Is 12 feet of snow in Calif. enough to ease drought?
Even after all this precipitation, state authorities have yet to declare water shortage officially over
SODA SPRINGS, Calif. — To keep out the snow, most of the windows of Andrew Schwartz’s cabin are boarded up with plywood, creating a gloom so persistent he keeps his house plant alive with a grow light and consumes daily vitamin D from a pillbox in his desk.
Snow falls in such abundance around Schwartz’s home — which doubles as the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory — that prior residents of his research station have been known to ski directly into a third-story window. The drifts bury cars, warp walls and pile up in monstrous mushroom caps on his roof, before sliding off with startling violence.
But even Schwartz, who has chased hailstorms in Australia and tornadoes in Oklahoma, faced weather last week unlike any he has known. The blizzard that blanketed California’s inland mountains hit Schwartz’s cabin with 70 mph winds and blinding snow that covered up his snowshoe tracks minutes after he made them. On Tuesday afternoon, as he went to check his instruments, he slipped and plunged into a drift up to his neck.
“That was the first time I’ve ever had a moment like: Am I going to get out of this?” he recalled. “That storm was genuinely the worst one I’ve seen in my life.”
The amount of snow that has fallen on California is rivaling some of the most bountiful years on record. Just in the past two weeks, more than a dozen feet of snow fell in this area, pushing the snowpack in the Central and Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains to roughly twice the amount of a normal year. The whiteout shut down national parks and interstates, buried neighborhoods, collapsed roofs, stranded motorists, trapped residents and knocked out power to thousands in mountain communities throughout the state.
For a parched populace coming out of three consecutive years of extreme drought — the flakes have also felt miraculous.
“We could not be more fortunate to have had this kind of precipitation after three very punishing years,” Karla Nemeth, the director of California’s Department of Water Resources, told a briefing Friday after the latest snow survey in the state.
Just last fall, California’s biggest reservoirs had dropped to dangerously low levels. A record number of wells in the Central Valley had run dry. Farmers were fallowing hundreds of thousands of acres. Residents in the Los Angeles area were being told to stop watering lawns. State officials were projecting dry La Niña conditions would persist; California was headed for a fourth year of drought.
“And then, after Christmas, something interesting happened,” Michael Anderson, the state climatologist, said during the briefing. “We began a rather amazing set of atmospheric rivers.”
A parade of nine drenching storms marched in off the Pacific, swamping the state. After a dry spell in February, another deluge of precipitation has fallen over the past week. This time, it came in the form of an unusually cold storm moving south from the Gulf of Alaska, dropping snow even at low altitudes and down toward the Mexican border. Flurries dusted the Hollywood sign.
Even after all this rain and snow, state authorities have yet to declare the drought officially dead. But the water supply have dramatically improved. The Federal Drought Monitor on Thursday reported the percentage of California experiencing at least moderate drought conditions had fallen from 84.6% to 49.1%. Major reservoirs across the state are at 96% of average levels.
But the extraordinary snowpack has been predominantly in the central and southern parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains, less in the north, where some of the state’s largest reservoirs remain far below capacity. The state’s groundwater supplies, drawn down during the past dry decade, will also not recover quickly, water authorities said.
“It takes more than a single wet year to really recover a lot of those groundwater basins that have been critically overdrafted for so many years,” said Sean de Guzman, manager of the snow surveys and water supply forecast unit at the California Department of Water Resources.
On Friday morning, de Guzman and his colleagues trudged across a snowy field south of Lake Tahoe and plunged a hollow metal pole into the depths, part of the monthly snow surveys that take place across the state. They found snows more than 9 feet deep, or 177% of average for that date.
The state’s record snowpack came in the winter of 1982-83. The snows this year have nearly matched those heights from four decades ago.
“With the next few storms here, throughout this month, we could actually surpass that,” de Guzman said.
The blizzard conditions have made it difficult to even assess what’s out there. A team hired to measure snow depths in Sequoia National Park had to be evacuated by a Navy helicopter Thursday, as they were marooned in a cabin near Mount Whitney.
“Some of these people that were extracted, they’ve been measuring snow for 30, 40 years,” de Guzman said. “And they’re seeing some of the most epic conditions they’ve ever seen up there.”