Todo Nieve/Where the snow comes from
Section 1 of 4
Where the snow comes from, and the decade it didn't
A season here is a handful of Pacific depressions and what the wind does to them afterwards.
The Andes at this latitude are not fed by a steady stream of weather. They are fed by a small number of storms that have to track far enough east to clear the crest, and by a snowpack that then has to survive the zonda. Four pieces on where the water comes from, how it is counted, and what the dry run of the 2010s actually measured once somebody wrote the numbers down.
4 pieces in this section
- Where the snow comes from, and the decade it didn'tThe Andes here depend on a small number of Pacific storms a season, which is why a quiet decade shows up as a measured deficit rather than a bad week.
- The zondaA dry warm wind coming down the lee of the range, and what it does to a snowpack in a day.
- How a snowpack is measured, and by whomStakes, pillows and manual courses, read on a schedule by people who drive a long way to read them.
- What the dry years actually measuredThe shortfall of the 2010s is a documented series, and the numbers are less dramatic and more useful than the coverage was.