DWR Photography - Kelly Grow
March 26, 2016 - SACRAMENTO – California’s snowpack usually reaches its peak in the early spring each year near the first of April. Melting of the snowpack increases as the sun’s path across the sky moves a little northward each day and solar radiation intensifies on the ground.
Snowpack surveys by the Department of Water Resource (DWR) in late March and early April are indicators of how much water California will reap from the melting snowpack, which in normal years provides about 30 percent of the state’s water.
On April 1, 2015, visitors to Phillips Station didn’t see a single snowflake, much less a snowpack. Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. stood on dirt that day as he issued his mandate to cut urban water use in California by 25 percent. The 2014-15 statewide snowpack’s water content was only 5 percent of the historical April 1 average, the lowest amount ever recorded.
Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, likely will find several feet of snow at Phillips on March 30. The snowpack there was 58.3 inches deep when he conducted the March 1 survey, and mountain conditions are vastly improved compared to 2015.
However, Gehrke cautions that the snowpack at any given location such as Phillips is not representative of the statewide snowpack. Electronic readings taken remotely at approximately 100 stations in the Sierra Nevada record the statewide snowpack’s water content each day throughout the winter; manual surveys at snow courses like Phillips supplement and validate the electronic readings.
The water content of the statewide snowpack today is 88 percent of the April 1 average:http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/snowapp/sweq.action (For earlier readings, click the calendar icon below the map on the page, select a date and then Refresh Data.)
Rainfall so far this year also is much improved over last year in Northern California. Precipitation since October 1 in the critical northern California watershed is 29 percent above average for today’s date: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/products/PLOT_ESI.pdf.Conditions in the Central Valley and Southern California are less favorable but still above average for today’s date.
Rainfall in the north has benefited the large reservoirs there. Shasta, Oroville and Folsom reservoirs all now store more water than their March 25 historical average, but the lack of rain in the south has resulted in below-average storage in almost all reservoirs there:http://bit.ly/1gIMQMG,
Residents should continue to conserve water due to drought conditions and impacts that are still felt in many parts of the state.
The Phillips snow course is one of more than 220 courses that will be measured manually during a 10-day window around April 1 to determine the snowpack’s water content.
Source: DWR
