Spain Now Officially In Worst Drought On Record - Reuters

MADRID, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Jose Maria Macias has been in the water business for the best part of four decades and cannot remember a drought as bad as the one Spain is suffering now. "We are going through a terrible drought. This is the third year of it and it's probably the worst there has been in Spain," he told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

Macias is president of the Tagus water basin, which stretches across central Spain southwest to Portugal, supplying Madrid's 6 million inhabitants on the way. Two months of Atlantic storms in October and November have brought only partial relief and the two big reservoirs at the head of the Tagus are only 12 percent full. "The storms and rain were very abnormal this year. In the lower parts of the river basin it rained quite a lot but in the upper part it rained very little," Macias said.

He is cautious about attributing the drought to climate change with only a few years data to go on, but says that the country's water authorities have to face up to climate change. "It's probably going to give us totally different weather patterns, with less rain falling in less time and more violent storms," he says.

Most of Spain is naturally dry and suffers periodic cycles of drought, such as a five year one in the mid 1990s. The year from October 2004 to September 2005 was the driest at least since records began in the 1940s. Rain in 2005/6 was 11 percent below average and 2006/7 is proving erratic.

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