By Kiley Russell. Bay City News.
California's latest survey of snow levels in the Sierra Nevada shows the state continues to make progress against a severe drought that looked set to drag on for a fourth straight year in December.
The Department of Water Resources ?DWR, for its acronym in English? The state's third snow survey of the season was conducted Friday at El Dorado County's Phillips Station in the Central Sierra.
The survey measured 116.5 inches of snow with a snow and water equivalent of 41.5 inches, which is 177 percent of the average for the date of March 3, according to DWR.
Additionally, data collected from 130 snow sensors across the state shows that statewide snowpack is currently at 190 percent of average with a snowwater equivalent of 44.7 inches.
"There was a good indication that it was going to be the fourth year of drought," state climatologist Michael Anderson said at a news conference Friday. «Then, after Christmas, something interesting happened: we began to ?see? quite an astonishing assemblage of a family of atmospheric rivers."
In the three weeks after December 25, the state was hit by nine massive storms that hit particularly hard from the Bay Area to San Diego and in the Central and Southern Sierra Nevadas.
Then a dry spell settled over the west until about a week ago, when the state again saw a "massive amount of precipitation" from a series of unusually cold storms coming out of the Gulf of Alaska, Anderson said.
The result is that, in addition to snow cover that is second only to the record set in 1982-1983, the state enjoys reservoir levels that are around 95 percent of normal for this time of year.
"Most are doing pretty well," said Jeanine Jones, DWR's manager of interstate resources.
Conditions have improved so much, in fact, that only about half of the state is still considered by the US Drought Monitor to be in severe or moderate drought conditions, a big change from late January.
Improved hydrological conditions led state water managers in February to set delivery forecasts of 35 percent of requested water supplies to the 29 public water agencies that draw water from the State Water Project, which serves 27 million people and 750 thousand acres of agricultural land.
That's an increase of just 5.0 percent of the requested supplies for 2022.
In addition, the federally administered Central Valley Project pegged deliveries for most urban and industrial water users at 75 percent of historical use, up from just 25 percent last year.
"Obviously this is the year of snow, if you will," Jones said.
Still, he cautioned that while many reservoirs are doing well, Shasta and Trinity in the Northern Sierra are still below average and the Colorado River basin, which helps supply much of its water to southern California, is more dry than average, as are many of the state's reservoirs. important groundwater aquifers, particularly in the Central Valley.
"Where we're not getting that recovery right away is in groundwater," Jones said. “It just takes a long time for it to recover and for that data ?on groundwater levels? leak out."
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