Bone dry: Regional precipitation more than 5 inches below normal
A beaver's channel in Glacier National Park barely has enough water to swim in. (Chris Peterson photo)
The US. Department of Agricultural on Monday announced that Flathead and Lincoln counties had been designated as primary natural disaster areas due to drought.
Both counties are in the depths of a drought, while other regions of the state are actually above normal precipitation for the water year.
In Kalispell, precipitation is 5.44 inches below normal for the water year, meteorologist Luke Robinson said last week. The water year is measured from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.
In West Glacier, a normal water year sees 29.3 inches of precipitation. This year, to date, it’s had just 17.17 inches.
In the historic fire year of 2003, when tens of thousands of acres of forest burned in Glacier, West Glacier saw 22.93 inches of precipitation total.
So far this year, it’s even drier than that.
Meanwhile some regions east of the divide are above average for precipitation. Choteau, for example, is at 10.67 inches currently. The mean for this time of year is normally 8.87 inches and for the entire water year is 11.09 inches.