A fairly decent start to this year’s rainy season quickly dried up.
The Central Coast of California is a story of ebbs and flows, wet years and drought.
From man-made reservoirs to underground aquifers, we need to store rain that falls in wet years to help supply the never-ending demand for water during the dry years. But it’s a constant battle to make sure there’s enough set aside to go around.
If this were the summer, it would hardly be worth mentioning. But the winter months are when the region expects to pick up a majority of its annual rainfall.
The good news is that despite this near-record long winter rainless streak, the season’s total rainfall (since Oct. 1) is still above average for Sacramento.
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is leading a research project to profile the concentration of lithium in the geothermal field beneath California’s Salton Sea, and to explore the most environmentally benign way to extract it.
Brine from the geothermal field is already pumped to the surface to generate geothermal power, and recirculated back underground. Lithium could be extracted from brine before it is pumped underground. Eleven geothermal plants are now operating in the Salton Sea, which Berkeley Lab describes as “pilot” operations.
An active weather pattern is in place across the western United States, AccuWeather forecasters say, and the arrival of a storm in the Northwest will eventually result in widespread impacts from California to the central and southern Rockies.
An area of low pressure was diving southeastward over the interior West on Tuesday. As the storm strengthens will moving into the Southwest region, areas of snow will break out and become locally heavy from the Sierra Nevada to the Rockies in Colorado and the various ranges in northern Arizona and New Mexico.
The recent dry weather in Northern California might be sticking around for a while.
The Climate Prediction Center forecasts a 77% chance La Niña conditions will continue through the month of May.
The term La Niña refers to a correlation between ocean water temperatures and winter weather patterns.
Oftentimes, the weather event brings wetter than normal conditions to the Pacific Northwest and drier weather to Southern California.
Most Marin County residents will once again be allowed to turn on their sprinklers following a nearly three-month ban.
The Marin Municipal Water District board voted unanimously on Tuesday to allow the district’s 191,000 residents in central and southern Marin to use outdoor sprinklers and drip irrigation two days per week. Outdoor irrigation using potable water supplies had been banned since Dec. 1 in response to the drought.
In California, you pay big bucks for blue skies and sunshine filled days like we had today in San Jose.
But this morning, ABC7 News Meteorologist Drew Tuma explained why it’s not necessarily always a good thing.
“This is our 49th day in a row without a drop of rain in San Jose,” Tuma said. “So, that is the record longest stretch in our winter season that we have not seen a drop of rain in parts of the South Bay. So you can see how dry it has been this winter season.”
Local irrigation district officials and Merced County farmers are worried the current wet season isn’t wet enough to yield more than one acre-foot of surface water for many local farmers in the coming dry season.
During a Merced Irrigation District board meeting this week, officials discussed how to grapple with the expected water supply shortages this year due to the drought and water allocations from Lake McClure, which the MID board decides every year.
La Niña is expected to stick around for at least a little while longer, with the transition back to neutral conditions most likely not taking place until at least later in spring.
That’s according to the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center forecast, which was released late last week.
NOAA says there’s an approximately 77% chance that La Niña conditions will linger between March and May. Forecasters also favor the transition back to neutral occurring from June to August, giving that a 57% chance.
The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds.
A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
