Miss the Drought? Try the Northwest : Climate: States from Washington to Wyoming look enviously at California as they suffer another disappointingly dry winter.

With Californians delighting in luxuriant vistas and cascading mountain streams for the first springtime in seven years, much of the Northwest is watching enviously after another disappointing winter promised continued drought conditions from Washington toWyoming.

February was the driest on record in most of the sprawling Columbia River Basin in Washington, where state officials plan to reconvene an emergency drought committee this week.

Scores of workers have been laid off near Spokane because there is not enough water to generate hydroelectric power for aluminum smelters, while extra firefighters have been hired for summer duty in national forests in Montana, Idaho and the Dakotas.

“We have had six years of drought, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to get out of it this year,” said Roy Kaiser, a water supply specialist for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service in Bozeman, Mont.

Although end-of-winter snowpack readings are uniformly better than last year across the West, they are well below normal for the seventh consecutive year in parts of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington. The measurements starkly contrast to those released last week by the California Department of Water Resources, which showed California’s snowpack at 150% of average, the best in a decade.

“We have a precipitation map here that looks like someone turned the West Coast upside down,” said Dulcy Mahar, spokeswoman for the Bonneville Power Administration, an Oregon-based government wholesaler of electricity to several Northwest states. “We bought hydropower from California this year, and that is almost unheard of.”

In the rest of the West, this year is shaping up to be one of the wettest on record. According to the National Weather Service, Arizona sloshed through its wettest winter this century, Nevada and Utah their second wettest, New Mexico its third and California its fifth.

The California data released last week showed the water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack five times greater than during the worst of the drought, with runoff projections--the key to water supplies for cities and farms--2 1/2 times greater than a year ago.

And that poses an image problem for areas of the West where the drought stubbornly persists. Sympathy is proving hard to get because officials in Washington, D.C., believe that the dry cycle broke everywhere.

“We are running head on into the Easterners’ perception of the West,” Mahar said, “that it is all California.”

The wide band of unusually dry conditions weaves erratically in and out of several states, sparing some communities while scorching others.

This winter ranked as the seventh driest in Washington since 1895 and the 18th driest in Montana, according to the National Weather Service, which bases its rankings on precipitation during December, January and February.

With the winter snow season now over in all but the highest reaches of the Rocky Mountains, the northern tier can only hope for unusually plentiful spring rains to end the protracted dry spell. Late spring storms helped cushion the blow of light snowfall last year in Montana, but hydrologists do not expect another such blessing.

“Those areas that are still dry at this time of the year are not really going to get out of the woods this season,” said Wayne Cheney, a hydrologist for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Denver who monitors precipitation data in 17 western states. “I think most everyone will find things a little better, but not enough to celebrate over.”

In Oregon, where the snowpack is deeper than usual and the southern part of the state has shared California’s abundance of moisture, a drought emergency remains because of low reservoir levels and fears of a rainless spring. Pockets of severe dryness also persist. The town well has gone dry in the Blue Mountain hamlet of Mt. Vernon in central Oregon, forcing 606 residents to rely on flows from a ditch that drains a nearby river.

“We are still having extreme difficulty,” said town administrator Mary Pendarvis, who has sought state help in digging a new well for the logging and cattle town. “You just keep your fingers crossed day by day as to how long our source is going to hold.”

Much of the problem in the Northwest is blamed on atmospheric quirks--in particular, a persistent high-pressure system off the West Coast that steered to California, Oregon and the Southwest many winter storms that typically would have hit to the north.

To complicate matters, said David Miskus of the National Weather Service, a second system off the Washington and Oregon coasts pushed other arriving storms farther north into Canada and Alaska. In short, he said, Mother Nature conspired against the Northwest.

“California has gotten well at our expense,” said Doug McChesney, a Washington water resource planner in Olympia. “Statewide, we are looking at 78% of normal snowpack, and our stream flows are off between 40% and 80% of normal.”

Even so, the situation is better than last year, the worst on record when three of six snow survey sites monitored by the city of Seattle were bare.

This year, Seattle’s snowpack readings ranged between 70% and 80% of average, said George Griffin, spokesman for the city’s water department, in what he characterized as cause for celebration.

“Although it is not normal, it is a lot better than last year and that is going to get us through this one,” Griffin said.

Still, the Bonneville Power Administration faces the prospect of a double-digit rate increase to pay for electricity purchased from as far away as Texas because of local hydropower shortages.

The utility depends on snow runoff into the Columbia River, but recent stream flows have been among the driest since the utility began marketing power in the 1930s.

Northwest Drought Rolls On . . .

After a seventh unusually dry winter in parts of the Northwest, the map of soil moisture looks the reverse of usual. While California and Arizona have wet soil, parts of Washington and Oregon and all of Idaho are rated dry by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In Washington, where the drought has forced the layoff of factory workers, only six winters since 1895 have been drier.

. . . but in California

The six-year drought here was broken with a vengeance, based on final state figures for the wet season that were released Thursday. Water content of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and the expected spring runoff into rivers are both well above normal. Storage of water in key reservoirs is at 90% of the average level.

All numbers indicate percentage of average

Driest Year This Year as Last During the Wettest Year of April 1 Year Recent Drought in Past Decade Snowpack Water Content 150 60 30 (1988) 190 (1983) Reservoir Storage 90 70 60 (1991) 115 (1983) Runoff Forecast 125 50 40 (1990) 230 (1983)

Source: California Department of Water Resources