this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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The thing is, reservoirs only hold so much. Get all that moisture at once, they have to release the extra water and it effectively goes to waste. Snow pack melting slowly will add that moisture slowly over the course of a longer time. Snow pack is like a reservoir for the reservoir.
Compound that with hotter summers that have longer periods of little to no precipitation.
The reservoirs are all low right now. If they weren't low right now it wouldn't be as big a problem, but because they are low now, and snowpack is low, its going to be more rough this summer.
My post was responding to someone saying they still had a lot of precipitation, and I thought they'd fill the reservoirs then.
Someone else theorized that the snow melt travels further than the rain due to the frozen ground or ice under the snow and that's why the reservoirs are low even though we are getting a lot of rain.