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The snow will begin to melt -- soon.

That's what water-supply officials promised Friday. Unseasonably cold weather has kept snowpack in the Central Cascades and elsewhere in the state well above normal and, in some cases, at record levels.

The Bureau of Reclam-ation, in issuing another optimistic monthly water-supply forecast Friday, noted snowpack-water content is 50 percent above normal for May 1. The agency said the current snowpack will contribute to an adequate water supply this summer for all users in the Yakima River Basin.

Some snowmelt is expected next week when the temperature is expected to reach 80 degrees.

"It's there. It is now just starting to come off," said Chuck Garner, river operations supervisor for the bureau in Yakima.

Even when it does begin to fill streams and rivers, the water isn't expected to prompt any flooding.

The Northwest River Forecast Center projects the Yakima and Naches rivers will rise throughout next week, but remain below flood stage.

The Naches River at Cliffdell, in the Nile area northwest of Yakima, is predicted to rise to about a foot below its 31-foot flood stage by May 19, the center said.

Further south, the Naches River at Naches will stay about two feet below its 17-foot flood stage during the same period.

The Yakima River at Umtanum, north of Yakima, also will remain below flood stage.

Scott Pattee, water supply specialist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Mount Vernon, said Western Washington watersheds from the Skykomish River, east of Seattle, to Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington are where the record snowpacks exist.

Pattee said cold weather is to blame for the deep snow.

"It's not so much that we had so much more snow in Central Washington. It's because it hasn't melted," Pattee said. "Usually, we see some melt that takes some snow off. It's part of the normal process. This winter, we saw none of that. When it fell, it stayed on the ground."

That will change over the next week as daytime temperatures will be up to 15 degrees above normal for a few days.

"If we get some warm days and warm nights, we should see some runoff," he said.

The cold temperatures and lingering snowpack have kept Yakima basin storage reservoirs from filling with water at a normal rate.

Garner said the five lakes that serve the three-county irrigation project held 526,650 acre-feet of water Friday, just 49 percent of capacity and around 63 percent of average for this time of year.