This rare heavy snowpack will make for a year of glacier-building, but he expects the expansion won’t last long. In his years studying snow in the Sierra Nevada, Painter has seen glaciers retreat with the rise in temperatures. He is looking forward to skiing all summer long. Next to his house in Mammoth, the snow has been up to 20 feet deep. On a personal level, Painter said he feels happy seeing all the snow. Rizzardo said the state’s goal is to expand the program to all 18 watersheds and fly six to eight times per year in each. The flights have been surveying 12 of the 18 mountain basins monitored by the state, typically flying three or four times annually in each watershed. Mammoth Lakes thrown into chaos by snowfallĮpic snowfall at Mammoth Lakes has become a nightmare for residents of this California ski resort community. “And it does it extremely accurately.”Ĭlimate & Environment Explosions, crushed buildings and flood fears. “It gives us for the first time, really ever, a true watershed-scale accounting,” said David Rizzardo, manager of the Department of Water Resources’ hydrology section. Those measurements on the ground add to the aerial survey data. In the Sierra Nevada, state officials continue operating the network of automated snow sensors and doing manual surveys in about 250 locations. It has also been flying over the Colorado River Basin and other parts of the West to collect data. Painter’s team has made 42 flights over the Sierra Nevada so far this year. Painter left NASA in 2019, carrying on the work through a spinoff by transferring the technology to Airborne Snow Observatories, a new public benefit corporation. Using a single plane, he and his team took measurements of the smallest snowpack on record in 2015, and then surveyed deep snow in 2017, when runoff filled the state’s reservoirs. Painter started the program in 2013 when he was working at JPL in La Cañada Flintridge. Painter said the aerial snow surveys have become a “part of the state water infrastructure” and are vital for improving water management as climate change unleashes more intense swings between dry spells and extremely wet conditions. He said preparing for extremes also requires using the best available science, including remote sensing by planes and satellites. Gold said that includes planning projects to capture much more water during extremely high flows to replenish depleted groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley. “We have to plan for the extremes in climate more appropriately, and that’s not something that we’re doing adequately as a state.” “It should make it clear to everyone that how we’re managing water resources in California needs to change,” Gold said. The extreme shift from the record drought to this historic snow year demonstrates the “climate whiplash” phenomenon that the state needs to prepare for, said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He and other experts caution that even as the big snowpack has brought a measure of relief for California‘s water supplies after three extremely dry years, the state’s long-term water challenges remain and will grow more acute as the climate continues to warm. “We’ve never had this intelligence before.”īased on current trends, some Sierra watersheds will hit peak flow in mid- to late May, while others will peak in June, Molotch said. “This is a game-changer in understanding how to make these flood releases,” Monier said. The district manages releases from Don Pedro Reservoir, which is now 73% full. The aerial surveys provide a three-dimensional picture of each watershed that is similar to a CT scan, helping to guide decisions about releasing water from dams under high-flow conditions, said Wes Monier, chief hydrologist of the Turlock Irrigation District. The new methods, Painter said, are like “all of a sudden going from radio to high-resolution television.” The flight crews bring back hard drives loaded with data, which feed into computer models that generate detailed forecasts of runoff and streamflow. The company uses three planes to survey snow watershed by watershed, from the Yuba River basin to the Kings River basin. Previously, they relied largely on automated snow sensors as well as manual surveys in which specialists trek into the mountains and sink metal tubes into the snow to measure the water content. The aerial surveys have enabled scientists to obtain much more detailed snow estimates than in the past.
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