With the wettest winter in five years having taken the hard edges off the historic drought and a key Sierra snowpack reading Wednesday expected to show big gains, Californians can look forward to substantial relief from mandatory statewide water restrictions.
A month that’s been called miraculous for California’s water supply is marching toward the finale of the rainy season, but as it was heading out the door, storms in Tahoe dumped half a foot of snow on ski resorts Monday night into Tuesday.
Without other definitive wet systems on the horizon, the powder — which continued to lightly fall into Tuesday evening — is likely March’s last hurrah, forecasters said.
The rain storms and blizzards that were supposed to come with El Niño were conspicuously non-biblical in California this winter, leaving the state in an ecological limbo that has regulators thinking about easing water-use restrictions in some places but not in others.
While the weather cheered ski resorts hit hard by the historic drought and brought some reservoirs to their highest points in years, in the end it dropped less snow than average in the Sierra, where more than a third of the state’s water comes from.
In this timely study, as they describe it, Hatchett et al. (2015) strove to determine whether the hydro-climatic conditions that occurred during the 2012-2015 (hereafter current) California-Nevada drought were “within the range of natural variability documented by paleo-proxy indicators,” which they hoped could lead to the “disentanglement of the relative roles of natural versus anthropogenic forcing factors as causative agents.” So what did they do? And what did they learn?
After losing a landmark judgment in 2015, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California must pay $8.9 million in attorneys’ fees to the San Diego County Water Authority, a San Francisco Superior Court judge ruled Thursday. As the prevailing party, the Water Authority is entitled to its attorneys’ fees, according to the court order; a previous decision awarded the Water Authority more than $320,000 in court costs.
MWD now owes the Water Authority more than $243 million, including damages, costs, interest and attorneys’ fees. The bill, including the award of attorneys’ fees, accrues simple interest of 7 percent annually.
A spring storm dumped fresh snow to parts of the Sierra and delivered partly cloudy skies and gusty winds to the Sacramento region Monday, capping a weekend of hammock-worthy highs in the 70s.
Chain controls were in effect part of the day on Interstate 80 over Donner Summit. By midafternoon, 11 inches of snow had fallen over a 24-hour period at Northstar California Resort north of Lake Tahoe, said spokeswoman Marcie Bradley. That brought the snowfall total for the season at Northstar to 441 inches, she said.
El Niño, or the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, is an occasional warming event in the Pacific Ocean that can initiate weather-related havoc across the U.S. Now, it has a new cousin. By examining 38 years of weather, atmospheric scientists have identified an ocean temperature anomaly — the Pacific Extreme Pattern — that can predict droughts on the East Coast up to two months before they hit. The team plans to build an alert system based on these findings, which could allow cities to prep for life-threatening heat waves, while also reducing people’s electric bills
How is climate change affecting agriculture? It depends.
Of 12 crops examined in Yolo County, walnuts are most vulnerable, while processing tomatoes and alfalfa acreage may increase due to warmer winters. In an effort to forecast how climate change may affect agriculture, University of California agricultural economists looked at how climate has affected crop acreage in the past. The effect of temperature changes on plants depends on local conditions and the crops grown.
Congress is about to try again to help ease California’s drought. A handful of bills – some new, some held over from last year – will come up for debate in the weeks ahead.
The subject is as partisan as the presidential race, and a lot more complicated. That’s because, when you get politicians involved in water, the debate becomes fixated on righting perceived wrongs, and drifts irrevocably away from solving actual water supply problems. Such is the case with the present selection of bills before Congress, which come from both ends of the political spectrum.
In response to dozens of pending protests, state and federal officials asked for a two-month delay in hearings that could decide the fate of Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial plan to build two massive tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
On Monday, the state Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation – the agencies that run the huge Delta pumps – requested a 60-day continuance on hearings that were scheduled to begin in early May at the State Water Resources Control Board.
