California’s mountain peaks are coated in white after a strong set of storms pummelled the state last week, with before and after images offering a promising sign for the state’s snowpack.
The atmospheric river-fueled storms were deadly and destructive, but also critical to replenishing water supplies in a state that has experienced a prolonged drought. The heavy rain dropped several feet of fresh snow, replenished reservoirs, and fed waterfalls and ephemeral lakes.
New satellite imagery from Nasa showcases the impact the dousing had on California’s snowpack, which acts as a water savings account. Roughly 5ft of snow fell in areas along the Sierra Nevada during the very wet week, with the images capturing large areas turned newly white.
It’s a hopeful turnaround from the beginning of January, when low levels during first snowpack measurement of the season sparked concerns of a “snow drought”. At that time, snow levels stood at just 28% of the historical average.
By the second snow survey of the year, conducted on 30 January, the snowpack stood at 52% of the average for that date. By 13 February, after the storms, the statewide total climbed to 73% of average.
California relies heavily on the snowpack for water supply, which trickles moisture into rivers, reservoirs and soils during drier seasons when precipitation is scarce. While the recent storms did provide a big boost, there’s still further to go. The snowpack would need to double its depth over the next month and a half to hit historical averages for 1 April – a benchmark day that typically marks when the state will enter drier times.
Still, the latest storms left water managers hopeful. And, there’s more wet weather in the forecast.
“We’re in a much more optimistic spot than we were at the beginning of the winter when we saw little snow and, although we aren’t at average yet, we are still in relatively good shape,” Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and manager at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, a University of California, Berkeley field research station at Donner Pass in California’s Sierra Nevada told USA Today. “We just need moisture to keep coming in and for things to not dry out completely.”
