NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued their outlook for March late last week, with a colder month expected ahead for many areas of the nation. Below average temperatures are forecast from the Northeast southward through the Tennessee Valley and Southern Plains to the Gulf of Mexico. Warmer than normal temperatures are favored in the Southwest.
Gov. Gavin Newsom may be piloting a lifeboat that will rescue the sinking California Delta. Or he may be in water over his head on a doomed mission.
The governor gets angry with skeptics who say he’s being delusional. But history sides with the doubters.
“I love reading all that, ‘Hey, he’s naive. He’s being misled,'” Newsom recently told a forum sponsored by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, his voice rising with a touch of sarcasm.
“It means we’re doing something a little different.”
What a difference a year makes.
As the comparison of satellite images above shows, last year at this time California’s Sierra Nevada range was buried in snow. And even as recently as January of this year, snowpack was looking pretty good.
But since then, the jet stream has ferried storms north of California, causing the snowpack to shrivel — from about 150 percent of average last February down to just a little more than 50 percent now.
In a dramatic decision that could significantly impact Silicon Valley’s water supply, federal dam regulators have ordered Anderson Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Santa Clara County, to be completely drained starting Oct. 1.
The 240-foot earthen dam, built in 1950 and located east of Highway 101 between Morgan Hill and San Jose, poses too great of a risk of collapse during a major earthquake, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates dams, has concluded.
“It is unacceptable to maintain the reservoir at an elevation higher than necessary when it can be reduced, thereby decreasing the risk to public safety and the large population downstream of Anderson Dam,” wrote David Capka, director of FERC’s Division of Dam Safety and Inspections, in a letter to the Santa Clara Valley Water District on Thursday.
Scientists have documented how climate change is sapping the Colorado River, and new research shows the river is so sensitive to warming that it could lose about one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures continue to climb. Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found that the loss of snowpack due to higher temperatures plays a major role in driving the trend of the river’s dwindling flow. They estimated that warmer temperatures were behind about half of the 16% decline in the river’s flow during the stretch of drought years from 2000-2017, a drop that has forced Western states to adopt plans to boost the Colorado’s water-starved reservoirs.
San Luis Rio Colorado, Mexico — Under the red girders of a nondescript toll bridge, waves gently lapped coarse sands in a gritty corner of this northwestern Mexican border city.
“There is usually no water and vegetation, and the ground looks like this,” local conservationist Alejandra Calvo-Fonesca said, gesturing toward the dusty shoreline of the Colorado River.
For a few months this winter, residents welcomed an unexpected surge of water in the river – a phenomenon they had not experienced since the spring 2014 “pulse flow,” when the United States released 107,000 acre-feet of water into the Colorado River Delta over a two-month period. That seminal event brought revelers in droves, eager to celebrate the revival of a historic waterway that is not only the city’s namesake, but a source of pride for its people.
President Trump believes he “got it done” in fixing California’s troubled and contentious water system. What he actually produced is another wrecking-ball delay and a lawsuit to try to halt his lopsided solution.
The president found a dirt-dry corner of the Central Valley to sign documents that bless more pumping of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta water southward to farms and water agencies. His blessing at a campaign-style gathering in Bakersfield won’t immediately rev up water shipments, but it should underline how divisive and intractable he’s making a long-standing problem.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California sued the Trump administration on Thursday to block new rules that would let farmers take more water from the state’s largest river systems, arguing it would push endangered populations of delta smelt, chinook salmon and steelhead trout to extinction.
The federal rules govern how much water can be pumped out of the watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, which flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains to the San Francisco Bay and provide the state with much of its water for a bustling agriculture industry that supplies two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of its vegetables.
The EPA has made an initial determination that it will eventually set legal limits for levels of two key PFAS chemicals in drinking water, the agency announced Thursday.
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the “preliminary regulatory determination” announced Thursday is the last step before the Environmental Protection Agency proposes limits on the releases of the two chemicals in drinking water and groundwater supplies. That announcement could still be months away.
The chemicals at issue are perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), two of many within the class of chemicals called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Scientists have linked PFAS chemicals—common in nonstick coatings and firefighting foam—to health problems including higher cholesterol, birth defects, and cancer.
A day after President Trump visited the Central Valley to celebrate a boost in water for California farms, state officials sued to block the additional water deliveries.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra, in a lawsuit filed Thursday, maintains that new federal rules designed to increase pumping from the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta fail to protect salmon and other endangered fish in the delta estuary.
