After three years of drought, California is beginning 2023 with more snow on the ground than at any start to a year in a decade. State water officials trekked into the Sierra Nevada to conduct the first snow survey of the winter season on Tuesday, reporting 174% of average statewide snowpack for the date.
Eight of the top 10 warmest years on record occurred in the last decade. The snowline where rain turns to powder continues to move uphill. The dry season is longer than ever as wildfires ravage forests and communities. It’s a bleak outlook for the state of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, not to mention our planet as a whole.
Bay Area residents would do well to keep their gloves handy, as they’ll be fighting a parade of storms that started on Boxing Day. Monday’s contender brought light showers and winds that evolved into heavy rainfall and intense winds by the Tuesday morning rush hour. In parts of the East Bay hills, Peninsula and North Bay highlands, winds gusted over 50 mph and were accompanied by intense rainfall across the region, where totals exceeded an inch and a quarter at both official downtown San Francisco and Oakland weather stations. More torrential downpours came down over the Santa Cruz Mountains and North Bay highlands, where stations like Felton and Mt. Tam exceeded 4 inches of rain.
For the second weekend in a row, Sacramento and the Sierra Nevada mountains saw back-to-back storms bringing rain to the valley and snow to the hills. Despite the recent wet weather, including snow intense enough to snarl mountain travel in the Sierra this weekend, California is still grappling with a number of drier-than-usual winters and persistent drought. So how much did these storms help?
A strong low-pressure system associated with an upper-level shortwave trough will impact much of the US West Coast today through Thursday, with the development of an atmospheric river over Northern California. After the initial AR, a second low-pressure system will develop offshore and travel down the coast, bringing another round of precipitation to the region Friday into Sunday.
Boosting what has been a mediocre start so far to the winter season, a storm from the Pacific Northwest is expected to bring widespread rain to the Bay Area early Thursday and blanket the Sierra Nevada with up to 3 feet of new snow. “This is a pretty good event. It’s going to be beneficial across the board,” said Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey. “We are excited for this one.”
Thousands of years ago during the last Ice Age, rivers flowed from giant glaciers in the Sierra Nevada down to the Central Valley, carving into rock and gouging channels at a time when the sea level was about 400 feet lower. When the glaciers retreated, meltwater coursed down and buried the river channels in sediment.
The last few days of rain and snow provided some welcome relief, but don’t be fooled — the water shortage is far from over. That wet trend will have to continue if there’s to be any real dent in the ongoing drought. Burbank, LAX, Lancaster and other places in Los Angeles County broke some rainfall records, but when it comes to drought and much of the Southland’s drinking water supply, it’s the snowfall up north that really matters.
The foundation of California’s water supply and the catalyst for the state’s 20th century population and economic growth is cracking. More exactly, it’s disappearing.
Climate change is eroding the mountain snowpack that has traditionally melted in the spring and summer to fill rivers and reservoirs across the West.
Now, with less precipitation falling as snow and that snow melting faster and earlier in parts of major mountain ranges like California’s Sierra Nevada and the Rockies in the West, managers of a major Sierra Nevada watershed east of Sacramento are replumbing their water systems to better handle bursts of rain instead of trickling snowmelt. Their “Supershed Approach” to replace the loss of the once-reliable snowmelt is being touted as a possible model for other Western watersheds that are expected to experience stronger, more frequent snow droughts.
Researchers from Colorado State University focused on areas they call “late snow zones” – regions in the Western mountains where snow doesn’t typically melt until May or later.
They found that between 1984 and 2020, wildfire activity increased in 70% of these zones throughout the West. The mountain ranges studied included the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, Basin and Range, and Northern and Southern Rockies.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
