Jeremy Miller

On a recent winter weekend, Kirkwood's slopes had bare patches.

What a difference a season makes at one laid-back California ski area known for deep powder, sweeping bowls and short lift lines.

Kirkwood Mountain Resort, located 35 miles southwest of the glittering mega resorts of Lake Tahoe, is well off its average of 500 inches of snow per year (and a far cry from last year’s record-setting 748 inches). This weekend’s North Face Masters big mountain snowboard competition has been postponed because of lack of snow on the area’s high cirques. And last Wednesday, the resort was bought for $18 million by Colorado-based Vail Resorts.

Kirkwood’s purchase by Vail, a company whose aggressive expansion and intensive development at its other ski areas (including Tahoe resorts Heavenly and Northstar) may portend multi-million dollar ski chalets, luxury boutiques and high-speed gondolas — all things the remote Kirkwood has eschewed in its 40 years of operation.

But according to some industry watchers, Vail’s business model may offer economic insulation from a changing climate, as California’s mountain snowpack is projected to decline by as much as 25% by mid-century.

The threat of dwindling snowfall and warming temperatures is by no means limited to the ski areas of the High Sierra. The issue has become a key focus of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, which produced a 2008 report titled “Climate Change and Tourism” (PDF). One study cited in the U.N. report examined the New England ski industry during the 2001-2002 season, when average temperatures during the ski season were a staggering eight degrees Celsius higher than those between 1961 and 1990. Between 2001 and 2002, the ski season was shortened by 11% and increased snowmaking led to a 35% increase in energy use. The study concluded that warmer-than-average seasons reduced operating profits by 19% when compared to “climatically average seasons.”

Vail’s adaptation to the changing weather involves offering skiers more choices — not in terms of terrain, but places to spend their money after the lifts close. (One statistic on the Vail webpage sums up how critical its off-mountain ventures are to its bottom line: “29,035: ‘The height of Mt. Everest and the stacked height of all ski boots sold annually by our retail outlets.’”

Earlier this month, Derek Thompson at theatlantic.com characterized Vail’s (and chief rival, Canadian ski company Whistler/Blackcomb) economic epiphany like this:

What Vail and Whistler have discovered is that lift-tickets. . . will always provide the foundation of ski-nomics. But a resort that offers only skiing is a terribly risky business model — like a snow farmer whose yearly harvest is only as good as the snow crop.

According to Vail’s latest financial report (PDF), 36% of its $807 million in revenues during the 2010-2011 season came from lift ticket sales. The other 64% was divided between lodging, dining, ski school and retail and rental sales.

More telling, however, are the company’s numbers from the 2009-2010 season (PDF). In spite of a poor economy and historically low snowfall totals, Vail reported a revenue increase of nearly four percent. “Vail has a range of auxiliary services that really helps to round out its business,” said Troy Hawks of the National Ski Area Association, a Colorado-based trade group. And here’s the key: Vail is “vertically integrated,” meaning it does not merely offer these services — it owns them.

Those who love resorts like Kirkwood precisely because of their lack of amenities may find cold

MyEyeSees/Flickr

Vail's flagship resort in Colorado. Only about a third of the company's business is from lift-ticket sales.

comfort in such figures. (Indeed, Vail’s flagship resort, tucked into a picturesque valley some 90 minutes west of Denver, has often been described as a bad caricature of a Tyrolean village.)

Kelly Ladyga, a spokesperson for Vail Resorts, said plans for the Kirkwood village are still being discussed, but she noted that Vail has done more than build up the base amenities at its various resorts, pointing to efficiency improvements of lifts and snowmaking equipment. Hawks echoed Ladyga’s comments. “When you have a large corporation like Vail, you have access to lots of capital and know-how that you might not have with, say, a smaller, independent company.”

Last week, as I rode the Sunrise Lift in 50-degree temperatures to Kirkwood’s vast bowls under 9,800-foot Thimble Peak, I sat next to Jim, a Heavenly season pass holder. “I don’t think this will ever become another Vail,” he said. “But a few more high-speed lifts to access all this great terrain wouldn’t hurt.”

Molly Samuel

Researchers found that heavy snowfall in the Sierra is connected to the amount of dust floating over from Asia.

In a weird twist on the “butterfly effect,” evidence is that Asian dust storms can mean more snow in the Sierra. The strange finding surfaced in research by scientists working on NOAA’s CalWater program. Scientists compared two Sierra storms, and found the one that contained dust particles from Asia had 40% more precipitation than the one that did not. The other storm had more particulate matter from sources in California, for instance, from burning trees or grass.

The researchers, including Kim Prather and Doug Collins from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego compared the two storms from the air.

In a series of test flights, scientists flew a zig-zag pattern from the former McClellan Air Base, east of Sacramento, toward the Sierra, using a specially outfitted C-130 research aircraft based at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

NCAR

A C-130 research aircraft was outfitted with special probes to collect cloud droplets and ice particles during the cloud fly-throughs.

Prather, who directs the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment at UC San Diego, said there’s still a lot to learn about the precise “interfacial” chemistry that goes on among cloud particles. Only one particle in a thousand is likely to become an ice crystal, the basic building block of snow. Prather says there’s “something chemically magical about ice crystals.” Apparently so, as clouds remain one of the most difficult aspects of climate modeling. “Aerosols” is the term scientists use to refer to all sorts of particulate matter drifting around in the air.

After a Friday presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver, Prather told me that no flights were scheduled this winter because of the unusual dearth of rain clouds, but that they planned to resume cloud-probing flights next winter.

The dust connection is another piece to the California water puzzle, and will help researchers better understand why we get precipitation when we do, and help them make better projections.

There’s more about the research in this article from the Bay Citizen.

Molly Samuel/KQED

Snow has been sparse in the Sierra Nevada this winter.

There are good years and there are bad years, but overall, snowfall in the Sierra hasn’t declined in the past century. That’s according to a new study by University of Alabama climatologist John Christy (who, it’s worth noting, has come under fire as a climate change denier).

The San Francisco Chronicle had a story about the report, “Searching for information in 133 years of California snowfall observations,” (link is to the abstract; full article is behind a pay wall) in today’s paper:

The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall – a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models.

John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have increased the effects of global warming.

Roger Bales, a professor of engineering at UC Merced and director of its Sierra Nevada Research Institute, said this study can’t be used to draw conclusions about climate change.

“(Christy) may have done some appropriate statistical analysis, but the conclusions are stressed beyond what the data will bare. It’s not surprising he didn’t find a trend because he lumped everything together.”

Bales said to detect a change in precipitation patterns from snow to rain, which is an indicator of climate change, the details of the data at specific elevations would be more valuable than all the numbers combined.

The Chronicle also quoted U.S. Geological Survey climatologist Mike Dettinger, who said that water content and density of snow are better measures than snow depth.

Kelly Redmond, a climatologist at the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute said he was slightly surprised to see the report, but not floored by it.

“It’s quite natural to say if it’s warming up we’ll see less snow, but in some places because of higher temperatures, we could see more,” he told me. “There’s that famous quote by René Dubos, ‘Trends are not destiny.’ This is a study of what it’s been up to this point. But I’m hesitant to say if it’s been this way, it’s going to stay this way.”

Update:

John Christy got in touch, and I asked him to respond to some of the points in this post. I’m copying his response in here.

Snow Water Equivalent (SWE): my recent paper directly addressed that issue and found snowfall a very good proxy for SWE. SWE is a valuable measure of one thing (amount of liquid water in the snowpack on a particular date, which misses the impact of later snowfalls).  SWE is very useful for its purposes, but only a few measurements go back to around 1930. Snowfall is a different metric (my paper) and goes back another 50 years (thanks to a lot of effort on my part) and so has the high added value of length-of-record as well as a metric of great value to define snow amounts as they fall (for recreation, snow clearing, snow-dependent ecology as well as runoff).

The rate of change of snowfall has been modeled to have already shown decreases (in the models). I addressed issues like temperature (Christy et al. 2006) and runoff/precipitation (Christy and Hnilo 2010 attached) … no changes have been found. Thus, models are not doing well in showing what mother nature is doing. It’s always a nice corner to run to by saying “our predictions can’t be tested because they apply only to the future” — the infamous unfalsifiable hypothesis. I test model results for the time over which we have both observations and model results. (My main work is dealing with global temperatures from satellites where it is more straightforward to show model vs. observation disagreement.)

One critical part of the paper was the handling of “missings as zeros,” where non-reports (i.e. missing) had been filled in with zeros since 1970 by someone down the line for many stations. I had to eliminate as many of these as possible — a very tedious process.

I looked at the elevation dependence in the So. Sierra in the last paper. Note that in the past 60 years, most sites showed positive trends, with no dependence on elevation.

Regarding the Calif. Water Report — the blog commenter was comparing very different apples and oranges: the time frame is different in two ways and the quantity itself is very different. In Fig. 2-13 the quantity is only Apr-Jul runoff for the Sacramento Basin only, not total annual runoff of all of the Sierra. The annual runoff (Fig. 2-14 lower and Fig. 2-16 lower) shows precisely what I found — no trend. The time periods are different too — mine go back 30 years more. It looks to me like California will have roughly the same amount of water it has had for the last 100 years — but I know the demand for water is always rising.

Matthew Green

An early snow in the Grouse Lakes area of the Sierra Nevada

By Matthew Green

For months now, I had reserved the second weekend in October for my annual grand finale “summertime” backpacking trip. Culminating an unusually short warm season, this was to be the ceremonial final alpine lake swim, the last mosquito bloodletting until well after next year’s thaw. Which is why, as my partner and I proceeded to pitch our tent in about 10 inches of snow last Friday evening, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been had.

Last week’s storm, which swept across the northern half of California early Wednesday, dumped up to a foot of snow in the Sierra’s high peaks, with accumulation as low as 5,000 feet. According to the Central Sierra Snow Lab, this is the first snowstorm in 96 days – since July 1 – marking the shortest duration between storms in the Sierra since 1969.

Green surrounded by white in the Sierra

Don’t get me wrong. It was absolutely gorgeous. We hiked – or more accurately, trudged – a few miles into the Grouse Lakes Area, a basin in Tahoe National Forest at just over 6,000 feet, where ridges of polished granite cascade into a necklace of shimmering lakes. Add a blanket of white covering the forest duff, dotted with  majestic cedars and pines,  and the scene was downright breathtaking. Not one mosquito, either. And even though the conditions for us over the weekend were gorgeous, with cloudless blue skies and daytime highs reaching into the low seventies, there was still plenty of snow on our way out Sunday afternoon.

Despite the earlier forecasts of blustery conditions in the area, we assumed (with little rationale aside from denial), any frigid weather this time of year would steer clear of anything below, say 7,000 feet. Evidently, not so.

“October is like a half-and-half month; there are dry Octobers and wet Octobers,” said Johnnie Powell, a weather forecaster at the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office. “This was a December-like storm. It’s not rare but it isn’t normal, either.” And by next weekend, he added, after a warm rain system followed by several days of dry weather reaching into the 70’s, most of the wintry evidence will be gone.

And oh, just for the record: as promised, I did take that final swim, a straight dive into a beautiful snow-encrusted lake, and a very swift exit out. I don’t regret it, but I might not recommend it.

Matthew Green is the education outreach specialist for KQED News.

A new study finds large losses of springtime snow cover in the West in recent years, raising concerns about water supplies.

Spring snowpack in the West is an essential water resource, particularly in Southwestern states that are prone to summer drought, like California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. (Credit: Wolfgang Staudt on Flickr)

Head south across the 40^th parallel, however, and things are dramatically different. While there is still above average snow throughout the Sierra, a relatively snow-less winter and spring has left much of the Southwest in a drought that has fostered record wildfires. Already local officials are worried there won’t be enough water to get through the summer months ahead.

This kind of contrast for the western spring snowpack is not unusual, though. It’s completely normal, and it’s exactly what climate scientists and meteorologists expect during years when the average weather pattern is influenced by La Niña, a climate cycle associated with cooler than average water temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

But while this north-south dichotomy turns out to be a regular feature of western climate, new research published today in the journal Science shows that, when compared to typical snowfall during the past 1,000 years, snowpack patterns appear to be changing as average temperatures climb. Scientists say that as temperatures continue to rise, this reduced snowpack will lead to more frequent water shortages in increasingly thirsty western states.

“We’re talking about simultaneous snowpack decline in the western watershed that supports 70 million people,” says U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) climatologist Julio Betancourt, who co-authored the new study. “We have to be concerned.”

For several years, scientists have observed that spring snowpack all across the West — in both northern and southern areas — has been decreasing. But now, Betancourt and a group of other climate scientists have found that the recent decline is a departure from patterns of the past 1,000 years. As part of the study published in Science, USGS ecologist Greg Pederson investigated tree ring data to learn how snowpack in the West, on either side of 40^th parallel, changed from year-to-year and from decade-to-decade. Looking back over nearly a millennium, he found that when the north had high snowpack, the south typically experienced low snowpack, and vice versa.

But Pederson and Betancourt noticed a change starting in the mid-1980’s. On average, the amount of snow on the ground at the beginning of April each year was decreasing everywhere across the West. It’s a trend that other scientists studying snowpack have pointed out. This has important consequences for water supplies for drinking water and agriculture, since many areas, including much of interior California, are dependent upon spring runoff for much of their water supplies.

Betancourt says that as average spring temperatures have risen, the snowpack has begun to melt earlier in the year (not the case this year, with record cold weather locking in substantial amounts of snow in many western ranges). Moreover, he says that in many places, the warmer temperatures mean that precipitation falls more as rain than as snow. So while the actual amount of precipitation hasn’t changed dramatically, the amount of rain has.

Snowpack in much of the West remains well above average, thanks to a cold and snowy winter and spring. In the Southwest, however, snowpack was well below average. (Image: NRCS)

“Snowpack is the water resources of the West,” says Greg McCabe, a USGS hydrology expert who was not directly involved in the new study, “and temperature has a dominant impact on the snowpack.” If warming temperatures in the West cause the snowpack to decrease even more, McCabe says, or if the timing of the melt each spring changes, then summer water shortages could happen a lot more often.

McCabe says the research provides valuable evidence about how snowpack has changed historically, and also how unusual the recent patterns appear to be.

According to Pederson and Betancourt’s findings, the way snowpack has changed in the past 30 years isn’t entirely unprecedented. There were two brief periods in the mid-1300’s and early 1400’s where there was less snow built up throughout the West.

“At both those other times in the past, we know it was warm then too,” explains Betancourt.

Now, however, climate scientists are predicting that average temperatures in the West are going to keep rising this century, due in large part to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Compared to the past, when snowfall returned to normal as temperatures dropped, researchers now expect that warmer spring weather could keep spring snowpack on the decline for years to come.

“What’s happening in the spring for snow is critically important [for water availability] compared to what is happening in the dead of winter,” says Betancourt.

So what do the authors make of a year like this, which has brought frequent snowfall to the Sierra, even into June?

“There isn’t anything that has happened this year that isn’t consistent with what our new findings are,” says Pederson. Even as average temperatures increase in the coming years, there will still be cool years where above average snowpack builds up in parts of the West, particularly during La Niña years. “But these years will tend to be weather noise over top of the larger climate changes we will see over many years,” he says.

NPR’s Richard Harris interviews Pederson in this story for Morning Edition.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, a content partner of KQED Climate Watch.

Photo: Craig Miller

I don’t know Mark Cowin, the director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. I haven’t even met the man, in person. But after listening to and reading his pronouncements about the state’s water supply, I’d guess he’s a guy who would barely crack a smile if he found himself holding a winning lottery ticket. I hazard that opinion because even after today’s great news about the Sierra snowpack–which is a little like finding out the state has won its annual water lottery–what Cowin emphasizes is that California isn’t out of the woods after the dry spell of 2007-2009. But more about that to follow. First, the details on the DWR’s final Sierra snow survey.

DWR announced on Friday that statewide, the water content stored in the Sierra snow is at 143% of normal for the date; 188% in the northern Sierra, 121% in the central mountains, and 139% in the southern reaches of the range. Up and down the Sierra, those figures are more than double the levels of the past two years, and are up to seven times as much as surveyors found in the bone-dry spring of 2007.

Last week, the Department announced it would increase allocations from the State Water Project to 30% of the amount requested from 29 urban and agricultural customers. Today’s snowpack news prompted the department to say that it’s likely to increase deliveries. How much? “Only marginally,” Cowin said in a phone interview this afternoon. “We’ll have to run the numbers, and we’ll probably make that determination in the next week or two.”

How much water will State Water Project customers get, eventually? Let’s run some numbers of our own.

The main reason the department cites for the very tight supply in the midst of a year of “normal” precipitation is the continuing below-average levels at California’s biggest state-owned reservoir, Lake Oroville. As of Friday afternoon, the lake is at 72% of normal for the date and about 60% full. But the stats that Cowin’s water geeks are crunching aren’t about the level today, but where they guess it will be as runoff begins to pour from the snow-blanketed mountains through the Feather River watershed into Lake Oroville. DWR officials have insisted that it believes runoff will be held down because of dry conditions caused by the last three drought years. You wonder if they’ll still believe that after assessing the impact of an unusually wet April and its impact on the snowpack.

While pondering that, here are some other numbers to consider if you want to play what I’ll call the State Water Project Allocation Game:

• After running far below its 2008-2009 levels all season, the water storage in Lake Oroville caught up and passed year-ago levels this week. The lake’s storage has increased six percent—more than 150,000 acre-feet—since last Friday.
• As noted above, this year’s snowpack is better than double last year’s.
• Last year, the state delivered 40 percent of requested water shipments to its SWP customers. The average allocation for the past 10 years is 68 percent.

Considering all of the above—last year’s deliveries, the snowpack, the sudden late-season surge in Lake Oroville’s levels—it’s a no-brainer that water deliveries will at least match last year’s 40 percent. The question is whether the allocation will go higher. All Cowin would say on that subject today is that he thinks that 45%, the amount DWR described two months ago as the upper limit for shipments this season, is still accurate.

But Cowin did say, as he has more and more frequently of late, that a preoccupation with the this year’s water level misses the point about California’s water reality.

“That’s why we’re so concerned when we get the black and white question, ‘Is the drought over,’” he said. “We are in a period of long scarcity in California. We have no idea what next year’s water supply picture will look like. It’s possible we could have two or three more dry years in a row. So we’re trying to get a message out that we need to have a new attitude about how we use water in California, and it shouldn’t depend on this week’s outlook. We need to conserve water just as a way of life.”

If you want to explore the state’s water supply picture for yourself, check out our California Reservoir Watch map, below:

View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map
View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

State water officials have announced they are likely to release a record-low allocation of water to cities and farms next year– just five percent of what water contractors have requested. Though still preliminary, it’s the lowest allocation since the State Water Project began delivering water back in 1967.

The announcement may have caught some by surprise, since Department of Water Resources (DWR) data would seem to show reservoirs at higher levels than last year at this time, with major reservoirs at 69% of storage capacity, compared to 57% last year.

When I asked DWR Deputy Director Susan Simms about it, even she was stumped at first. But then she called me back to say that the data includes both federal and state reservoirs, and the state’s storage levels at both Lake Oroville and San Luis Reservoir (shared with the feds) is actually lower than last year (52% and 48% of “normal,” respectively). And, she says, the state has to contend with pumping restrictions to protect both salmon and delta smelt this time around.

DWR Director Lester Snow told reporters this morning that there’s nothing in the recently passed bundle of state water bills that can provide any immediate relief. And if you thought the prospect of increased precipitation from El Nino could save the day, don’t get out the umbrella just yet. David Rizzardo, Chief of the state’s Snow Survey section, estimates there’s only a 50-60% chance of a stronger El Nino kicking in this year. December and January will be the most telling months–but precipitation from El Nino would likely be concentrated in the southern half of the state. Officials say that would provide more “flexibility” in meeting water needs systemwide, but all of California’s biggest reservoirs are located in the northern part of the state.

December water delivery estimates almost always get a boost once it starts snowing. Last year’s initial projection was 15%, and that was later revised upward, eventually to 40 percent. Snow called today’s estimate “very conservative.”

If you think the five percent figure is supposed to scare us, it is. Water officials want to send a message that Californians need to be prepared to conserve. The state’s drought coordinator, Wendy Martin, just returned from a water tour in Australia, where she says she saw water-saving measures in place that California has yet to fully develop: storm water recapture, water recycling, and more. Martin also observed that the Australians now wish that they’d taken the epic drought of the last several years more seriously, sooner.

Snow on Mt. Whitney. Photo: USFS

An interesting example of this arose this week in a report by Richard Harris for NPR’s All Things Considered. It’s worth a listen, if only for the back-and-forth between two climate scientists over snowfall in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, tells Harris about trouble he’s had publishing research that appears to counter the mainstream view that the Sierra snowpack is endangered. For a response, Harris goes to Philip Mote at Oregon State University, one of the scientists who reviewed Christy’s research.

Also interviewed are Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Judy Curry from Georgia Tech.

The head of the UN’s climate panel finally issued his own statement on the email flap, which was part condemnation of the hackers, part defense of the science and peer review process.

Surveyor Frank Gehrke takes one last poke at the season's shrinking snow pack. Photo by Craig Miller.

When veteran snow surveyor Frank Gehrke stuck his aluminum tube into the thinning snow course at Phillips Station this morning, the “Mount Rose” snow gauge stopped dead a few inches in. He then withdrew a sad little cylinder of corn snow, about the size of a flashlight battery. There was barely a foot of snow left at this measuring station, 6,900 feet above sea level. Water content: 35% of normal. Yikes. Of course, that’s just one station among many surveyed on a monthly basis to help handicap the coming summer’s water supply.

The numbers are in for the season’s last snow survey: On average throughout the Sierra Nevada, water content clocks in at 66% of normal for this date. Last year at this time it was 72% of normal. The southern third of the Sierra came in at 61%.

So even with that hope-lifting late-season burst of precipitation that started in mid-February, we ended up even worse than last year–at least in terms of the snowpack. Some local reservoirs filled up nicely with the soggy spring. The trouble, says Gehrke, is that “The big ones didn’t.”

Some municipal water districts have vacillated on rationing plans for the summer. But the big state and federal systems that supply irrigation water to farms have largely stuck with their drastic cuts in allocations this year.

The bottom line, according to state water director Lester Snow:  “When combined with extremely dry years in 2007 and 2008, low storage in the state’s major reservoirs, restrictions on Delta pumping, a growing population and prediction of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, it is clear the problems facing California will persist beyond this year and this drought.”

Official drought proclamations have been a source of some controversy since the rain finally began falling in February. The Department of Water Resources has produced a statewide water plan and put it up for comment until June.