Oregon State/UCLA Study: New Reservoirs Will Not Help The West; Snowpack Decline Too Big, Too Fast
Scientists have found dramatically declining snowpack across the American West over the past six decades that will likely cause water shortages in the region that cannot be managed by building new reservoirs, according to a study published Friday.
The study led by scientists from Oregon State University and the University of California, Los Angeles found drops in snow measurements at more than 90 percent of regional snow monitoring sites that have consistently tracked snow levels since 1955, said Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University.
Study authors also used modeling to show the average snowpack in the region dropped between 15 and 30 percent in a little more than a century, he said, and that modeling paralleled the actual findings based on existing measurements. That means the region’s average snowpack has lost the equivalent volume of water that it would take to fill Lake Mead, the West’s largest man-made reservoir, Mote said.
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The amount of water stored in the region’s snowpack is roughly the same as all the water stored in the region’s reservoirs, he said. “The solution isn’t in infrastructure. New reservoirs could not be built fast enough to offset the loss of snow storage,” Mote said. The study found California had the most gains in snowpack since 1955, but recent droughts erased those gains and caused the snowpack to fall in many locations.
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https://www.kqed.org/science/1920658/study-new-reservoirs-will-not-offset-dramatically-declining-snowpack
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