Snowpack Archives

Why Understanding Snowpack Could Help the Overworked Colorado River

November 17, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /Deseret News (Utah)by Amy Joi O'Donoghue

Forty million people, 5.5 million acres of farmland and the livelihood of residents in major metropolitan areas such as Salt Lake City, Denver and Las Vegas depend on the Colorado River, described as the workhorse of the West and under assault by drought.

The U.S. Geological Survey is in the beginning stages of learning more about this river via an expanded and more sophisticated monitoring system that aims to study details about the snowpack that feeds the river basin, droughts and flooding, and how streamflow supports groundwater, or vice versa.

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First Rains of Year Didn’t Bring Much to Northern California — But Another Storm is Coming

November 16, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /The Sacramento Beeby Molly Burke

In some places, more than an inch of precipitation fell Friday in Northern California while other places, including Sacramento, saw only a fraction of that. Whatever came down in the first rains of the season were a mere drop in the bucket.

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Extraordinary Heat, Rare Summer Snow Brought Unprecedented West Coast Firestorms

September 14, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Mike Lee /Los Angeles Times by Rong-Gong Lin II and Joseph Serna

The West Coast had just experienced a record-shattering heat wave when news came last week of a rare late-summer snowstorm in Colorado. To those still sweltering in California, Oregon and Washington, it sounded like a dream come true. In fact, it was an omen of a greater disaster to come.

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Bigger, Badder Storms Coming In Years Ahead, and California Is Right In Their Path

July 16, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /San Francisco Chronicleby Kurtis Alexander

California’s wild weather swings, from pounding rain to drought and from fires to floods, are widely expected to worsen as the climate warms. A new study shows just how severe things might get, and it’s not pretty.

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In Parched Southwest, Warm Spring Renews Threat of ‘Megadrought’

July 9, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /The New York Timesby Henry Fountain

Here at 12,000 feet on the Continental Divide, only vestiges of the winter snowpack remain, scattered white patches that have yet to melt and feed the upper Colorado River, 50 miles away.

That’s normal for mid-June in the Rockies. What’s unusual this year is the speed at which the snow went. And with it went hopes for a drought-free year in the Southwest.

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Sacramento Region Plans to Store Water Underground as a Climate Change Adaptation Strategy

July 8, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /CapRadioby Ezra David Romero

The Sacramento region is preparing for the long term impacts of the climate crisis when it comes to water supply. Central to the plan is a groundwater storage program with two to three times the space of Folsom Lake.

As the climate warms it’ll likely become harder to fill up reservoirs, because the snowpack could be small for multiple years. Think of the nearly empty reservoirs across California during the most recent drought.

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Cash Flows: How Investors Are Banking On the West’s Water Scarcity

June 4, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /KUNC Coloradoby Aspen Journalism

In the arid West, scarce water supplies are growing scarcer. Climate change is shrinking snowpack in river basins throughout the region, leaving the future water supplies for cities, industries and farmers uncertain.

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Snow-Water Equivalent Still Down Despite Recent Storms

May 20, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /Enterprise Recordby Jake Hutchison

Though the last couple of weekends have seen wet weather, it hasn’t been enough to keep up with the yearly average in time for summer in California. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is tested regularly by employees of the California Department of Water Resources, has yielded some grim results so far in 2020 in terms of snow-water equivalent.

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California’s Mountain Snow Cover is Vanishing a Month Early, in a Worrying Setup for Fire Season

May 8, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kimberlyn Velasquez /The Washington Postby Diana Leonard

On Monday, California fire officials gathered to launch the state’s annual Wildfire Preparedness Week. The message they delivered was clear: Summer 2020 would not mimic summer 2019, when wildfires mostly remained small and manageable into August.

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Season’s Last Snowpack Survey Confirms Dry Winter. California Inching Toward Statewide Drought

May 3, 2020/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Mike Lee /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler

The last Sierra Nevada snowpack measurement of the season on Thursday confirmed what California officials have feared for months: The state has suffered through a dry winter.

The state Department of Water Resources announced that the snow was just 1.5 inches deep at its traditional measuring spot at Phillips Station, a vast field off Highway 50 near Echo Summit. The “snow water equivalent” was just a half an inch, or just 3 percent of average for this time of year.

The Phillips measurement was an outlier. A broader measurement taken by 130 electronic sensors throughout the Sierra revealed an average snow water equivalent of 8.4 inches, or 37 percent of average for this time of year.

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