The warm winter has left very little snow in California’s Sierra Nevada, and now an extreme heat wave is accelerating the rapid melt in the mountains.
The Sierra snowpack measures 48% of average for this time of year, according to state data, down from 73% of average in late February.
When water expert Newsha Ajami went skiing near Lake Tahoe in early March, she saw snow from the last round of storms had rapidly disappeared from the slopes, and many ski lifts were closed.
“There was a lot of bare land, bare mountain with no snow,” she said. “Almost all of it was gone. It was kind of scary.”
California relies on the Sierra snowpack for about 30% of its water, on average. But the extraordinary warmth across the West this winter, which broke records in many areas, brought more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow.
Scientific research has shown that human-caused climate change is pushing average snow lines higher in the mountains and changing the timing of runoff.
Warming driven by the use of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases also is bringing longer and more extreme heat waves.
California’s snowpack typically reaches its peak around April 1. But this year, state measurements from across the Sierra Nevada show that the snowpack has been shrinking since Feb. 25, and the rapid loss of snow is set to continue this week as the West bakes in a heat wave that is forecast to break records in many areas.
The National Weather Service said the “rare summerlike heat” this week will bring high temperatures 15 to 30 degrees above normal across much of the Southwest. Areas where the heat is expected to set records include Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Fresno and Phoenix.
The National Weather Service warned that the heat wave, in addition to bringing risks of heat stress, also will create hazardous conditions along rivers as rapid snowmelt causes rising water levels and swift currents.
There is more melting snow in some parts of the mountains than in others. In the southern Sierra, the snowpack stands at 71% of average, while the northern Sierra is just 28% of average.
Despite the lack of snow, precipitation this winter has been slightly above average statewide. And California’s major reservoirs, boosted by ample runoff from the last three years, are at 122% of average.
“The reservoirs are full. It should be fine this year. But does this mean we are OK in the long run? I don’t think so,” said Ajami, who leads a new program focusing on risk, resilience and recovery from extreme weather events at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.
The water infrastructure system that California built over the last century, she said, depends heavily on snow naturally storing water and then gradually releasing snowmelt into reservoirs to serve cities and farmlands.
“The challenge we’re facing right now is, that cycle has been really altered, so we don’t really have a system that can be managed properly under the current conditions we are experiencing,” Ajami said. “It’s a big problem, and we really do need to go back and look and see how we can rethink and reoperate these systems.”
She said that means a wide range of efforts, such as changing how dams are operated and directing stormwater to replenish depleted groundwater. Efforts to enhance the health of forests and mountain meadows, she said, also are important so the landscape can naturally absorb and store water.
The Colorado River, another major water source for Southern California, has shrunk over the last quarter of a century amid a megadrought worsened by rising temperatures. This year, the snowpack in the upper part of the Colorado River watershed stands at 59% of average, and that will mean even less snowmelt feeding the river’s reservoirs, which are declining toward critically low levels.
Ajami pointed out that extreme heat is not only causing snow to melt faster but is also causing sublimation, in which snow is transformed directly to water vapor. And when hot conditions leave mountain soils parched, melting snow can be absorbed into the ground before runoff reaches streams and rivers.
“The system as a whole is under stress,” Ajami said. “Because of climate change, it is impacting the way the water cycle is behaving.”
The record warmth this winter, with some states seeing seasonal temperatures more than 3 degrees above average, brought “the classic signature of a warming climate on mountain snowpack,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
That signature of warming winters, he said, was less snow cover “because it either fell as rain rather than snow, because you’re on the wrong side of the freezing line, or because it fell as wet snow to begin with and melted quickly.”
