How unusual is the current low PNW snowpack?

I hope global warming is the new Y2K and soon we will all be laughing about it while snorkeling through expansive fields of champagne powder. Later we will complain about how we havent had a good tomato growing season in years!

Certainly a low snow year. But there has also been some seriously fun skiing to be had if you look hard

Ski season kicks in to full gear for me usually in May when the days are long and long traverses in the alpine are ripe

Maybe it's time to start thinking about some trams to the alpine in the Cascades. Wouldn't a tram to Mt Cashmere be great? How about up to Spider Gap area?

I think Crystal and Paradise already provide good and quick and easy access to higher alpine areas no? Let's leave spider gap and cashmere wild

Amar/Andyrew,

Nice analysis, I was thinking about doing that right around the 15th... would be interesting to look at various lag correlations between the April 1 snowpack and earlier points throughout the season, and see if binning by el nino/la nina/la nada or below/normal/above April 1 snowpacks gave you different looking values. The sample size is unfortunately pretty small to do this in a really meaningful way, but there still might be something qualitative that pops out.

BScott,

Interesting Nature link... I don't have a good cite on hand for the PNW, but work by Mike Wallace at UW has shown that even for specific models, ensemble runs suggest that the regional evolution of climate has large variability to it in scenarios where the overall global mean AGW signal is pretty consistent from member to member. While the secular trend of AGW will be there, on a regional basis natural variability is a very large amplitude signal, and to a big extent, as Amar suggests, our near future is much more likely to be affected by the PDO phase.

Bumping this excellent post from early Winter for purposes of reflection. If ever someone should be able to say "I told you so..."

Bumping this excellent post from early Winter for purposes of reflection.  If ever someone should be able to say "I told you so..." 

Thanks, I was planning to post an update in this thread after the April 1 numbers came out and say just that! (Well, actually not to say that, but definitely to post some late-season numbers and analysis.)

It's nice when things work out this way, especially since it supports the historical data in the original analysis. And especially since it means that snowfall has been far above-normal from southwestern BC to northern Oregon over the last 3 months since the first real storm cycle of the season arrived on January 7, belatedly saving the ski season over that region. But the weather and climate are fickle, and it could have worked out very differently, if the unusually persistent ridge of high pressure off the West Coast had persisted longer, or rebuilt strongly again and again, as it did once for almost 2 weeks in late January. If there had been 3 weeks of high pressure in February instead of a huge 3-week storm cycle (including record-breaking snowfall in some locations on the east slopes of the Washington Cascades), things would be far less rosy right now and the snowpack would remain well below-normal throughout the Pacific Northwest.

And farther to our south, the season never did recover during winter, as the strongest systems either went by to the north or had snow levels above 8-9000 ft delivering torrents of rain instead of heavy snowfall. The snowpack situation in southern Oregon and all of California remains dire, still under 50% of normal in southern Oregon and 15-30% of normal in California. The current spring storm cycle (March 25-April ??,2014) may go a long way towards improving that with many feet of snow predicted in that area over the next week and beyond, but it is highly improbable that it will recover to anywhere near 100% of normal this season by either April 15 or May 1 (and significant snowfall rarely occurs in any part of that region after May 1 except at the highest elevations). It could happen, but chances are very slim.