I know its early, but its looking like the third dry year in a row, so far.

Check this out

Will my bivvy at Edison Lake last August become a permanent campsite?



Yep, that's in the middle of the lake. Blue Grouse dug the SPOT signal from this point.

Salty, what is the link you wanted to include?

Not the same as your picture, but even back east it is dry. This reservoir in the rainy Virginia mountains is way down, lots of shore not normally seen. What happened to global warming and storms?

Picture from ridge on the AT between Tinkers Cliff and McAfee Knob on the way to Dragons Tooth, ( so-called Triple Crown, just got back last night)


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/snowapp/sweq.action

Climate change manifests differently at different times: not necessarily more storms, or more rain. Maybe here fewer, more intense storms, there fewer, weaker storms, etc. One projection is that Europe will get a lot colder and snowier, due to shutdown of the Gulf Stream.

yeah, I know that. I was just being snide.

it is interesting though, to read journals and books about Polar explorers and walers and how much hundred of miles of ice coverage varied over the years for causes we still do not completely understand, even with satellites and too much data mining at times.

Some of those polar fluctuation were, of course, not global change but macro-regional from fluctuations in gyri of the Gulf Stream near Greenland, or its terminus even as far north as Novaya Zemlya.

I'd like to hear if anyone can now take a wooden sailing vessel through the Northwest Passage like Roald Amundsen did. He was the first, but had to winter over partway there.

Bit of a jump from drought in California and Virginia to Polar ice caps, but I'll go for the ride.

First off, Amundsen did not sail through, he skiied the last 800 kilometers, and his adventure went on for multiple years 1903-1906 where he was iced in over for months at a time. Although polar ice coverage varies widely from year to year, his odds would be greatly improved today.

In the summer of 2000, two Canadian ships took advantage of thinning summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean to make the crossing.

In 2006 the cruise liner MS Bremen successfully ran the Northwest Passage, helped by satellite images telling where sea ice was.

In January 2010, the ongoing reduction in the Arctic sea ice led telecoms cable specialist Kodiak-Kenai Cable to propose the laying of a fiberoptic cable connecting London and Tokyo, by way of the Northwest Passage, saying the proposed system would nearly cut in half the time it takes to send messages from the United Kingdom to Japan.

In 2013 the first large sea freighter MS Nordic Orion was able to use the passage.

Climate change is manifesting itself most noticeably in the arctic and antarctic regions, as predicted. The scientific evidence is overwhelming, but I don't think Steve wants to launch a debate on that topic so I won't start linking to dozens of peer reviewed articles on ice cores, permafrost melting, and ice shelf breakup. In the end, the scientific method will never be able to prove that humans are causing climate change just like the scientific method can't prove that smoking causes lung cancer. This issue has turned into a mostly party line belief in science vs an obsession to cast doubt. Doubt is easy, just look in the sky, I don't see any greenhouse gas and it was a cool day today.

"...just look in the sky, I don't see any greenhouse gas and it was a cool day today."

Now where have I seen someone write like that?

The numbers are not looking good starting out this winter season.

At least there is some snow in the Sierra. This from Monday -- Whitney is the peak on the horizon just left of center. The Palissade Crest is the closest ridge.




Here's South Lake (I think).

He DID reach open waters. The skiing was only to reach a telegraph outpost, and spread the news, but his secret message for the press was not kept secret.

Amundsen did not have a nuclear powered icebreaker. He sailed, in a tiny 45 ton sailing ship with a tiny auxiliary engine, into open waters west of the Canadian north on a multiyear trip on a route that in parts is too shallow to be commercially feasible, even today with less ice.

I only brought this up to point out the ice variabiity from year to year. I agree no interest in posting various "proofs" for one side or the other. Climate change is real, but the "why" has become like religion. Maybe the "truth" is somewhere in the middle.

Steve - thanks for the aerial pictures and getting us back on track. I'll stop.

PS: I cannot tell if that is South Lake. In August it was nearly empty for dam repairs when we went by. Maybe it has filled up since then? That sounds too fast.

Nice shots, Steve.

Both look South from approximately Mono and San Joaquin headwaters. In that region, snowpack is all the way up to 38% of average for the date. Looking north, its a very different story. Central Sierra has about 16% and northern, including Trinity has 6%. Mammoth, snow capital of the entire range is reporting 28" fallen so far, with 18" base. That's not much for a mountain that closed its season on August 13, 1995, and averages 400 inches per year.

> PS: I cannot tell if that is South Lake. In August it was nearly empty for dam repairs when we went by. Maybe it has filled up since then? That sounds too fast.

The full-size picture is here. If you look at it and find the lake, you can see the dam is completely dry. The water appears to be in what must have been the original un-dammed lake.

Don't think it can get much lower.
The imagery date on that screenshot was only a month after your photo.

Dave Alden: Thank you for labeling the picture!

Lake Sabrina is the lake, not South Lake. I appreciate your work.





...any chance you could find the time to label the fourteeners in the other picture? :-)

Even the Bush administration's science team, Exxon Mobil, and every other oil company has recognized the "why" of climate change associated with human activity. So they're also religious zealots? It's been interesting to watch as their story changed from "no it's not warming" to "okay, it's warming but it's not due to humans" to, "okay it's warming and humans are contributing" to today's PR message "okay it's warming, we need to stabilize our CO2 output, but it won't be that bad." The real question will be asked by future generations, "why did our generation knowingly take this risk and leave them paying the price?"

And I'll stop there as well and get back to the snowpack topic, which most climate change models predict to decrease in California as a trend toward more rain and less as snowpack. What we have right now is just a good old fashion drought.

Nice labeling. Thanks.

So Cal Edison generates as much hydropower as they can each year from water stored in Edison and Florence, and their entire Northern & Eastern Hydro Systems, so these lakes get pretty darn low every fall anyway. The drastic drawdown shown in the photos of this thread might be associated more with San Onofre nuclear plant being decommissioned than the drought.

WZ member Paul sent me these two pictures from South Lake he took back in May, and a link to an Inyo Register article:

Not enough water for local lakes

South Lake Memorial Weekend 2013


The old earthen dam……

I was there during the fish opener, end of April 2013. Hiked a mile or so above Sabrina and then above South Lake. Just realized the lakes were so ugly I didn't take any pictures. People were driving down the boat ramp onto the lake bottom out to the remaining "ponds" to fish.

The article you linked to is very detailed about all the various demands on the Bishop lakes and eastern system in general. Different set of constraints for the Eastern Hydro system than the Northern Hydro lakes at Edison and Florence where they tend to drain those lakes pretty low every year fall anyway. By the time the road opens up to that area in late spring, they're pretty full again. I'm not discounting the effect of the drought on Edison and Florence, just saying they have different demands on them and hydro is a higher priority there. Not sure if the shutdown at San Onofre nuclear plant is playing a role, but it might be. SoCal Edison is under enormous pressure right now with all this going on.

SN: Your initial observation is correct, but it contradicts your conclusion about SONGS:



[Emphasis added] Since they generate as much as they can every year, they can't can't generate any more, whether SONGS is down or not. So the drastic drawdown can't be due to the SONGS outage, it can only be due to the normal production and the abnormal lack of replenishment.

This one was a bit more of a challenge!

I'm sure I missed some creditable peaks. Sorry, my eyes started hurting...

Hey, I'm only speculating here, Dog. But I'm thinking they used the water to generate hydropower earlier than usual during peak demand in summer to make up for lost power at San Onofre. But maybe they just needed the water for Huntington and Shaver Lakes, I really don't know. Meeting with them soon, I'll ask.

I'll bet your eyes hurt! Thanks so much! It is so cool that ten of the California Fourteeners show up in the picture.

I am curious what tools you used to identify the peaks. Are you a Google Earth expert, or...?

Steve and Dave, thanks for taking the picture and for labeling it. That is very cool looking at Sierra and familiar peaks from a different perspective.

a little late finding my August 2013 South Lake picture but here it is

Wow: that is dry!!

By the end of September, it was much lower than that. However, the high altitude lakes seem to be doing okay at that time(Long lake, Spearhead Lake, Bishop Lake, Blue Lake, Hungry Packer Lake, etc.)

Keep in mind that both South Lake and Lake Sabrina are artificial lakes, not natural, except for a small part of upper Sabrina. Before the dams were built, the South and Middle forks of Bishop Creek flowed unimpeded. This year SCE was letting water run straight through without attempting to store it, in order to continue providing water for the down-stream power generating stations.

If the current storms are any indication, the snow pack is slowly building up again. We'll keep our fingers crossed!

I use Google Earth and other GIS based programs at work every day. Things are a little slow right now, so I have time to label peaks.
Great pictures by the way!

As everyone should realize, the snowpack is very very low this year. I think 2013 was the driest year in CA recorded history and there's no precip on the horizon for January so far. On the bright side, the hiking was great around Lake Tahoe over the holidays with warm sunny weather and only occasional use of microspikes.

AP article on the recent snow survey

Couple feet on the way over the weekend for the Tahoe area!

We got an inch of precip down this way today. It poured for a long time. YES!!!

The recent bump in precip gave the year a chance to not go down as the driest on record, at least in the southern third. The north is still well in record low range

bump in graph

Forecast now predicts stronger warming trend with snow turning to rain on Sunday. Snow levels around 8,000-8,500 around Tahoe. That would be bad for snowpack and skiing.

If the climate models happen to be correct instead of a hoax, then we'll have a lot more of these winters. California winters have a lot of variability, and there will be extremes in the other direction of course. Talking about trends over time.

Hi
Visiting the site after several months. How is the snow situation in Sierras? Is it below 100%. I am planning for the HST and want to make sure that I hike during the best flower season. July or August? or even earlier?
Thanks!

Hi Krishna. This is going to be a tricky year for flowers, because while the general snowpack is much much lower than usual (some 30% of normal is one of the numbers I have read), there will still have to be warm enough temperatures to melt what is there (for the flowers to poke through) Normally, I have found that middle July is good for around 8-9 thousand feet, and middle/second week of August is good for the high country (based on Northern Sierra & Hikes to Dana, which is usually still covered in snow until the end of June - starting elev around 9.5 thousand ft, ends at 13 thousand). It might be earlier this year; I will be interested to read what others have to say.

19% of normal in the southern Sierra. Flowers in June, even earlier at low elevations

Snow Water Content Graph

We're skipping our April ski trip as there is nothing to ski on, and are planning an early summer hike instead.

I hate to quibble with you Fishmonger (I do enjoy some quibbling with others now and then), but technically it's 27% of "normal" in the southern Sierra for an average Feb 1st. The 19% you cite is relative to the average April 1 water content, April 1 being the last snow survey of the season.

We're well below normal and nothing big on the horizon. Only a Miracle March could make a difference at this point. The mighty Groundhog says wildflowers and mosquitoes will start early, creek crossings will be easier, and fires will be raging this summer and fall.

Thanks! On the other hand this year plenty of cross country around here in Chicago. The Dupage Forest Dept started grooming the Waterfall glen trails and I had several weekends of cross country! Fantastic powder snow on well groomed trails. We are expecting another 2 to 3 in tomorrow. Cant ask for more!

On the other hand, I'm sure many of your neighbors are asking for less

woohoo 27% of normal...

well, that still sucks. The other 73% precip are in my yard it seems. 34 days in a row below 32F here, and getting colder again. Nothing melts here. Snow and ice piling up, even without a single big storm. The jet stream is all screwed up and long term, I suppose we need to get used to crazy patterns like this.

Pretty soon, we are going to be talking about a whole different pipeline other than for oil.

The Columbia River is more valuable than all the oil shale in Canada!

Well, for me the past is a ghost and future is a dream and all I have is NOW (as some one put it). Enjoy while it lasts! I never saw this kind of snow in all these years in Chicago! Its beautiful, challenging and very very satisfying! Well, the whole neighborhood knows that I am crazy and two of my neighbors even followed me all the way to Mt. Whitney two years back!

Krishna:

I will also be doing HST or a variant, this summer, and looking for the best flowers. I was actually pretty impressed with flowers and fruit on the JMT last summer. I think its a stress response, but I don't know what will happen in this, the third year in a row of below normal precip. Let me know as you plans firm up.

Salty:

I am sending my permit appl on March 1 as the Ranger told me that they honor permit requests for July after March 1st only. Currently my choices are July 15th or any day beyond (as my LA cousins will be home around that time). I am applying for two persons starting at Crescent meadows and ending at WP in a leisurely 7 days! For best flowers, I was told its better in June. Keep me in loop about your plans.

Hope these rains would add some snow to Sierras. We are getting 1 in today and 7 in tomorrow! More x-country on Sunday hopefully! Never enjoyed Chicago winters this good! The Best so far!

We got a BIG DUMP here on the west side this morning (and overnight). Haven't seen it rain this hard in a very long time. Sure feels good!

Mammoth expects 35" of freshies

a few more of these storms and I may still change my April plans. Ionian on ski may actually be possible then.