Agriculture already monopolizes 90 percent of global freshwater—yet production still needs to dramatically increase to feed and fuel this century’s growing population. For the first time, scientists have improved how a crop uses water by 25 percent without compromising yield by altering the expression of one gene that is found in all plants, as reported in Nature Communications.
It’s been an usually dry winter, and last weekend’s atmospheric river was welcome for the snow and rain it brought. But what did it mean for California’s water supply? In truth? Not much. As of last week, this winter was on track to be one of the warmest and driest on record. So, no one would blame you if you breathed a sigh of relief when that freezing cold storm came through and dumped rain and snow on our parched state. But look at the numbers and you’ll see that California’s far from recovered.
When it rains, it pours — and that has San Francisco water officials looking into charging property owners a new “storm-water fee” to help with the upkeep of the city’s aging sewer system. The first target will be the owners of vacant lots. “It’s a tax on rain,” fumed Jason Sanders, who was just notified that effective July 1, he will be assessed $31.46 a month for runoff on his vacant lot on Ashbury Street.
Jim Cuming is a retired farmer whose grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland. Edward Cuming got 160 acres in Arizona’s Yuma Valley from the federal government. Jim Cuming said the land was as undeveloped as a dry riverbed. In order to survive and develop the farm, his grandfather had to make a living. “This Laguna Dam project opened up. So they moved up to the dam and he worked on the dam there as a carpenter,” he said. That means Cuming’s grandfather helped build the dam that made it possible to irrigate his own farmland.
Monday’s snow survey at Phillips Station tells a more positive story than it did before the recent storm, but totals are still well below average. Despite the recent late-winter storm that brought much-needed snow to the Sierra Nevada, the snow water equivalent (SWE) is 9.4 inches, which is 39 percent of normal for early March. “California has unquestionably experienced a dry winter this year, with a near-record dry February,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth.
Welcome drifts of fresh snow awaited California’s water managers on their late-winter survey of the vital Sierra Nevada snowpack Monday after a massive winter storm slowed the state’s plunge back into drought. The storm piled up to 8 feet (2.4 meters) of new snow in the mountains from late last week through the weekend, forcing Department of Water Resources officials to postpone the measurement for a few days.
Two tunnels, one or none? The question continues to swirl around plans to perform major surgery on the sickly heart of California’s water system. Confronted with a shortage of funding, state officials announced last month that they would move ahead with the construction of one giant water tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta rather than two. But the announcement did little to settle the fate of the project, which Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration considers vital to sustaining water deliveries to one of the country’s richest agricultural regions and the urban sprawl of Southern California.
Drought conditions have returned to much of the Desert Southwest and southern Plains due, in part, to a dry winter that left the land parched in several states.Using data from the U.S. National Drought Monitor, NASA compiled a map that shows the areas of the country that have fallen back into some of the worst drought categories just nine months after 95 percent of the nation was drought-free. The map, using data acquired Feb. 27, shows extreme drought taking over parts of Texas and the Desert Southwest, with moderate or severe drought seen in the Southeast, northern Plains and parts of California.
More rain and snow is on the way. It’s expected to be dry today, Tuesday and through Wednesday night in the South County with the high hitting 70 degrees before cooling off again, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). But then Wednesday night another storm will move into the area bringing up to a quarter of an inch rain to Manteca through Friday. Yosemite Valley is expected to receive a half inch of rain.
After one year of torrential respite, drought may have returned to California, and with it, a renewal of the state’s perpetual conflict over water management. State and federal water systems have told farmers not to expect more than a fifth of their paper allocations, the state Water Resources Control Board is weighing a new regime of mandatory conservation, and supporters of more reservoirs are complaining about the glacial pace of spending $2.7 billion set aside in a water bond for more storage.
