Southwestern Sask. floods, despite drought conditions

Last year there was a lot of concern about the drought-like conditions in southwestern Saskatchewan.

But now, all people can talk about is the amount of flooding the area has seen over the past week.

That’s all thanks to the warm temperatures experienced in that part of the province lately.

“Last year and for a couple years, things have been quite dry in the southwest,” said University of Saskatchewan research associate Phillip Harder. “We went into winter with fairly dry soils, which was then followed by quite a large snowpack accumulation because we had a snowy winter.

“Two things kind of happened. When (the snow) did start melting, it happened very quickly because we have so much energy. The other aspect is that looking at Swift Current, it didn’t go below zero (Celsius) for four to five days. Normally in the prairies we have cooler nights and things freeze or slow down and stop melting and then when the sun comes up again, that process starts over.”

Harder said from data he’s seen, the snow in places like Swift Current was melting at 25 millimetres per day – five times higher than the regular amount.

“In this situation, we just had these extreme melt rates that meant that the soil, even though it was dry, was not able to absorb it fast enough,” he added.

Harder suggests for now it’s still tough to tell if this will impact soil conditions for the summer.

“Drought conditions potentially could persist. We didn’t have this recharge of soil moisture that normally we would’ve expected with this amount of snow, so there are still some risks having an uncharged soil moisture profile,” Harder said.

“Hydrology is always changing and we never quite know what the year is going to hold. Even though we had a runoff event that didn’t meet soil needs, we’ve still got a lot of summer left to go and things could go in either direction.”