California drought: Sierra snowpack at record lows

Frank Gehrke, chief of snow surveys for the California Department of Water Resources, left, leads his group out to measure snow levels near Echo Summit.

Too Many People

• The political hacks from both parties want to keep importing endless millions of new water sucking people into California.  More water sucking farms. More water sucking businesses.  More water sucking housing tracts and golf courses.  
• There is no real thought given as to where all this "magic" new water is supposed to come from.  So rather than changing policies on growth people turn to raping what is left of California's natural beauty for short term gain.
• I am not becoming a leftist in my old age, but what is wrong with zero population growth???  Anyone who drove the nearly wide open 405 freeway 30 years ago knows what has happened to the quality of life in our People's Republic.  

(San Jose Mercury News)  -  As California caps what may be its driest January on record, Frank Gehrke will lead a bevy of surveyors on Thursday to a predetermined spot on Echo Summit in an exercise that has become a monthly downer in the documentation of the state's historic drought.

As a thirsty state anxiously stands by for the results, the crew will drive some aluminum rods into the snow to measure how deep it is then weigh the white powder to calculate its water content.

At least that's how the monthly winter ritual will play out on the nightly news. But the photo-op belies the complexity of the coordinated effort to size up the state's snowpack around the clock.

Today, snow sensors scattered through the Sierra, satellite imagery and aerial flybys augment the 106-year-old "manual survey." The technology helps to provide a clearer update of California's water conditions that water agencies depend on to perform the increasingly crucial job of managing our diminishing water supply for the rest of the year.

Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville

"I think they'd be amazed," Gehrke, chief of California's Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, said of his predecessors. "The capabilities are much greater than anyone could have imagined back then."

What won't amaze Gehrke this year is the predictability of Thursday's results. This year, the Sierra snowpack -- which usually provides 30 percent of California's water -- is critically low, less than 30 percent of normal for this time of year, the snow sensors show. December's storms began filling up reservoirs, but they were too warm to turn rain into an abundance of snow.

The public sees only one of the many manual surveys done last week and this week, when a small army is fanning out to over 200 sites across the Sierra range to extract "snow cores." The teams are part of a cooperative of 53 municipalities, public utilities, federal agencies, water districts, irrigation districts and private companies with vested interests in predicting the spring melt of mountain snow into California rivers and reservoirs.

The snow cores the teams collect and weigh will reveal the amount of frozen water held in the mountains. Their main tool, a hollow metal cylinder, differs little from what their predecessors used over a century ago to sample the snow. "The manual snow surveys program are still the backbone of our water supply forecasting," Gehrke said.

Like dozens of other water providers, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the Bay Area's primary water supplier, relies on the snowpack data to predict the amount of snow melt that will flow into Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.


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Folsom Lake near Sacramento

The problem in NOT lack of rain
You cannot keep importing endless millions of water using people
into California which is mostly a desert.