The news on California’s awful drought just keeps getting worse.
A paper published Monday by the journal Nature Climate Change shows that the Sierra Nevada snowpack is currently the lowest it has been in 500 plus years!
“We were expecting that 2015 would be extreme, but not like this,” said senior study author Valerie Trouet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona told The LA Times.
And the snowpack is one of the most important things there is when it comes to California and H2O. Via LA Times:
Snowpack is a key factor in California’s water supply: Melting Sierra Nevada snow helps to replenish and sustain state reservoirs and provides the state with roughly a third of its water. Because of this, researchers and state officials began monitoring snowpack in the 1930s, and have established 108 measuring stations throughout the Sierra Nevada.
This spring, researchers found that the April 1 snow water equivalent was only 5% of average since monitoring began.
And while plenty of scientists have been predicting El Niño will bring much needed rainfall to California this winter, unseasonably high temperatures could result in more rain than snow and may not contribute to building a large snowpack.
