Ample rainfall helped put a dent in California’s drought, but it also created more fuel for wildfires, officials said.
Fire departments are gearing up for a long summer with training exercises and are encouraging people to be fire safe. “With lots of rain this winter, the grass grew a lot, and we became a dry tinderbox,” Chief Mike Butler of the Dobbins/Oregon House Fire Protection District said.
As temperatures race toward the triple digits, City Council members voted unanimously to reduce water conservation goals but maintain a twice-weekly watering restriction.
The Department of Utilities presented a plan to drop conservation goals from 28 percent over 2013 levels down to 10 percent and increase watering to three days a week but found little support from the council. Instead, the council embraced an alternative suggestion from Councilman Jeff Harris that would keep the city’s water shortage level at stage two –acknowledging ongoing drought conditions – but lower the conservation target to 20 percent.
The winter of 2015 capped four years of drought that resulted in an unprecedented water deficit in Sierra Nevada snowpack. Much of California’s water comes from snowmelt.
Researchers at UCLA say in a new study, that this winter’s strong El Niño didn’t make up for that deficit. They found that even if the state gets above-average precipitation, it will take until 2019 to recover. Scientists used NASA satellite and snow survey data to assess snowpack. This gave them a better and more accurate picture of snow in higher elevations.
Cash-strapped cities are contending with aging, leak-prone water systems that waste trillions of gallons a year and result in damaging breaks.
When forecasters last year warned of a massive El Niño, some Californians held out hope that a single extremely wet year could bust the state’s severe drought.
But a study published Tuesday in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, offered support for the argument that state hydrologists have been making for months: It will take several years to recover from the four-year water shortage. Specifically, researchers studied the Sierra Nevada and found that the lackluster snowpack there, year after year, created a sizable water deficit that the state may not recoup until 2019.
Every spring, snow begins to melt throughout the Rocky Mountains, flowing down from high peaks and into the streams and rivers that form the mighty Colorado River Basin, sustaining entire cities and ecosystems from Wyoming to Arizona. But as spring becomes summer, the melting snow slows to a trickle and, as summer turns to fall, all but stops.
Scientists have known for a long time that flow in rivers is sustained by contributions from both snowmelt runoff and groundwater.
California’s drought has revealed that when it comes to water, not every community is equal.
When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced last month that the country’s largest reservoir, Lake Mead, had fallen to its lowest-ever level at 1,074ft (327m), the question many asked was: How will it affect one of California’s primary drinking sources?
After all, some 19 million Californians, nearly half the state’s population, receive some part of their water from the Colorado River, which flows into the 80-year-old reservoir created by Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas.
The El Niño-fueled storms that coated the Sierra with nearly normal snow this winter brought blasts of hope to drought-weary California.
But after the flurries stopped and the seasons changed, the melt-off from the high country has been swift and disappointingly scant, according to new water supply estimates from the state. The Department of Water Resources now projects that the mountains will produce about three quarters of normal runoff during the months of heaviest snowmelt, shorting the rivers and reservoirs that typically provide a third of California’s water — and cementing a fifth year of historic drought for the Golden State.
With triple-digit heat, a full moon and fires raging from Santa Barbara County to the Mexican border, another summer straight out of end times has arrived.
Monday’s summer solstice followed an unsettling 13 consecutive months of record-setting heat on this planet, in a year that is on track to be, yet again, the hottest ever. Across the American West, warnings of dangerous heat have been issued, spanning four states and some 40 million people. At least five deaths have been attributed to the heat wave so far in Arizona, which hit 120 degrees in Yuma.
