The picture remains grim for California. The Sierra Nevada snow pack is now at a 500 year low, according to a study reported by NewScientist (19 September 2015, paywall):
This year’s April level was at just 5 per cent of the historical average recorded for the month between 1951 and 2000.
It’s bad news for drought-ridden California because melting snow from the Sierra Nevada range fills 30 per cent of the state’s reservoirs (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/7p7). California suffered devastating wildfires this week that were fuelled by the region’s worst drought on record.
LiveScience adds,
And the researchers don’t expect normal snowpack levels to be replenished anytime soon. “We should be prepared for this type of snow drought to occur much more frequently because of rising temperatures,” study researcher Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist (a scientist who studies tree rings) at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, said in a statement. “Anthropogenic [human-caused] warming is making the drought more severe.”
The following map courtesy OpenEI and is of the Sierra Nevada Thermal Region.
NASA“s Earth Observatory also contributes:
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured two natural-color images of the snow cover in the Sierra Nevada in California and Nevada. The top image was acquired on March 27, 2010, the last year with average winter snowfall in the region. The second image was acquired on March 29, 2015. In addition to the significantly depleted snow cover, note the change of color in the Central Valley of California and the lack of snow in the interior of Nevada. (Most of the white in 2015 is cloud cover.)
Looking closely at the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada, scientists working with NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) found the snowpack there contained just 40 percent as much water in 2015 as it did at its highest level in 2014—which was already one of the two driest years in California’s recorded history. In its first springtime acquisition of 2015, the ASO team quantified the total volume of water contained in the basin: On March 25, the mountain snowpack was 74,000 acre-feet, or 24 billion gallons. In the same week of 2014, the snow total was 179,000 acre-feet.
The wildfires, so well covered by the media, were certainly exacerbated by the ongoing drought, and it provides opportunities for prison inmates to mitigate sentences and learn new skills, as reported by the BBC:
When painter Henry Cruz was sent to San Quentin prison three years ago, for a crime he doesn’t want to talk about, he never thought he would spend part of his sentence fighting fires. But that’s what he has been doing for the past 18 months.
“It gets scary sometimes, but at the same time, it makes me feel good. Being a firefighter is a privilege – it makes you feel like you are in civilisation.
“I like saving nature, and sometimes people,” he says. “It makes me feel like a hero.”
While I would certainly like to understand the eventual recidivism rate for this subgroup of prisoners, it doesn’t really compensate for the damages and stresses on the state caused by the wildfires and drought.
