(Photo courtesy of azwater.gov)

The Salt River Project expects more water coming into Central Arizona this year.

Arizona will see substantially more snowmelt coming into the Salt and Verde rivers this spring.

For the first time in six years, Arizona had an above average winter — in fact, it was about 150 percent of normal precipitation. That’s welcome news for reservoirs on the Salt and Verde rivers.

“We anticipate we will have close to a million acre feet of runoff,” Charlie Ester with the Salt River Project said.

Compare that to only about 330,000 acre feet last year. Ester said SRP’s reservoir system is now about 75 percent full.

“We will have stored more than a year’s worth of water from this winter, so things are really looking good right now,” he said.

So does that mean the drought is over? Not quite, according to Ester.

While SRP has plenty of water now, this one year isn’t enough to reverse so many dry ones. But if we get another wet year or so, Ester may be willing to say it’s over.