Use numbers, not vibes, when deciding if something like this is unusual. Dismissing this because march is a "spring month" is like asking someone who lives in Miami if they consider it unusual to have no snow on the ground in February.
Which of course isn't an antithesis to the lack of snow in the west, and likely is literally the flip side of the "same problem". but interesting
> The snow is melting so fast in the Sierra that, if it continues at its current rate, little would be left by early April. It’s unlikely to keep up this astounding pace, but there’s still high potential for the earliest melt-off on record in the state, according to Swain.
> “It feels like we skipped spring this year and dropped straight into a summer heatwave,” said Karla Nemeth, the DWR director, during Wednesday’s briefing. “What should be gradual snowmelt happened suddenly weeks ago.” This year’s was one of the quickest surveys they’d had, she added.
So the alarm here is the rate of melt, it should be sustained over a longer period. This is a problem because this is a natural "store" of water for downstream sources... if it's all released earlier it evaporates quicker and isn't replenished with more melt throughout the season.
Peak snow cover in the west (California) is expected to be in early April. December was an intense month of rainfall and the snowpack was trending towards above average, but then a dry Feb and a heatwave in March not only ensured the pack didn’t grow but pretty much nuked whatever cover early season rains brought. It is shocking because in December it was looking like historical snow and it went into catastrophic shortage in 3 months.
Beside that, the measurements are of how much moisture is left to melt off:
It’s not just the amount of snow left on mountaintops that’s concerning experts, but the amount of moisture still frozen within them. “Snow water equivalent” (SWE), a measurement of what could melt off to supply natural and manmade systems, is exceptionally low.
California did quite well in December. Then late February and early March came along, and a rain event at high altitude melted a lot of the snowpack, followed by a not-uncommon heatwave in mid-late March melted a lot of what was left.