Every year we go up into the mountains near Mt. Rose and check out how much snow has fallen to gauge our water supply for our area.
A couple days ago the snowpack peaked - even though yesterday's nice weather caused some loss.
The data from the site today was 106 inches of snow depth and 36.6 inches of water content; which brings us to 99% median peak for the snowpack for this time of year.
Jeff Anderson, an NRCS Hydrologist, says, "This site usually peaks on April 10th, so we have a few more days. Maybe if we get some rain this afternoon that’ll get included in the snowpack.”
The whole point of these surveys is to find out what kind of runoff we're going to have for the year. They say having a median runoff now in April will not quite fill all of the reservoirs, but it will be close.
Chad Blanchard, the U.S. District Court Water Master for the Truckee and Carson Rivers says, "Boca should fill, Prosser should fill, Tahoe will get about 93% full, and Stampede will be about 90% full - so unfortunately not enough to fill everything, but we’ll be close."
Comparatively, 2023 was a huge winter for us.
Anderson says we've had three years of great snowpacks for the Tahoe region, which is great news.
The Tahoe Basin for April 1 was 95% median for the snowpack.
Anderson adds, "The spread - the last two winters we’ve had above normal snowpacks across the whole state. This year, we only really saw that for northern Nevada to be well above normal.”
The Truckee River supply is 80% of all the drinking water for our area, but they say just filling Tahoe or getting close to it will give us three summers of supply.
Blanchard explains, "January is typically our biggest month and so to have a very poor precip[itation] January is concerning for sure. However, the pattern this year has been wet for a short period and then an extended dry period and then wet again. So we were hoping that there would be a turnaround and that happened; and unfortunately we didn’t get a large snowpack but it’s median and we’ll take that."
Anderson also mentions, "January was pretty abysmal, actually, in terms of precipitation. The thing that I point out is New Orleans got as much snow as Mt. Rose in January. They got about eight inches in New Orleans; it was kind of a record event.”
They point out that to miss a whole month of precipitation - it's great that we've been able to catch up, since the weather in the beginning of the year was not looking promising.
