Despite a slow start to the snowpack season “it’s not too late to catch up,” says Peter Goble, a climatologist from the Colorado Climate Institute. The El Niño year that we’re currently in could mean good spring precipitation.
“We do see sometimes that we make up early deficits in these El Niño years. So there’s a little bit of a reason to perhaps have some hope there,” he said.
We’re really only in the first third of the snowfall season, but he said that snowpack values in the South San Juans and Sangre de Cristo ranges are in between the 10th and 30th percentile for snow, meaning that 70 to 90 percent of years on record we’ve had higher snowpack values at this point in the snow season than we do right now.
We have a little bit of hope on the horizon, he says, as the first and middle parts of January will be a “little on the wetter side.”
However, the snow we have now, measured through the SNOTEL sites, is the worst snow has looked since January 1, 2018. It’s not as bad as it was, but it’s the worst since then. “We definitely like to see fortunes reverse from here,” he said.
Compared to years like 2020 and 2021, “those were years where we ended up with bad drought conditions in summer in spite of pretty good snowpack numbers at this time of year.” The reason for that he said was that “we went into fall with much drier than normal soils and the spring in those years was quite dry, as well.”
We’re kind of seeing the opposite this year.
It’s been a poor performing snowpack season till this point, but “we’re a little bit shielded because our precipitation earlier this fall and our soil moisture levels are better than we’ve seen in some more recent years.”
It’s not at all a guarantee for El Niño to surprise us with good precipitation, but Goble said there’s reason to have “at least some” optimism that the spring may be on the wetter side of normal. The springs in 2020 and 2021 were on the drier side of normal. “So we may kind of see the reverse of one of those years…. Better moisture in the shoulder season could end up helping us out.”
“Some of the good that came out of conditions earlier this fall, like October,” he said, “those are benefiting us now. We’re in better shape given the snowpack than we could be if conditions last season and even this fall were different.”