Imagine Lake Tahoe with no snow year round.
Every winter storm that reaches the basin brings only rain.
No skiing. No snowboarding. No winter sports of any kind.
As unpleasant and uncomfortable a thought it is, Tahoe is staring at a drastically different future.
A dramatic decline in the Sierra Nevada snowpack will be felt the most in Northern California by mid century, according to a study published in December 2018 by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Those findings were reiterated Wednesday during the 23rd annual Operation Sierra Storm: “The New Reality,” a national weather conference hosted on Tahoe’s South Shore.