El Niño, have you abandoned us?
After a super stormy stretch last week, San Diego County has warmed up and dried out. And the forecast for the coming week calls for a few spritzes locally, but that’s about it.
Has El Niño, the periodic phenomenon that shifts the storm track and holds promise of drought relief for parched California, left us in the lurch?
Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip in the House of Representatives, explained how the fight to get more water for farmers played out in the last session — a fight which ended with no resolution.
We encourage him to keep up that fight.
The congressman placed the defeat of a water bill at the feet of California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, saying the long-time senator pulled her support at the 11th hour, leaving no time for negotiations and thus, killing the bill. Feinstein blamed Republicans for the bill’s demise, saying she had never agreed to any part of the proposed legislation which would have moved more water out of the San Joaquin Delta to the Central Valley and also paved the way to develop more storage of water in the future. McCarthy said she pulled her support at the last moment, saying he was “blind-sided” by her action.
Meteorologists are unsure if the current El Niño weather patterns will provide enough rainfall to pull California out of its historic four-year drought. But we do know that things are trending that way after a wet December that marked the halfway point in the water year.
Particularly, the second quarter of the water year finished with the highest number of inches since 2010-11. From Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, Exeter Irrigation District reported 2.36 in October, 2.05 in November and 3.30 inches in December, for a total of 7.71 inches of rain. Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District showed a similar trend with .99 inches in October, 2.05 inches in November and 3.12 inches in December, for a total of 6.16 inches. But the real story was in Ivanhoe, where Ivanhoe Irrigation District reported 3.52 inches of rain in October, 1.73 inches in November and 2.48 inches in December, for a total of 7.73 inches of rain.
As robust storms continue to move through California, El Nino conditions in the Pacific Ocean are already starting to weaken, a National Weather Service expert says.
Sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that serve as a key fuel for the weather phenomenon are starting to cool, although a strong El Nino is expected to persist in the Northern Hemisphere through the winter, said Michelle Mead, a National Weather Service warning coordinator.
The current weather pattern, fed by a dominant subtropical southern jet stream, is typical for a strong El Nino winter, Mead said in an email.
U.S. lawmakers from California have more political turbulence ahead of them with the introduction Tuesday of a bill to settle a long-running San Joaquin Valley irrigation drainage dispute.
The legislation by Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, would implement a sweeping drainage settlement reached between the Obama administration and the Westlands Water District. It also reignites some of the same regional and partisan conflicts that have dogged past water bills.
It’s finally raining in California — just when we’d begun to think that it would never rain again. But the state is deep in water debt. Traditionally, California has depended on snowmelt for about a third of its water. The recent storms have gotten California’s snowpack up to slightly above average for this time of year, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to refill reservoirs.
This summer, as California was struggling through its most severe recent year of drought, two California members of Congress unveiled legislation meant to ease the pain.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Republican Rep. David Valadao introduced, separately and respectively, the California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2015 and the Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015. Though both are aimed primarily at their home state, the bills’ scope is West-wide.
A series of storms passing over Northern California are expected to drench residents in rain and dump up to 2 feet of snow on the northern Sierra Nevada, a precious water resource the state relies on in the spring, the National Weather Service said.
The storms are expected to bypass Southern California, according to the weather service.
Starting Tuesday night, the first of the storms is expected to reach from San Mateo to Sonoma before moving farther inland toward the Sierra Nevada. The region’s forests between the coast and the mountains could see up to eight inches of rain by Monday while the mountains could get 2 feet of snow, said Karl Swanberg, a forecaster with the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office.
I will admit, I was out of town during last week’s storms, attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but from what I heard while in Sin City our poor, dear coastal North County was all but obliterated.
“El Niño is here!” my wife texted me, saying the whole family was holed up and she was making chili. “I sure hope the lights don’t go out.”
I made light of her concern and received a stern rebuke: “You’re not here. You don’t what what it’s like. This is serious.”
It looks like this El Niño — which will rank among the strongest on record — has passed its peak in terms of tropical ocean temperatures, but it’s not going away anytime soon. In fact, the biggest El Niño impacts on the U.S., like rain and snow for California, are probably still to come.
The country has already started to feel the influence of El Niño with a recent spate of storms that dumped much-needed precipitation on California. The cold winter months are when El Niño holds sway over North American weather patterns, generally leading to cooler and wetter weather over the southern tier of the U.S. and warmer and drier conditions over the northern parts of the country and southern Canada.
