Monthly snow survey canceled due to lack of snow

Due to the prospect of finding only bare ground, the Department of Water
Resources (DWR) did not conduct a May 1 snow survey at Phillips Station at the top of Echo Summit near Sierra-at-Tahoe.

“We can’t count on the Sierra snowpack to replenish our water supplies,” said California Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin. “Major reservoirs are dropping at a time when they typically would be filling with melted snow. We need careful, sparing use of water across the state, because we don’t know when this drought will end.”

When Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. attended the April 1 survey at Phillips and announced a mandatory 25-percent reduction in water use across the state, the ground was barren of snow in every direction. It was the only April 1 since DWR began surveying Phillips in 1941 that no snow was found there.

DWR and its cooperating agencies verify snow conditions at locations throughout the Sierra. Despite last week’s storm that left snow on the ground at Phillips Station and the rest of the Lake Tahoe area, that snow was expected to melt away by Friday before the scheduled May 1 reading. The snowpack normally is at its peak in early April before slowly melting in spring and early summer into streams and reservoirs to supply 30 percent of the water used by California’s cities
and farms.

The last time snow was found at Phillips on May 1 was 2011.

April 30's readings from electronic sensors up and down the Sierra indicate that statewide, California’s snowpack water content is one-half an inch, 3 percent of the 16.6 inches normally in the snowpack on today’s date. On April 1, the most comprehensive measurement date, the statewide measurement was just 5 percent of normal.