Snowpack/drought news: ‘We went from really, really bad to pretty good’ — Todd Boldt #COdrought

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From the Fort Collins Coloradoan (Bobby Magill):

Last month was the fourth-snowiest April in Fort Collins’ history, with a wet and sloppy 29.4 inches of snow piling up at the Colorado Climate Center weather station on the Colorado State University campus. That’s a whopping 23.2 inches above normal for the month. You’ll have to go back to 1945 to find an April at least that snowy.

Climate Center researcher Wendy Ryan made that official Wednesday in her monthly Fort Collins weather summary report, which also revealed that this is the 16th snowiest winter season since record keeping began here in 1890. By April 30, a respectable 66.3 inches of snow had fallen since the snowfall season began. That’s 11.2 inches above normal for the season, a figure that doesn’t include snow totals from the city’s snowstorm Wednesday…

As of April 30, Northern Colorado remains in a moderate drought, which in recent weeks has been downgraded from a severe drought, according to the weekly drought update report from the National Integrated Drought Information System.

The region’s snowpack remains below normal, with the Laramie River Basin showing Colorado’s most water-laden snowpack at about 96 percent of normal, according to May 1 Natural Resources Conservation Service Snotel data.

From the Loveland Reporter-Herald (Tom Hacker):

“Overall, everyone should be pretty ecstatic,” said Todd Boldt, an NRCS surveyor who spent Monday in Rocky Mountain National Park and Tuesday on the upper Poudre River taking measurements. “We went from really, really bad to pretty good.”[…]

Measures taken at four stations inside Rocky Mountain National Park showed a broad range of results. The water content of the snow at 9,000-foot Deer Ridge, near Moraine Park, was 50 percent above normal. Hidden Valley’s number matched the 30-year average exactly. Bear Lake’s total, after 36 inches of snow during just three April days, was still lagging slightly at 75 percent of normal…

Snow at the Big South Fork of the Poudre contained 144 percent of the average year’s water content. The Chambers Lake reading was 104 percent, and the Cameron Pass snowpack was 91 percent of normal.

The additional snow might lead Northern Water, the agency that manages the water supply from the Colorado-Big Thompson project, to ratchet up the quota that it grants its customers annually.

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