Drought Conditions Improve, but Streams Remain Low.
Greenwich experienced about 15.4 inches of rainfall cumulatively over March, April and May, according to a water supply update issued by Aquarion Water Co. on June 9.
“Drinking water reservoirs have improved and average levels statewide were more than 100 percent of normal as of the end of April, with three systems at less than 90 percent of normal,” McClure said in his release.
Although efforts to refill the state’s reservoirs have been successful, Connecticut’s stream flow and groundwater levels remain below their historical average.
On March 6, the river averaged 14.6 cubic feet of water per second, and on March 14 it averaged 20.3 cubic feet of water per second.
Rippowam River remains at low flow—it is currently about four inches below the historical average for the month, and its stream flow has fallen to lower levels since the beginning of the month.
Over the week of June 4 through June 10, the river averaged at 29.4 cubic feet of water per second, while the same week has historically seen flow discharge rates of 55.9 cubic feet of water per second between 1976 and 2016.
In this region, because of the coolness and the natural rainfall we have, for the most part people can get away with watering once a week,” Savageau said.
“It’s going to require years of adding infrastructure and conservation to make up for the loss of water that’s no longer available,” Fazekas said.
“For us, that means increasing the amount of water from the Bridgeport system transported into Stamford and Greenwich.” People-Tag: Denise Savageau, Peter Fazekas, Rob Katz, Savagaeu Tags: drought, greenwich, water supply

Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed.
An unprecedented 40-year experiment in a 40,000-acre valley of Yosemite National Park strongly supports the idea that managing fire, rather than suppressing it, makes wilderness areas more resilient to fire, with the added benefit of increased water availability and resistance to drought.
After a three-year, on-the-ground assessment of the park’s Illilouette Creek basin, University of California, Berkeley researchers concluded that a strategy dating to 1973 of managing wildfires with minimal suppression and almost no preemptive, so-called prescribed burns has created a landscape more resistant to catastrophic fire, with more diverse vegetation and forest structure and increased water storage, mostly in the form of meadows in areas cleared by fires.
"When fire is not suppressed, you get all these benefits: increased stream flow, increased downstream water availability, increased soil moisture, which improves habitat for the plants within the watershed.
The value of forest clearings Wildfire management, as opposed to suppression, comes with major changes in the way the forest looks, Stephens and Thompson said.
Only four areas in the western U.S., including two in California — the Illilouette Creek basin and the Sugarloaf Creek basin — have allowed lightning fires to burn in large areas for decades.
And in recent drought years, when surrounding basins saw more trees die, there was almost no tree mortality in the Illilouette basin.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."
Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire.
"Wildfire management vs. fire suppression benefits forest and watershed: Long-term experiment in Yosemite shows managing fires can help make forest more resilient to fire."

The excess rainfall helped alleviate abnormally dry and drought conditions in parts of eastern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
This week’s map reflects a one-category improvement in conditions in the drought/abnormally dry areas of South Carolina.
Recent rains also resulted in improvements to the drought/abnormally dry areas in northern and central Georgia as streamflow and soil moisture conditions improved.
In the southern part of the state, moderate (D1) and severe drought (D2) were reduced to areas that continue to show lingering dryness at 60- to 90-day timescales.
Extreme drought (D3) was removed and some areas near the coasts saw two-category improvements as recent rains totaled up to 7 inches.
Meanwhile, above-average rainfall in the eastern part of the state resulted in a reduction in the abnormally dry (D0) area.
Abnormally dry (D0) areas crept northward into parts of southern Oklahoma in response to precipitation deficits and corresponding dry soils and vegetation.
Pasture and crop conditions further deteriorated, resulting in the westward expansion of abnormal dryness (D0) and the introduction of moderate drought (D1) in the eastern part of the state.
Looking Ahead The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center forecast calls for continued rain June 7-14 across the South and eastern portions of the United States.
Author(s): Deborah Bathke, National Drought Mitigation Center Dryness Categories D0 … Abnormally Dry … used for areas showing dryness but not yet in drought, or for areas recovering from drought.

Two months of above-normal precipitation in Connecticut has convinced a coalition of state agencies to lift the drought watch that it issued last October, but officials warned that groundwater and streamflow in the state "remain vulnerable."
The drought watch was issued last autumn at a point when most of the state was suffering from nearly two years of below-average precipitation.
Nearly all Connecticut drinking water reservoirs have returned to normal capacity as a result of recent rains.
But members of the grpup noted that "streamflow and groundwater levels have demonstrated some volatility and remain vulnerable" this spring.
Last week, U.S. Drought Monitor experts noted that "groundwater levels remained unfavorably low" in areas of New England like Connecticut that suffered from the extended lack of precipitation.
The U.S. Drought Monitor, a collaboration between the federal government and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, tracks drought conditions across the country.
A large swath of eastern Connecticut and the shoreline are now considered entirely free of drought.
October 2016 was the first time the state interagency group had ever issued a drought watch.
But the two-year-drought used up much of the below-surface groundwater in Connecticut and experts say it will take many more weeks of normal rainfall to fully restore those aquifers and wells.
April was the first month since August of last year that sections of this state were classified as entirely drought-free by federal climate scientists.

While changing precipitation patterns can have a significant impact on stream flows in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers indicates that shifts in vegetation type resulting from warming and other factors may have an equal or greater effect.
Their findings appear in the journal PLOS One.
"We found that vegetation change may have a greater impact on the amount of stream flow in the Sierra than the direct effects of climate warming," said lead author Ryan Bart, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
Exacerbated by climate and drought, fires such as the 2013 Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park can destroy entire stands of forest, which may not return.
Because the future composition of shrub lands and the distribution of shrub species in the Sierra Nevada is unknown, the researchers examined stream flows under multiple possible scenarios of vegetation-type conversion in two Sierra Nevada watersheds.
While some forest-to-shrub land conversion scenarios resulted in higher stream flow, depending on factors such as the size and area covered by shrub leaves relative to tree leaves, Bart noted that a shrub-dominated landscape would not necessarily result in more water in stream.
"Shrubs are adept at pulling water out of the soil, so that in some cases, a decent-sized shrub may use just as much water as a much taller tree.
It is only when shrubs are much smaller than trees that we see less water used by vegetation and thus more stream flow."
"The results underscore the importance of accounting for changes in vegetation communities to accurately characterize future stream flow for the Sierra Nevada."
Effect of Tree-to-Shrub Type Conversion in Lower Montane Forests of the Sierra Nevada (USA) on Streamflow.

California Overcame 1/100 Odds to Beat Its Epic Drought.
Never tell California the odds.
Not only has the state recovered from its record-breaking drought, it did so in record time.
According to a new NOAA study looking at 445 years of climate data, California had a 1 percent chance of breaking the drought in just two years.
“What we see in the historic record is an increase in the likelihood of warm and dry periods, punctuated by wet conditions,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, climate scientist at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
“What we used are existing climate reconstructions based on tree ring data, which show river and stream flows,” says Eugene Wahl, the study’s lead author and a paleoclimatologist for NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.
To make sure their correlation was sound, Wahl and his co-authors calibrated tree rings to stream flow for over 60 years of data—from 1916 to 1977.
All this legwork was really so Wahl and his team really could figure out the rate at which California recovered from its most recent drought relative to those in the past.
The following year, the bucket gets a little more water.
A little more the following year.

"The reservoir systems are in very good shape, with some nearing 100 percent capacity," he added.
"We evaluate the drought indicators at the beginning of each week, so when we look at the indicators on Monday it will include all the rain" that New Jersey received during the past week, he said.
Some trouble spots Although most reservoirs in North Jersey are faring well, ranging from 93 to 100 percent of their capacity, two large reservoirs in Central Jersey remain below average for this time of year, according to Assistant New Jersey State Climatologist Mathieu Gerbush at Rutgers University.
The Spruce Run Reservoir is currently at 65.6 percent capacity and the Round Valley Reservoir is at 71.8 percent capacity, Gerbush said.
If flows are near average, then we know groundwater has responded well and that last lingering drought indicator will be diminished or in many spots gone," Robinson said.
Status of other reservoirs As of April 3, the overall water storage level of 12 of North Jersey’s biggest reservoirs was at about 94 percent capacity, which is slightly above average for early April, according to state DEP data.
Here’s a breakdown of the latest levels reported at each of the four major water suppliers in North Jersey: The Suez-NJ System, which has three reservoirs in Bergen County, is now at 100 percent of its capacity, after being down to about 60 percent in January and February, then up to 90 percent on March 31.
The Newark Water Department’s five reservoirs are now at about 95 percent of their capacity, after being down as low as 52 percent on Nov. 30, 2016.
The North Jersey District Water Supply Commission’s two reservoirs are at about 93 percent of their capacity, after dropping to less than 50 percent in September, October and November last year.
The Jersey City Water Department’s two reservoirs are at about 93 percent of their capacity, after dropping to less than 60 percent in November 2016.

A new report finds much of New Jersey is drought-free.
We had a significant snow and rain storm across the Garden State last week, but the New Jersey Department of Environmental protection has not changed any of its drought warnings or watches in central and north Jersey — yet.
A drought warning remains in effect for Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties.
However the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report for New Jersey shows 43 percent of the state (southern and coastal) is now classified as being drought-free, while only 6 percent of northern New Jersey is still listed as being in a “severe drought” situation.
DEP spokesman Larry Hajna said most reservoirs are in good shape because demand for water has been down for months, “but that demand will increase in the coming months and we’ll need to review the indicators at that point to see if any changes are warranted.” Broccoli agreed that at this point taking a wait-and-see approach makes sense.
He said over the next few weeks there is a potential for above normal precipitation in New Jersey, which is good news, “but of course there’s a big difference between a forecast and what really happens.” “The forecast looks optimistic, but we’ll have to see if Mother Nature delivers on those promises,” he said.
He said it’s important to keep in mind “we’re probably better at predicting the direction our temperatures will take as opposed to how much rain we’ll get.
With rain so much depends on individual storms, and how much rain they deliver in a particular location.” Broccoli said there are indications weak El Nino systems could be forming in the Pacific Ocean, which could bring New Jersey and the rest of the East Coast above-average precipitation, but that pattern will not take shape until next winter.
“We’re really looking pretty far into the future when we’re talking about what may happen next winter, on the basis of a projection that has yet to materialize,” he said.
More from New Jersey 101.5:

Task Force Watching Drought Conditions Closely.
The maps at Tuesday’s Drought Management Task Force meeting now show a less threatening beige or yellow.
"Conditions have improved, but not to the point that we would sit back and relax," Vandana Rao said at Tuesday’s meeting.
The first half of February was fairly good to us.
The last half of February, the first week of March, not so much," said National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Dunham, who also sits on the Drought Management Task Force.
Dunham says the above-normal temperatures experienced during the month of February did not help recovery from the drought.
That’s a phenomenal snow loss.
And I just have a hard time figuring that that much snow loss went into the ground," Dunham said.
The task force agreed to keep the drought index at the advisory level in northeastern Massachusetts as well as for Cape Cod and the Islands — one level away from "normal."
It’s due to meet again in the second week of April.