Triple whammy on snowpack

Sunny days and hardly any rain. It's been a great March — unless you've got your eye on the snowpack in Utah's mountains.

"It's not looking very good," said Ray Wilson, hydrologist with the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service in Salt Lake City, about snowpack totals across the state.

The snowpack has been hit with a triple whammy: 70 percent of average snowfall statewide; a melt that began three weeks too early; and now about a third of normal precipitation for March, which is usually Utah's wettest month.

Even if the state got a few big storms, Wilson said, "it's probably too late to salvage the snowpack" for this year.

The snowpack levels are so low that they've fallen below the "lower-limit checks" on the agency's computers. "So we're falling into new-record territory" at some sites in central and southern Utah, he said. As of Wednesday, snowpack levels were 28 percent of normal in the Virgin River basin, and 60 percent of normal in northern Utah.

"Once the snowpack gets this warm, it takes a lot of cool weather to stop the melt," Wilson said. "You can get fresh snow deposit on top, but the snowpack is still warm enough to where it's losing water."

A warm spring, with melting stretching out for additional weeks, means that more snowpack is lost to the "-ations" — evaporation, sublimation, infiltration and transpiration (water use by plants) — explained snow-survey supervisor Randy Julander.

"Stream flow is the last thing that comes out of the checkbook," he said. "Everything else has to be paid off first."

Spring rain in the mountains goes directly into the ground and doesn't contribute to the runoff in any appreciable way, he added. Julander was in the mountains east of Cedar City on Wednesday, surveying the snowpack. It was raining at nearly 9,000 feet, he reported.

The good news is that the state has water stored in its reservoirs, so this year, the skimpy snowpack won't have much impact on water supplies. "If we get multiple years (of low snowpack), we'll start to see more problems," Wilson said.

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com