You are now in Media Coverage San Diego County category.

Embrace El Nino or Ignore it: Guess San Diego’s Rainfall

Lacking current polling data, it could be hard to determine if more people believe in El Niño or the Great Pumpkin. El Niño has fallen on hard times. Once considered a fairly reliable indicator of a wet winter in much of California, in recent years the periodic phenomenon has produced little rain and a growing number of doubters. And that puts participants in the Union-Tribune’s 17th annual Precipitation Prediction Contest, launching today, in a bit of a quandary. Should they maintain a sincere belief in El Niño, like Linus and the Great Pumpkin, or move on like Sally after she realized she had wasted Halloween night in the pumpkin patch? Because El Niño is coming. Again. Probably.

Dry Lake Bed in Mojave Desert at Center of Water Debate

Cadiz, a water supply company, wants to pump out and sell 50,000 acre-feet of water from an aquifer under the Mojave Desert. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is trying to stop them. “It’s those aquifers that keep the plant life growing which nourish the animals — the bighorn sheep and the desert tortoises,” the California Democrat said at a news conference at the Whitewater Preserve in Riverside County. Feinstein, along with Rep. Raul Ruiz and state Sen. Richard Roth, spoke out against the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. The project aims to pump the aquifer and pipe water from it across the desert to sell to Southern California cities.