Want Snow? Don’t Go Looking in the Sierra Nevada

Each winter, California officials trudge up the Sierra Nevada to measure the snowpack, with news cameras watching closely. Last year, there was a thick blanket of white. This year, the blanket had turned to a crunchy brown.

“We would like to have had more snow,” said Grant Davis, the director of the Department of Water Resources, after officials put the official measurement of “snow water” at 0.4 inches. In some areas, the snowpack was as low as 3 percent of normal. Across the Sierras, snowpack is at 24 percent of the historical average.

Roughly one-third of California’s water supply comes from runoff in the Sierras — snowpack measurements are critical to help plan how much water cities and agricultural areas will receive. Still, Davis said there was no cause for alarm.

“It’s far too early to draw any conclusions about what kind of season we’ll have this year,” he said. Typically, half of the annual precipitation in the state comes in December, January and February.

It’s easy to gloat about sunny skies to East Coast friends bracing for a “bomb cyclone” blizzard, with officials there declaring emergencies and canceling school. But it was just three years ago when Gov. Jerry Brown stood on a bone-dry patch of land in the Sierras, declared a drought emergency and ordered mandatory cutbacks of water usage across the state.

With reservoirs still full from last year’s downpours, there is little reason to worry that the state will face cutbacks again anytime soon.

Still, “it’s pretty grim,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California.

“We use hope as a strategy for rainfall,” he said. “But everyday it doesn’t rain the probability of having a very dry year has really increased.”

In 2012, the dry Sierras did not touch off a panic, he added. Perhaps it should have.

“Could we have looked forward to what we would end up having, we would have panicked,” he said. “There’s no Goldilocks moment here — either there’s a whole lot of snow or very little.”