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Sierra Runoff to Refill LA’s Silver Lake Ahead of Schedule

/in /by /U.S. News & World Report

Residents of the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles will get their lake back months early, thanks to the massive Eastern Sierra snowpack. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drained the 96-acre open-air reservoir in 2015 for construction to divert drinking water to a new, covered reservoir that complies with updated storage regulations. The department had planned to begin refilling Silver Lake Reservoir in May, using local water sources in a process that would have taken about 12 months.

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Sacramento’s Rainfall Year In Top 10 When It Comes To Wettest Ever

/in /by /Sacramento Beeby Bill Lindelof

The 2016-17 rainfall season is the ninth wettest on record for Sacramento – and more precipitation is on the way Friday. Nearly 30 inches of rainfall has fallen in Sacramento, 29.93 inches to be exact. Northern California rainfall has swollen rivers, filled reservoirs and ended drought conditions. “The main reason it’s been so wet is that we’ve had double the atmospheric river events that we typically see in a water year,” said Brooke Bingaman, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.

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Another Reservoir Overflows As Northern California Receives More Rain

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby Joseph Serna

The milestones marking California’s wettest year in decades continued to pile up Thursday, as state water officials said a reservoir high up in the Sierra Nevada has exceeded capacity for the first time in 21 years. Lake Davis began overflowing onto its earth-and-rock spillway Wednesday after a couple of light rainstorms this week, Department of Water Resources officials said. “While DWR does not anticipate problems downstream of the reservoir near Portola, flows below the lake could exceed what residents, businesses and anglers have experienced over the past three decades,” the agency said Thursday.

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How California Is Saving Rainwater For A Sunny Day

/in /by /Popular Science by Mary Beth Griggs

Outside the window of Helen Dahlke’s office, at the University of California at Davis, the clouds hang low, their edges seeming to brush against the building. It’s raining intensely, an unusual event in a perpetually parched state suffering from a five-year drought. “It looks like the end of the world,” says Dahlke happily. As a hydrologist and professor who studies how water flows over and through rock, soil, fields, and farms, she is something of an H2O whiz.

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Engineers Warn of ‘Significant Risk’ if California’s Oroville Dam Isn’t Fixed

/in /by /The Wall Street Journalby Jim Carlton

California faces “a very significant risk” if state officials fail to repair a damaged spillway at Lake Oroville before the November onset of next winter’s rainy season, a team of engineering consultants has warned the reservoir’s operator.

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NASA Grant To Explore California’s Drought Conditions

/in /by /10 Newsby Anthony Cave

Could NASA satellites help with decision making during drought conditions? That’s what researchers at the University of Colorado are trying to figure out. The school received a $1.4 million grant from NASA on March 6 to study California’s drought conditions using NASA satellite data. “California is such as interesting place to study water, because of the cycles of drought to floods,” lead researcher Noah Molotch said. Molotch, along with a couple other scientists, are collaborating with the California Department of Water Resources on the research. According to the grant terms, the study is expected to run through January 2020.

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Toilet To Tap: Brewery Creates Beer From Recycled Wastewater

/in /by /Live Science (New York)by Kasey Deamer

A Southern California brewery has put sustainability on tap with a new brew made exclusively from wastewater, according to news reports. This month, Stone Brewing unveiled its “Full Circle Pale Ale,” which was made using recycled water from San Diego’s Pure Water project, reported Mashable. This was all done in the name of sustainability, the brewery said, noting how the historic drought in California affected the state’s water sources.

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Rosarito Beach Project Faces Uncertain Future

/in /by /desalination.biz

The company’s 10-K filing – its company annual performance report published on 16 March 2017 – states: “Both the exchange rate for the Mexico peso relative to the dollar and general macroeconomic conditions in Mexico have declined since the US presidential election in November 2016. These changes have adversely impacted the estimated construction, operating, and financing costs for the project.”

 

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California May Face Significant Risk From Dam

/in /by /Associated Press (As published by The Mercury News - San Jose)by Ellen Knickmeyer

California is not just fighting nature as it attempts to repair the nation’s tallest dam, badly damaged last month by surging storm waters. It’s also racing the clock. Safety experts say there is no time for delay in a state plan to restore the 770-foot Oroville Dam, and they warn California would face a “very significant risk” if a damaged spillway is not in working order by fall, the start of the next rainy season.

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Agency: California Farmers Will Get Bump in Irrigation Water

/in /by /Associated Press (As published by US News)

Farmers in a vast agricultural region of California will receive a significantly greater amount of irrigation water this summer compared to past drought years — but not their full supply, federal officials announced Wednesday. Record winter rain and snow in some parts of California have put a major dent in the five-year drought, boosting reservoirs with irrigation water for use during hot, dry months. Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley will receive 65 percent of what they expect from a federal system of reservoirs and canals, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials said.

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