're walking back to your car. That's when that first big storm always hits while you're walking back to the car. It seems like, you know, we were down in Cochise County working on a show recently, and it is just so brown and dry down there. The joke kind of was, don't wear corduroy. You're gonna start a wildfire. Is it so dry as it appears, or is it just our perception? Again, when it comes to this whole dry winter,

Kevin Strongman: it's been pretty dry. It's mixture of perception. Also is looking at records like, yeah, it's been pretty dry across the area. And definitely you can see it in a drought monitor would be actually going back into extreme drought slowly across the whole entire, you know, County of Cochise, county, even to the other counties of southeast Arizona. So it's that it's definitely dry.

Christopher Conover: All right. Well, thanks for spending some time with us.

Kevin Strongman: Thank you.

Christopher Conover: It's a pleasure. That was National Weather Service Meteorologist Kevin strongman, you heard some mention of wildfire in that last interview. To learn even more about how fire conditions are looking for the upcoming season, we spoke with Tiffany de villa. She's a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management.

Tiffany Davilla: The conditions right now that we're facing, obviously, you mentioned they're dry. Warm and dry. We have temperature slated for 100 plus degrees this week. But looking back over the last six or seven months, starting in the fall, we had unseasonably warm temperatures and a very dry fall, and even winter, for that matter. There was not a lot of precipitation across the state, whether that was rain or snow. Very minimal amounts of snowfall in Northern Arizona, minimal snow pack. So all of that plays a role into what our outlook could be for the next couple of months.

We're also taking into consideration the drought. You know, we've got severe drought across most of the state. In fact, we have more than 50% of the state in extreme drought status, with about 7% in exceptional drought. So that's very concerning as we move into our even drier months coming up in the summer. With that being said, our fuels are drought stricken. There's lots of concern in Southern Arizona with the fine fuel, the amount of fine fuel, and the lack of moisture in that area. So we do have the potential for high fire activity, not just in Southern Arizona, but across the state. And again, that statewide activity is due to the warm temperatures, the dry conditions, the drought stricken fuel, and then a windy or spring pattern that we have in store for us, as well.

Any time we have those red flag warnings, we do have the potential for critical fire danger. Any ignition source into that fine fuel vegetation is going to start a fast moving, rapid spreading wildfire. In years past, our fire activity was primarily based on elevation and vegetation component. But this year, there is the potential for widespread fire activity everywhere from Southern Arizona up into Flagstaff and across into Northeastern Arizona. But we could see that higher fire activity in Southern Arizona because of the fuel conditions on the ground and the warmer temperatures in that area. And not just Southern Arizona, but across the Sonoran Desert, where we have that fine fuel component, a lot of invasive species, as well, and that abnormally dry summertime weather. We'll start to see here in the next couple of weeks.

Christopher Conover: We were down in Cochise County recently, and someone made the statement, nobody should be wearing corduroy, because there's a good chance that by just walking, you could start a fire. It seems so dry down there, those those grasses and fine fuels

Tiffany Davilla: Absolutely. And you know, normally what we'll see is we'll enter our fire season with activity peaking in southern Arizona because of that grass, that fine fuel vegetation. And then we usually see Northern Arizona kind of peak, you know, in June, once those temperatures warm up a bit more there and the snow pack starts to dissipate? Well, we don't have that snow pack to dissipate. So we could see northern act. Northern Arizona's fire activity increase at the same time we're seeing the rest of the activity increase. So again, our fire season this year is really not based on elevation or fuel type, but we're looking at widespread fire activity for most of the next few months,

Christopher Conover: everybody in the nation, probably around the world, was looking at Western wildfires this year with what happened in California. Is there a lesson to be learned before we get some fires going here in Arizona, for homeowners? Is, or people who are renting homes and things like that. Things to do now, before our fires get going, that we should remember California for?

Tiffany Davilla: Absolutely. We should be proactive. 365 days of the year. We shouldn't be waiting until we're entering fire season to start working on our properties. If you're waiting, it's too late, you know, making sure that you're clearing any dead vegetation, whether that's grass, diseased trees from around the property, dead trees, keeping your your lawn watered in, mowed, removing any debris that may accumulate on your rooftops, sealing rooftops, sealing, you know, tiles, shingles, things of that nature, and removing any flammable material away from your property. Yesterday, we were speaking to somebody, and he had mentioned that his grass on his property is waist high. We shouldn't be letting it get to that point. We should be taking care of that now, and we should be making sure that we're proactive. The state is actively engaged with the Firewise USA program. We are the liaison to that federal program. We've been trying to get into many communities that aren't already on the Firewise USA platform to start working on that community engagement and collaboration between residents, because it starts with you as the homeowner. We need to worry about ourselves first, and then we start working outward. So make sure your home is taken care of first. Don't worry about your neighbor. Understandably, there are some concerns when somebody has a neighbor with overgrown vegetation and they don't want to take care of that, create the defensible space around your property first, and we'll worry about all of those other impacts after the fact, but we try and work with as many communities as possible. Again, across the state, we're not singling out one area or another. We know which communities need the help. We're looking for communities to reach out to us as well, to make sure that we're taking care of their needs and bringing them, you know, into some idea of what they can do to protect their homes. We are actively engaged across the state with multiple fuels projects, whether that's on federal lands or state trust land, or around, you know, private property as well. So we're doing our part each and every day, and we want to make sure that the public is doing theirs as well. Because wildfire knows no boundaries. A wildfire could start on private property, move on to state trust land, or move on, in your case, onto the Coronado National Forest. So we need to do our jobs together, and we need to collaborate appropriately to make sure we're all reducing that wildfire risk across the state.

Christopher Conover: So interestingly, the total acres burned in Arizona seems to maybe be on the decline in the 2010s through 2020, we'd see seasons approaching a million acres burned. I remember those when I first got here that numbers dropped lately, 300,000 last year. Not that that's an insignificant number, but under 200,000 the two years before that. Is this just good advancement, or did we just get lucky the last couple of years?

Tiffany Davilla: So we looking back at our numbers over the last 10 plus years, it looks like we're on a cyclical a cyclical scale. So again, it all is based off of, are we in El Nino? Are we in La Nina? What are the conditions that we're facing in the winter months? Because, you know, we don't just go start in January and say, okay, April, we're going to see windier conditions and a lack of precipitation. We take into consideration what our fall and winter months look like as well, because at the end of the day that's going to showcase what we have in store. Did we get a lot of rain? Are we now overgrown with grasses and brush? Did we get no rain? But we still have that dense vegetation out there? It is now dry. It's kindling. You know, there's areas across the state that have been untouched by fire for years. Those are the areas that are also critical to us as well. Last year, for instance, we had the Freeman fire northeast of Oracle. It ran probably 20,000 acres in a 24 hour period. Because of it was wind driven. The fuel type it was burning in, the topography it was burning in. You know that one was started by lightning. But ironically, that area really doesn't get a lot of fire as large as it as it went. And again, ironically, about 10 days later, we had two more starts in that same area. Our outlooks are based off of what our past fall and winters look like, what our spring temperatures and conditions are going to look like, and then what our summer weather is going to be, and then also taking into consideration what our monsoon season may be as well. Because really the monsoon season, if we get a great monsoon season with a lot of precipitation statewide, that really could put an end to our fire activity. But if we don't really have that active monsoon. Turn which we've seen in the last couple of years, our fire activity could extend well into late summer and early fall.

Christopher Conover: All right. Well, fingers crossed for a quiet fire season. I guess we'll all just have to sit and wait.

Tiffany Davilla: Absolutely, and I just wanted to clarify a couple things when you were talking about the fire numbers. Also, for this year, we've already had nearly 300 fires that have burned nearly 6000 acres, as compared to 2024 year to date, where we saw 89 fires for 4000 acres burned. So you can already see we're almost three times the amount of fires that we've had since last year, year to date.

Christopher Conover: That was Tiffany Davilla of the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management. You're listening to The Buzz. After the break, we turn our attention to water supply. Stay with us.

Christopher Conover: Welcome back to The Buzz. I'm Christopher Conover. We're looking at how a dry winter will affect Arizona's upcoming summer. Each year, as temperatures warm and snow melts, Arizona's reservoirs begin to fill up, but an ongoing mega drought throughout the American West has large reservoirs like lakes Meade and Powell making headlines in recent years due to their relatively low status. Those reservoirs in particular are fed by the Colorado River, while states in the region's North largely had above average snowfall this winter. States to the south, such as Arizona, Colorado and Utah have not so what does a dry winter mean for our water supply, particularly as it relates to cities that rely on the Colorado River? We asked that question of the central Arizona project's Dr Noli Templeton,

Nolie Templeton: so we're right at the, you know, the end of the peak snow pack season. And so now our focus is shifting into what's the runoff going to look like from the snow that we got? So, you know, the runoff into Lake Powell, which is the upstream, larger reservoir that runoff comes from different headwater regions in Wyoming or Utah or Colorado or New Mexico, and so we monitor the snow pack in those different headwater regions. And it wasn't a bad snow year. It was about right around average, depending where you are in the basin. As you went further south, New Mexico had not a great snow pack year. But northern Colorado, southern Wyoming actually wasn't. It was right around average. So now we're shifting from the snow accumulation season to the snow melt season, and so we're watching what that means for how runoff is going into Lake Powell. And the latest forecast, we're looking at about 70% of average runoff. That's a trend that we have been seeing, that even with, you know, 100% right on average snow pack, we're getting less than average runoff. So what that means is Lake Powell will be filling up over the next couple months because the snow is melting and coming into the reservoir. But we do expect that if, right now, we're expecting right around 7 million acre feet of water to go into the reservoir over this water year of 2025 which will mean that it will go down when we're comparing to where it was last year. That's the reality of just not a great runoff from an average snow pack season

Christopher Conover: when it comes to the reservoirs. I know zap doesn't have a lot to say about the water going into Lake Powell and Lake Mead, but when we get to some of the smaller but important reservoirs like Lake Pleasant, how much say do you have about how much water goes into Lake Pleasant and then how much water comes out of Lake Pleasant in Maricopa County?

*Nolie Templeton: Yeah, so Lake Pleasant is a reservoir that's managed by Central Arizona Project. It's not something that a lot of people know all the time. It's known for being that fun recreational area, but we really just use it as a way to manage our water deliveries. So it's not so much used as far as storage and whether it's a wet or dry year, but it's more something that is used operationally at zap to optimize the best time to meet our water orders throughout the year. And so when we do so, we don't have a huge say in how. You know, Lake Powell and Lake Mead are operated by the Bureau of Reclamation. I. But we do. It's something we closely monitor, because they're managed by the 2007 interim guidelines. So we're heavily involved in those water policy decisions and shortage agreements that were made under the interim guidelines and under the 2019 drought contingency plans. And now we're also heavily involved in how those policies will be changing in post 2026 and so when we look at Lake Mead, you know, we're we're heavily involved to monitoring what that release is going to be from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, because, based on where Lake needs, elevation is going to be, that will then impact what shortage condition we're going to be in for the next calendar year, and as we've been in since 2021 we will be in a shortage condition, which means that we will be taking less water. And those reductions are largely born by the state of Arizona, but really it's largely born by Central Arizona Project. And so when we see less runoff going into Lake Powell, it then does determine, usually, that there's less release from Lake Powell to Lake Mead, which then will have less, you know, the elevation in Lake Mead will go down, and then that may impact what type of shortages cap and zap water users will be taking for the next calendar year.

Christopher Conover: When we did an episode of our podcast on water called tapped. We did one about the cap canal system, and we learned that those canals have to stay full. Meanwhile, Lake Pleasant is, as you said, a lot of people know it as a place for recreation. I'm a scuba instructor. I have more dives in Lake Pleasant than probably somebody should. Is there any worry, because of the recreational nature and the structure, like with the canals, about drawing Lake Pleasant down in dry times?

*Nolie Templeton: I wouldn't say that. We're so our CIP operators. You know, heavily, we're very conscientious of how to best manager, manage Lake Pleasant to meet our water customer deliveries. And so if our water supply is going down, I think it means that we essentially move water through the canal at a slower rate. We're able to also there's some different types of operational flexibility, such as that. It also provides us, you know, the ability zap just as part of our annual maintenance has sections of the canal that are that go dry because we need to do inspections in those areas or make minor repairs. And so in those situations, that's again, a time when we would heavily rely on or the management of Lake Pleasant to be able to temper that canal going out of, you know, the canal going dry for a section, for a period of time, and then coming back online. So it's something that our operators are always, you know, continuous, 24/7, analyzing, always, planning a day a week, a month a year out, to ensure that, you know, the operations are continuing as normal as possible.

Christopher Conover: Does one bad winter, at least in the southern part of the Colorado basin? Does that cause any concern for C, A, P, as the water, regarding the water supply, or is it more of a multiple bad winters, long term drought. You know, one season there, there are changes year to year.

Dr. Nolie Templeton: So as far from a long term, long term planning vantage point, you know, we're well aware that there'll be wet winters and dry winters. The trend, though, that we have seen from the early 2000s is that we've had a lot more dry than wet, and that's a trend that we expect to continue into the future.

We know that the Colorado River Basin is drying or there's an aridification processes at play. And so even when we get an average snow pack because of hotter temperatures, we have drier soils, more evaporation. All these different elements make it so that then there's less water going into the stream or streams that then feed the Colorado River, then feed Lake Powell. So, you know, it's not one dry winter that's going to take the system. The system is huge, almost 60 million acre feet of storage of water. But what we've seen is we've had a lot more dry than wet since the early 2000s and those dry and dry and dry years have absolutely impacted the system. And the early 2000s is a big a big example of when the system was was really suffering from a few dry years back to back. And that's what prompted the 2007 interim guidelines to make sure that the states were aware and committed to cutting their water use so that we could preserve the system.

What we've seen, too, in the last several years is again dry and dry, I think, 2020, 2021, and 2022 are all very dry years and. Having that back to back to bac, resulted in a need of updated policy. And so what came out of that was the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. And essentially what that meant is, again, the lower basin states, California, Arizona, Nevada, came together to commit to preserving even more water into Lake Mead. So above what those interim guidelines were, above what our drought contingency plan commitments were, we've conserved even more water into Lake Mead, with the goal being almost 3 million acre feet by 2026. That's just so we understand that we need to preserve, we need to be sustainable. Preserve the system and ensure that it's sustainable into the future. So I wouldn't say it's one dry winter that's that's so concerning, but in a way we have been edge and planning for a drier future since the early 2000s.

Christopher Conover: And as you mentioned, there have been some interim guidelines, and there are still negotiations going on basin wide on how the Colorado will get used and divided up in the future.

Dr. Nolie Templeton: Yeah, absolutely. And so that's, that's the biggest planning decision at Central Arizona Project. The planning process on how the reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, will be operated post 2026. The interim guidelines will expire, and so the seven states are trying to figure out how to plan for an even drier future than what we have seen. Particularly the lower basin states have led the charge with the with the alternative that was submitted to Bureau of Reclamation for analysis. We recognize that it's going to be a drier future, and that we need to reduce use to make sure that the system as a whole stays healthy.

Christopher Conover: Thanks for spending some time with us.

Dr. Nolie Templeton: Yeah, you're welcome.

Christopher Conover: That was Dr Noli Templeton of the Central Arizona Project, and that's the Buzz for this week.

You can find all our episodes online at azpm.org and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts, just search for the Buzz Arizona. We're also on the NPR app. Zac Ziegler is our producer, with production help from Maggie Farmer. Our music is by Enter the Haggis. I'm Christopher Conover, thanks for listening.

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