March heat in American west has left snowpack at record-low levels

slwvx

I own land and water shares in the Great Basin and can confirm that this is real. On a more positive note, one random person in the area unexpectedly confirmed that they thought global warming was indeed real.

bayarearefugee

Shouldn't we be past being "stunned"? The past 11 years are the hottest 11 years on record. Climate catastrophe is coming, soon. Everybody knows this, even the vocal deniers (the ones with power, not the sheep they feed propaganda to). They've simply decided to profit off it instead of trying to slow it down. The "drill, baby, drill", "clean beautiful coal" lunacy and wanting to invade Greenland and Canada are all directly related.

lazystar

I don't see the point in comparing photos of snow coverage in feb 2026 to the same area in march 2026. March is a spring month, of course snow coverage will be worse. Itd be more shocking if the snow coverage increased. they should show march 2026 vs. march 2025/2024/2023 etc.

ourmandave

I was naively hoping they were stunned because it wasn't as much as they expected.

bpt3

I have to ask because this makes no sense to me: In the article, there is a picture of 3 workers taking a snow survey and finding "zero measurement of snow". This is reported as "the second lowest since 2015". How is any measurement of a quantity of an item less than zero? You can't have negative snow to my knowledge.

patchorang

There are quite a few comments here talking about how comparing images from feb/march isn’t useful. Here’s data on what’s going on. This snowtel location is within the Utah picture in the article. https://www.cbrfc.noaa.gov/dbdata/station/swegraph/swegraph_...

FpUser

We have tremendous water, folks, tremendous. The best water. You look at Canada: beautiful water, big water ... It’s just sitting there! Not fair, not fair. We should be getting some of that water. It’ll be huge.

bix6

Colorado river collapsing this year?

saltcured

Our whole flood control and water supply system is designed around the expected storage of water as snow. Ignoring horrifying drought scenarios, it is also troubling to think about how this will change if we start having warm winters and more of the winter precipitation as rain. I think the worst case would be if we end up like some tropical countries, where they can have disastrous flooding and then drought in very short cycles. The water comes all at once and you cannot hope to control or contain it. But there are also gaps that strain the ability to store enough water and manage consumption rates.

justonepost2

Just another few million blackwells bro and the AGI will solve it for us.