NM - Warm March has ‘destroyed the snowpacks’

Remember those good snowpacks in New Mexico’s northern mountains a month ago? Well, a memory is just about all they are now. “We really took a huge hit for snowpack in March,” Brian Guyer, senior forecaster with the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service, said Monday. “All that warm weather we had in March, some record highs, it really just destroyed the snowpacks.” At the start of March, two basins in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were at 100 percent and 121 percent of normal, and other northern basins were at more than 80 percent. With the possibility of more snow in March and maybe even April, things were looking promising then. Not so now. As of Monday morning, the Sangre de Cristo basins – which feed the Rio Grande – were at 64 percent of normal. In addition, the Pecos basin was at 65 percent, the Rio Chama River basin at 53 percent, the mountains around Cimarron at 30 percent and the Jemez River basin at 15 percent. Those numbers come after three consecutive years of bad snowpacks. And if there’s any more snow coming, there’s no sign of it yet. “No snowfall on the horizon for the next 10 days or so,” said Chuck Jones, also a senior forecaster with the Weather Service’s Albuquerque office. “Between the wind, sunshine and warm temperatures, we have below normal snowpack and early snow melt.”...more