Time to worry yet?
Snow-free January heads into dry start to February
One of the snowiest Decembers on record is likely to be followed by one of the driest Januarys on record as the Sierra heads into February this weekend with nary a January snowflake to its name – and there doesn’t look to be relief anytime soon, with forecasters increasingly glum toward chances of precipitation in the next week or two.
The dry spell is beginning to haunt Eastsiders, who have learned the hard way that one even epically wet month like December 2021 can easily be followed by three dry months, leaving a snowpack that was half-way to normal for the entire winter at the end of December half way (or less as the snowpack begins to melt) to normal for the entire winter at the end of March.
The forecast for the next few weeks isn’t much better either; Mammoth’s own forecaster Howard Sheckter has been throwing doubt on some forecasters talk about a big storm this coming week for a month now, and he appears to be right, as the National Weather Service, Opensnow and others begin to backpedal on chances of snow for the coming week.
“Current projections show little, if any, precipitation making it into the Sierra or western Nevada as this system brushes by the region,” the NWS said Wednesday afternoon, after hinting at a snowy start to February for the past few weeks. “Another shortwave is forecast to dig into the trough later next week, but it too has an unfavorable trajectory to bring meaningful precipitation to the Sierra.”
“The dry pattern continues through Sunday,” said Bryan Allegretto with the Tahoe-based Opensnow consortium, Wednesday afternoon. “The pattern shifts Monday through next week, but the chances of any precip are fading. We stay in a dry pattern
through at least mid-february.”
That’s what Sheckter has been saying for weeks. “I realize that the Global Forecast System, or ‘GFS,’ has had the effect of getting the ‘Wet Foots’ all excited about a big first week of February snowfall wise,” he said in his most recent update this week “I saw the (water content forecast) from the GFS last night showing two to three feet next week, but I have not been buying into to it! For me, the big reason is that the MJO (Madden Julian Oscillation pattern) is stuck in the circle of death, meaning that one, it’s very weak and, two, it’s not supportive of a wet week next week at all! Of course, the MJO is not the only teleconnection that can force mid-latitude circulation. However, it’s a big one and when you do not have the support of Old Julian and Madden, to me, you’re flying in a cloud without IFR. Again, there have been several forecast model runs of the GFS that are/were exciting, but (we) have not been biting. The European, model has not been in this camp and for good reasons.”
That said, the winter is young; there are still two of the traditionally wettest months of the winter to go; February and March.
“I have had lots of folks asking me lately that, “is this the end of Winter,” Sheckter said. “What I say is that no, It’s not even February yet! Even so, folks are still having withdrawals from an intoxicating December, from more snowfall than they could remember!”
That also said, when the asked Sheckter what to expect beyond next week, he clammed up.
“I am not seeing anything clearly enough to go out on a limb,” he said.
But some forecasters are – and it’s not exactly a rosy forecast.
“The January update of the seasonal models has just come out, and they’re continuing to suggest a relatively high likelihood that the peak of the rainy season (Januarymarch) as well as the spring (April-june) will be drier than average across most of California except for perhaps the very northernmost portion,” said Daniel Swain, a meteorologist with UCLA in a recent update. “So, if the seasonal models continue to be about as correct as they have been so far this season, I’d continue to put my money on a drier than average outcome for the rest of the season. Not completely dry, of course; seasonal predictions could not tell us that anyway.”
He said, however, if it were not for the big storms in December and October, things would be much, much worse. In other words, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, given that the odds were always strong this La Nina winter was going to be drier than average.
“...the broader context matters greatly,” he said. “In the long term, California had been experiencing a recordbreaking, historically severe drought heading into Water Year 2021-2022. Then, following “Bombtober” (October 2021’s huge atmospheric river storm) and the December deluge, many folks breathed a (much needed, and justified) sigh of relief, since those two single wet months single-handedly ended fire season, added some critically needed flow into extremely low rivers and reservoirs, and delivered an impressive early season snowpack. All of that is great news.
“But much of California remains in severe to even extreme drought conditions as of early January, since a mere month or two of wet (even very wet) conditions simply cannot erase the ecological, hydrologic, and groundwater effects of two to three extremely dry and record warm preceding years,” he said. “With a dry “back half” to winter looking like the most likely outcome, it seems highly likely that California and most of the rest of the broader Southwest will still be experiencing a significant drought throughout the coming calendar year. With warming temperatures and increasing evaporative demand due to global warming, it’s just getting that much harder to escape the effects of landscape-scale aridification.
“That said, the drought we’ll likely be experiencing come summer won’t be nearly as bad as it would have been had we not had the October and December we just did – arguably, parts of California just narrowly averted a pretty dire escalation of drought consequences in 2022, thanks to just a couple of storm events,” he said. “Flying by the seat of our collective pants, as it were (which, although it really should be obvious by this point), is decidedly not an effective long-term water management plan” and the state needs to start planning for more near-constant, long-term drought and extreme heat conditions.
A few snow dances won’t hurt either.