A strong Pacific storm system brought flooding rains to California and heavy snow to the Sierra Nevada, but drought concerns continue for Nevada as persistent dry and warm temperatures cut into the state’s snowpack.
February brought the first atmospheric river of the winter into the Sierra, and while the storm system improved conditions significantly it has not produced enough snow to recover from Nevada’s poor January conditions.
Lack of snow and precipitation in earlier winter months has decreased the likelihood of an average water year for Nevada, said Thomas Albright, the interim Nevada State Climatologist.
“We had a very dry start,” Albright said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to make up. It’s not that it couldn’t happen. But we’ve got about half the season behind us. So we’d have to have a really big end of the season.”
Up until the start of February the snowpack in Tahoe Basin and the surrounding Sierra mountain range, an important water source for the Truckee River and the Reno-Sparks area, was “anomalously low,” said Albright. Chances of snowpack reaching a median peak in the Sierra are now only about 2 in 10 based on historic data, according to the U.S. Department of Agricultural Natural Resources Conservation Service’s winter outlook report . Low snowfall in the Sierra through January also resulted in western Nevada, including the Reno-Sparks area, slipping into “abnormally dry,” a precursor to drought.