Rob Ford was watering his hay last October at his small Washington County, Utah, ranch when he realized the flow was weaker than usual. He called the irrigation manager who monitors the water levels.
“The water is really weak,” Ford said he told the irrigation manager. “Is that about what we are expecting today?”
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
So says Matthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and he might as well be talking about California these days. As the planet continues to heat up, the state’s landscapes, watersheds and weather are shifting so fast it can be difficult to keep track.
The winter that wouldn’t quit showed up again in the Sierra Nevada region of California and Nevada on Tuesday.
The fast-moving, blustery storm wasn’t expected to last long, but it was enough to require chain controls on some trans-Sierra highways and add to staggering snowfall totals left by an exceptional series of winter storms.
As California’s wet winter has given way to warmer spring weather, the state’s record snowpack has begun to melt.
Though the accumulated snow still measures 249% of normal as of April 18, new satellite photos show that the white blankets enveloping mountains across the state have started to recede.
When white settlers forayed into what came to be known as the Imperial Valley at the dawn of the 20th century, they found a barren desert in California’s southeastern corner, unpopulated except for a few members of the Kamia clan of the Kumeyaay tribe.
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.
