NEVADA'S DROUGHT WILL EASE, FOR NOW.

Byline: Mike J. Ybarra The New York Times

Water has always been scarce in Nevada, which gets 6 inches of rain in a good year. Not a single river crosses the whole state. The runoff from the Sierra Nevada piddles into two sizable lakes or evaporates in the desert.

The past eight years have marked the longest drought on record. Reno has undergone two years of water restrictions that have changed the face of this improbably leafy desert city: Lawns have died and golf courses have browned. Instead of rushing through the heart of town, the Truckee River, which carries 80 percent of Reno's water from Lake Tahoe, is down to a trickle.

But the dry spell could be near an end. The Sierra snowpack, which supplies Lake Tahoe with most of its water, is more than 16 percent deeper than normal. Ten feet of snow has been dumped in the mountains above Reno over the past couple of weeks. "And it's still snowing," exulted Mike Turnipseed, a state water engineer.

Last year, twice the normal amount of snow and rain fell in the mountains, enough to replenish the surface water lost over eight years but not underground water, like wells, whose levels have dropped as much as 25 feet.

With a month to go, the current rainy season has been a whopper, compared with the typical year. Lake Tahoe, where the water level had remained 3 feet below normal for several years, is now 2 feet above average. Recently, water had to be released from a reservoir above the Carson River to prevent flooding. Even Las Vegas got a dusting of snow a few days ago.

Still, John James, the state climatologist and a geography professor at the University of Nevada in Reno, said he would not recommend to the governor that the drought be declared officially over until after a snow survey April 1, by which time the state is likely to have all the snow it is going to get.

Locally, James is famous as a pessimist. Residents joke that even Noah floating by would not convince him that the drought was over. "We have to be realistic," he countered in an interview. "We're in a desert."

That desert grew substantially during the past eight years of drought. Walker Lake dropped more than 25 feet, increasing its salinity so much that 90 percent of hatchling fish introduced during that period died. Officials expected the lake to become a dead zone. The river's normal flow is allocated to agricultural uses; the lake gets the leftovers, which until the recent storms had been nonexistent.

Pyramid Lake, the terminus of the Truckee River, has also been drying up, its level dropping 100 feet this century and threatening the survival of the cui-ui, a prehistoric fish that lives nowhere else. The thick new snowpack in the Sierra, while improving the situation, will not cure it, since Nevada is simultaneously the nation's driest and fastest-growing state.

Las Vegas, whose annual growth rate exceeds 10 percent, has the least rainfall in the nation but the highest per-capita water consumption.