Last week, a massive marine heat wave sitting roughly 60 miles off California’s coast oozed eastward, providing warm water fuel for Hurricane Hilary and its historic trek north. It was a worrisome development for researchers who have monitored this warm mass for nearly a decade — and who are watching a developing El Niño in the equatorial Pacific.
California farmers are putting a big target on Glen Canyon Dam, telling the federal government it’s time to take a serious look at suggestions to stop using the dam to produce electricity. Talk of decommissioning the dam has been on the fringe of criticism of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation management of the Colorado River, but it could gain momentum as public comment is released in the coming days.
You can understand our optimism. It hadn’t rained in Phoenix for four months. Other parts of the West were hot and dry. Then came the big one: Hurricane Hilary. While rainfall totals were disappointing in Phoenix, the storm did dump quite a few inches on California and Nevada. Areas near Lake Mead got pelted, leading a bunch of folks to presume that the nation’s largest water reservoir would get a decent boost from the rainfall. But that’s not how it works.
In the opening chapter of “The Ministry for the Future,” science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson details a calamitous heat wave that kills almost all the residents of a small town. In another chapter, he imagines a catastrophic flood that wipes out Los Angeles.
The late Octavia Butler described a Southern California reeling from years of drought in “Parable of the Sower,” and Paolo Bacigalupi writes about a near-future Southwest that’s also been devastated by drought.
Earlier this summer, state water officials introduced draft regulations that, if passed, would allow purified wastewater to be directly introduced to drinking supplies.
Currently, purified wastewater has to be introduced to environmental buffers like groundwater aquifers before being added to drinking supplies, but the new regulations would allow treated water to bypass this step after undergoing additional purification processes.
Eight locations along the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts experienced a record surge in high-tide flooding days last year, a trend intensified by rising sea levels and weather patterns that El Niño is expected to escalate in 2024, NOAA said Tuesday.
Coastal communities are expected to face three times as many high-tide, or “sunny day,” flooding instances through next April, compared to two decades ago, agency officials said in a press call.
Climate scientists are bracing for potentially lengthy El Niño and La Niña events, according to a new study revealing how the underlying mechanism for climate variability is responding to increased greenhouse gas emissions in unpredicted ways and inducing El Niño-like conditions after volcanic eruptions.
The research published in Nature Wednesday details recently discovered trends of the “Pacific Walker Circulation,” (PWC) an atmospheric phenomenon relating to east-west circulation along the equatorial Pacific.
Colorado River Basin states don’t agree on very much when it comes to the future operations of the basin’s largest water savings banks. One thing they do agree on: The current rules aren’t working.
California’s most-recent drought is over. Reservoirs are full. Ski season lasted until July.
But despite the wet winter, an effort is gaining momentum in the state capitol to add manicured green grass to the list of business trappings — like fax machines, pagers and typewriters — that have become obsolete in a changing world.
Tropical Storm Hilary swept over the Golden State on Sunday, bringing a massive amount of precipitation along with during what is normally the driest time of the year, when wildfires are always a looming issue. The record-breaking rains left a trail of floods, mudslides and debris flows in their wake, with parts of Southern California left to pick up the pieces to start the new week. But, did the storm actually do anything to impact the state’s water supply?
