Who woke up thrilled to see new snow yesterday morning? The Tahoe Basin received 1-3 inches of fresh snow overnight, putting an end to a long dry spell in our region. In fact, the streak of 37 consecutive days without precipitation during meteorological winter marked a record for Tahoe, writes the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.
Although the epic storms of last December are still vivid in our memory, our current snowpack follows the trend of a declining annual snowpack that we have been seeing since data was first collected in 1950. While winter seasons are punctuated with extreme high and low snow years, the graph in the 4th image shows the overall decline in the snowpack at Palisades Tahoe.
In the graph below, future projections shown in red and green dashed trend lines are based on the current emissions rate (red) and the if-we-act-now rate (green), respectively.
Sorry, but 1-3″ doesn’t end a dry spell. It was gone by 11am