Yosemite Falls Surging and 'Only Getting Bigger'

Yosemite National Park's highest waterfall is growing as an above average amount of snowpack melts from the mountains.

The national park posted a picture of the Yosemite Falls looking full, cascading down from the creek on April 14.

"'This isn't even my final form!'—Yosemite Falls in April, just about every year. Yosemite Falls has been making quite a splash lately in a display that should only be getting bigger over the next few weeks!" the national park said in an update to Facebook.

The 2,425-feet Yosemite Falls, one of the tallest in the U.S., is made up of three separate falls: Upper Yosemite Fall (1,430 feet), the middle cascades (675 feet), and Lower Yosemite Fall (320 feet).

Yosemite Falls' water comes from Yosemite Creek, which is fed completely by snow melt. The more snow that settles in the park over the winter, the fuller Yosemite Falls will be when the weather warms in the spring, and the snow begins to melt.

The national park saw the worst of a rare California blizzard over the winter, and subsequent storms that dumped a high amount of snow across the landscape.

The waterfall usually reaches its peak in late spring, when up to 2,400 gallons of water per second can flow over the cliffs. But this all depends on the amount of snow.

Although it looks big right now, this will be nothing compared to how it grows over the rest of the spring.

"While recent rains add an extra surge to the flow, it's primarily snow that feeds our most famous waterfall—snow that is properly melting right about now," the national park said in the recent update. "The aptly named Yosemite Creek at the top of the fall collects the snowmelt from 43 square miles north of the Valley, but that melt doesn't occur all at once. Warming temperatures ramp up the melt rate of the snow that's been stockpiling since the fall, with peak flow usually occurring sometime in May before often drying out completely in late summer."

For this reason, hydrologists at Yosemite National Park make sure to measure flows in an entire water year, which runs from October. The water year calculations estimate the continuous cycle of snowfall and snow melt, as well as the amount of water in the dry season.

In late summer, Yosemite Falls usually runs dry. This is typically when the snow has all melted, and fed into waterways.

The Merced River, which flows through Yosemite National Park, eventually flows into the San Joaquin River, which is the longest in central California.

"If you think this waterfall is impressive, just wait to see it in the next month or so when the Merced River will likely be flowing at over 2000... cubic feet per second, that is," the national park said.

In the months following particularly wet winters, the Merced River can experience extremely high water levels. Last year, following a winter where a record amount of snowpack accumulated in Yosemite, the Merced River got so high that areas were severely flooded and closed for a short period.

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