A colossal amount of rain and snow has fallen over California in recent months from a dozen atmospheric rivers: more than 78 trillion gallons of water and counting.
It’s not the wettest year the Golden State has ever seen, but that’s a huge amount of water in a state that has been plagued by drought for several years. The gallon count is consistent with National Weather Service data that was compiled by the meteorologist Ryan Maue.
The 78 trillion gallon number is based on the statewide average of 27.6 inches of rainwater and “snowwater equivalent” that fell across the state as of October 1 – the start of the California water year – the week of March 20.
“Snow-water equivalent” is the height of water that would cover the ground if the snow cover were in a liquid state,” according to the weather service.
CHART:Find out how soaked California is – and why it would take several years like this to erase the drought
How much water is in 78 trillion gallons?
Precipitation didn’t fall evenly across the state, but if it did, it would have covered the state of California with about 30 inches of water. This is enough for:
- Fill the Rose Bowl over 900,000 times.
- Fill over 110 million Olympic swimming pools.
- Fill Lake Tahoe – twice.
In case you need a refresher, here’s what the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, California looks like:
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Is this the wettest winter California has ever seen?
At 27.6 inches so far, California still has a long way to go to break the record for wettest year on record: “The wettest year was 1982-1983, which totaled 42.81 inches,” California state climatologist Michael Anderson said.
How does the California winter compare to the average?
Maue said the long-term statewide average from Oct. 1 through the end of March is expected to be 52 trillion gallons of water (18.6 inches statewide). So more than 25 trillion gallons above average have dropped this year – about 150% of the average.
How does it compare to recent dry years?
California’s extremely wet winter of 2022-23 contrasts sharply with the state’s drought in recent years. The last water year, for example, ended with statewide rainfall at 76 percent of average, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
This year has therefore already seen about twice as much precipitation as the entire hydrological year 2021-22.
Additionally, the years 2020-22 were the “driest three-year period on record in California, breaking the old record set by the previous drought of 2013-2015,” according to a press release from WaterWorld magazine.
How much snow has fallen in the California mountains?
Several ski resorts in California and the western United States have seen up to 58 feet of snow this winter, according to Weather.com. That’s about 700 inches of snow.
How to stack 58 feet? Well it’s bigger than the average height of three male giraffes stacked from head to toesaid Weather.com meteorologist Chris Dolce.
(Keep in mind that the 58-foot total is accumulated snowfall over the entire winter, not snow depth. Due to melting, evaporation, and compaction, the actual depth snow at any given time has never been so high.)
Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort in the Eastern Sierra announced on Wednesday that it had set an all-time high of 695 inches (nearly 58 feet) of snow for the season at the resort’s main lodge.
PREVIOUSLY:30 feet of snow? That fell in parts of California as snow blankets huge swaths of the state.
More than 57 feet of snow fell at the Central Sierra Snow Lab, a University of California, Berkeley field research station located at Donner Pass in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. The normal peak snowfall total is around 30 feet.
The 57-foot upright has already shattered a nearly 40-year-old record held in 1983.
Heavy snow set another record this week: On Tuesday, the water content of the Sierra’s central snowpack was 234% of the April 1 average, a benchmark for its all-time high, according to the Sierra Water Resources Department. the state.
Another fun fact from this winter: California transportation officials said earlier this month that they removed so much snow from state roads in February that it be enough to fill the Rose Bowl 100 times.
What is the snowfall record in the United States?
As incredible as these snowfall totals are, there’s still a long way to go from the country’s snowiest winter ever of 95 feet, which happened at Mount Baker Ski Area in Washington State in during the winter of 1997-98, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Is all this rain and snow ending California’s drought?
Not enough.
California’s recent rains and snow helped lift nearly two-thirds of the state out of drought conditions.
In fact, according to the US Drought Monitor, as of March 23, only 36% of the state of California was in drought, compared to 100% on January 1.
“Obviously the amount of water that has fallen this year has significantly alleviated the drought,” said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It hasn’t completely ended the drought, but we are in a very different place than we were a year ago.”
However, while the state’s drought situation has improved significantly, much of the West still faces a long-term water crisis as experts warn that water demand will continue to rise. exceed supply.
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Even Los Angeles got soaked this winter
When you think of Los Angeles, rain isn’t the first type of weather that comes to mind. However, this winter season has been extraordinarily wet in the city of angels. So far this season, some 21.28 inches of rain has been recorded in downtown Los Angeles, the National Weather Service said. That’s more than double the nearly 9-inch average.
January and February were particularly wet. In January, 8.95 inches fell, more than double the monthly average of 3.29 inches, the weather service said. In February, rain in downtown LA was 5.95 inches, well above the average of 3.64 inches.
A deadly and costly winter in California
So far, storms have killed more than 20 people in California and likely caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, according to AccuWeather.
Contributor: The Associated Press
USA Today