An hour east of San Diego, there’s a lonely stretch of dry, barren land. There’s not much here but sand, dirt, and some wiry shrubs.
But keep driving east and the landscape suddenly shifts.
The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors has ended the local drought emergency it declared two years ago, but officials are encouraging residents to continue conserving water.
The board’s unanimous vote came Tuesday and accompanied a series of measures to continue the county’s water conservation and drought preparation efforts.
When we talk about California’s water, we often think of what we can see: a snowpack, reservoirs to hold water, and aqueducts to deliver water to communities throughout the state. There is another source of water for California, and it sits deep under our feet. It’s called groundwater.
The Department of Interior has indicated that if states don’t cooperate on dividing Colorado River water, more cuts may be on the way.
The agency indicated that California could also face cutbacks, which means that the state’s wait-and-see strategy may have fallen short.
California has senior water rights to the Colorado River, and so far, that has worked in its favor.
It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.
El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.
Although much of California no longer suffers from drought conditions thanks to the recent record rainfall, the Golden State isn’t quite yet out of the woods when it comes to a scarcity of water.
And that means sustainable water management must continue to be top of mind for executives in a variety of industries, including turf management, agriculture, and hotel and resorts.
While drought conditions have improved on the Central Coast following our wet winter —saving water is still a priority. That’s why the city of Soledad is getting creative when it comes to how they water their public sports fields and parks.
Soledad is using a $16 million state grant to build a pipe system from their wastewater treatment plant to deliver recycled water to public fields across town. The city made history a few years back with the construction of a wind turbine that powers the treatment plant Their newest accomplishment comes in the form of purple pipes.
More than a century ago, an accidental oasis in the California desert created a popular residential and vacation spot for families.
But over the last few decades, environmental experts say climate change and drought in the Salton Sea have led to a destination that’s been plagued with dust bowls, receding waters and other hazards.
In the Central Valley, agriculture is everything. Farmers here grow 25% of the country’s food, yet copious amounts of flawed produce is dumped or left to rot.
For many supermarkets, an orange with a hail scratch is deemed unsellable. In 2019, researchers from Santa Clara University found that an estimated one-third of food in northern and central California is wasted, largely because of supermarket standards and consumer habits. We cannot follow this model of growing more produce than we need – or wasting this much – given California’s limited water resources, drought on surface water, and severe overpumping of groundwater.
Despite a wet winter, California and other western states will still need to cut back how much water they draw from the Colorado River. The question federal and state officials are weighing is: How much will they each need to cut?
