In a boost for California’s water supply, a series of recent storms that blanketed the Sierra Nevada in snow has built the state’s snowpack to its highest December level since 2015.
The snowpack — a key source of the state’s water supply — measured 113% of average this week, roughly 40% higher than the snowpack during the same time in 2018, according to the Department of Water Resources.
Even before he was sworn into office, Gov. Gavin Newsom threw his weight behind a series of tentative deals, brokered by his predecessor, that were intended to bring lasting peace to California’s never-ending battles over water and endangered fish.
The deals, designed to reallocate water from the state’s major rivers, have yet to be finalized a year later.
Now, one of the nation’s most powerful farm irrigation districts says it will back out of the agreements completely if Newsom follows through with a pledge to sue President Donald Trump over a federal plan to pump more water to farmers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the fragile estuary on Sacramento’s doorstep.
In the very early years of the 20th century, Western leaders had big dreams for growth, dreams tied to bringing water from the Colorado River across mountains and deserts.
In dividing up the river, they assigned more water to users than the system actually produces. The consequences of the so-called “structural deficit” are being felt today, as states sweat through difficult river diplomacy to prop up water levels in reservoirs.
Wild weather will bear down on the holiday season with a soaking atmospheric river for the West, drenching tropical downpours for the South and soaring temperatures in the East. For most, dreams of a white Christmas will remain just that.
An atmospheric river is moving to the West Coast, likely to bring menacing flooding, heavy mountain snow, and damaging winds.
Atmospheric rivers are narrow corridors of the upper atmosphere that transport intense moisture from a large body of water onto land.
The San Jerardo housing cooperative in Salinas is home to 60 farm workers and their families. I am its general manager.
The people in my housing cooperative breathe pesticides when neighboring fields are sprayed. When agricultural practices harm wildlife, we see the change in our backyards. The people of San Jerardo also have a stake in moving toward more sustainable agricultural practices.
A rather quiet gathering of those who control the most precious resource in the West happened on the Strip last week.
It was the annual Colorado River Water Users Association Conference.
U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Tuesday called for more federal money and oversight to shore up the nation’s aging dams following an Associated Press investigation that found scores of potentially troubling dams located near homes and communities across the country.
My personal and professional lives collided in the middle of the night at the end of October when my neighbor pounded on our front door.
Had we received the warnings of the growing Getty fire? We hadn’t. Our neighbor shouted that mandatory evacuations had been issued for much of our Pacific Palisades community in Los Angeles.
The heavy management of river systems in California is causing a compression in the migration timing of Chinook salmon to the point that they crowd their habitats. As a result, they might miss the best window for entering the ocean to grow into adults. Currently, less than 3% of wetland habitat remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
