Snowpack

I don't know about you, but I love the rain. Any time it rains I think of agriculture and how welcome water is to farmers, at least if it's not a flood. Any time it snows, I think great. Again, agriculture comes to mind and snowpack is good. With that in mind, I called National Weather Service hydrologist Troy Lundquist to find out how optimistic we should be about snowpack. "We are currently in a La Nina phase and that has to do with the sea surface temperatures over the central and eastern Pacific Ocean near the equator. The sea surface temperatures are cooler than normal in a La Nina and those are the conditions we are under right now Typically, we see over the past decades they have been studying this phenomenon, we see cooler than normal temperatures over the Northwest and above normal precipitation. Since it is during the winter time and since we see those cooler than normal temperatures and above normal precipitation, you would logically expect to see above normal snowpack over the winter. At this point it is still very early in the new water year but there is reason to be optimistic. It looks like things may be trending in that direction of cooler and wetter than normal. But we have a lot of winter ahead of us and, as you probably know, the past couple of years, we have seen some pretty warm temperatures over the winter and during the early spring which has really impacted our runoff. So that can certainly play a role in how our water supply pans out.