Unlike usually verdant California, droughts come and go in Nevada. This one, however, is especially difficult because this is the third exceptionally dry year in a row, depleting stored water and thrusting fallow fields into long-term crisis, experts say.

“This has been three of the driest years in recent decades, and they’ve been consecutive,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer based in Pasadena, Calif., who develops climate forecasting technology for NASA. “Nevada is always on the cusp of disaster, water-wise. Everything is in the open range, so they’re on their knees. If there’s no rainfall, there’s no grass. Everything is so crispy.”

Drought is defined, of course, by its numbers — and these are exceptionally brutal. The most recent measure of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, conducted Jan. 30 by the California Department of Water Resources’ chief snow surveyor, Frank Gehrke, found just 12 percent of what’s normal. As a result, various Nevada basins that are fed by the Sierra snowpack are as low as 15 percent of the average.

Across Nevada, the flow into the Humboldt River from the Ruby Mountains that ring Elko is equally meager. At the Rye Patch Reservoir near Lovelock, for instance, dam operator Joe Karr said last week that, for the first time in the reservoir’s nearly 80-year existence, there might be no water released downstream. Normally by early February, water laps at the sides near the top of the dam, but this year the concrete floor of the dam’s lock is merely spotted with a few modest puddles.

If Karr’s prediction holds — and climatologists expect the next months to be just as parched — 2014 will be a total loss for many.

“That means we won’t have any crop,” said Dan Knisley, owner of the 3,000-acre Great Basin Farms near Lovelock. “We’d have whatever God would provide for with rain in the summer. We’d have no grain crops, no wheat crop. Some marginal alfalfa will die out.”