Loveland Pass

From Cory Reppenhagen: 9 News Meteorologist

As of Feb. 25, the snowpack in the Colorado mountains is still tied with the 2001-2002 winter for the worst on record. It's been in the statistical cellar for more than a month. This level of snowpack data first started getting measured in the winter of 1986-1987, so the worst in 39 years.

Snowpack is the measure of how much water is inside the snow that's accumulating at the headwaters of our major river systems high in the mountains.

The weather pattern has been somewhat active since Feb.10 and there have been slight gains. More snow is in the forecast. And the good news is that the pattern is expected to remain active through the middle of March. The bad news is that the snow forecast during that stretch is really only average. So, the chances of actually finishing the season at average or above is, while not impossible, extremely unlikely at this point.

Here’s the most telling data. If you take each of the last 38 spring snow seasons since 1987 and project those onto our current snowpack level, only one of those springs would be capable of getting us back up to average. That would be the spring of 1995.

The long-range modeling through the first two weeks of March shows an active pattern, but with only enough snow to keep Colorado snowpack just above last place. And the Spring Precipitation Outlook from NOAA is slightly favoring below average precipitation through the end of May.

That spring of 1995 was epic. The automated weather stations in the mountains don't measure the amount of snow that falls, only the amount of water in the snow when it accumulates on the ground, so a precise amount is not available. Some snowstorms have wetter snow than others. If a storm has dry snow, it could take 20 inches of snow to create just one inch of water. Spring snow is typically a little wetter, so it could be more of a 12:1 or a 15:1 ratio.

But the Natural Resources Conservation Service database can give us a good idea of how much snow did fall in the spring of 1995. On March 1 of that year, the statewide Colorado snowpack median was 8.1 inches. That's about when the epic tirade of snowstorms started. By May 10, the statewide median was up to 17.5 inches of snowpack. That's a gain of 9.4 inches of snowpack in just the spring months — the biggest spring on record.