Our latest snow storm brought the type of conditions that skiers have been waiting for all year, but was the moisture enough to help us climb out of what's been a below average winter?
"We were close to some of the dryer winters on record,” said Jeff Anderson, Hydrologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. “We've sort of lifted out of one of those disastrous kinds of winters into not a great winter, but better than it was."
During Monday’s NRCS snow survey, Anderson measured 86 inches of snow depth and 22 inches of water content at the Mt. Rose SNOTEL site. These measurements were a big jump from just last month.
"That's 67 percent of median for this day,” said Anderson. “Which is up about 12% since this past storm started."
Monday’s survey was supposed to take place on March 1st, but because of the storm that just passed through the Sierra, officials pushed the survey back so they could have more positive and accurate results.
“How much of the hole got filled in with this storm, we had a real nice increase,” said Anderson. “We got up to 5 ½ inches of water out of this storm."
But is more water what’s needed after coming off of last year's historically wet winter?
"We were happy not only to have the precipitation but to have it fall as snow, because if it falls as rain and runs off right now, we can't capture it,” said Federal Water Master Chad Blanchard.
He said we can’t capture the water because the reservoirs are as high as they can legally be at their current flood control levels.
“We have to maintain a certain amount of free space in the reservoirs to capture a flood event in case it happens,” said Blanchard.
That free space can be used for water storage later this spring once the threat of a flood begins to decrease. Until then, these experts are hopeful that if we are in for a miracle March, that the precipitation continues to fall as snow.
Anderson says it would take two to three more storms like the one we just had in order to bring our snow pack to average levels.
