Low Snowpack Raises Concerns

PHILLIPS, Calif. —  After the sixth-driest December on record, California’s water stewards came to a Sierra meadow near here Tuesday and found the skimpiest snowpack they have measured since the end of the last California drought in the early 1990s.

State hydrologists determined that the water content of the Sierra snow is less than a quarter of normal levels for early January, but avoided any suggestion that a disastrous dry spell might again be at hand.

“We’re falling behind pretty significantly,” Dave Hart, a surveyor with the state Department of Water Resources, said after taking core samples from a thin layer of snow at 6,800 feet in the El Dorado National Forest. “We’re going to have to have a whole lot of storms to get caught up.”

With plenty of winter left to go, state water officials are hopeful that enough rainfall will blow into California to return precipitation totals to near normal.

“At this point we’re not overly concerned,” said Jill Wicke, the Metropolitan Water District’s systems operations manager. “It is still too early in the year to predict.”

The slow start comes after five years of wet weather, gully washer winters that had farmers happy, ski resorts humming and California’s vast network of reservoirs brimming with surplus water.

The state’s reservoirs stand at about 115% of normal, boosting confidence among water officials that it would take two consecutive dry years to significantly disrupt deliveries.

“If we were at lower storage in the reservoirs, I’d be more worried,” said Maurice Roos, the state’s chief hydrologist. Roos figures the odds are roughly even that the state might emerge from the dry spell in pretty good shape. He took a look at the 10 driest Decembers in the state’s history and found that “about half continued dry, about half we came back to near normal. Only time will tell.”

But the dearth of rain and snow has been bad news for ski resorts and farmers, particularly in the southern Sierra, which has gotten only a light dusting of snow this season.

At Mammoth Mountain, runs are open from top to bottom and 15 lifts are operating on weekends, but only because the resort vastly expanded its snow-making system since the drought years. Last month, the ski area had a paltry 11 inches of snow compared with 40 inches in December 1998 and an astonishing 153 inches the same month in 1996.

“Natural snowfall has almost all but eluded us of late,” said Joani Saari, a Mammoth spokeswoman. “As far as Mother Nature, we’ve been given the cold shoulder.”

Farmers trying to coax winter crops with the help of rainfall have been hard hit. Bob Krauter, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau, said winter wheat crops are on the verge of ruin. In addition, cattle ranchers have had to purchase feed because vast expanses of range land have dried up. For the first time in years, farmers are irrigating some fruit orchards in the Central Valley to make up for the lack of winter rainfall.

The dry weather runs counter to long-range forecasts by meteorologists, who expected a near normal year for precipitation. Those predictions were based in part on the lingering La Nina weather pattern. Last year, cold weather and rainfall were near normal in the north state, while Southern California was a bit drier than usual.

But the 1999-2000 season has so far stumped weather experts, with anemic rainfall totals across the state.

The absence of precipitation is particularly important in the Sierra Nevada, where the snow of winter helps quench the state’s thirst during dry summer months. The state has been collecting snow surveys since 1926, using the totals to make predictions on runoff come spring thaw.

As they have for years, Hart and Pierre Stephens, the state’s chief water supply forecaster, ventured into a field Tuesday off U.S. 50 near the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort. Hart took samples at more than half a dozen spots every 100 feet.

With wrinkled weeds poking up through the snow and a dry brown ridgeline as a backdrop, the results were discouraging. Ten inches of snow depth here. Twelve inches there. At one spot, Hart was faced with bare ground, a patch where the snow had melted completely. He moved a foot or two, like a Sunday golfer shifting the ball to get a better lie.

In the end, the average snow depth was less than 11 inches, compared with nearly three feet in the same meadow last year. Weighing the snow collected, Hart and Stephens determined the water content at 24% of normal. Statewide the average is about 22%, they said.

“That’s pretty low,” Hart said. “After all these wet years, I guess you sort of expect a dry one. But if it continues into next year, we could have some problems.”