The California Department of Water Resources will conduct this winter’s first snow survey on Wednesday, Jan. 2.
A traditional center of attention will be the manual survey scheduled for 11 a.m. off Highway 50 near Echo Summit.
This and other manual and electronic readings up and down the state will determine the amount of water in the early winter snowpack.
Thanks to early season storms, electronic readings indicate that statewide, the current snowpack water content is 137 percent of normal for the date.
The snowpack normally provides about a third of the water for California’s households, farms and industries as it slowly melts into streams, reservoirs and aquifers in spring and early summer.
In addition to boosting snowpack readings to above normal, early storms have replenished the state’s reservoirs.
Lake Oroville in Butte County, the State Water Project’s principal storage reservoir with a capacity of 3.5 million acre-feet, is at 70 percent of capacity, 111 percent of normal for the date.
Shasta Lake north of Redding, the federal Central Valley Project’s principal reservoir with a capacity of 4.5 million acre-feet, is at 71 percent of capacity, 113 percent of average for the date.
The Department of Water Resources and cooperating agencies conduct manual snow surveys around the first of the month from January to May.
The manual surveys supplement and check the accuracy of real-time electronic readings.
Electronic snowpack readings are available on the Internet at http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/snow/DLYSWEQ .