It’s been a tale of two winters across Utah.
The mountains around Provo, Salt Lake City and Logan are currently enjoying above average snowpack levels. Southwest Utah, however, has not been so lucky.
The Santa Clara River watershed near St. George, for example, has less than half of its normal snowpack. It’s the same for the Paria River basin next to Bryce Canyon National Park. Overall, southwestern Utah has 64% of the snow it normally has at this time of year — and just 27% of what it had this time last year.
Even the higher elevations are lagging.
Utah Snow Survey Supervisor Jordan Clayton said Gardner Peak in the Pine Valley Mountains is normally one of the region’s highest-accumulating sites. Right now it's at just 56% of normal.
“There's not a lot of snow there at all, and the snow that's there is much denser than it would normally be,” Clayton said. “So we've got something between snow and ice up there right now that's not terribly deep.”
That icy mixture could spell trouble down the road, he said, because a denser snowpack requires less energy to start melting. So unless it gets buried under some layers of fresh powder, it could lead to an earlier-than-desired melt this spring.
Hayden Mahan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City, said southwest Utah’s winter has gotten off to a slow start for a couple of reasons.
First, the region missed out on two major storm systems that delivered much of northern Utah’s snow in December and early January. And the snow clouds that have crossed southwestern Utah haven’t stuck around long enough to do a whole lot.
“We have seen storms, but typically they come in and then they go out pretty quickly,” he said. “That's not very conducive for building a deep snowpack.”
On top of that, he said, temperatures have stayed on the warm side. St. George just experienced its fourth-warmest December on record, with an average temp of 45.5 degrees. So, much of the snow that’s fallen melted away before the next round of flakes can pile on.
A few days of snowfall in late January only increased southwest Utah’s average snowpack total from 3 inches to 3.8 inches — well short of its 6-inch historical average for this time of year.
So, what might the rest of the winter hold?
The most likely outcome, Clayton said, is that snowpack remains below average between now and its peak in mid-March — probably ending up around 70-80% of normal. But the estimates vary widely, from reaching far above average snowpack levels to setting a new record low.
“We've got a lot of winter left, so there's reason to be hopeful,” Clayton said.
One reason for his optimism is the El Niño weather pattern that’s taken hold since last summer, which can have a loose correlation with increased winter storm activity in the southwestern U.S. That hasn’t materialized in Utah yet, but Mahan said the outlook for February — which favors above-average precipitation across southwest Utah — gives him hope that it might finally arrive.
“We can really catch up quickly if we have a really active pattern. So, really a couple of decent storms could easily put us back to where we are [normally] this time of year.”
And there is some good news. Leftover moisture from last year’s record-setting wet winter is still helping southwest Utah get by.
Many aquifers and reservoirs remain full. Sand Hollow and Quail Creek near St. George, for instance, are at 96% and 75% capacity. This time last year, they were 70% and 66%, respectively.
Utah’s soil also remains saturated, Mahan said. So even an average snow season this year could lead to exceptional runoff because a bigger share of that water would make it into streams and community water supplies.
“It’s probably for the best that we don't have the volume of water [this year] that we did last year because we’d run into some pretty big problems,” he said. “We don't have a lot of capacity to hold a bunch of additional water.”
