SANDAG crews continue to work on the San Dieguito Lagoon Restoration project in Del Mar, which will convert 84 acres — or approximately 63 football fields — of former agricultural fields to saltwater wetlands.
Let’s dredge up the project’s goals and progress for the portion of the lagoon system east of Interstate 5 at El Camino Real and Villa De La Valle known as W-19.
After years of dealing with drought conditions, the region’s water supply is in good shape, ready to meet the demand for 2024, according to the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA).
“Last year we were starting Water Year ‘23 in really heavy drought conditions with state mandatory reductions and this year there’s no mandatory water use reductions… there’s a lot of water in storage in Northern California, reservoirs are full,” said Efren Lopez, water resources specialist with SDCWA.
That’s because of all the storms over the past year that drenched California, delivering above-average amounts of rain and snow with the Sierra snowpack reaching 200% above average.
This October marks 20 years since San Diego cut a famous deal that protected it from drought but paved the way for putting a high price on otherwise free water from the Colorado River.
The hard-fought deal – called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, or QSA – dramatically lowered how much water California takes each year from this river that makes life possible in seven western U.S. states and northern Mexico. It ensured, for the first time, that California wouldn’t use any more than its share. And it achieved that by putting a cap, for the first time, on how much water the farmers in Imperial Valley could take. Water officials would now meticulously count every gallon that once haphazardly emptied from farm fields into the Salton Sea. Today, that massive lake is in danger of becoming a massive public health and ecological disaster.
San Diego County water officials said Monday the region should have plenty of water in the coming year, even though there is lingering concern about water coming from the Colorado River basin.
The San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) said local customers are reaping the benefits from decades of effort to diversify and secure water supplies.
“Because we’ve invested. We’ve done the work — in our infrastructure, in our reliability and in conservation,” said Efren Lopez, a water resource manager with the SDCWA.
The San Diego County Water Authority says higher than expected rainfall amounts and an anticipated El Niño are keeping levels high.
The outlook for the upcoming water year in San Diego County is good, in terms of supply, the County Water Authority said, but that doesn’t mean San Diegans should decrease their conservation efforts.
Efren Lopez, a water resources specialist with the County Water Authority, told ABC 10News that water supply for the county looks good for 2024 in comparison to 2023, when the state was dealing with a severe drought.
But then things turned around.
As the official 2024 California water year began Sunday, the San Diego County Water Authority predicted “reliable supplies” thanks to full reservoirs and and continued investment in desalination and other diversified sources.
At the end of August 2023, reservoirs in the county had an additional 137,400 acre-feet of storage, an 80% increase from the same time in 2022 amid drought conditions. And compared to recent years, the condition of the Colorado River is improved and California will not face supply restrictions.
Current El Niño conditions appear likely to become comparable to the “great” El Niño of 1997-98, according to an experimental prediction system used by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research.
“Our forecast system has shown that it can do a remarkably good job of accurately hindcasting past El Niño events when we’ve tested it using historical data, which gives us high confidence in this forecast,” said NCAR scientist Stephen Yeager, who helped lead the modeling effort.
The Southwest monsoon has wrapped up, and it featured a weird split of record dry conditions in parts of Arizona and soaking rain, including from the remnants of a former hurricane in California, Nevada and other states.
To understand where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve come from. That’s the idea researchers were pursuing with the recent geochemical analysis of a single stalagmite from a cave in Grand Canyon National Park.
More specifically, they measured the ratio of stable isotopes in calcite deposits within the stalagmite to help predict how the volume of groundwater aquifers may be affected by a warming climate.
