Sentences with phrase «said snowpack»

Though heavy storms swept through the state at the end of March — drenching the lowlands with rain and dumping up to seven feet of new snow in the Sierra Nevada — state officials on April 1, considered the end of California's wet season, said the snowpack had an estimated water content of just 32 percent.

Mote said snowpack levels in most of the western U.S. for 2017 - 18 thus far are lower than average — a function of continued warming temperatures and the presence of a La Niña event, which typically results in warmer and drier conditions in most southwestern states.

Not exact matches

«The Cascades could see a 50 percent loss of snowpack, which could translate into a large reduction in summer water,» says Hamlet.

Since 1915, the average snowpack in western states has declined by between 15 and 30 percent, the researchers say, and the amount of water lost from that snowpack reduction is comparable in volume to Lake Mead, the West's largest manmade reservoir.

«The amount of water in the snowpack of the western United States is roughly equivalent to all of the stored water in the largest reservoirs of those states,» Mote said.

«The 2015 snowpack season was an extreme year,» Mote said.

«The snowpack we had this year was below average — around 70 percent of average towards the end of February, followed by one of the driest, warmest Marches on record,» said Tim Mathews, a fire meteorologist with the Rocky Mountain Coordination Center.

Additionally, as the state's snowpack melts earlier because of warming, Cayan said, there is more runoff from higher elevation, which increases flooding.

«You don't necessarily have to have a «dirtier» snowpack to make it dark,» said lead author Marco Tedesco, a research professor at Columbia University's Lamont - Doherty Earth Observatory and adjunct scientist at NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies.

«Increased runoff caused by dust on snowpack acts as a major leak in the reservoir system,» says Thomas Painter, a professor of geography at the University of Utah.

This time, no return to cooler period Tim Barnett, a climatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new results appear to agree with his earlier work that used climate models to show humans» greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to declining snowpack in the western United States.

«The Northern Rockies have shown the greatest response to warming in terms of snowpack decline,» said lead author Greg Pederson, a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Rocky Mountain Research Center.

«I think we get some idea of what natural variability is in the snowpack,» said Barnett, though he noted his expertise lies in climate models, not tree - ring studies.

Pederson says he's confident his tree - ring results are accurate in part because during a brief period of overlap during the 20th century, the snowpack depth derived from the tree rings and modern observations look like «photocopies» of one another.

«Basically, we're taking satellite observations that say it's getting darker and taking a model that simulates temperature and snow morphology and using that to calculate how snowpack has evolved,» Doherty said.

«When snow first falls, snow grains are quite small, and as snowpack ages, and particularly for warmer snowpack, you get consolidation of those grains into larger clumps,» said Sarah Doherty, a researcher at the University of Washington who co-authored the paper.

Even in the rainy Pacific Northwest, we depend on yearly snowpack for drinking water and healthy river flows for fish, said Rolf Gersonde, who designs and implements forest restoration projects in the Cedar River Watershed.

Also like California, Stevens said, climate change modeling predicts a future of hotter summers, accentuated droughts, and shrinking winter snowpacks in Turkey's Taurus Mountains, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers arise.

«While reduced snowpack has been predicted for some time, they find that the shift toward low snow years and increasing water stress in the Northern Hemisphere is «imminent,»» said Andrew Fahlund, executive director of the Water in the West program at Stanford.

Warmer global temperatures will lead to shallower snowpack in many mountainous areas, says Keith Musselman, a hydrologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Changes come even with lower warming What was most surprising, Diffenbaugh said, is that the accelerated melting of the snowpack would occur even if the world were able to limit warming to the target of a 2 - degree - Celsius increase agreed upon in international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Current infrastructure was built for a snowpack and water runoff system that the study predicts won't exist in the years to come, he said.

«Combined with declining snowpack and population growth, this will likely threaten the long - term ability of the basin to meet its water allocation commitments to the seven basin states and to Mexico,» Famiglietti said.

And the GPS data is about 50 percent more accurate than one hydrologic model used to estimate snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and roughly on par with another one, Argus said.

«The usual climate here is that we come out of winter with a pretty good snowpack, and then that slowly melts over spring into summer,» State Climatologist Nick Bond said.

stories,» says Musselman, who used historical snowpack measurements and computer models to predict how the melting rate will change by the end of the century (Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038 / NCLIMATE3225).

Past strong El Niño events, such as in 1982 - 1983 and 1997 - 1998, have seen robust snowpacks, Swain said, but they may not be the case with any event now or in the future.

That threat is a concern with this year's low snowpack, as less snow leads to a drier landscape, Brettschneider said.

Fires in the West, droughts in the Southwest, melting snowpack in the Northwest, flooding and heavy rainfall in the Northeast, the much stronger coastal storms and hurricanes that we've seen in the Gulf: we've gotten to the point where we can all point to something that's happening and say: «This is what climate change is doing to our region.»

«The strength of the relationship between forest greenness and snowpack from the previous year was quite surprising to us,» Molotch said.

The research team initially set out to identify the various components of drought that lead to vegetation stress, particularly in mountain snowpack, said Molotch.

«With snowpack melting earlier in the year, that has a cascading effect on when the growing season of montane environments begins,» Woodburn said.

Four dry summers and four winters with a dramatically reduced snowpack have taken a toll throughout the Golden State, and will likely kill 58 million trees due to severe water loss, said Greg Asner, a Carnegie Institution biologist who published his results online on December 28 in Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.

Snowpack in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, which provides water for power generation, was down as much as 50 percent in some areas in spring, McCorkle said.

«[C] ommunities across the Nation are already experiencing a range of climatic changes, including more frequent and extreme precipitation events, longer wildfire seasons, reduced snowpack, extreme heat events, increasing ocean temperatures, and rising sea levels,» the report says.

Warmer temperatures are causing mountain snowpack, on which so much of the life in the region depends, to melt earlier in most years, he said.

That's all fine and good, but a new report from the National Academy of Sciences says that changes in the monsoon and the melting snowpack will be much more an immediate threat to the region.

Due to more frequent droughts and declining snowpacks,» [y] ou're going to have an increasingly limited resource and increased demand from cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas» for water typically used by Rocky Mountain ranchers, said Rick Ridder, a veteran Democratic consultant in Denver.

The lead author of the new study says a 30 percent decline in mountain snowpack is «very likely» and greater losses are possible.

«A lot of the West relies on snowpack melting in the spring for its water,» she said.

But in a year with the snowpack at just a little over 30 percent, the natural recharge this year will be minimal, he said.

Ingram acknowledged that the so - called «elephant in the room» is climate change and said numerous computer data show California becoming warmer and drier in decades to come, reducing the snowpack in the mountains.