The punishing drought conditions afflicting most of California are expected to endure for months, climate experts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said Thursday.
There is a 60% chance, NOAA experts said, of a La Niña event this winter — conditions that would likely bring about a cool and very dry winter.
As the sun began to rise over Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village neighborhood, the headlights of a city work truck brought into view utility official Shiloh Jones’ target: wasted water.
Jones, part of Santa Rosa’s newly formed “water waste patrol,” had spotted a puddle on the sidewalk and traced it to a runaway irrigation system in a bed of pink roses.
Moving both irrigation and our limited natural rainfall through your yard into storage areas via the use of various landscaping features borrow Mother Nature’s engineering. This is especially important during hot, dry summer months. If your yard is perfectly flat, you must move soil and features around to create more water-retaining contour areas.
Drought has long fueled tensions between growers, who depend on the water for irrigation, and the Klamath Tribes, who hold two protected fish species as sacred.
As he set goals last Thursday for the Bay Area to conserve water, Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged the lack of metering provides no sense of how much water is used by California agriculture. Growers in the Watsonville area in Santa Cruz County, however, are metered, and the meters have resulted in significant water conservation.
A California power plant likely will shut down for the first time ever because of low water during a prolonged drought, squeezing the state’s very tight electricity supplies, state officials said yesterday.
The Edward Hyatt power plant, an underground facility next to Oroville Dam in Butte County, is expected to close in August or September, said John Yarbrough, California Department of Water Resources assistant deputy director of the State Water Project.
The North American monsoon has returned to Colorado, and the rain has brought some much-needed relief to some of the driest parts of the state — after multiple back-to-back years of almost no summer rain. “We call it the no-soon, because we just didn’t get anything,” said Bill Trampe, a third-generation rancher from Gunnison in southwestern Colorado. Gov. Jared Polis has recently declared a drought emergency for the region and the rest of western Colorado.
Signing an Executive Order on July 8, California (CA) Governor Gavin Newsom has asked Californians to voluntarily cut their water use by 15% to mitigate severe drought conditions across the state, and to protect water reserves and help maintain critical flows for fish and wildlife.
During the last drought from 2012 to 2016, Californians were ordered to cut their water use by an average of 25% statewide. With the new drought emergency declarations, there is still no statewide emergency or mandate to reduce water use.
The request applies to businesses and agriculture as well as residents. Meeting the target could save enough water to supply 1.7 million average households for one year, according to state officials. Fifty counties, about 42% of the state’s population, are now under drought emergencies — essentially everywhere except San Francisco and urban Southern California.
Global warming has already left its mark on the backbone of California’s water supply, and represents a growing threat to its first developed agricultural region, state experts have warned in a new study.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta fuels California’s $3 trillion economy, including its $50 billion agricultural industry, sustains more than 750 plant and animal species and supplies 27 million people with drinking water.
Climate change is exacerbating droughts and accelerating the transformation and decline of California’s native forest and aquatic ecosystems. As a state, we are poorly organized to manage these effects, which need extensive focused preparation. We need to adapt (and we will make mistakes in doing so). Our human, economic and environmental losses will be much greater, however, if we manage poorly because of delay, complacency or panic.
