As of Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 there were 94 inches of snow on the ground at the Snow Lab on Donner Pass. That’s the deepest snowpack we’ve ever had on record at that date and records started in 1868.
“This year we have more snow than we’ve ever had at this time,” said Randall Osterhuber, a lead researcher and hydrologist at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory on Donner Pass. – sfgate.com
The previous record for June 7th was set in 1967 at 79.92 inches os snow on the ground.
The main reason that this is so interesting is that if we get a strong heat wave in California, as is normal for this time of year, all that snow is going to melt and come crashing down the Sierras and overwhelm our river, reservoir, and canal systems.
Large scale flooding is a real possibility in the coming weeks as we could see up to quadruple the run-off we are currently experiencing.
There is no arguing that the weather in California was insane this year. Record snows in the Fall, Winter, & Spring, Tornados, and 6 weeks of warm spring temperatures in January and February made for an strange weather year.
What does Bay Area weather man Mike Pechner say about the weather we’ve been having this winter?
“I think it’s climate change. It’s absolutely bizarre. You could pick any day in the winter and this weekend’s rainfall in the Bay Area would probably beat any of those days. How weird is that? So it is more than bizarre. It’s weird.” – sfgate.com
Check out the SF GATE article where I stole most of this information to find more: sfgate.com. Thanks for the link Heckler.