Weather and Climate - 2023

 

Ok, so we have had our first heat wave and associated first wave of low elevation, local flooding.  There is still a huge snowpack up high and a potential for more pervasive flooding to come this spring, but what does this really mean?  Are we going to flood or not?  I once asked an old farmer, out standing in his field, if he thought it would rain that day.  He looked up at the sky and clouds and said “somewhere”.  

The 200% of the average snowpack we have will put a few more feet of water in the Great Salt Lake and maybe 30 feet in Lake Powell.  We need 5 – 10 years of this kind of water to solve those big problems and the effects of a 20-year long regional drought that may not be over yet. Our local reservoirs will fill and our streams and rivers will exceed flood capacities and activate historical flood plains.  It’s going to flood again somewhere, possibly everywhere. 

With 30-40 inches of water up Thayne’s Canyon and in the Uinta’s or 10-20 feet of actual snow in the Cottonwoods and Wasatch, there is a lot of water still to come off.  If it comes off slow and steady, say 1-2 inches a day, we will be ok, but if it comes off late and fast, say 3-4 inches a day, we will flood.  That depends on the weather.  Luckily some of snow cover on the south facing and the low elevation slopes is starting to melt but it should be completely gone by this time of year.  If it all melts at once it is like having a much bigger drainage basin feeding our streams and flows will be high.  Flooding like the early eighties is possible with rapid heating or rain-on-snowpack, as are slope instabilities and mudslides, especially in areas that have been burned.   Remember City Creek running between sandbags on State Street in 83 and the Thistle land slide closing Spanish Fork Canyon for a year.   This may be another wicked year.

Groundwater will be up, and our sump pumps and underdrain systems will be working overtime, even if they are kept clean and clear and legally out of the sanitary sewer pipes.   The sewer district may see as much as 500 million gallons of additional infiltration and additional inflow this spring that is difficult and expensive to treat.   Our depleted aquifers will also be replenished somewhat but that doesn’t mean we should not continue to conserve water with wise use this summer.  One good year is weather, not climate.  We are not out of the drought yet.

This is the worst drought in 1200 years.  Drought is not binary, it is not just a red blob on a map, it is an evolving regional climate condition, and it is a state of mind.   Especially in this age of Disconnect where what happened in the past has no bearing on what happens in the future.  This is the Anthropocene epoch where man is the main cause of change on earth.  We influence the weather and climate, atmosphere and oceans.   So, is this an anomalous year or is there Persistence in this Atmospheric River climate pattern that will last for years, like it did throughout the early eighties where we had five big years?  One big year does not give you climate change, but climate change will give you one big year, and many more. The only things we can count on are more extreme weather events and continued climate changes.  An old cowboy, on horseback, once told me that ‘only fools and tenderfeet try to predict the weather.’   ‘Which one are you’, he asked?