Tahoe in the News

‘Totally unprecedented’: Why Lake Tahoe’s water is clearer than it has been in 40 years

Greg Thomas | San Francisco Chronicle
April 10, 2023

Lake Tahoe is as clear as it’s been in 40 years, an encouraging sign of the lake’s health amid a long-term trend in which its famous clarity has deteriorated.

An annual report on the lake’s clarity from the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, published Monday, shows that visibility in 2022 was, on average, much better than it was in 2021 — due largely to a spike in clarity observed in the last five months of the year to levels not seen since the 1980s.

That sudden improvement “is, I believe, totally unprecedented,” said Geoffrey Schladow, TERC director. “We’ve never plotted data like this, where the last five months of the year were totally different” from the remainder of the calendar year…

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