In May, California’s water authority is set to soften water conservation requirements for certain areas of the state, including the North Coast.
While this announcement was met with a favorable response by local water officials, the State Water Resources Control Board’s Chairwoman Felicia Marcus said earlier this week that nobody will be off the hook entirely.
Arizona and California are arguing over Colorado River water again — this time over whether it should be inscribed in law that California can’t take Arizona’s share of river water that’s left in Lake Mead to prop up lake levels.
The dispute is over whether it would benefit the troubled river system to guarantee in writing that one state can’t take another state’s water that’s left behind in the lake — or whether such an effort could disrupt already delicate negotiations over the river’s future.
Endangered salmon blocked for nearly a century from hundreds of miles of the Klamath River in Oregon and California are expected to return en masse under unusual agreements signed Wednesday to tear down four hydroelectric dams.
U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who signed agreements with the governors of both states, said the plan would bring about one of the largest river restoration projects in the history of the U.S.
The April 1 federal allocation of irrigation water to California farmers is no joking matter for those south of the Delta who were slapped across the face with the announced 5 percent allotment.
How much better 5 percent is than zero is a matter of degree akin to choosing your death slowly and painfully, or quickly and efficiently.
The announcement illustrates gross negligence on the part of federal and state regulators who hide behind court edicts and biological opinions that are proving to have no positive effect on fish populations in the Delta region and the two main river systems in California that feed it.
California, Oregon and a private utility Wednesday signed an agreement that could finally take down four hydroelectric dams that block salmon migrations on the Klamath River.
The pact, signed by the governors of both states and federal officials at the mouth of the Klamath in Northern California, spells out a road map for pursuing the dams’ demolition without congressional approval.
The rains this winter were more or less than expected, depending on where you live and what you expected.
In September of last year, many weather forecasters expected heavier than normal rains in Southern California, and mixed expectations for rains in Northern California. However, Northern California ended up receiving normal rainfall and Southern California did not.
Stanford researchers who studied trends in the atmospheric circulation patterns that affect California’s rainfall have found that conditions linked to the hot, dry weather during our latest drought have become more frequent in recent years, according to research published Friday.
That means that while this year’s El Niño-driven storms may have brought temporary relief to the Golden State’s parched soil and depleted reservoirs, Californians can expect more frequent droughts in the decades to come, said the study published by Science Advances.
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands recently announced a startling global statistic. About two-thirds of the world’s population experience a severe water scarcity for at least one month during the year. About half of these 4 billion people live in India and China. And the country that comes in third for periodic water shortages? The United States, with California as drought central.
Yet something just as startling should be noted about California and how its 39 million people have responded to a long and historic dry spell.
Atmospheric patterns resembling those that appeared during the latter half of California’s ongoing multiyear drought are becoming much more common, a new study finds.
“The current record-breaking drought in California has arisen from both extremely low precipitation and extremely warm temperature,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, associate professor of earth system science at Stanford University. “In this new study, we find clear evidence that atmospheric patterns that look like what we’ve seen during this extreme drought have in fact become more common in recent decades.”
In the nine months since the effective date of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandate of a 25-percent reduction in water use in urban areas of the state, reports from the 400-plus suppliers of that water indicate they’ve fallen just short of the goal.
From June 2015 through February of this year, cumulative water savings among the urban suppliers totaled 23.9 percent, according to California’s State Water Resources Control Board.
