Hey California, need some snow? (don’t laugh, we’ve sold them water)
Snowpack near Spada Lake buries 1997 record
The snowpack above Snohomish County’s main drinking water reservoir at Spada Lake has smashed a record set more than a decade ago.
At Stickney Ridge, the snow is 16 1/2 feet deep, nearly 3 feet deeper than the record set in 1997.
Most years, the snow is about 8 feet deep.
“These are the deepest readings ever recorded on the first of April since we started measurements in 1986,” said Bruce Meaker, senior manager of regulatory affairs for Snohomish County PUD.
The deep snow ensures there’s enough water for people, fish and power generation at the Jackson Hydroelectric Project, he said.
“A year like this means we’ll be able to generate more electricity in late spring and summer than we would in a drier year,” Meaker said. “We will have a steady source of water running into the reservoir for the next several months.”
That likely means cheaper electricity for the utility.
“As power generation goes up, that’s less power we need to buy from Bonneville (Power Administration), which means not spending money out of our operating budget for power costs,” Meaker said.
All three of the PUD’s test locations south of Spada Lake broke records. There was so much snow it took two helicopter trips to do the measuring work and bigger equipment to drill down far enough.
Crews were able to get some measurements last week. A site called Kromona Mine is usually 52 inches deep this time of year, but now snow is piled 125 inches deep.
Ignore all the talk about cheaper water rates. In 1997 we were told that they there was too much snowpack and they had to let a lot of watt generating H2O go through the dam spillways, and they raised the rates.
The next year, 1998, when we didn’t get nearly enough snow and we were told to cut back on our watt usage, they raised the rates again because people listened and they hadn’t sold enough wattage.
Maybe Oregon can sell Cali some snow too
The cumulative snowfall at Mt. Hood Meadows ski area from Nov. 1 through Monday — 650 inches — is the most ever recorded there.
That’s a bit over 54 feet of snow, or the width of the roadway on Michigan’s Mackinac Bridge, the third-longest suspension bridge in the world; the circumference of the Abraham Lincoln giant sequoia in the Yosemite Valley; and the crest level of the Mississippi River at Cairo, Ill., on March 25.
It was snowy at the ski resort on Mount Hood during the same period in 1982-83, when the previous record of 623 inches fell. But this past winter’s snowfall — and last week’s in particular — had one advantage over the “Cascade cement” that typically falls in March, said Dave Tragethon, the ski resort’s marketing director.
“Everybody I talked to agrees that there has never been better powder than we had last week,” he said. “The snowpack is very airy.”
Even compressed over time, the base depth of the snow at Meadows on Tuesday was 199 inches; 225 inches at Timberline Ski Area; and 207 inches deep at Mt. Hood Skibowl.
This year’s statewide snowpack is looking a lot like the snowpack of 1999, when Oregon basins clocked in with a mantle of snow 170 percent of average on April 1, the date when snowpacks usually reach their peak in Oregon. It’s also more than twice what was on the ground April 1, 2007, when the statewide snowpack was 68 percent of average.
I hope this doesn’t screw things up for Greenland
Joern Skov Nielsen, deputy director of Greenland’s Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, said Thursday that there might be more oil in his country than the entire past production of the North Sea. That would be about 50 billion barrels. Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Husky Energy last year received licenses for exploration, which will be made easier by the melting of Greenland’s ice.
The same ice retreat, caused by the gas and diesel engines which powered the Viking boats, and allowed them to deposit themselves on the North American continent a thousand years ago.
What? The Vikings sailed there?
Oh, yeah, I forgot.
Let’s add this up kiddies:
1. Abundant, drought-breaking snowpack in Western mountains.
2. Discovery of huge new gas/oilfields in Iceland, North Dakota, Kamchatka.
3. Huge new redevelopment of existing oilfields in the Permian Overthrust Zone (TX, OK)
4. Huge new development of wind power (WA, OR, ID, TX)
5. Major breakthroughs in more efficient solar cells.
6. Ditto for storage batteries, in the 3-5 year frame.
7. Promising developments in tidal-flow and wave-generation technologies.
Say, has anyone heard from the “Peak Oil” alarmists lately? Energy crisis? Say WHAT?
Rivrdog, add in the potenial reserves in the Bakken Formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakken_Formation) that are only now being tapped. Potenially hundreds of Billions of barrels of oil in a stable region of the world? I wonder what that will do to the price of Texas Tea, in China or elsewhere.
Scientists in the U.K. have reported evidence that further refutes one theory of global climate change.
In the heated debate over global warming, there is an opposing idea, called the cosmic ray theory, which contends that climate change is simply caused by cosmic rays coming from the sun.