A multibillion-dollar measure that would help build, repair, and maintain a wide variety of water infrastructure projects sailed through the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Wednesday.
California’s wild weather swings, from pounding rain to drought and from fires to floods, are widely expected to worsen as the climate warms. A new study shows just how severe things might get, and it’s not pretty.
Atmospheric rivers (ARs)—long, sinuous corridors of water vapor in motion in the lower half of Earth’s atmosphere—are a key aspect of California’s cool-season climate. ARs are in many cases pretty unremarkable when they’re out over the open ocean, visible on satellite as a narrow ribbon of cloudiness and (usually) light precipitation. But when these moisture plumes attach themselves to wintertime low pressure systems and make landfall along the California coast, the consequences can be dramatic—prolonged heavy rain and mountain snow often result, along with sometimes powerful winds.
Welcome back to Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. If this is your first edition, we’re glad to have you.
A proposed pipeline in Utah could divert approximately 86,000 acre feet of water annually from Lake Mead, but it will most likely not harm the overall water level in the reservoir.
The city received $4.565 million in state grant funding to expand its water reuse efforts, with most of the funds going toward its Pure Water Oceanside Project.
The city received the money from the Department of Water Resources through the state’s Integrated Regional Water Management Program. The program supports water reuse programs like Oceanside’s to increase the state’s water sustainability.
The White House’s Council on Environmental Quality today published its final rule to update the National Environmental Policy Act. The effective date is Sep. 14; however, it is subject to congressional review, which could delay or even prevent its implementation.
Though the public at large may continue to dispose of non-flushable wipes through their toilets, wastewater professionals are well aware of their propensity for clogging sewer systems and creating expensive issues. But even these professionals may not be aware of another water system problem that researchers are now tracing back to non-flushable wipes.
Precipitation extremes will likely intensify under climate change. However, much uncertainty surrounds intensification of high-magnitude events that are often inadequately resolved by global climate models. In this analysis, we develop a framework involving targeted dynamical downscaling of historical and future extreme precipitation events produced by a large ensemble of a global climate model. This framework is applied to extreme “atmospheric river” storms in California.
The San Diego County Water Authority’s asset management team recently celebrated the completion of a comprehensive condition assessment of more than 27 miles of the agency’s oldest pipelines. The assessment was performed in record time over just 16 months.
