The water level at Lake Tahoe continues to rise, but a dry February is putting the brakes on the heavy snowpack that was fueling relief earlier this winter from four years of drought on both sides of the Sierra.
Lake Tahoe has risen to within about 9 inches of its natural rim, but that’s still far short of the average this time of year of more than 2 feet above the rim, National Weather Service hydrologist Tim Bardsley said.
NASA is breaking down the effects of El Nino across California and what the state should expect next. The agency says there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that warm El Nino water is still present in the Pacific, so there is still time to get some good El Nino storms in both Southern California and Northern California.
California Democrats are so predictable, they’re like a broken record playing a bad song over and over. Every election cycle they propose “new” legislation or hype their “prior efforts” to help solve our state’s water-supply crisis.
This time Sen. Dianne Feinstein is proposing “new” legislation that would do nothing to solve the underlying causes of California’s water supply crisis – rigid, scientifically groundless, environmental regulations that so far this year have allowed enough water to flow to the ocean to fill six Millerton lakes, about 3 million acre-feet.
Californians are doing an outstanding job conserving water, reducing urban water use by nearly 26 percent during the last seven months of 2015, compared with the same period in 2013, exceeding Gov. Jerry Brown’s 25 percent reduction mandate. California’s investor-owned water utilities, together serving approximately 6 million people, are partnering with their customers to achieve those savings. The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) has recognized many of our members among the state’s water conservation standouts.
The severity of this historic drought has required extraordinary conservation measures to ensure adequate water supplies. As SWRCB Chair Felicia Marcus said last spring, “This is the drought of the century, with greater impact than anything our parents and grandparents experienced, and we have to act accordingly.” Given the uncertainties with the weather, the SWRCB made the prudent, responsible decision on Feb. 2 to extend the emergency conservation regulations (with appropriate adjustments for local climates, population growth and drought resilient supply investments) through October 2016.
Unless you’ve been hibernating with Punxsutawney Phil this winter, chances are that you know about El Niño, a periodic warming in surface ocean temperatures across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean, which has been altering weather across the globe. The effects have ranged from wildfire-causing droughts in Indonesia to ocean storms off the coast of Chile, with waves massive enough to rush up onto land and flip an SUV.
An El Niño’s effect on weather can be complex, and in some cases didn’t behave as predicted. In drought-ravaged California, for example, meteorologists thought the ocean temperature phenomenon probably would bring above-average rain to the southern part of the state in January, with a lesser chance of precipitation in the north.
A judge has ordered the release of the names and addresses of Los Angeles residents who received turf removal rebates aimed at helping California conserve water during the drought.
Superior Court Judge James Chalfant said the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California must release the data but granted a temporary exemption to more than two dozen law enforcement officials, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
Earlier this month a report from California’s agriculture department found that even despite severe drought conditions, California’s farmers had record sales of $53.5 billion in 2014.
“With the punishing drought entering its fifth year, the figures are sure to stoke tensions between farmers on one side and, on the other, city-dwellers and environmentalists, who complain they are being forced to make greater sacrifices than growers,” wrote the Associated Press in an article about the report.
After a seven-month legal battle, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on Friday released the names and addresses of thousands of Los Angeles residents who received cash rebates for replacing their lawns.
Nearly three dozen Angelenos received rebates of $10,000 or more, the data show. The largest single rebate among the nearly 3,400 Los Angeles residents who received a payout was $25,000 for the owner of a single-family home in Brentwood.
Water savings by Californians continued to dip in January for the sixth straight month, raising questions about whether conservation efforts will satisfy Gov. Jerry Brown’s aggressive 25 percent reduction target.
Regulators announced Thursday that residents cut water use by 17.1 percent last month when compared with the same time period in 2013, the baseline year under the mandate.
This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.
“During an El Niño, the precipitation averaged out over the entire globe doesn’t change that much, but there can be big changes to where it happens. You end up with this interesting observation where you get both floods and droughts just by taking the usual precipitation pattern and doing a shift,” said George Huffman, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
