An extraordinarily warm and mostly sunny January has left the snowpack across California’s Sierra Nevada far smaller than usual — 59% of average for this time of year, state water officials announced Friday as they held the season’s second snow survey.
“We are now about halfway through the typically wettest part of the year,” said Andy Reising, manager of snow surveys for the California Department of Water Resources. “We still have February and March, but each dry week we have will make it more difficult to catch up.”
The next two weeks aren’t expected to bring any significant storms. A late rebound is still possible before the season reaches its typical peak on April 1, Reising said, but “having two weeks ahead of us that we know is unlikely to produce any more snowpack and precipitation — that doesn’t look good.”
He spoke after he and other snowshoe-clad officials measured snow in a meadow at Phillips Station near South Lake Tahoe, where they hold snow surveys between December and April. It was 23 inches deep.
There are 130 monitoring stations across the mountain range that provide electronic readings. The northern Sierra is currently at 44% of average and the southern Sierra 79% of average.
Record warmth has left much of the western U.S. with little snow this winter.
Precipitation has fallen more as rain than snow, especially at lower elevations — a symptom of global warming, which in recent years has been pushing average snowlines higher in the mountains.
California relies on the Sierra snowpack for about 30% of its water on average.
Despite the lack of snow, California has ample water this year, with good rainfall and major reservoirs at 124% of their average levels after three years that brought average or above-average snow.
For the first time in 25 years, no part of California is currently experiencing drought, or even abnormally dry conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor website.
It’s a very different situation in the Rocky Mountains, where a severe and long-lasting drought continues.
The snowpack in the upper Colorado River region is at 62% of average for this time of year, one of the lowest in decades, according to federal data. That means more hard times for the Colorado River, which is fed by snowmelt.
In the last quarter-century, the Colorado River has lost about 20% of its flow, and research shows climate change has intensified the long stretch of mostly dry years.
The river provides water for farms and cities across seven states, from Wyoming to California, as well as northern Mexico. Its reservoirs have dropped dramatically as drought has persisted and water use has outstripped the shrinking supply.
Negotiators for the seven states that rely on the river have been holding talks to try to agree on a long-term plan for cutting water use.
The dismal snowpack will probably further intensify the long drought in the Colorado River Basin, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
“It’s kind of a startlingly bad picture where virtually all major western watersheds are doing very poorly,” Swain said in a livestreamed discussion of the western snow outlook.
“This is probably going to get considerably worse in the coming days.” Swain said. “Right now, it would take a miracle March and then some, really throughout this entire region, to really bolster the snowpack.”
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