All of this means drought conditions will continue clobbering Southern California for the time being. That’s bad news for farmers like Chris Sayer of Petty Ranch in Ventura County. He grows citrus and avocado trees. Lately, the leaves on some plants have started going brown.
“A lot of these leaves look really stressed, you can see how the tips of them are all dried out,” Sayer explained as he walked past an avocado grove.
As if we needed more proof, the Sierra snow survey last week made clear that Californians must continue to conserve water while working to build a more reliable water system.
The snowpack is roughly normal in Northern California. But the situation is worse in Southern California, where El Niño was a bust, delivering half of normal rainfall.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California made the argument that the district’s email servers are often used for personal business, and are therefore the realm of private communications.
Even though the U-T asked only for official emails on government accounts, the district claimed emails sent by a government employee on an official account saying “what a disaster” would not be relevant to government activities.
Federal officials will say how much water some California farmers can expect to receive this year in one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement on Friday affects San Joaquin Valley farmers, spanning California’s interior from Stockton to Bakersfield. It is home to about one-third of California’s farmland. Because of drought, many of the farms in the last two years received no water from a vast system of reservoirs and canals.
It’s the last day of March, which means it’s the end of the six-month period during which Southern California receives most of its rain. So, during this El Niño winter, how much rain did the region get?
Not much at all. A number close to 100 would mean it had been a typical year for precipitation—and this year the L.A. area is still about 40 percentage points below that. With just a few hours left in March, it will be impossible to make that up.
Some water providers in northern California say that with near-normal northern Sierra snowpack, state water managers should “relax” conservation mandates for the region.
The comments come a day after the season’s last Sierra Nevada snowpack measurement and as the latest U.S. Drought Monitor report shows drought has eased slightly in northwest California. Extreme drought still covers 55 percent of the state and exceptional drought nearly 35 percent of California.
Ballot measure establishes in the California Constitution — above the reach of politicians, bureaucrats, special interests or judges — that the priorities of water use are: domestic use first, and irrigation use second.
A proposed California ballot measure funds water storage projects to address the state’s immediate water supply needs. The proposed Reallocation of Bond Authority to Water Storage Initiative also prioritizes water uses in California by putting people and growing food first in the California Constitution. For 25 years, politicians, bureaucrats, special interests and the courts have made other uses of water more important than domestic and irrigation uses.
As climate change has heightened concerns about the global decline of mangroves, a study released this week found that such ecosystems along the desert coast of Baja California may be more important than previously thought for keeping heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography discovered that despite their short and stunted appearance, mangroves in these desert locations had surprisingly high rates of sequestering carbon underground. In some cases, the ability was several times greater than that of lush mangroves in tropical locations.
The results of the annual California snow survey are in. Despite the huge increase from one year ago, snowpack is still below average for this time of year. This is a disappointing outcome after what seemed to be the best possible scenario for the state — a very strong El Niño festering in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Every month from January to May, a survey team from the California Department of Water Resources hikes to Phillips Station, high in the Sierra Mountains east of Sacramento.
While the northern part of California has seen encouraging levels of water in many of their reservoirs, Southern California is still mired in drought, so desperate for rain that we’ve even seeded the clouds with iodide in an attempt to coerce more precipitation out of them when El Niño alone wasn’t getting the job done. Now, as we approach the first day of April, the typical rainy season draws to a close and it looks like Southern California has had a solidly below average year, says KPCC.
