After two dry years, the California is in desperate need of rain and snow. October marks the beginning of California’s new water year, which will run through Sept. 30 next year.
This also signals the transition from the long, dry summer months to the wetter time of year. But new research is showing a delay to California’s rainy season.
Bay Area water agencies have saved nearly 10 times more water than the state average in the past year.
Collectively, 58 Bay Area water districts saved an average of more than 10% in July 2021 compared with the same time last year, according to new statistics from the State Water Resources Control Board.
As Tracy Schohr goes about her day, water is always on her mind. She’s thinking of it as she rides an all-terrain vehicle around the pasture, looks up hay prices and weather forecasts, and collects data on grazing and invasive weeds for a scientific study. Schohr is a rancher and farmer in Gridley, California, where her family has raised beef cattle and grown rice for six generations. She also aids in scientific research to study drought and other agricultural issues with the University of California Cooperative Extension.
Federal officials project more bad news for the drought-stressed Colorado River, which provides water to Las Vegas and much of the Southwest.
The Bureau of Reclamation issued a report last week saying there is a high likelihood over the next few years that California, the river’s largest water user, will join Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico in seeing cuts to its allocation.
With severe drought strangling the West, the country’s largest water provider has embarked on a multibillion-dollar project that could help them cope with increasingly frequent shortages exacerbated by climate change.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California wants to recycle Los Angeles’ wastewater, creating a new supply stream that would significantly reduce the city’s reliance on imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River.
It would mark a new paradigm in Western water infrastructure. Instead of the dam-building and constructing massive pipelines and aqueducts to connect far-flung rivers to cities, Metropolitan’s proposal focuses on producing “new” water locally. And it seeks to utilize what has historically been wasted; Los Angeles’ wastewater is currently treated and discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
California’s energy future keeps pointing to Kern.
The latest 10-figure energy storage proposal in the county is a damlike “pumped hydro” project connected to the California Aqueduct that would store and release 3,500 gigawatt-hours of power per year on or near Tejon Ranch.
There’s no money yet for it or a similar proposal the same Los Angeles County engineering and development group disclosed in December that would be located next to Isabella Lake.
Since the start of the pandemic, thirsty Americans have drowned their sorrow in bottled water. Even before the coronavirus blew into all our lives, bottled water was, and has been for years, the No. 1 beverage in the United States, surpassing soft drinks as the choice of increasingly health-conscious consumers. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated things.
According to a recent report from the International Bottled Water Assn., sales of bottled water exploded last year “as consumers stocked up in order to stay home amid the coronavirus crisis.”
Standing atop a pockmarked red mesa, Rod Colwell looks out at an expanse of water that resembles a thin blue strip on the horizon. The Salton Sea, California’s largest lake, has come and gone at least five times in the last 1,300 years, most recently in 1905, when floodwaters from the Colorado River refilled its basin.
A mid-century resort destination, the lake has since become an environmental disaster zone.
Increasing evaporative demand is escalating summertime drought severity in California and the West, according to climate researchers.
Evaporative demand is essentially the atmosphere’s “thirst.” It is calculated based on temperature, humidity, wind speed and solar radiation. It’s the sum of evaporation and transpiration from plants, and it’s driven by warmer global temperatures, which can be attributed to climate change.
