MISSOULA — Snowfall so far this winter in Western Montana has been bit a disappointing.
A question that is in many people’s minds is how could the lack of snow impact our upcoming spring and summer.
There are 95 mountain snow observation sites in Montana — known as Snowtels — which measure how much water is in the snow along with snow height. The sites are running well below average.
“Of those 95, 24 as of today are recording record low snowpack conditions,” noted Montana climatologist Dr. Zachary Hoylman, who is a research assistant at the University of Montana. “And an additional 18 sites are reporting their second lowest snowpack on record. So what that means [that] overall, 44% of the Snowtel sites are reporting record low or near record low snowpack.”
We checked in with the National Weather Service in Missoula to get an idea of what they are seeing. And as can be expected, it's
much of the same.
“If we were to look at a specific basin in the upper Clark Fork Region — so upstream of Missoula, along the Blackfoot drainage — this black line represents where we are currently. This line is a representation of the max water we have seen in this basin. Green line is average, and red is an all-time low,” Leeann Allegretto, a meteorologist and hydrologist at the NWS office showed us. “So, where we are sitting right now is very close to an all-time low.”
One question that is on many people’s minds is that if we remain dry, what sort of impacts could this have moving into the spring and summer months.
“I’d say this is too early to say what this means in terms of fire. The main concern that I have in respect to this snowpack is the water supply issue and stream flow as we go into the spring and summer and what it might mean for our ecological systems, our fisheries our recreation industry,” Dr. Hoylman explained. “There is going to be a lot of importance on seasonal rains this year unless we see significant changes to our weather pattern and accumulations to our snowpack.”
It's not all bad news. We do live in Montana, and if there’s one thing that seems to never change, it’s that the weather is always changing.
“Just because it’s an El Niño year and we typically see low amounts. We could get a wet spring. There are indications that if you look back at previous El Niño years…we did get a wet spring,” Allegretto noted. “So, there are a lot of variables still at play, not all hope is lost. Again, this isn’t a great set up going into summer, but we could still make up ground in spring.”
Speaking of making up ground, we did see snow last week in parts of Western Montana and scattered snow is again in the forecast this week; and at this point, every little bit helps to continue to build that snowpack.
