Water Conservation & Drought
Drought Defined
California's droughts are primarily about the lack of rainfall, but in Washington, the law defines drought conditions with criteria beyond just precipitation.
In Washington, a drought emergency is declared when:
- The water supply for a region is below 75% of normal levels.
- The water shortage is likely to cause undue hardships for water users.
This definition ties closely to water availability and its impact on people, agriculture, and ecosystems, making it a hydrological definition. In contrast, California uses a meteorological definition, focusing on rainfall levels.
State lawmakers in Washington set these criteria to determine when disaster relief funding can be made available for drought emergencies.
The Washington State Department of Ecology is responsible for identifying conditions that meet the legal definition of a drought. To do this, their staff closely monitors winter weather patterns and measures snowpack levels. They also work with other state and federal monitoring agencies to gather and analyze data. This careful monitoring helps the state determine when drought conditions exist and ensures a timely response to potential water shortages.
The Dungeness Snotel Station is one of four SNOTEL locations in the Olympic Mountains and one of over 30 across the state. Data collected from all four Olympic SNOTEL sites are typically reported together to represent conditions for the entire mountain range, rather than focusing on individual basins. This approach provides a broader understanding of snowpack and water supply trends across the region.
This approach makes sense because the Dungeness SNOTEL site is located at about 4,000 feet elevation, which is over 1,000 feet lower than the top of the watershed. Data from this site alone wouldn’t fully represent the conditions at higher elevations. Historical records for the Dungeness station, which has been in operation since 1999, show that snow at this elevation typically melts out by early May, compared to early or mid-June at higher-elevation stations. Combining data from multiple sites provides a more complete picture of snowpack and water availability across the range.
In the Pacific Northwest, snowpack drought is not about annual rainfall or the bounty (or lack) of flowers and spring growth, but instead, it’s about the snow in the mountains. The state definition is consistent with this. Hydrologists and other snowpack watchers find limited delight in unseasonably sunny and warm weather in April and May because it means the snowpack is melting early and that could mean dangerously low flow conditions in streams come August and September unless summer rain showers arrive. For the Dungeness River, extreme low flow is 105 cfs or lower (cubic feet per second) measured at the U.S. Geological Survey Flow Gage 11 miles up the river.
In late August 2023, the Dungeness River is flowing below 100 cfs, unless it's raining - which we have seen off and on.
Click on the brochure image to the right for more information and ideas for saving water indoors and outdoors.
The undue hardship mentioned in the state’s drought definition primarily refers to challenges faced by farmers who anticipate running out of irrigation water from streams by August, as well as communities that depend on snowmelt in streams and rivers for their drinking water supplies.
This hardship also affects salmon, which, like commercial irrigators, require ample streamflow to survive. To address this, the state may offer payments to irrigators to reduce river diversions when it could help maintain streamflow for salmon.
In the Dungeness watershed, stakeholders have worked together since the late 1980s to address shared concerns about flooding, drought, agriculture, and salmon recovery. The Dungeness River Management Team, which includes a representative from the City of Sequim, meets monthly to discuss and collaborate on these issues.
A notable example of cooperation occurred in 2015 when Sequim’s reclaimed water was used to supplement streamflow in Bell Creek. This effort benefited both salmon habitats and farmers who rely on the creek for irrigation. This video tells the story.