WICHITA, Kan.-A drought that is stretching into its third year is stressing drinking-water supplies from Kansas to New Mexico even as much of the nation emerges from last summer’s bone-dry conditions.

Some communities in Texas are down to 180 days or less of supply, while areas of rural New Mexico have been drilling deeper wells to keep taps running. Officials here in Wichita are looking at big-ticket items such as a pipeline and the reuse of wastewater because a reservoir that supplies nearly two-thirds of the city’s water was forecast until recently to run dry by fall 2015.

National data show a six-state region that also includes parts of Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma remains extremely dry, even as parts of the Midwest and Great Plains have come out of last summer’s historic drought, with states such as Iowa and Illinois dealing with floods this spring.

A three-month forecast released Thursday by the National Weather Service predicts the drought will persist, or even intensify, in many areas already facing extreme conditions, while the drought in more eastern sections of Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma will ease further.

And while the effects on agriculture-from crops withering to ranchers struggling to find grazing land-have garnered much of the […]