“Snowpack levels in the West are melting faster than climate hydrologists have seen in nearly four decades, bringing the snowpack far below normal in most states in the West,” says High Country News.
That marks a major turnaround after water resource managers in many western states announced in early April that their snowpack levels were “near normal.” In California, where drought has gripped the state for the last five years, the snowpack was 127-percent of normal. But since then, record-high temperatures in California, the Pacific Northwest, Idaho and Montana, as well as a sharp drop in precipitation, have slashed hopes that a wet El Niño would help the West recover from drought. In the Sierras, the highest snowpack readings are now only at 66-percent of normal.
According to Noah Diffenbaugh, associate professor at Stanford and a researcher at the Woods Institute for the Environment, water basins in the arid American West are some of the world’s most sensitive to climate change. The Colorado River Basin, which supplies 40 million people in seven states, and California’s Northern and Central basins could be deeply affected by climatic shifts. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change predicts that global temperatures will rise four degrees Celsius before 2100, in which case the rapid snowmelts seen this spring will be the new normal— “happen[ing] more like 40 to 80 percent of the time,” Diffenbaugh says.