Declining Snowpack Worrisome for California: Researchers

It has been know that California has been facing a record-long drought since 2012. Researchers said precipitation is not the only thing that is to be blamed for the Californian drought. They said declining snowpack is also a big deal in a place like California.

Soumaya Belmecheri, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona along with her colleagues, used two different sets of historic tree ring records to reconstruct 500 years of climate history. They used blue oak tree rings as a proxy for winter precipitation and another from a variety of trees, as a proxy of winter temperatures.

Researchers said studying the tree rings made it possible for them to model Sierra Nevada snowpack going back to the year 1500. They found that today’s today's snowpack is just five percent of its average level over the last five centuries.

Belmecheri whose findings were published in the journal Nature Climate Change said that the decline in snowpack is quite a big deal for California with its Mediterranean-like climate.

“You can think about it like a water bank that can be used later in the spring and the summer when it melts”, she said.

She said maybe snowpack in the Sierra Nevada will no longer be a reliable source of water. So maybe a system that is more resilient to this type of drought should be thought of and designed.

The study researchers suggested that the new design could also include maybe changing where the water is captured. If there will be more rain in than snow in the future, then there should be plans to store the rain water, they said.