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OPINION: California Doesn’t Let a Drought go to Waste

/in /by /The Christian Science Monitor

Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands recently announced a startling global statistic. About two-thirds of the world’s population experience a severe water scarcity for at least one month during the year. About half of these 4 billion people live in India and China. And the country that comes in third for periodic water shortages? The United States, with California as drought central.

Yet something just as startling should be noted about California and how its 39 million people have responded to a long and historic dry spell.

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Is California’s Drought Now the Rule, not the Exception?

/in /by /Futurity (Rochester, N.Y.)by By Ker Than-Stanford

Atmospheric patterns resembling those that appeared during the latter half of California’s ongoing multiyear drought are becoming much more common, a new study finds.

“The current record-breaking drought in California has arisen from both extremely low precipitation and extremely warm temperature,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, associate professor of earth system science at Stanford University.  “In this new study, we find clear evidence that atmospheric patterns that look like what we’ve seen during this extreme drought have in fact become more common in recent decades.”

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El Niño Helped, but no Panacea, as California Battles Drought

/in /by /Total Landscape Care (Tuscaloosa, Ala.)by By David Rountree

In the nine months since the effective date of California Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandate of a 25-percent reduction in water use in urban areas of the state, reports from the 400-plus suppliers of that water indicate they’ve fallen just short of the goal.

From June 2015 through February of this year, cumulative water savings among the urban suppliers totaled 23.9 percent, according to California’s State Water Resources Control Board.

 

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Things to know: The next Step in California’s Drought

/in /by /Associated Press (As Published by Napa Valley Register)by By Scott Smith

Some residents of drought-stricken California who let their lawns turn brown and took shorter showers could soon get some relief, while others may continue to feel the pain. In the coming months, state officials will undertake a monumental task of rewriting conservation orders for a fifth year of drought.

The challenge for state regulators will be treating millions of residents fairly, unlike the El Nino storms that soaked Northern California with considerably more rain and snow this winter than the drier Southern California.

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Ventura County Supervisors Protest Water Rate Change, But Protest May be Moot

/in /by /Ventura County Star by By Kathleen Wilson

Ventura County supervisors are opposing a proposed rate change by the giant Metropolitan Water District, saying the measure would undermine conservation and is unconstitutional.

Metropolitan now bases rates for water treatment wholly on the volume purchased. The district’s board is set to act next week on separate charges to cover fixed costs of building, running and maintaining its plants.

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El Nino-Induced Snow Proves to be ‘Disappointing’ for Drought-Stricken California

/in /by /AccuWeather by By Kristina Pydynowski

Much-needed mountain snow and rain returned to California this winter, but fell short of expectations amid a super El Niño.

The official snow season for California’s Sierra Nevada came to an end at the start of April on a below-normal note and one that AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Ken Clark called “disappointing.” The amount of water stored in the snow for the entire mountain chain averaged 14 percent below normal on April 1, according to the California Cooperative Snow Surveys.

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A Delta Tunnel Project’s Lofty Ambitions Have Been Scaled Back

/in /by /Los Angeles Times by By Bettina Boxall

Only a close look at the Middle River revealed anything amiss in this part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Instead of flowing north toward San Francisco Bay, as nature intended, the Middle was headed south. On the other side of Bacon Island, the Old River was doing the same thing.

The backward flow of these two obscure channels is at the core of a proposal to build California’s biggest water project in decades: a $15-billion diversion and tunnel system in the delta, the ecologically failing hub of the state’s waterworks.

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Drought-Stricken California Ponders Future of Conservation

/in /by /Associated Press (As Published by Merced Sun-Star) by By Scott Smith

Taking a regional approach to saving water in California’s drought, state regulators suggest relaxing or dropping conservation orders for El Nino-soaked Northern Californians, while keeping in place strict rules for residents of drier Southern California.

Officials on Monday will launch a discussion about the best approach to saving water as California’s drought modestly improves, but clearly hasn’t ended as it stretches into a fifth year.

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Calif. Delta Smelt Lawsuit Tossed as Moot

/in /by /Courthouse News Serviceby By ELIZABETH WARMERDAM

A federal judge dismissed an environmental lawsuit challenging California’s now-dismantled emergency salinity barrier across a channel of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in response to the drought.
U.S. District Judge Lawrence O’Neill ruled on March 31 that the complaint from the Center for Environmental Science, Accuracy and Reliability (CESAR) is moot.
The 750-foot-wide rock barrier was built in May 2015 as a temporary fix to prevent additional saltwater from fouling freshwater supplies to approximately 25 million people, according to the defendant California Department of Water Resources.

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California Drought Patterns Are Recurring… And ‘Triple R’ May Be To Blame

/in /by /Nature World News by By Jhay Are See

It looks like California will have to be extra resilient in the coming years, as a new study revealed that the recent droughts threatening the Golden State will become more common and will possibly bring more extreme dry spells in the future. This is due to a blocking ridge, dubbed the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” that deflects storms from the state.

“The epic drought is far from over. These scientists show that the frequency of atmospheric circulation patterns that worsen drought conditions has increased over the long-term,” said Anjuli Bamzai.

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