WA’s snowpack languishes with little hope for the months ahead

Climate Lab is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the effects of climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project is funded in part by The Bullitt Foundation, Jim and Birte Falconer, Mike and Becky Hughes, University of Washington and Walker Family Foundation, and its fiscal sponsor is the Seattle Foundation.

If you’ve caught a glimpse of the Olympic Mountains on a clear day recently, you’ve probably noticed a distinct lack of snow across the peaks.

That’s the story across all of Washington: some snow, but not nearly enough.

Snowpack across the entire state sits below normal levels, in some places less than half what an average winter might bring.

“It’s worse than I expected,” state climatologist Nick Bond said.

The lack of snow is, in part, due to climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The warming atmosphere increasingly means precipitation that once fell as snow will instead fall as rain. But it’s also due to El Niño conditions pushing warm, tropical air into the Pacific Northwest.

Snowpack on the Olympic Peninsula is 30% of normal levels, according to the latest data from the National Water and Climate Center. Levels throughout the Puget Sound region hover between 61% to 49% of normal.

The relatively dry winter conditions come after a warm and dry summer, and the effects can compound in the months ahead.

Steve King, a service coordination hydrologist with the Northwest River Forecast Center, said water supply forecasts for April through September anticipate below-normal streamflows west of the Cascades, in the Columbia Basin and in Eastern Washington. Although, precisely how far below normal the state’s water supply will end up remains to be seen, he said.

The end result can mean dry soils and foliage, drought, and wildfire concerns as well as risk to salmon and other aspects of the environment. 

State officials declared a drought emergency across a dozen Washington counties last summer, sparking both mandatory and voluntary water restrictions west of the Cascades. Seattle City Light also announced a rate hike after the utility’s hydropower production took a hit.

Winter isn’t over yet, Bond noted, and there’s still time for more snow. With a little luck, the rains might continue even if the snowpack doesn’t pick up.

“Hope against an early start to summer,” said Bond, who is based at the University of Washington.

Conditions this winter aren’t as bad as the record-low snowpack levels seen in 2015, Bond said, but they’re certainly worse than last winter. 

Around this time in 2023, several locations across the state boasted above-normal snowpack. The Olympic Peninsula had more than twice the amount of snow accumulation as it does now.

But even in a relatively average winter, increasingly common heat waves in the spring can melt the snowpack more quickly than normal, plunging the state into a water deficit as it reaches the dry season. Such was the case last year.

Snowpack is important because it acts as a giant frozen water bank, melting gradually and flowing into the state’s reservoirs when there’s room to spare. Without it, much of the rainwater that falls flows into Puget Sound rather than being captured by our reservoirs. The region’s snowpack has shrunk by a third since 1955, and it could dwindle up to 70% more by the mid-2080s, depending on how fast global emissions continue to heat the atmosphere.