You are now in California and the U.S. category.

With no fanfare President Obama signed a massive water infrastructure bill that would take the average person longer to read than Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” given that the average person is more apt to read the famous novel than suffer through the paper dump of such a bill. That said, the water officials I spoke with recently agreed that it’s a necessary first-step for California. If you’re interested, you can read it for yourself, starting at Subtitle J, Section 4001.

 

New rules floated by California water regulators would force utilities to sell less water at a time when it is becoming more difficult for them to raise customer rates, credit ratings agency Fitch said on Monday. “Water rates have risen faster than incomes. If this trend continues, Fitch would expect that overall rate flexibility – the ability for utilities to raise rates – could be tested,” it said in a note. California has been in the grip of a drought since 2013 that has cost the state’s agricultural economy billions.

Merced elected officials and community members alike gave the State Water Resources Control Board a tongue lashing Monday during a public hearing on the board’s Bay-Delta Plan. Officials called the state board members “the grim reaper,” “the assassin squad” and “domestic terrorists” for their proposal to send 40 percent of Merced River’s water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to boost salmon populations, which critics have characterized as a “water grab.” “Water is life in this region, and you appear to have no other purpose than to take that life away,” Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, said.

The weather has quieted down across California after last week’s soaking storm across the state. The setup involved several different factors that led to the significant rainfall event across the state, especially along the coast of northern and central California. For starters, a plume of moisture was observed extending from the tropics near Hawaii to northern California. This transport of high moisture content is referred to as a atmospheric river as I noted in the last blog and can be seen below. The persistent plume of moisture provided the fuel for the heavy rain.

This fall has seen a ridiculously persistent ridge of high pressure — which has driven the majority of the Gulf of Alaska storms north of the Central Coast over the past six years — give way to a trough of low pressure along the West Coast. This condition has allowed a plume of subtropical moisture, or an atmospheric river, that stretched past the Hawaiian Islands to bring abundant rainfall to San Luis Obispo County during the first half of December. In fact, above-average rainfall has fallen throughout the Central Coast since October.