In 2019, Australian skies glowed crimson in one of the country’s worst recorded fire seasons. The infernos blackened some 190,000 square kilometers of land, killing dozens of people along with an estimated 1 billion animals and destroying thousands of structures. The bushfires also unleashed plumes of smoke so voluminous they could be seen from space.
As winter rains caused Monterey County’s rivers to swell past capacity and rush out to the sea, people began asking: Isn’t there a way to catch and reuse all that water? That’s what Monterey is preparing to do through a project financed by the state – in this case turning runoff lost to Monterey Bay into drinking water.
The Lake El Estero Diversion to Sanitary Sewer Project will reroute drainage from the city stormwater system at the lake into existing sanitary sewage pipes along Del Monte Avenue, which lead to Monterey One Water’s regional treatment plant in Marina for recycling into drinking water as part of the Pure Water Monterey project.
Coachella Valley water agencies are lifting some drought restrictions following an exceptionally wet winter in California, although experts and officials warn that California residents should keep getting used to “conservation as a way of life.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom and his administration have touted plans to build a tunnel to transport water beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, saying the project would modernize California’s water infrastructure and help the state adapt to climate change.
But an advocacy group is urging the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to abandon the $16-billion project, saying it doesn’t make financial sense for the state’s largest urban water agency.
While California’s water outlook saw marked improvement in the short term, climatologists say years of worsening conditions across the West will take far more than this winter’s storms to recuperate.
Veva Deheza, executive director for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System, said in a briefing Tuesday that about 25% of the West remains in drought — compared to 74% at the start of the water year this past October.
Nearly half of the U.S. West has emerged from drought this spring, but the welcome wet conditions haven’t entirely replenished the region, scientists said Tuesday.
Hydrologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said deep snowpack across much of the West will bring short-term relief, but the equally deep “bathtub rings” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are a reminder of the long road to bringing supply and demand in balance.
Atmospheric rivers are essential for the transportation of precipitation occurring in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. The rapidly changing climate is causing shifts in these long, flowing regions of the atmosphere, resulting in an increasing number of extreme weather events that bring about destruction across the world.
A joint venture of AECOM and Brown and Caldwell (AECOM-BC Team) has been chosen to provide program and project management support and engineering design services for the Pure Water Southern California program, one of the largest water reuse programs in the world.
The Colorado River has shaped life as we know it in the southwestern United States. Its water has allowed for explosive population growth and agricultural development in some of the driest parts of the country. But due to overallocation and climate change, the river is drying up.
In a world of worsening heatwaves, flooding, drought, glacial melting, megafires and other calamities of a changing climate, Gary Gragg is an optimist.
As California warms, Gragg — a nurseryman, micro-scale farmer and tropical fruit enthusiast — looks forward to the day that he can grow and sell mangoes in Northern California.
