The snow pack in the Olympic Mountains is only 1/3 of the median, among the lowest in history. It’s only April and we are already getting advisories for water conservation. This snow pack is the only water that we will have during summer and fall until the next rains in October.
This year, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming all set new record-low April 1 Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) values since SNOTEL monitoring began in the 1980s. California recorded its second-lowest April 1 SWE value.
An El Nino may be shaping up which could be good for crops in the midwest but there could be negative impacts in different parts of the country.
Our Sierra snowpack is not looking good, took a weekend run from the SF Bay Area across Donner to Carson City, NV last weekend, the mountains were pretty sparse, this pic is at the Donner Rest stop, dry roads, not the skier traffic we expected, so we made good time… But all our CA reservoirs are full, hopefully they don’t dump the excess before we see how it[s going in a couple months… Rain this weekend, more next week, but it’s hard to guess whether it can help the snowpack, this late in the season…
But, as previously mentioned, the water reservoirs are close to full right now, so it isn’t a dire emergency right now. I fully expect there to be more wildfires this year, particularly when the dry Santa Ana winds start blowing this summer and fall. We’ve been lucky for the past few years, but that luck may be running out.
Snowfall for the Sierras over the next week is predicted to be about 20".
I’ve been up in Tahoe this year since February. These predictions are a local joke, “inches means centimeters.”
Most ski resorts are already closed. Homewood didn’t even make it past March. Heavenly closed April 4th. Palisades and Northstar will close after this weekend California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack is the second-lowest since 1950. Studies predict consistent “low-to-no snow” below 8,000 ft in the Sierras by the 2060s due to climate change.
Too true, what’s sad for me to see is that in my many decades, before the last few, we never had to think about it, it just happened, I remember trips, camping, taking Boy Scouts, up into he Sierras when they’’d have to figure out how to safely set up the camp on top of the snow, and sometimes even fall through into the creek running below, unseen! Anyway, walls of snow packed up along the roads, if they were open, but now, we have to keep an eye on forecasts, weather channels… Fires beyond our imagination, BIL lost their home, total loss, Friends, even my Cardiologist lost his home, an antique Mercedes he’d restored, as well as all the other folks who lost it all.. Spooky stuff to deal with, but so far, all survived, recovered what they could… The pic is all that was left of BIL’s kitchen, lost the beautiful Cockateel & Parrots that were in the cages…
So we wait & watch… Our local FD had sent nearly all their guys out to help, left only one rig to cover the town, luckily we were fine, but…
You’re lucky. Ours aren’t. Roosevelt is only 46% full, and they keep talking about having to shut down the hydro generators (though they haven’t yet). That’s local to us. Lake Mead is only 30% full (which they classify as “critical”). They are talking about shutting down the hydro power there, too.
Lake Mead has been low for a long time, I visited it, saying in Page, took a boat ride back into some of the nooks n crannies, but it was real low them many years ago, so I’m not surprised, but we need some good rains out there to get it back up…. We seem to rely a lot more on our Sierra snowpack, and this looks like it’s going to be a tough year…
Actually, Mead relies on snowpack in the Rockies. The Colorado river drains that entire region (western slope of the Rockies).
I’ve been there several times, and each time it appeared lower. You could see the “bathtub ring”, and how far the water was below that. I haven’t been over it in probably 10 years (haven’t gone to Vegas for a show for a long time). Yes, it’s been “critical” for probably that long.
Things are grim in the Colorado River Basin. We’re already in an extended drought and this winter made that much worse. In order to keep Lake Powell high enough to generate electricity they plan on releasing more water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir, thereby drawing it down.
It looks like we are heading for a record low flow on the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. Normal peak flows are in June or even July for extraordinarily wet winters. This year they are predicting that the Colorado will peak in APRIL. I don’t know if that has ever happened before. This could change, but it is going to take some very heavy precipitation to make much of a difference.
For years the climate models have been fairly accurately predicting hotter and drier for the US southwest and that sure seems to be the way it is going. Meanwhile the entities responsible for managing the allocation of water from the Upper and Lower Colorado River Basins cannot agree on what steps to take to deal with the problem of insufficient water storage. They will have to come up with some kind of plan.
The Southwest U.S. has been in a persistent, large-scale drought for 26 years, beginning in 2000.
Scientists now categorize this period as a megadrought, making it the driest multi-decade stretch the region has seen in at least 1,200 years.
