It’s finally raining in California — just when we’d begun to think that it would never rain again. But the state is deep in water debt. Traditionally, California has depended on snowmelt for about a third of its water. The recent storms have gotten California’s snowpack up to slightly above average for this time of year, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to refill reservoirs.
It looks like this El Niño — which will rank among the strongest on record — has passed its peak in terms of tropical ocean temperatures, but it’s not going away anytime soon. In fact, the biggest El Niño impacts on the U.S., like rain and snow for California, are probably still to come.
The country has already started to feel the influence of El Niño with a recent spate of storms that dumped much-needed precipitation on California. The cold winter months are when El Niño holds sway over North American weather patterns, generally leading to cooler and wetter weather over the southern tier of the U.S. and warmer and drier conditions over the northern parts of the country and southern Canada.
El Niño is finally making its presence felt with a series of welcome storms. Since we don’t yet know if it will put a significant dent in California’s epic drought, state regulators are preparing the next version of an emergency regulation that has required statewide mandatory conservation in urban areas since last June.
An initial framework released last month by the State Water Resources Control Board staff, however, is raising deep concerns that the regulation could take a critical tool off the table – local water projects developed to buffer the effects of drought.
A record-breaking storm has been battering California, as well as other states throughout the nation, for more than two weeks now due to the El Niño, a term given to the warming of the Pacific Ocean which causes drastic fluctuations in weather all over the world.
“A parade of strong Pacific storms characteristic of a strong El Niño event will batter the state this week and will likely bring damaging flooding by the time the second storm in the series rolls through on Wednesday”.
Now that 2016 has gotten off to a wet start, with a series of El Niño storms drenching California in recent days, the question is turning up with increasing frequency at dinner parties and coffee shops:
“How will we know when the drought is over?”
The answer, water experts say, is more complicated than you’d think.
Simply put: The drought could end this year, according to state water officials. But for that to happen, as California enters the fifth year of the worst drought in the state’s history, rains will have to continue arriving in pounding, relentless waves through April to fill depleted reservoirs and dry rivers and push the Sierra snowpack to at least 150 percent of normal.
The drought in California has been going on for five years now. But if you’ve turned on the TV recently, or, for that matter, if you live in California, you may have noticed it’s raining there – a lot.
The storms this past week are fueled by an El Nino, which is essentially a temperature change in the Pacific that has brought unseasonably warm temperatures to much of the country and a whole lot of precipitation, especially in Southern and central California. The question is – what difference does any of this rain make to California’s historic drought?
Tuesday the state Water Resources Control Board reported the state had again failed to meet its water conservation goals in November. The same day, record rainfall was recorded at Los Angeles International Airport.
Missing the water saving goal is a bad thing, but the water board was conciliatory, as it has shown it is inclined to be. It emphasized that cumulatively from June to November, we were on track to hit the governor’s 25 percent water use reduction.
To the untrained eye the three images looked practically they same. They showed the El Niño pattern from 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.
The first two brought crazy weather to Northern California and Northern Nevada. It’s usually the first quarter of the year where the moisture really starts to fall.
“So far we’ve got out of this event exactly what we expected,” Sasha Gershunov, climate and meteorology researcher at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, said of this winter’s weather phenomenon.
Now that 2016 has gotten off to a wet start, with a series of El Niño storms drenching California in recent days, the question is turning up with increasing frequency at dinner parties and coffee shops:
“How will we know when the drought is over?”
The answer, water experts say, is more complicated than you’d think.
Despite of all the rain, California’s reservoirs are still very low. The storage system is used to capture rainfall and snowmelt runoff for use later in the year.
El Niño is producing snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The snowpack is looking promising according to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). Current snowpack measurements are 16 inches more than they have been recorded since 1965.
