It snowed 5.7 trillion gallons of water in Calif.
The M.S. Dixie makes it way around a partially frozen Emerald Bay. Photo/John Gomez
By Jason Samenow, Washington Post
How do you seriously dent a drought? You blast it with the equivalent of trillions of gallons of water. That’s exactly what happened in California in January.
Twenty feet of snow buried parts of Northern California in just two weeks, with up to 30 feet in some ski areas. For the month, the Sierra Nevada witnessed 120 percent of its annual snowfall.
The January snow output by itself eliminated 37 percent of a five-year (2012-16) snow water deficit, according to University of Colorado-Boulder Center for Water, Earth Science, and Technology.