A week and a half of storms has helped the Weber Basin reach a critical benchmark for this time of year.

Posts on the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District’s Facebook page late this week heralded that the storms have helped the basin surpass the median snow water equivalent for this part of the season after lagging behind for weeks.

Darren Hess, assistant general manager of the Weber Basin Water Conservancy District, told the Standard-Examiner that the recent storms have packed a bit of a punch.

“The snow water equivalent measures the amount of water that’s in the snow,” he said. “Typically, Utah snow can be fairly dry, and that’s why we have some of the greatest snow on Earth in terms of skiing on. But some of these recent storms that we’ve seen have actually had a really high water content in the snow we’ve received. You’ve probably noticed that when you’ve ben shoveling it.”

He said officials have been surprised with how fast things turned around.

“It’s amazing — we went from 77% (of normal) prior to the last 10 days,” he said. “After the last 10 days, we’re upwards of 120% (of normal). … That’s really good news for our mountains and for our future water that’s going to be delivered to our revisions here.”

As of Friday, Hess said the snow water equivalent was 118% of normal, a figure that could see the snowpack stay ahead of average for several days.

“We’re in mid-January right now … the peak of the snowpack is April 1 but then it starts to really diminish so we’ve got two and a half months still of potential weather patterns that could bring snow,” he said. “Now that we’re already 118%-120%, we’re 20% over what a normal year would bring. We are looking really good. Every day that goes by that we do not see snow, we typically see a drop of 1%-1.5%. So even if we got no snow for the next 20 days or so, we would still be at 100%. One hundred percent basically into February is looking really good and March can be a really snowy month as well.”

While the region is in a good place now, there’s still plenty of unknowns about how the remainder of the snow season will shape up.

“It’s always hard to tell what the future’s going to bring,” Hess said. “It’s really hard to forecast any weather patterns outside of eight to 10 days, so I wouldn’t venture what the future is going to bring because we just don’t know. Next week or so looks fairly dry — maybe a couple of storms bring rain and maybe a little mountain snow, but it’s looking fairly dry over the next week or so.”

Still, he says officials are thankful for what they did receive with this last set of storms.

“We hope it continues,” he said. “Our reservoirs, on average, are about 80% full right now, so any water we receive we’re going to fill those up quickly and then we’ll be able to spill water to the Great Salt Lake much quicker this year than last year.”

Newsletter