I live in a city that has gotten less snow the last five winters than Huntington Beach, California.
All right, maybe it technically wasn’t snow. The National Weather Service said technically what accumulated on the beach was graupel, a word I had never heard until today. It’s from a Germanic word meaning “pearl barley” and …
Pearl Bailey?
No, pearl barley, which refers to pellets of snow or soft hail.
Whatever it is, we don’t even get graupel here, although we did get normal hail once last summer.. We’re at almost the same latitude as Surf City, although we’re at nearly a thousand feet higher elevation.
This is my 13th winter living in Georgia and I don’t think we’ve had a total of six inches snow in all that time.
I lived in Los Angeles County for 19 winters before that and we didn’t even have that much snow.
Winter has always been my favorite season, but these last 32 barely qualify.
Some parts of California have had 600 inches of snow this winter, and the state’s snowpack is at least at 177 percent of normal. Since 30 percent of the state’s water comes from the snowpack, this winter has truly been a boon for the state.
Most of the state’s reservoirs have been replenished, although it would take several years like this to return groundwater levels to normal. It’s even worse in the center of the country, where the Ogallala Aquifer is vanishing fast.
Climate change? Some people continue to insist it’s not happening.
But something is definitely happening.
And it sure isn’t good.