{"id":41889,"date":"2018-12-22T08:02:15","date_gmt":"2018-12-22T13:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41889"},"modified":"2018-12-22T08:02:15","modified_gmt":"2018-12-22T13:02:15","slug":"sierra-nevada-snowpack-on-track-to-collapse-79-new-study-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41889","title":{"rendered":"Sierra Nevada Snowpack On Track To Collapse 79%, New Study Warns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sierra Nevada Snowpack On Track To Collapse 79%, New Study Warns<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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A new report by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)\u00a0examined\u00a0the headwater regions of California’s ten major reservoirs,\u00a0representing half of the state’s\u00a0surface storage, discovered each could experience\u00a0a 79%\u00a0decline in peak snowpack water volume by 2100.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Berkeley Lab used\u00a0supercomputers to\u00a0investigate current warming trends and carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

Scientists analyzed how a future warmer world would affect “snowpack upstream of\u00a010 major reservoir<\/strong>s \u2014 three in Northern California, three in Central California, and four in Southern California. The reservoirs are Shasta, Oroville, Folsom, New Melones, Don Pedro, Exchequer, Pine Flat, Terminus, Success, and Isabella,” said\u00a0The Mercury News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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By 2039 to 2059, the\u00a0snowpack runoff could drop by 54%,<\/strong> the study\u00a0determined, and then 79%\u00a0from 2079 to 2099. The study noted that\u00a0three northernmost reservoirs, Shasta, Oroville and Folsom, could see an 83% reduction, by 2100.<\/p>\n

Alan Rhoades, a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley Lab and lead author of the study, said\u00a0his team of researchers found that peak\u00a0runoff could come four weeks earlier by 2100, at the beginning of March rather than April\u00a001.<\/p>\n

Mountain snowpack is a significant source\u00a0of water for California:\u00a0“Our precipitation is really intermittent and extremes-driven,” Rhoades said. “We get 50% of our annual precipitation in five to 15 days, or one to two weeks. Our water demand is highest during the summer months when we don’t get a lot of precipitation, so we really rely on mountain snowpack as a stopgap for our water supply.”<\/p>\n

“So as the world continues to warm, these storms will get even warmer and won’t readily get to freezing, whereby you could have snowfall or snow accumulation and the persistence of snow on the surface,” <\/strong><\/em>he said.<\/p>\n

As a result of warmer weather, the\u00a0amount of snow is projected to decrease while rain could increase. The study noted that it did not look at rainfall, only mountain snowpack.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sierra Nevada Snowpack On Track To Collapse 79%, New Study Warns A new report by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)\u00a0examined\u00a0the headwater regions of California’s ten major reservoirs,\u00a0representing half of the state’s\u00a0surface storage, discovered each could experience\u00a0a 79%\u00a0decline in peak snowpack water volume by 2100. Berkeley Lab used\u00a0supercomputers to\u00a0investigate current warming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,141,369,23571,3367,23572,866,4318],"class_list":["post-41889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-global-warming","tag-sierra-nevada-snowpack","tag-snow","tag-snowpack","tag-water","tag-zerohedge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41890,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41889\/revisions\/41890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}