Rain not enough to get Brazos Valley out of drought

A bone-dry stock pond on W.C. Scasta's 10,000-acre ranch near OSR may have been the most obvious of many signs that a severe drought was damaging his ranchland in late 2011.

What had been like a small lake was reduced to an empty 11-foot hole in the cracked ground.

So he's been a little more than pleased to see above-average rainfall start 2012, which has returned his pond to capacity.

"The water is now level with the ground," Scasta said excitedly on Monday.

Similar indications abound across the Brazos Valley. Grass is greener and nearby rivers and creeks seem to be flowing much higher. But, experts warn, the troubles are nowhere near over.

"There has been tremendous improvement; however, we are still in a drought," said Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.

Nielsen-Gammon, who is a professor at Texas A&M, said he has been asked about the impact of the rain so much recently that he has come up with a new metaphor: Texas is like a biscotti that has been dunked in coffee.

"The outside is moist and soggy, but it is still hard and dry under the surface," he said.

Municipal water users will see limited benefit from winter rains. Local cities pump their water from aquifers, meaning they don't rely on rain like cities that use surface water. That means rain is more beneficial to Bryan and College Station in the summer, when it allows residents to turn off their sprinklers. In the winter, residents usually aren't watering their lawns anyway.

"The impact of the rain is that there is no impact," said Water Services Director Dave Coleman.

Scasta, meanwhile, said he has loved the rain, but needs much more to significantly help production at his ranch. Before the drought, his property produced an average of about seven bales of hay each year. Last year, he had little to nothing.

"This county is just plum out of hay," he said. "Nobody has any left."

Like much of Texas, the area needs long sustained rainfall, or ranchers will have to continue to buy hay that was grown outside the state at a higher cost than they pay inside Texas.

According to a national drought monitor map maintained by the University of Nebraska that is updated every Tuesday, all of Brazos County remained in what's considered either an extreme or exceptional drought last week.

Nielsen-Gammon said rainfall has been hampered by La Niña, a climatic occurrence in the Pacific Ocean that causes drought in Texas.

Meteorologists say that looks like it is dissipating, but likely will keep Texas drier than normal through the summer.

"Even when La Niña is gone, its memory will still be in the atmosphere," Nielsen-Gammon said.

Even more troubling, Nielsen-Gammon said, is that there's about a 50 percent chance that La Niña will return soon.