Wichita ? With drought lingering in western Kansas, groundwater levels appear to have fallen dramatically for the second year in a row, the Kansas Geological Survey said Monday.

The early findings are unofficial; the annual survey of 500 water wells in central and western Kansas is only half complete, said Rex Buchanan, associate director of the Kansas Geological Survey, which is based at Kansas University.

In a telephone interview en route to a well near Garden City, Buchanan said the survey’s water specialists were finding just what they expected: water level drops very similar to last year’s numbers.

“It exacerbates an already tough situation,” Buchanan said.

The geological survey’s study is conducted annually in conjunction with a survey of an additional 700 wells measured by the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s Division of Water Resources. Between them, the two agencies measure water wells in 47 Kansas counties.

Water specialists started taking measurements Friday in northwestern Kansas, moving south over the weekend to Syracuse, Garden City and Liberal. They expect to finish today around Dodge City.

Final measurements will not be available until next month, but specialists comparing notes daily during the survey are already predicting declines as severe as those found last January.

Those measurements showed groundwater levels dropped an average of 2.5 feet in northwestern Kansas, 4.75 feet in southwestern Kansas and 1.5 feet in west-central Kansas between January 2002 and January 2003.

“We were expecting to see things very similar,” Buchanan said. “It was just as dry in northwestern Kansas this summer as it was the previous summer.”

For several years groundwater declines had leveled some because of conservation measures and wetter weather during the 1990s. But the big declines of the past two years are the result of people pumping more to make up for the lack of rainfall, he said.

It has been so dry in some parts of the state for so many summers that survey crews this week have come across irrigation wells already putting water on the ground to make up for the lack of subsurface moisture. They found the same thing happening a year ago.

The water well measurements are taken at the same time each January — after the end of the irrigation season — which gives water levels a chance to stabilize.

Most of the measured wells are used for irrigation — tapping into the High Plains aquifer, which includes the Ogallala aquifer. Recharge on the Ogallala is typically less than a half inch a year, regardless of rainfall.

“There is no question it speeds the depletion up,” Buchanan said.