As students return for the spring semester, they were greeted with a winter weather advisory and around a foot of snow.
But this year is not a regular year for snow fall according to John Abatzoglou, University of Idaho assistant professor of geography.
By April 1, Idaho’s snowpack should contain roughly three times the amount of water of all the surface level aquifers in the state.
The snow accumulation season ends at different times of the year depending on elevation, Abatzoglou said, but April 1 is the cutoff date.
November may have been dry, which Abatzoglou said is not normal for this region, but the lack of snow early in the season is not necessarily something to worry about.
“We basically have a pretty big deficit that we’ve gotten ourselves into. The good news is that there’s lots of time left in the snow accumulation season to dig ourselves out of that deficit,” Abatzoglou said.
The snow which fell as students were preparing to return to campus helped alleviate the deficit the Northwest was facing at the beginning of December, he said.
Courtesy | John Abatzoglou
The snow water equivalent is the amount of moisture in the snow and is
an important measurement for regional water resources. The recent snowfall helps lessen the deficit, but he said much of the Northwest is still lagging. “If we can store more water in mountain snowpack, then that’s great. It melts at the time of the year and we start utilizing water. It’s critical for Idaho and most all the, all the western states,” Abatzoglou said.
Abatzoglou said the forecast system projects there will be a continued decrease in the deficit and by early February there will be a broad area of the region with snowpack closer to normal.
He is currently working on a project with some partners to go beyond finding the answer to question “is it a wet or dry season?” but to model what the weather and climate in our region could look like.
The project is funded by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and will come up with a model to show current conditions and make some predictions on what could come.
“We have some collaborators at the University of Washington, and they run the hydrological models. And so those basically take some of the weather information that we produce, and they’re able to model things like snowpack and soil moisture and runoff,” Abatzoglou said.
The result is a model which shows on a map how much snow is currently at different data points, like Moscow Mountain.
“One thing we are working on is to develop a system for forecasting the weather and climate over the next few weeks to months,” Abatzoglou said.
Snow on the mountains is beneficial to this state for activities like tourism and ski resorts and agriculture Abatzoglou said.
The website with the model can be found at climatetoolbox.org.
Kali Nelson can be reached at [email protected]