Arizona governor Katie Hobbs said this week her administration is terminating state land leases that for years have given a Saudi-owned farm nearly unfettered access to pump groundwater in the dry southwestern state.
A new water year is here and there is much anticipation for what a growing El Niño will bring California. There is a likelihood the state could see back to back big water years.
After a year of unprecedented heat and flooding, experts are cautiously hopeful for California’s new water year with the threat of the historically unruly El Niño looming.
With the start of the new water year this week, state officials say there is plenty to celebrate. State climatologist Michael Anderson said in a Tuesday briefing that between October 2022 to March of this year, the state got 153% of normal rainfall, making it the sixth wettest water year on record.
After a devastating drought in 2021 that left Lake Oroville at their lowest water level ever at 628.47 feet, the lake has now seen an intense increase in water levels.
“This past winter storms provided a huge boost to the state water projects, water supply, especially at our largest reservoir at Lake Oroville,” said Ted Craddock, Deputy Director of the State Water Project.
The North Marin Water District is pushing back on the state’s proposal for permanent water conservation measures regardless of drought conditions.
The proposal, known as “Making Conservation a California Way of Life,” would require hundreds of large urban water suppliers to set and meet new conservation targets beginning in 2025. Agencies also would be required to submit more detailed information to the state on how their water is being used.
A second straight wet winter may be in store for California, but state water regulators are turning their attention to the prospect of long-term water shortages, with plans for permanent statewide restrictions.
Current El Niño conditions appear likely to become comparable to the “great” El Niño of 1997-98, according to an experimental prediction system used by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“Our forecast system has shown that it can do a remarkably good job of accurately hindcasting past El Niño events when we’ve tested it using historical data, which gives us high confidence in this forecast,” said NCAR scientist Stephen Yeager, who helped lead the modeling effort.
The Southwest monsoon has wrapped up, and it featured a weird split of record dry conditions in parts of Arizona and soaking rain, including from the remnants of a former hurricane in California, Nevada and other states.
To understand where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve come from. That’s the idea researchers were pursuing with the recent geochemical analysis of a single stalagmite from a cave in Grand Canyon National Park.
More specifically, they measured the ratio of stable isotopes in calcite deposits within the stalagmite to help predict how the volume of groundwater aquifers may be affected by a warming climate.
Colorado River officials plan to expand a conservation program next year that pays farmers and ranchers to use less water. But questions remain about some of the proposed ideas and the program’s overall efficacy.
The state initially launched the System Conservation Pilot Program in 2015 as a part of a multistate effort to conserve water from the Colorado River, which provides water for millions of residents throughout seven states as well as Mexico. The effort was designed to see if conservation efforts could stabilize the water levels in critical reservoirs along the river, like Lake Powell.
