Sections of northern and western Maine are still in a drought, despite the fact that Aroostook County has had so much snow that officials have asked that The County be declared a disaster area and eligible for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Officials are hopeful, however, that all the snow this month, especially the Feb. 4-5 blizzard that dumped 2 feet on northern Maine, will lift the state out of the drought that has plagued it for nearly two years.

Maine’s coastal counties no longer are experiencing drought conditions, according to information compiled by agencies for the U.S. Drought Monitor. All of Oxford and Franklin counties, along with the southern sections of Penobscot, Piscataquis and Somerset counties, are listed as abnormally dry. All of Aroostook County and the northern sections of Penobscot, Piscataquis and Somerset counties are listed as having moderate drought conditions.

“Three to 6 more inches of water would put us out of drought,” Mark Turner, hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Caribou, said Monday.

That equates to between 30 and 60 more inches of snow, depending on its water content, he said. A simple average formula equates 10 inches of snow to 1 inch of rain, although last week Turner measured 7.8 inches of water in 34 inches of snow taken from a protected area in Caribou.

“It’s hard to give an average water content for snowfall,” said Gregory Zielinski, state climatologist, whose office is at the University of Maine’s Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies. “We can have a real wet snow where 5 or 6 inches of snow is equivalent to an inch of rain or a real dry snow where 15 inches of snow is equivalent to an inch of rain. It just depends on the snow.”

Light, fluffy snow combined with nearly two weeks of bitter cold made the first month of 2003 one of the driest Januarys on record, according to Zielinski. It was the sixth-driest January in Bangor and the third-driest in Houlton.

On average, February is the driest month of the year, but the water content in the snowpack increased between 2 and 8 inches in northern Maine from Jan. 6 to Feb. 6, with the largest increases in Aroostook County, according to the Maine Cooperative Snow Survey Program chart. That dramatic increase was attributed to snowstorms the first weekend of this month.

Turner, Zielinski and other experts agreed that in addition to more precipitation over the next two months, Maine needs the snow that is already on the ground to melt slowly, so that it is absorbed by the soil and doesn’t run off into rivers and streams, which could cause ice jams and flooding. That’s what happened on April 1, 1987, when the April Fool’s Day flood occurred.

While climatologists, hydrologists and meteorologists measure precipitation rates against averages, there is only a 1-inch difference between the driest and wettest months in Maine, said Zielinski. The yearly average is 2.5 inches of precipitation per month while November, the wettest month, averages almost 3.7 inches of precipitation.

March, according to Zielinski, is the month that could determine whether the state’s groundwater levels return to normal or not.

“As the seasons are changing and we get more warm, humid air moving up into the state toward a Canadian cold front, Maine can become a battleground between the two air masses,” said Zielinski. “The hallmark blizzard for the Northeast was in March 1888. In 1993, we had the superstorm on March 13 and 14. Historically, we’ve had some huge storms in March.”