Warm weather taking toll on Sierra snowpack
By Jeff Delong, Reno Gazette-Journal
Nearly a week of unseasonably warm weather took its toll on a still-bountiful Sierra snowpack, with no new storms expected anytime soon.
Temperatures across the Reno-Tahoe area are expected to drop about 20 degrees today, slowing the snowpack meltdown.
Experts now are looking to February to bring back storms needed to keep the snowpack deep, providing needed water for next summer.
This season's next snow may show reduced water content. Photo/Kathryn Reed
“We’re losing a little, but the bigger concern is just no storms coming,” said Dan Greenlee, snow surveyor with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service.
After a series of heavy December storms layered the mountains in white, January arrived with a snowpack at twice-normal levels. Storms petered out, and temperatures rose, with the Lake Tahoe Basin’s snowpack dropping from 227 percent of average on Jan. 1 to 176 percent on Tuesday.
Are there really two articles about snowpack and water resources on the site today? One says the early storms have provided the water we need after three years of drought and the other says that the warm weather for the last couple of days is destroying the snowpack? Does that occur to anyone as contradictory?