California’s final manual snow survey of the season found no measurable snow at Phillips Station, marking the second-lowest reading on record for the site.
The Department of Water Resources conducted the survey yesterday off Highway 80 at Echo Summit at what would normally be a meadow buried in five feet of snow.
Statewide the snowpack stands at just eighteen percent of average. It’s the second-lowest April reading in 75 years of record-keeping.
DWR Director Karla Nemeth [nihm-ith] says this year’s conditions could be a sign of things to come.
We're getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is I don't know. We clearly have something called a snow drought. Where we do get precipitation, but we just don't get the snow. And it's that lack of snow that's going to challenge our overall storage that we all rely on.”
Nemeth says reservoirs are nearly full, but the water will have to last through the dry season with little snowmelt to replenish them.