Can bountiful California snow ease the drought?
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 that 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 this 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 Nina 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.
Anderson and other climate scientists attribute these wild oscillations in extreme wet and dry periods to the warming climate. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture - sucking up more during dry periods and deluging during wet ones - while also breaking down typical jet stream patterns, allowing cold air to move further south than normal.
Even after all this rain and snow, state authorities have yet to declare the drought officially dead. But the water supply — and projections for once the snow starts melting in the spring — have dramatically improved. The Federal Drought Monitor on Thursday reported that the percentage of California experiencing at least moderate drought conditions had fallen from 84.6 percent to 49.1 percent in the past week. Major reservoirs across the state are at 96 percent of average levels.