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El Niño Expected to Stay Strong, Finish Wet

/in /by /Lake Tahoe Newsby By Kathryn Reed

To the untrained eye the three images looked practically they same. They showed the El Niño pattern from 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

The first two brought crazy weather to Northern California and Northern Nevada. It’s usually the first quarter of the year where the moisture really starts to fall.

 

“So far we’ve got out of this event exactly what we expected,” Sasha Gershunov, climate and meteorology researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, said of this winter’s weather phenomenon.

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California Drought: How Will We Know When It’s Over?

/in /by /San Jose Mercury Newsby By Paul Rogers

Now that 2016 has gotten off to a wet start, with a series of El Niño storms drenching California in recent days, the question is turning up with increasing frequency at dinner parties and coffee shops:

 

“How will we know when the drought is over?”

The answer, water experts say, is more complicated than you’d think.

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VIDEO: El Nino Peaks, Parts of California Face Flooding

/in /by /Ag Web

Despite of all the rain, California’s reservoirs are still very low. The storage system is used to capture rainfall and snowmelt runoff for use later in the year.

 

El Niño is producing snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The snowpack is looking promising according to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). Current snowpack measurements are 16 inches more than they have been recorded since 1965.

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Lawmaker Wants To Throw the Checkbook at Water Hogs

/in /by /Daily Democrat (Woodland, Calif.)by By Denis Cuff

A California lawmaker is dramatically raising the stakes when it comes to water, proposing fines that could reach thousands of dollars a day and public shaming of everyone who fails to conserve.

 

Legislation introduced this week would require the state’s 411 urban water districts to set a local limit on household water consumption for drought emergencies.

 

Violators would be fined at least $500 for every 748 gallons of excess use.

 

An Alamo house identified last month as using more than 11,200 gallons per day would be assessed $6,800 a day in fines, or more than $200,000 a month, under the penalties called for in the bill.

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