The United States District Court Water Master, Chad Blanchard say's it's been a great year for the snowpack and a huge turnaround from the water content year we had last year.
The Water Master also says, all of our reservoirs should fill and spill. He says Tahoe was below the rim at the beginning of this year, but now we've accumulated more than we could've hoped for. Blanchard also says he knows people might be sick of all this precipitation, but if we get Tahoe full then we can have three summers of water supply out of it.
"That's why these forecasts are so important, it lets us know if we're going to fill, if we have more water coming in than we have room for and we have to make decisions and plans to be able to get that water out at a reasonable flow rate to not cause issues down streams." Blanchard explains.
Jeff Anderson, a hydrologist or the Natural Resource Conservation Service tells us, some of their surveys have gotten delayed because of how much snow we've been getting. But today we finally got to see just how much snow piled up.
They found 188 inches of snow depth, which is over 15 and a half feet, containing 73.6 inches of water content, which is over 6 feet of water, Anderson says, "So I would be having to swim if I was standing here and all the snow was melted right now, and that's 211% of median for the day so that's like 2 winters worth of snow that we got in this single winter." At this snow survey site on Mt. Rose, the amount of snow they have now is the 4th highest compared to all of the years since 1981.
But those years peaked at the end of April and early May, so Anderson says we still have time for the site to break its own record. He says from the south end of Tahoe into the Carson and Walker Basin, every site except one is setting a new all-time snow water content value for the year.
He also explains how the snow is great for the drought we've seen for the past three years. He says a lot of those drought effects have been erased by this massive snowpack.
