Salina ? If anyone in Topeka knows drought, it would be Tracy Streeter.

For starters, he’s director of the Kansas Water Office, the state’s lead agency in water planning. Furthermore, by law, the Water Office is responsible for identifying drought conditions in Kansas. He’s chairman of the Governor’s Drought Response Team.

And at the Kansas Water Authority’s quarterly meeting last month in Great Bend, Streeter was talking up the drought. He twice said the state might be in a historic drought and that the relentless decline of the water level in Kanopolis Reservoir – it’s at its lowest level since 1989 – was due to the weather.

“I wish I had a crystal ball to predict when the drought will break,” Streeter said. “Obviously, lack of rainfall is the primary culprit. … We’ve got a very complex issue here in the midst of perhaps a historic drought.”

But here’s the thing – if when you say “drought” you mean unusually low rainfall, Kansas has only flirted with drought in recent years. That’s according to the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb., which posts the Standardized Precipitation Index for the entire country. And a review of the Palmer drought index since 2000 confirms that, by any objective measure, weather conditions in central Kansas are on the dry side – indeed, some parts of Kansas, in particular the northwest corner, have seen periods of serious drought – but they don’t compare to drought that’s been seen here before.

Is it drought?

Through the end of November, the Standardized Precipitation Index for 2006 showed that the only part of Kansas that is unusually short of rain is the southeast corner, which is moderately dry.

And 2005? The only part of Kansas that didn’t see near normal rainfall for the year was east-central, which was moderately wet.

What about 2004? Normal, except for the south-central/southwest corner, which was moderately wet.

2003? Northwest Kansas was moderately dry; the rest, normal.

It isn’t until you go back to 2002 that significant portions of Kansas were drier than normal – northwest and west-central were extremely dry, north-central was severely dry and northeast was moderately dry.

But even in 2002, one of the driest years since 1970, central Kansas – the area that contains the Smoky Hill River Basin below Cedar Bluff Reservoir – received rainfall that was classified as near normal.

The question of whether Kansas is in a drought isn’t merely academic. A record number of streams in Kansas had low flow this summer. The Smoky Hill River, which flows into Kanopolis Reservoir before it reaches Salina, where it supplies the city with water, was no exception.

Flow into Kanopolis through November is the lowest ever measured, breaking the low-flow record set in 1983. This year’s flow was less than half the flow in 2002.

That low flow, in turn, has allowed the level of Kanopolis Reservoir to fall to the lowest level in 17 years. It has been below normal for 15 months and, if it hasn’t recovered by early March, will set an all-time record for the most consecutive days below normal.

Water shortage

Whether Salina faces a water shortage next summer will depend on the winter and spring. Today, the lake is 7.5 feet below normal, but one serious rain spell could erase that. In April 1973, the Kanopolis Lake level rose 20 feet in 10 days. There have been five years in which it rose more than 20 feet in a month.

But when state water officials say the lack of streamflow is due to drought, it implies the cause is both temporary and unusual. Pressed for what he means when he says “drought,” Streeter acknowledges that by established measures, much of Kansas hasn’t seen much drought lately.

“If you look at the Palmer (drought index) or some of those, they don’t indicate we are in a horrible drought right now,” he said.

David Pope, chief engineer of the Division of Water Resources and one of the most powerful figures on the Kansas water scene, says the drought might not be the worst Kansas has weathered, but it nonetheless is real.

“I am not arguing the point that we are in a severe drought,” he said. “We have had several years of cumulative below-normal precipitation from which we have not recovered. … Keep in mind that you can have two or three or four years of marginal or even substantially below-normal (precipitation) and then you can get above normal for a year or two, but you haven’t recovered.

“You have to have above-normal (rainfall), substantially, for quite a period after you have been in drought before you really get back to normal.”

What is drought?

So what is a drought?

Mary Knapp, state climatologist at Kansas State University, is, of course, intimately familiar with the technical measures of drought, but she also has a nontechnical definition.

“A drought is you don’t have enough water to supply what you need,” she said in an interview last summer. “Part of a drought definition is what are the supplies versus what are the current demands. People have been grasping for how to measure drought since the first time people went to get water and couldn’t get it.”

The National Drought Mitigation Center has a wealth of information on drought. In a section on defining drought, it notes that drought can be expressed in meteorological, agricultural, hydrological or socio-economic terms.

Typically, droughts by definition are unusual, a departure from long-term patterns. The site points to the evolution of drought definitions in Australia as an example.

“The country provides financial assistance to farmers only under ‘exceptional drought circumstances,’ when drought conditions are beyond those that could be considered part of normal risk management,” it explains.

Measurements

The Palmer drought index, which is calculated by the National Climatic Data Center, is based on rainfall, temperatures and soil types. It was developed in western Kansas and Iowa.

And the Palmer index does show that some parts of Kansas have been hit hard by drought since 2000. Central Kansas only flirted with drought until this year, according to the index.

On the other hand, the Palmer index shows that northwest and north-central Kansas have experienced drought, some of it severe, nearly constantly from 2002 through 2004.

The Standardized Precipitation Index is based on the premise that it isn’t enough to know whether rainfall is above or below average. What matters is how far above or below average it is. Thus it looks at rainfall for a given location and determines how closely that matches long-term patterns for that location. The index value is either positive or negative: positive means conditions were wetter than normal, negative means they were drier. Between 1.0 and -1.0 is considered normal.

Consider the 12-month Standardized Precipitation Index for central Kansas.

The National Climatic Data Center has monthly rainfall totals for central Kansas that go back to 1895. To determine the current 12-month SPI, the index looks at rainfall in central Kansas from November 2005 through October 2006 (23.87 in.) and compares it to all the other November-through-October periods.

Since 2000, the 12-month index for central Kansas has dipped below -1.0 three times: the year ending in July 2002 (-1.2), the year ending in August 2002 (-1.1) and the year ending in September 2002 (-1.6).

At all other times during the period, the Standardized Precipitation Index was in the range described as normal, with the exception of the 12-month period that ended in March 2000, which was moderately wet (1.3).