THE SNOW PLANE: How a new way to measure snowpack is changing the drought in California

摘要

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY miles outside San Francisco, a reprieve to the city's crippling water crisis could be falling from the sky right now: snow. When it eventually melts in the spring, the snowpack that piles up in the Tuolumne River Basin in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains will collect in the Hetch Hetchy reservoir before being doled out in San Francisco, directly determining just how much water will be available for every shower, lawn, and carbon-neutral backyard chicken coop in the city. But all that stored water helps only if city water managers know exactly how much is coming.