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The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) has come under criticism after a local TV station filmed one of the agency’s substations watering its artificial grass. The synthetic turf was installed in 2011 as part of a program to replace grass with drought-tolerant landscaping at 71 DWP facilities. “All told, this program has removed over 1.3 million square feet of grass and replaced it with California-friendly landscaping,” DWP spokesman Joe Ramallo told Reuters. “That’s enough water to (serve) 314 single-family homes in Los Angeles each year.” Nearby residents became angry after seeing the sprinkler systems running to water the synthetic turf.

 

A mountain lake in California may provide answers surrounding the current five year drought as well as the other major droughts in the history of the state. Glen MacDonald, a climate change researcher and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles led a study in which he has analyzed the relationship between prolonged drought, surface sea temperatures, and the previous periods indicating climate warming.

California is now five years deep into one of its most severe droughts on record, and scientists are continually probing the different factors that affect the state’s climate, and how much those are related to the overall warming of the globe. Increasingly, this means looking back into the past for clues about how the region has changed over the last few thousand years and what influences might shape its future. In this connection, new research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the Pacific Ocean may play a bigger role than anyone thought — and an unexpected one.

I drove out past Merced last year to see a dairy farmer testing a new idea. He irrigated 40 acres of feed corn with drip lines, which are much more common in orchards and vineyards than annual crops. The lines did more than conserve water. They delivered fertilizer, in the form of nitrogen-rich wastewater from one of the farm’s manure lagoons. Such precise application could reduce the risk of pollutants seeping into drinking-water aquifers – a concern with the widespread practice of flood irrigating with lagoon water.