Eighty percent of New Hampshire is still in a drought. Will the snow melt help?

Snow is giving way to mud after temperatures peaked into the 60s and 70s across the state over the past week, and experts are paying attention to how the snowmelt will affect flood risk and the state’s long-running drought.

While this year may have felt like a classic New England winter, it was the eighth driest December through February since record keeping began in the late 19th century, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

That means there’s not much hope that melting snow will alleviate the drought that’s covering 80% of New Hampshire.

Conditions have been essentially “locked in place” since winter began and the ground froze, said Ted Diers, who leads the water division at the state Department of Environmental Services.

“Any snow that falls is on top of the ground, it’s not soaking in,” he said.

The state’s water debt is so big that even if snow penetrated soils during the winter or now as it melts, it isn’t enough to resolve the drought outright.

“The water that’s stored in that snowpack is only a couple inches, and we have deficits of a foot to a foot and a half that have carried over from the summer drought,” said Sarah Jamison, a senior service hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine.

Since surface water levels are low across the state, the snow melt will first fill up ponds and wetlands before it reaches rivers and creates problems.

“Overall flood risk for the state is actually below normal, because the drought conditions just seem to be the more dominant factor,” Jamison said. “It’s going to take a heck of a lot more water to raise the river up to flood stage than it would otherwise normally need,” she said.

But even with low water levels, ice jams could still pose a problem this mud season. When ice melts, it causes blockages on rivers and they can overflow rapidly. Most rivers in New Hampshire have enough ice to create a risk, according to Jamison.

“Ice is the ‘it’ factor. It’s the wild card. It’s unpredictable,” she said. “Even with low-flow rivers like we have across the state, it doesn’t necessarily need that much water to cause flooding because it can become an instant ice jam.”

Experts say a slow and steady snow melt that can trickle into soil and replenish groundwater would keep flood risk low and help improve drought conditions.

Too much rain too fast on top of the snowmelt could create a flooding event but fail to fix the drought, because a lot of the water would end up as run-off.

Diers, with the state’s environmental services department, said a steady period of consistent rain over several weeks would replenish aquifers and wetlands.

While NOAA is forecasting the state’s drought will continue through May, Diers said, weather can be hard to predict this far out.

And the predictions are getting tricker to make as climate change increases the variability in weather, said Mary Stampone, New Hampshire’s climatologist .

“We’re also seeing…a lot of ups and downs,” she said. “And so the transition seasons like fall and spring are where we can get a lot of that.”

New Hampshire springs are seeing earlier and earlier warm days, followed by late-season cold snaps. This can put a strain on local ecosystems, which rely on snow melt as a crucial water source, especially during growing seasons.

Diers said it’s important for people to be prepared and be thoughtful about their water consumption as we approach warmer months.

“It’s several months away until the really high water use season occurs,” Diers said. “Now is the time to reassess your water use and figure out ways that you could use less.”