A state water regulators meeting…not the kind of thing that makes you think “I’ve got to be there.”
But with new environmental rules on the table for vineyards across Sonoma and Mendocino, there was hardly an empty seat to be found at the latest gathering of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.
Frank Reichenbacher worries it will soon be over for his Tumamoc globeberry — a rare Sonoran desert vine that features a fruit that looks like a tiny watermelon and tastes like dirt.
For 41 years, Reichenbacher, an associate researcher at the University of Arizona’s Tumamoc Desert Lab, has followed the same three patches of the rare plants in southern Arizona — including one on Tucson’s Tumamoc Hill.
Now that July’s sizzling numbers are all in, the European climate monitoring organization made it official: July 2023 was Earth’s hottest month on record by a wide margin.
July’s global average temperature of 16.95 degrees Celsius (62.51 degrees Fahrenheit) was a third of a degree Celsius (six tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) higher than the previous record set in 2019, Copernicus Climate Change Service, a division of the European Union’s space program, announced Tuesday. Normally global temperature records are broken by hundredths or a tenth of a degree, so this margin is unusual.
“These records have dire consequences for both people and the planet exposed to ever more frequent and intense extreme events,” said Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess. There have been deadly heat waves in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, Europe and Asia. Scientific quick studies put the blame on human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
Across the western U.S., many areas received record or near-record amounts of snowpack over the winter. With the spring and summer temperatures melting the abundant snow, a record volume of streamflow has been recorded in several basins in the southwestern U.S., providing more water for the area later into the summer than is typically seen.
After two multi-year episodes of intense drought over the past decade, there is finally a centralized hub of resources and information for well owners and communities that suffered when their wells went dry. Before the most recent drought lifted thanks to this year’s historic winter, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) launched its Be Well Prepared program in May.
In early 2023, Lake Powell hit a record low — sitting at only about 22% capacity. As of late July, those levels were nearly double. Utah’s Colorado River Commissioner Gene Shawcroft said the ailing reservoir had risen 65 feet from the record spring runoff. Those inflows lifted the water levels to about 40% capacity.
Two associations that represent the interests of wastewater treatment and water reclamation plant operators are unlikely to succeed on their claims challenging the federal government’s approval of California’s new water quality standards, a federal judge in the state ruled Monday. On May 22, Clean Water SoCal and the Central Valley Clean Water Association — groups with member agencies that own and operate wastewater treatment and water reclamation plants — sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Tomas Torres, director of EPA’s Region IX, over the approval of California’s new water toxicity provisions.
The gray, two-story home with white trim toppled and slid, crashing into the river below as rushing waters carried off a bobbing chunk of its roof. Next door, a condo building teetered on the edge of the bank, its foundation already having fallen away as erosion undercut it. The destruction came over the weekend as a glacial dam burst in Alaska’s capital, swelling the levels of the Mendenhall River to an unprecedented degree.
Maybe you’ve heard that Lake Mead is on the rise again. It’s up a little more than it was a year ago, about 20 feet higher than where it was at this time last year. They released more from Lake Powell upstream in April. Plus, we had a very snowy winter. Snowmelt from the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains feeds the Colorado River. But everyone who lives in Las Vegas or Northern Nevada knows that this all just a mirage. One wet winter does not overturn more than 20 years of drought.
A new state Colorado River Drought Task Force will meet nine times between now and early December, and hold two public hearings to develop recommendations on how the parched river’s supplies will be managed inside state lines as its flows continue to decline. At its first meeting Monday, 100 people joined the virtual session as the 17-member task force began planning the work it must conclude by Dec. 15.
