Fort Bragg, long powered by timber, fishing and tourist economies, is getting notice statewide for its push to create monetary green out of the Blue Economy, state officials said. Blue Economy is the term coined for a nationwide trend seeking revenue from the ocean without extracting its resources or doing things that cause serious environmental harm.
Last week, California announced initial allocations of just 5 percent of requested supplies from the State Water Project in the coming year. That was actually an improvement from last December, when the state called for zero allocations for 2022. The eventual allotment for this year eventually rose to 5 percent.
Winter is off to a running start in California, after a pair of December storms dropped several feet of mountain snow and soaking low-elevation rains across much of the state. Parts of the Sierra Nevada have recorded more than double the expected snowpack for the time of year, and another significant storm could be on the way this weekend.
An expanded Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program began last month as a result of the unexpected “bomb cyclone” in October 2021 that hit North America’s West Coast, followed by another atmospheric river less than a month later that caused severe flooding in Washington.
“Climatologically, November and December can bring some of the worst floods for that part of the world,” said research meteorologist Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Ralph leads the AR Recon program, along with Vijay Tallapragada, Ph.D., Senior Scientist at NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center, in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the California Dept. of Water Resources, NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, and the U.S. Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron “Hurricane Hunters.”
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) is leading a letter signed by 14 other senators urging Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to help Western states survive what they are calling a “22-year mega-drought” that is threatening farms and ranches across the West. “The American West is in crisis. Across the major basins of the American West … farm and ranch families hang in the balance as they grapple with a 22-year mega-drought,” they warned.
So far, things are going well for Northern California heading into what is, on average, the busiest part of the rain and snow season. As of Monday morning, many locations around the region are reporting above-average rainfall totals since the water year began on Oct. 1. Downtown Sacramento has had close to 4 inches as of the most recent observation on Sunday.
Two atmospheric rivers (ARs) are forecast to make landfall along the US West Coast on 9 Dec and 12 Dec. The first AR is forecast to bring a short period of AR 1 conditions (based on the Ralph et al. 2019 AR Scale) to coastal Southern Oregon. The deterministic GFS and ECMWF have drastically different solutions for a developing area of low-pressure associated with the second AR, making it difficult to pinpoint the timing, IVT intensity, and landfall location.
Arizona is preparing to enter for the first time into a Tier 2A shortage for the lower Colorado River basin, with cuts beginning at the start of the new year. For the state, this means a reduction of 21% of Arizona’s Colorado river supply and about 9% of the state’s total water use, according to the Central Arizona Project. Cities that use the Colorado river will see a 3% reduction while tribal supplies will be reduced by 7%. And for the users of CAP water, there will no longer be excess water and agriculture pools from the Colorado River.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas across the West, and for the parched mega-drought region, the December snow is a welcome gift. With back-to-back-to-back winter storms across the West, the snowpack is thriving. Parts of the Sierra and the Pacific Northwest are seeing above-average snowpack for this time of year. In Central California, the Sierra stands at 200% of normal for snowpack average to date.
