NASA is breaking down the effects of El Nino across California and what the state should expect next. The agency says there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that warm El Nino water is still present in the Pacific, so there is still time to get some good El Nino storms in both Southern California and Northern California.
California Democrats are so predictable, they’re like a broken record playing a bad song over and over. Every election cycle they propose “new” legislation or hype their “prior efforts” to help solve our state’s water-supply crisis.
This time Sen. Dianne Feinstein is proposing “new” legislation that would do nothing to solve the underlying causes of California’s water supply crisis – rigid, scientifically groundless, environmental regulations that so far this year have allowed enough water to flow to the ocean to fill six Millerton lakes, about 3 million acre-feet.
Unless you’ve been hibernating with Punxsutawney Phil this winter, chances are that you know about El Niño, a periodic warming in surface ocean temperatures across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean, which has been altering weather across the globe. The effects have ranged from wildfire-causing droughts in Indonesia to ocean storms off the coast of Chile, with waves massive enough to rush up onto land and flip an SUV.
An El Niño’s effect on weather can be complex, and in some cases didn’t behave as predicted. In drought-ravaged California, for example, meteorologists thought the ocean temperature phenomenon probably would bring above-average rain to the southern part of the state in January, with a lesser chance of precipitation in the north.
Earlier this month a report from California’s agriculture department found that even despite severe drought conditions, California’s farmers had record sales of $53.5 billion in 2014.
“With the punishing drought entering its fifth year, the figures are sure to stoke tensions between farmers on one side and, on the other, city-dwellers and environmentalists, who complain they are being forced to make greater sacrifices than growers,” wrote the Associated Press in an article about the report.
After a seven-month legal battle, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California on Friday released the names and addresses of thousands of Los Angeles residents who received cash rebates for replacing their lawns.
Nearly three dozen Angelenos received rebates of $10,000 or more, the data show. The largest single rebate among the nearly 3,400 Los Angeles residents who received a payout was $25,000 for the owner of a single-family home in Brentwood.
Water savings by Californians continued to dip in January for the sixth straight month, raising questions about whether conservation efforts will satisfy Gov. Jerry Brown’s aggressive 25 percent reduction target.
Regulators announced Thursday that residents cut water use by 17.1 percent last month when compared with the same time period in 2013, the baseline year under the mandate.
This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.
“During an El Niño, the precipitation averaged out over the entire globe doesn’t change that much, but there can be big changes to where it happens. You end up with this interesting observation where you get both floods and droughts just by taking the usual precipitation pattern and doing a shift,” said George Huffman, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
California has experienced, over the past few years, its most severe drought on record. In response to worsening conditions, Governor Jerry Brown announced the first ever statewide mandatory reduction in urban water use in April 2015. This calls on Californians to reduce their use of potable (safe for drinking and food preparation) urban water by 25% from pre-drought levels. Californians are meeting the mandate.
California is entering its fifth consecutive year of drought, with many areas experiencing “exceptional” drought levels. While rain and snowfall have improved recently, water storages remain low and the long-term drought signal has not changed.
Residents are starting to fall behind California’s mandatory 25 percent water conservation target, state officials said Thursday. As of January, water users in California’s cities and towns have used 24.8 percent less water since mandatory conservation began last year, the State Water Resources Control Board said. The latest numbers mean that for the first time since June, urban Californians missed the overall mandatory water-conservation target.
Water district officials from California’s Central Valley are looking to a deeply fractured Congress for relief from what they expect to be a third straight year of no federal allocations.
Westlands Water District general manager Tom Birmingham compares the drought-related water shortages bedeviling valley communities to the drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich.
