Snow By The Foot Helps Oregon Water Outlook

ENVIRONMENT 

By Pete Springer

Timberline Lodge, OR  February 1, 2008 12:40 p.m.

Scientists say snowpack levels in the West are dropping because of climate change.  But so far, this has been a banner winter in Oregon.

To check on the current snowpack, Pete Springer went to Oregon’s tallest mountain - Mt Hood.

Watch an audio slideshow of the snow survey trip

The snow is so deep right now it takes fifteen minutes of shoveling just to get from the road to the top of the snowpack.

Once they've carved stairs out of snow, a group of t.v. and radio reporters climb to the top and strap on snowshoes.

Jon Lea is a snow survey supervisor for the National Resources Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  As he leads the group to the survey site, he explains why the snow levels are important.

Jon Lea: “In most of the western U.S., 70-80-percent of our water supplies are all based on melting snow.  So when you have a really good snow pack on the ground and it doesn’t come off until springtime, that’s our water supply for the coming summer—so it’s sort of like a bank deposit where you deposit now in the wintertime and withdraw it later in the spring and summer.”

Snowpack levels also determine how much water flows through rivers and streams - critical for allowing salmon to return to the ocean.

Jon Lea: “This is a snow tel site.  It’s one of 150 we have in Oregon and Washington that our office is responsible for maintaining and that’s what it does—it collects information on how much snow is on the ground, how much rainfall we’ve had, what the air temperature is, what the snow depth is.”

Lea and Rashwawa Tama—a snow survey hydrologist—assemble the snow tubes for measuring the snow pack.  Lea jams the tubes in the snow while Rashawa compiles the data.

“One forty-three!  One forty-three.  We’ll see what it’s like.  And the core is 90.  90!  And we’ll dump it out and start over again. Want the stick?  Sometimes this new fallen snow is hard to get into the tubes.”

A study just published in the journal Science found that, snowpack in the Cascades has dropped 40 percent since 1950 - a result of climate change.

And scientists said, the Columbia and other Western rivers are flowing earlier.

But maybe not this year.

Jon Lea takes several measurements with the snow tube before he’s confident he has a good sample.  Weighing the tube helps determine the water content, which Lea interprets.

Jon Lea: “The snow pack was 177 inches deep.  And in the 177 inches of depth, there was 53.2 inches of water.  Which brings it in at 123-percent of average for this time at this particular location.”

That’s almost double the water content since the survey last month.  Statewide, the snow pack is 139-percent of average, says Lea.

Jon Lea: “We’re still a little bit low out in the Owyhee Basin area and for southeastern Oregon, there the snowpack is about 88-percent of average.”

Jon Lea: “Kind of ranges from the low of 88-percent out in eastern Oregon.  The coast range right now has the best percentage at 340-percent of average snow pack in the coast range.”

Climate change also means weather is less predictable from year to year. 

Turns out Oregon has the highest percentage snow pack in the west right now.  Washington is second at 123-percent of average.

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© 2008 OPB