Despite five spill gates open, Folsom Lake is rising once again and is nearly 70 percent full and Lake Shasta is nearly 80 percent full. Within weeks, the State Water Board will have to decide whether to ease tight water use restrictions.
As many as 13.1 million people living along U.S. coastlines could face flooding by the end of the century because of rising sea levels, according to a new study that warns that large numbers of Americans could be forced to relocate to higher ground.
The estimated number of coastal dwellers affected by rising sea level is three times higher than previously projected, according to the study published Monday in the science journal Nature Climate Change.
Department of Water Resources State Climatologist Michael Anderson talked to the dairy industry about the status of El Nino, which the majority of may have passed already. “So the tropical sea surface temperatures did reach their peak anomaly in November and have since been cooling,” Anderson says. “Beginning mid-February it starting cooling much more rapidly. We expect a transition towards neutral conditions in the latter part of spring and expectations are that we may transition to a La Nina condition by later in the fall and into winter.”
With California’s two largest reservoirs hitting historically average levels following a weekend of heavy storms, the state’s chief water regulator is cautiously optimistic that the drought may finally be relaxing its grip. If the wet weather continues, she said, the urban conservation mandates that turned lawns brown and have Californians taking shorter showers may be eased in the weeks ahead.
“In May, we’ll be either lifting it or changing it significantly,” Felicia Marcus, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, said Monday. “The more precipitation we get, the more snowpack we have, the better it is.”
They see the purchase as part of a water grab to send more water to Los Angeles through Gov. Jerry Brown’s $15.5 billion twin tunnels plan, at the expense of fish and wildlife. Either way, some 20,000 acres of island is moving toward a change of ownership that is stirring up waves in California’s water politics.
After months of negotiations, the Metropolitan Water District board authorized its general manager Tuesday to enter into a contract to buy the islands from the privately owned Delta Wetlands Properties. The deal, valued at some $200 million, is expected to wrap up soon.
A series of storms pushed California’s biggest reservoir past its historical average for mid-March this weekend and put the second largest one on track for doing the same by Monday afternoon, officials said.
Together the Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville reservoirs have the capacity to hold more than 8 million acre feet of water and after a wet weekend in Northern California, they were 79% and 70% full, respectively, by Monday morning, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
Citing potentially higher costs that would be passed on to customers, Orange County’s largest provider of water to homes and businesses is intensifying its opposition to a key supplier’s plan to buy desalinated water from a proposed $1 billion Huntington Beach plant.
Federal forecasters have downgraded their projections for the Colorado River after an unusually hot, dry February that has increased the likelihood of a first-ever shortage declaration at Lake Mead.
Forecasters are now predicting the arrival of shortage conditions at the nation’s largest man-made reservoir in January 2018. Just a month ago, forecasters expected Lake Mead to narrowly avoid the shortage line for at least the next two years.
Water from the rain-swollen Sacramento River is spilling over a 33.5-foot-high concrete wall and into a bypass built to divert flood water.
NOAA hydrologist Robert Hartman said Sunday the overflow is expected to reach a depth of three feet on Tuesday then start receding. It’s the first time water has spilled over the so-called Fremont Weir crest and into the Yolo bypass since 2012. The nearly 2-mile-long concrete wall is located about 8 miles northeast of Woodland.
Flying over the boundary of Yosemite National Park, the view from 10,500 feet spanned east across 30 miles of snow, ice and rock to the Sierra Crest. The west-facing flank was side-loaded with massive slabs of snow up as far as you could see. Frozen lakes looked like giant skating rinks.
As the plane banked to the right, we caught our first glimpse of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne. Looking toward Yosemite Valley, the top edge of Half Dome was visible, its colossal escarpment jutting into the sky.
