organpg It’s Spring, but the Sierra Are Getting Slammed by Another Round of Snow

　　

Significant snow falling in the Sierra Nevada over the next few days could be the region’s last big snow dump of the season, showcasing a dramatic rebound for the snowpack that provides a significant portion of California’s water reserves through the rest of the year.

“Any research into the mechanisms of how this animal is able to live for such a long time will at some point need the genome sequence,” said Steve Hoffmann, a computational biologist at the Leibniz Institute on Aging and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, in Germany, who led the research.

Snow started falling in the Sierra Nevada, the California mountain range that straddles the state’s border with Nevada, on Sunday, and plenty more is expected through Tuesday. Elevations above 4,000 feet are expected to record one to four feet of snow, while the highest peaks over 8,000 feet could pick up five feet.

“It’s coming really heavy right now,” Andrew Schwartz, the director of the Central Sierra Snow Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday morning. “I think it’s one of the snowiest periods we’ve had all season.”

Five-day precipitation forecast 1 2 3 betef 5 10+ inches Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Notes:  Values are shown only for the contiguous United States and are in inches of water or the equivalent amount of melted snow and ice. By Zach Levitt, Bea Malsky and Martín González Gómez

The snow arrived with a large storm system that was spread across the entire length of the West Coast on Monday and was expected to deliver light to moderate scattered rain from Seattle to Los Angeles. Precipitation was also expected in Southern California, Dr. Schwartz said, “just not as much as up north.”

But the big story with this system is the snow.

The Weather Service called the storm system “robust” and winterlike in the Sierra Nevada and issued a series of winter storm warnings discouraging people from traveling in the mountains through Tuesday. Drivers are likely to be required during periods of heavy snow to use tire chains to travel on many of the major highways, including on Interstates 80 and Highway 50, which provide access in and out of the Tahoe Basin.

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