Western Mountain Snowpack

Western Mountain Snowpack

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
It doesn't matter whether you are a rancher or farmer. No matter what you do you need….USDA meteorologist Brad Rippey looks at the Western mountain snowpack landscape as the 2019-20 snowpack season approaches its midway point. “We are approaching the halfway point in the 2019-2020 western winter wet season has certainly been an interesting season to this point with a parade of storms moving out of the southwest and across the central and southern Rockies. We’ve also seen a pretty decent amount of moisture across the eastern slopes of the northern Rockies. But one area that has largely missed out on the rampant storminess has been Northwest. Some of the lowest snowpacks at this time are in the Oregon Cascades, especially the northern part of the state where we see snowpacks, less than 50 percent of the average in early January, and broadly looking at Oregon, Washington and Idaho, we see the vast majority of the basins reporting snowpacks in the 50 to 75 percent range. We have seen a recent uptick in storminess across this region, but the area has continued to deal with above normal temperatures that have limited high elevation snowpack accumulations.
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