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In Response: Water Authority Meetings Open And Transparent

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribune

Regarding “Local agencies ignore ‘be open’ admonition”(April 5): It was disturbing to read the U-T Editorial Board’s recent inaccurate and unwarranted assertion that the San Diego County Water Authority has ignored state law by not providing public notice or agendas for every meeting for which a board member receives a stipend. The U-T unfairly attempted to create the impression that the Water Authority was not complying with California’s open meeting laws. This is not true.

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Gov. Brown Declares California Drought Emergency Is Over

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby Bettina Boxall

Startlingly green hills, surging rivers and the snow-wrapped Sierra Nevada had already signaled what Gov. Jerry Brown made official Friday: The long California drought is over. Brown issued an executive order that lifts the drought emergency in all but a handful of San Joaquin Valley counties where some communities are still coping with dried-up wells. He also made it clear that the need for conservation is not going away. “This drought emergency is over, but the next drought could be around the corner,” Brown said in a statement. “Conservation must remain a way of life.”

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California Storms: This Rainy Season Now Ranks 2nd All Time In 122 Years Of Records

/in /by /The Mercury Newsby Mark Gomez

California’s current rainy season can no longer lay claim to being No. 1. After relatively modest rainfall in March, this season now ranks as the second wettest in 122 years of record-keeping, according to data released Thursday by federal scientists. Between October 2016 and March 2017, California averaged 30.75 inches of precipitation, the second-highest average since such records began being kept in 1895, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Oroville Disaster May Have Been Caused By Weak Soil Under Spillway

/in /by /News Deeplyby Matt Weiser

The destruction of Oroville Dam’s main spillway in February likely occurred because it was built on highly erodible rock, according to several experts interviewed by Water Deeply. If confirmed by a forensic investigation now underway, rebuilding the spillway will require a much more expensive and time-consuming effort. The Oroville spillway was ripped apart in February as California Department of Water Resources (DWR) released water from the dam to make room for heavy storm runoff into the reservoir. It’s an important reminder that no matter how carefully built and maintained a dam might be, it will always remain vulnerable to unknowns.

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Scientists Link California Droughts And Floods To Distinctive Atmospheric Waves

/in /by /Phys Org

The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year’s unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found in a recent study that the persistent high-pressure ridge off the west coast of North America that blocked storms from coming onshore during the winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15 was associated with the wave pattern, which they call wavenumber-5.

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Spring Storm To Build On Already Historic California Snowpack

/in /by /Associated Press (As published by NBC Southern California - Los Angeles)by Jonathan Lloyd

An unusually strong spring storm will add more snow to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where winter storms left behind the most robust snowpack in the last six years.  A brief bout of rainfall, possibly accompanied by strong winds, is expected in the Los Angeles area Saturday with more significant precipitation to the north. The storm could be the most powerful the Sierra Nevada Mountains have seen in April in a decade.

 

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Scientists Link California Droughts And Floods To Distinctive Atmospheric Waves

/in /by /Phys.org
The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year’s unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found in a recent study that the persistent high-pressure ridge off the west coast of North America that blocked storms from coming onshore during the winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15 was associated with the wave pattern, which they call wavenumber-5.
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We Depend On Lakes We Can’t Fill To The Brim

/in /by /Chico Enterprise-Record

April 1 is a telling date in California water policy each year. All the measurements — snowpack, water in reservoirs — are compared to that date. And this April 1, there was something very interesting to note. We all know it’s been a wet winter, but on April 1, most of California’s reservoirs were not full. We know there are some other issues in play with Lake Oroville — just 76 percent full at the end of the day April 1 — but most of the other lakes were down too. Shasta was 89 percent full, Trinity 90 percent, Folsom just 60 percent.

 

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Water Agency Requires Fiscal Reform

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribune

As working families across the San Diego region struggle to make ends meet, the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has no such concerns. That’s because the MWD can tax and raise rates at will – and it has done precisely that. Several steps removed from nearly 20 million residents it serves, MWD overcharged ratepayers $847 million more than the agency’s budgets said was needed from 2012 to 2015. To make matters worse, MWD overspent its budget by $1.2 billion from 2013 to 2016 on things like buying Bay-Delta islands ($175 million) and turf replacement ($420 million).

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BLOG: Remaking The Salton Sea

/in /by /Public Policy Institute of Californiaby Lori Pottinger

The Salton Sea—California’s largest lake—faces an environmental crisis. The already-shrinking desert lake will receive less water starting next year, which will accelerate the exposure of toxic dust along its shore, increase its already high salinity, and reduce a food source and habitat for hundreds of bird species that rely on the lake. The sea, which was created by a break in a Colorado River irrigation canal in the 1900s, for decades relied on irrigation runoff from local farms for sustenance.

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