National Climatic Data Center, 14 January 2003

According to the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Albuquerque (Charlie Liles),

In spite of decent late summer and autumn precipitation for a good portion of New Mexico, concerns continued to grow about the reservoir situation. The NWS state drought monitoring group expected El Nino-enhanced precipitation would alleviate some aspects of the drought, but not end the longer-term hydrologic drought.

Much above-normal precipitation is needed to restore reservoir levels, which continued to drop. The Elephant Butte reservoir storage is now 34 percent of capacity, down from 79 percent last year at this time. In the San Juan Basin, storage is now 64 percent of normal, down from 103 percent last year at this time.

Consequently, while the agricultural aspect of drought has likely seen some improvement the past few months, the long-term hydrologic drought remains, and is likely to get worse.