After years of punishing drought, a historic winter snowpack is bringing a reprieve to the Colorado River Basin and the nation’s largest reservoirs.
The US Bureau of Reclamation announced Thursday that this winter’s rain and the projected runoff from above-normal snowfall is expected to boost its water releases this year from Lake Powell to Lake Mead by 2.5 million acre-feet.
The states of the Lower Colorado River Basin have traditionally played an oversized role in tapping the lifeline that supplies 40 million people in the West. California, Nevada and Arizona were quicker to build major canals and dams and negotiated a landmark deal that requires the Upper Basin to send predictable flows through the Grand Canyon, even during dry years. But with the federal government threatening unprecedented water cuts amid decades of drought and declining reservoirs, the Upper Basin states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico are muscling up to protect their shares of an overallocated river whose average flows have already dropped 20% over the last century.
For the first time since 2006, California officials have increased allocations from the vital State Water Project to 100% of requested supplies, as reservoirs across the state are nearing capacity and an epic snowpack has yet to melt.
An unusually wet winter brought unprecedented snowfall and a succession of heavy rainstorms, pulling much of the state out of a punishing years-long drought and transforming the year’s water outlook.
Olivenhain Municipal Water District’s 4S Ranch Water Reclamation Facility is the California Water Environment Association statewide 2022 Plant of the Year. The award was presented April 19 at CWEA’s Annual Conference in San Diego. The award acknowledges the facility’s accomplishments to increase water supply reliability by reducing imported water demand and plant operations.
A new satellite by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will soon provide more precise — and vital — data on how much water is available on Earth’s surface, allowing better forecasts for extreme weather conditions such as droughts and floods, and helping water resources managers and farmers to get a better picture of their water budget.
The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography or SWOT mission was launched in December 2022 from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
Rob Ford was watering his hay last October at his small Washington County, Utah, ranch when he realized the flow was weaker than usual. He called the irrigation manager who monitors the water levels.
“The water is really weak,” Ford said he told the irrigation manager. “Is that about what we are expecting today?”
Design is underway on the $500-million Donald C. Tillman Advanced Water Purification Facility, one of the largest potable reuse projects in the country.
Led by LA Sanitation and Environment (LASAN) and the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power (LADWP), the facility will be constructed via progressive design-build, with Jacobs serving as the lead contractor.
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
So says Matthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and he might as well be talking about California these days. As the planet continues to heat up, the state’s landscapes, watersheds and weather are shifting so fast it can be difficult to keep track.
The winter that wouldn’t quit showed up again in the Sierra Nevada region of California and Nevada on Tuesday.
The fast-moving, blustery storm wasn’t expected to last long, but it was enough to require chain controls on some trans-Sierra highways and add to staggering snowfall totals left by an exceptional series of winter storms.
As California’s wet winter has given way to warmer spring weather, the state’s record snowpack has begun to melt.
Though the accumulated snow still measures 249% of normal as of April 18, new satellite photos show that the white blankets enveloping mountains across the state have started to recede.
