Using tree rings to reproduce hundreds of years of data concerning snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, a team of researchers marked this year's a five-century-low.
Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the new study measured the mountains' snowpack on April 1 of this year, the end of the wet season. The historically low snowpack was likely exacerbated by California's drought and the record-high temperatures over the last year.
According to Discovery News, the researchers initially only went back about 80 years for the historical context of this year's snowpack.
"When we saw the April 1 snowpack numbers coming out and how they were at 5 percent of average since the 1930s, we discussed how someone should put that into a longer term context," Valerie Trouet, a researcher at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. "By adding temperature we were able to develop an even better model of snowpack back to 1500.
"Our study really points to the extreme character of the 2014-15 winter. This is not just unprecedented over 80 years - it's unprecedented over 500 years," she said. "We should be prepared for this type of snow drought to occur much more frequently because of rising temperatures. Anthropogenic warming is making the drought more severe."
An associate professor of dendrochronology, the analysis of tree rings, Trouet emphasized the importance of snowpacks.
"Snow is a natural storage system," she said in the statement. "In a summer-dry climate such as California, it's important that you can store water and access it in the summer when there's no precipitation."
