The weather forecast for the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 will likely include rain showers and cloudy conditions for San Diego County.
Santa Ana winds will continue to blow throughout the region, especially in the mountains and inland valleys, early in the week. Some gusts could reach up to 65 miles per hour in the mountains and up to 35 miles per hour inland.
I arrived late to the Upper Colorado River Commission meeting in Las Vegas, having briefly gotten lost in the disorienting maze of garishly lit slot machines, escalators reaching to the heavens, and hallways with a vanishing point at infinity. Could there be a more incongruous place to hold a convention about something so natural and sublime as water?
Just as I took my seat, Becky Mitchell, the forceful, passionate commissioner from the state of Colorado, said something puzzling and important. “The Lower Basin states continue to overuse their allocation of Colorado River water.”
A series of December storms delivered a welcome boost to California’s snowpack, scientists said on Tuesday in a closely watched assessment of the state’s water resources for the year ahead.
The snowpack survey recorded a snow depth of 24in (61cm), said Angelique Fabbiani-Leon, state hydrometeorologist at the California department of water resources’ snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit. The survey was conducted at the Phillips station in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range that covers the eastern part of the state.
There’s nothing better than a long, hot shower after a particularly grueling day, but with energy costs soaring nationwide, it might be hard to justify pushing the water heater to its limit.
However, by upgrading to a heat pump water heater, you might feel a little less guilty about savoring that time in your steamy oasis. Heat pump water heaters draw heat from the surrounding air to warm your water, rather than burning fuel or relying on energy-intensive heating elements.
The Newsom administration and local agencies are working to capture stormwater for future use as California faces a series of major storms during the holiday period.
According to officials, the efforts are intended to strengthen water supplies statewide while reducing flood risks as heavy rain moves across the region. The development comes California braces for winter storms expected to impact the state throughout the holiday season. Governor Gavin Newsom said California has taken early, coordinated steps to protect residents from the storms’ impacts.
Lake Shasta waters lapped higher after a series of atmospheric rivers dumped up to a foot of rain in the region.
Not counting runoff, storms added 12-14 inches of rain to all areas of the lake between Dec. 19 — when the series of wet winter storms started — and Dec. 26, said Nathan Rick with the National Weather Service Sacramento branch. Another 1.5 inch was expected to fall before the Dec. 27-28 weekend.
Lush green fields of alfalfa spread across thousands of acres in a desert valley in western Arizona, where a dairy company from Saudi Arabia grows the thirsty crop by pulling up groundwater from dozens of wells.
The company, Fondomonte, is the largest water user in the Ranegras Plain groundwater basin, shipping hay overseas to feed its cows in the Middle East. Like other landowners in the area, it has been allowed to pump unlimited amounts from the aquifer, even as water levels have declined.
A year ago, officials were sounding alarms about a bone-dry winter that days later would combine with hurricane-strength winds to bring about the worst fires in Los Angeles history. Now, Southern California just experienced its wettest Christmas in modern history.
This Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were the rainiest in the modern record for Southern California, according to the National Weather Service office in Oxnard. And more rain is on the way. A flood watch was forecast to remain in effect for much of the state through at least Friday afternoon, with rain expected throughout the day. Skies should clear up by the weekend.
When budgets are tight, political promises that fight climate change or pollution tend to take a backseat. That’s true nationally, as the climate news publication Heatmap explained last month, pointing out various Democrats in Congress who backed off policies to combat global warming out of concern for the high costs they could impose on voters. San Diego is no different.
What’s not being calculated in government financial departments run by elected decisionmakers is the future cost of climate change on its residents – the more frequent flooding, heat waves and depleted natural resources. But, as Heatmap aptly put it, voters don’t go to the polls for lower costs in 2075. Voters want lower bills now.
The president of the Utah State Senate has an idea he thinks could help states along the Colorado River. “What we do in Utah is we solve problems and that’s what we’re in the middle of,” Senate President J. Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said in a recent interview with FOX 13 News.
His idea is to pay California to build more desalination plants along the Pacific Ocean for their water needs. In exchange, they’d give up some shares of water along the Colorado River for Utah and other upstream states to use.
