How wet will it be? Baruffaldi said the North State can expect as much as 5 1/2 inches of rain through Tuesday. The first of the rain should arrive Thursday morning and then ease off a bit Friday. Another storm is expected to arrive Saturday night. And more is forecast to follow that one through Tuesday.
The series of storms is being drawn up from out in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii, said David Houck, a meteorologist with Accuweather.
When experts predicted in 2014 and into 2015 the impending arrival of a major El Niño event for 2015-2016, Californians breathed a collective sigh of relief. The phenomenon marked by warm Pacific Ocean temperatures was predicted to bring substantial amounts of precipitation, which has been sorely lacking over a dramatic four-year drought in the state. However, the latest updates on precipitation and snowpack shows a mixed bag in California, highlighting that with El Niño, prediction is a tricky business.
Been pretty wet the last few days. Streams are full, rivers are full. Without doubt, come summer, we’ll wish we had saved more of what is just running out to sea now, but apparently we’re not smart enough as a state to do that.
The solution has been known for years: You build Sites Reservoir west of Maxwell, and divert some of that extra water there. There’s plenty of rain water available from the roughly 10,000 square-miles of untapped Sacramento River watershed between Oroville Dam and Shasta Dam, but there’s just no way to save it now.
Saline groundwater from coastal aquifers is a better alternative water source than seawater for reverse osmosis (RO) desalination due to reduced membrane fouling and pre-treatment costs, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have found.
The study was published in Environmental Science & Technology and conducted by Researchers at the BGU Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, the BGU Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences and the Israel Geological Survey.
Sacramento dries out for at least 24 hours before the parade of storms begins again to drench the north state later in the week. Residents should have a rainless Tuesday to pick up branches scattered by the weekend’s high winds and clear roof gutters choked with leaves and rain water. The numbers tell the story of a wet start to March in Sacramento.
The series of storms that marched into the city are much like what used to visit Sacramento before drought. The storms extended over several days.
There has never been another March 8 quite like the one Folsom Lake is experiencing this year.The day will carry extra resonance for the lake as it marks a day in history where water levels reached historic highs compared with any level recorded on the same day.
Dating back to 1976 when the California Department of Water Resources began tracking the water storage levels at Folsom Lake, the 697,938 acre-feet of water beat out the previous high of approximately 650,000 acre-feet recorded for March in 1982, according to the DWR.
The powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California agreed Tuesday to buy four islands and a portion of a fifth in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a bid that some conservationists believe is a blatant water grab by California’s largest water agency.
The district’s 37-member board of directors, representing 26 agencies in Southern California, authorized Metropolitan’s general manager to enter into a purchase agreement to buy 20,369 acres of land encompassing Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Bouldin Island, most of Holland Tract and a portion of Chipps Island, in Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Solano counties.
A wet weekend flooded roads and reactivated slides that temporarily closed State Route 299, and even more precipitation is ahead for across Humboldt County this week. “Our crews have been out there working throughout the night responding to literally dozens of incidents,” Caltrans public information officer Phil Frisbie said on Sunday.
The landslide that closed State Route 299 at Big French Creek near Big Bar in Trinity County for multiple days in January reactivated due to rains and both lanes were closed Saturday evening.
Populations of the threatened Delta smelt have plummeted to the lowest in history. The three-inch fish is often the focus of California’s water wars. Every fall and spring, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducts trawls to determine populations of the threatened Delta Smelt. This year the department hasn’t netted more than seven fish in each trawl.
“Delta smelt have suffered significantly because of the drought and the extended period of low inflow and outflow from the Delta,” says Carl Wilcox with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
After three years of an unprecedented drought, a “Godzilla” El Niño formed in the western Pacific. Previous years with strong El Niños had been unusually wet, with the warm patch sending one wet system after another rolling into the region. California had essentially missed two years’ worth of precipitation. Surveying the wet season to come last fall, meteorologists said that El Niño was how it might restore the balance.
Now, six weeks remain in the state’s annual rainy season, and results are mixed.
