It’s been a tough few years for Northern California, disaster-wise. The north state has been hammered in quick succession by catastrophic drought, intense flooding and rampaging wildfires. While it’s reassuring to know such extreme events are historically uncommon, they’re also not simply a result of bad luck.
Scientists have only recently begun to understand that they share a common natural link.
Little rain has fallen in California since the start of the water year on Oct. 1, putting signs of drought back on the map.
The federal Drought Monitor Map, a mechanism to measure drought that’s mainly used in agriculture, shows 81% of the state as abnormally dry. A small portion (4%) of the map near the Arizona border is designated as “moderate drought.”
As climate change continues to sap the Colorado River’s water, some users face serious legal risks to their supplies, according to a new analysis by researchers in Colorado and New Mexico.
Declining flows could force Southwest water managers to confront long-standing legal uncertainties, and threaten the water security of Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico.
While California scored the only “A” in a new environmental assessment of the nation’s beaches, the state’s sole shortcoming in the report pulls back the curtain on a growing conflict over whether beachfront homeowners should be allowed to protect their property against rising seas.
Some argue that protecting coastal homes, roads and train tracks with boulders and other types of seawalls is the most practical way to deal with sea-level rise. But the Surfrider Foundation, which issued the new report, is among those who believe that approach should be avoided. It says the result is the elimination of beaches as the ocean washes away sand and waves pound directly onto the armoring.
Mojave Water Agency (MWA) cut the ribbon on a $4.3 million, clean-energy system last week after yeas of planning. The new hydroelectric project will take advantage of water from the California Aqueduct to the district’s groundwater basin in the Victor Valley by converting existing pressure into electrical energy. The process will provide a near net-neutral status in its energy consumption — a byproduct that will save MWA millions of dollars over the next 30 years and provide numerous environmental benefits.
A gas-burning generator at a Huntington Beach power plant could keep firing until as late as 2023, following a state commission’s recent vote.
The AES facility was scheduled to close by the end of next year, but the California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously last week to extend its operating life for up to three additional years.
Pushing back the plant’s retirement would delay remediation of the site, as well as prolong the practice of “once-through” cooling — a process that uses seawater to cool the coastal energy transformers, which can kill fish and other marine life.
From 2011 to 2016, California experienced five years of extreme drought, during which numerous high temperature records were broken. These hot, dry years were followed by the extremely wet winter of 2016 -2017, when, from October to March, an average of 31 inches of rain fell across the state, the second highest winter rainfall on record.
All that rain meant a bumper crop of grasses and other vegetation, which, as hot and dry conditions returned, likely contributed to a combustible mix of fuels that played a role in the severe fires that have swept California in the past two years.
On September 10, 2019, at the 34th Annual WateReuse Symposium in San Diego, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a draft National Water Reuse Action Plan for public comment—containing 46 proposed actions, to be accomplished by a mix of federal, state, private, local and private stakeholders, in order to promote 10 strategic objectives. For many in the water sector, this was a welcome recognition—a validation, if you will, of a new movement and set of practices and technologies that will impact drinking water, energy, agriculture and industry throughout the nation.
Solar panels and wind turbines are lifelines to any non-apocalyptic version of the future. They’ll help us keep the lights on, the air breathable, and the planet inhabitable. But while the climate and health benefits of wind and solar are well known, they have another, underappreciated feature that could come in handy in our inevitably warmer, drier future: They don’t rely on water.
Ag Alert: What types of solutions are being built into the plans to bring a basin into sustainability?Ravazzini: As of this date, DWR has not received any plans for review. What DWR is looking for upon submission of the plan is that a GSA (groundwater sustainability agency) has developed a path toward sustainability. How GSAs achieve that goal will differ from basin to basin. One of the state government’s roles is to support these local solutions.
