West Coast, Mountain West 10-13F Above Normal Seasonal Temperatures; Sierra Snowpack Tied For Worst

[hatrack]

From San Diego to Seattle, February has looked — and felt — a lot more like April. Flowers that normally wouldn’t start to bud until well into spring have already started to blossom and grow. Residents have been walking around in t-shirts and shorts, a rarity even for Southern California winters. “Winter has seemed to have completely forgotten about us out here,” Kathie Dello, deputy director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University, said during a press teleconference last week.



While the unseasonably warm weather is pleasant for now — certainly compared to repeated snowstorms and bitter cold in the East — it comes with an ominous tinge. The heat is doing nothing to help the severe entrenched drought, which has failed to improve during what is normally the region’s wet season.

A stubborn area of high pressure off the West Coast has kept the warmth in place and also prevented substantial precipitation from falling. What storms have been able to break through have dropped rain and not snow, which is needed to ensure a steady water supply into the summer dry season. And while the rains that did fall have helped replenish some reservoirs and moistened soils, they come with a downside, as vegetation that’s flourishing now could increase forest fire risks when it dries out after the wet season. “California's really feeling the effect of these incredibly warm temperatures,” Daniel Swain, an atmospheric science PhD student at Stanford University, said in an email. That, combined with “very large multi-year precipitation” shortfalls is “resulting in the continuation of severe drought conditions,” he said.

EDIT

January is usually the wettest month of the year for San Francisco, but the city didn’t receive a single drop of recorded rain last month; that's never happened before. Two storm events, one in December and one at the beginning of February, have brought some moisture to California and parts of Oregon and Washington. But snowpack is California’s main source of drinking water, and the tropical origins of the storms, called atmospheric rivers, meant that winter rain fell instead of snow.


NWS Hanford ✔ @NWSHanford
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Looks like August with lack of snow in @YosemiteNPS at 8,100 ft. Photo by Elizabeth Christie #CAWx #CADrought
11:51 PM - 18 Feb 2015


http://www.climatecentral.org/news/for-the-west-a-winter-that-feels-more-like-spring-18700

[Systematic Chaos]

1. How is this one sinking like a rucking fock with no comment???