Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday relaxed drought rules in California amid a winter season filled with atmospheric river storms, flooding and a massive Sierra Nevada snowpack — soaking conditions that followed three dry, grueling years that had been marked by water shortages, extreme wildfires and heat waves.
Members of Congress from six of the seven states that use Colorado River water are convening a new caucus. The group aims to help rally federal funding for water projects along a river that supplies 40 million people and is shrinking due to climate change.
Records keep piling up across Utah this winter.
Snowpack reached a new high after Thursday night’s storms. The snow water equivalent in Utah, or the amount of water the snow will release when its melts, sits at 26 inches as of Friday morning. That ties with the previous known record of 26 inches set on April 13, 1983, according to Utah Snow Survey data. And with the snow still falling, Friday is likely a new snowpack record.
With an exceptionally rainy season for California, much of the state is free from drought, including most of San Diego County, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Since the beginning of 2023, California has seen a record-setting amount of snow across the state, especially in the Sierra Nevada, setting up the state to close in on the records for the highest snow water equivalent, which was reached just over a decade ago.
Snow water equivalent is the amount of water that would result from melting the snowpack, according to the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s inundation isn’t going to change that.
How is this possible, given the unrelenting series of atmospheric river systems that have dumped near-record snowfall over the Sierra and replenished the state’s reservoirs?
The Imperial Valley, a vast grid of greens, browns and yellows, produces dozens of crops. But two visual features define the valley: open channels carrying water from the Colorado River and blocks of hay that tower above the irrigation channels.
Forage crops such as alfalfa, sudangrass and bermudagrass cover more than half the Imperial Valley’s farmland. “From the growers’ perspective, alfalfa is their best crop,” said Ali Montazar, University of California Cooperative Extension irrigation and water management advisor for Imperial, Riverside and San Diego counties.
Nearly 50 years after being filled, Lake Powell recently reached its lowest point.
Since then, the lake’s seasonal uptrend in water levels has begun.
Lake Powell hit a new low of 3520.46 feet on March 13, data from the Bureau of Reclamation shows.
However, the following eight days all saw more water flow into the lake than out of it, resulting in just under half a foot of rise in water levels. The increase is the first sustained gains the lake has seen since May of last year.
Hours after another storm soaked Southern California, LA County’s principal stormwater engineer Sterling Klippel stands at the base of the San Gabriel Dam, looking like a kid in a candy store. He gazes in awe at the thousands of gallons of stormwater rushing through this dam every second.
“Just this October, this facility was completely drained,” he says.
Recent wet weather is helping fill up the often-dry Twitchell Reservoir to a dramatically high level not seen in a quarter century.
As of Wednesday, the reservoir located about 10 miles east of Santa Maria, along the Northern Santa Barbara and South San Luis Obispo county line, measured at 57% capacity, a remarkable amount since it was only 1% capacity in early January.
