Snowpack survey offers hope for state's water supply
By JANET ZIMMERMAN
The Press-Enterprise
Any doubt about the benefits of this month's lengthy and powerful storms was dispelled Friday when measurements in the Sierra Nevada showed the snowpack is well above normal for this time of year.
But state water officials cautioned that even a good start to the season doesn't ward off the possibility of a fourth year of drought, and that conservation is now a way of life in California.
It's also unlikely, they said, that State Water Project allocations to agencies that serve millions of Southern California residents will increase beyond 40 percent -- even if it's an average rainy season -- because of environmental restrictions and other problems in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The snow survey "offers us some cautious optimism as we continue to play catch-up with our statewide water supplies," said Sue Sims, chief deputy director at the Department of Water Resources. "Even if California is blessed with a healthy snowpack, we must learn to always conserve this finite resource so that we have enough water for homes, farms and businesses in 2010 and in the future."
The water content of the snowpack, which determines spring runoff out of the mountains, is 115 percent of normal. At this time last year, it was 61 percent of normal.
This was the second of five monthly readings from manual measurements and electronic sensors near Lake Tahoe. The most important will be the early April reading that takes into account the entire rainy season.
The news was better than the reading a month ago, which showed water content at 85 percent of normal for this time of year.
"It's a fairly significant improvement," said Frank Gehrke, a snow surveyor for the state.
The information will be used to make allocations for the State Water Project, the aqueducts that move water to Southern California from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Early-season allocations for this year are just 5 percent of what contractors requested, a historic low. But state officials said that could increase if this winter proves to be a wet one.
Besides snowpack and depleted reservoir storage, there are other factors, said Wendy Martin, the state's drought coordinator.
Federal officials have restricted pumping in the delta to protect the endangered delta smelt and -- for the first time this year -- salmon. Those regulations, combined with water-quality restrictions, severely limit how much water can be pumped at any given time, Martin said.
Last year, California had an almost average water year and could still deliver only 40 percent of requested amounts through the State Water Project.
"This year, with additional regulatory restraints, under average conditions, we'd be challenged to get to even 40 percent," she said.
But Dave Miskus, a meteorologist at the National Centers for Environmental Protection in Maryland, was encouraged by the impressive start to winter.
In the 10 years that Miskus has been mapping conditions on the U.S. Drought Monitor, he has never made as many changes as he did following January's week of storms.
By Thursday morning, the browns and tans that signify severe to moderate drought had been replaced with yellows and whites that mean conditions are merely abnormally dry or there is no drought.
"There were one to two category improvements across much of the Southwest," Miskus said. "The whole area got way above normal precipitation and it helped the drought situation across the entire area."
According to the Drought Monitor, 2.2 percent of the state is in severe drought, compared to 48.9 percent at this time last year. Miskus declared that California's short-term drought is over because soils are saturated.
But the long-term drought continues because reservoirs that supply residential and agricultural uses are far from where they should be, he said.
Lake Shasta rose more than 20 feet after the storm and is now at 82 percent of average for this time of year. Lake Oroville, the main reservoir for the State Water Project, is at half of its average storage for late January.
"You need to have average precipitation the rest of the season to make sure there's enough water in the reservoirs and snowpack. If it stops now, you'd be in trouble," he said
http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/s...0.464053a.html