It was supposed to be one of the wettest Februaries on record. Instead, by one measure at least, it became the hottest.
At an average high temperature of 77.5, this February sailed almost two degrees above the previous record set in 1954, according to a Times analysis.
The window is closing on California’s opportunity to have El Niño put a significant dent in the state’s epic drought — which one study has shown to be the most severe in 1,200 years.
Snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada range, a significant source of the state’s water, is definitely doing better than it did in 2014 and 2015, as the animation above shows. But with statewide snowpack standing at just 88 percent of normal for this time of year — the heart of the snow season — it really needs to do a whole lot better. (In the southern part of the Sierra, snowpack is at just 78 percent of normal.)
As most of you know, water remains one of the most pressing issues facing our state and region. Whether or not our drought is ending cannot yet be determined, though future droughts are a certainty.
I have long supported initiatives that would increase local water supplies. While a member of the Escondido City Council, I was an early supporter of the `toilet to tree’ plan. I joined with Escondido Growers for Agricultural Preservation (EGAP) to support using recycled wastewater to irrigate the citrus and avocado groves on the city’s perimeter. Since the capacity of the city’s outfall pipeline that delivers Escondido’s excess wastewater to the ocean is insufficient for future growth, a costly upgrade will soon become necessary. Instead of spending millions to upgrade the pipeline, Escondido is now building the first part of a multi-phased project to deliver this water to local farmers and other users. While this solution won’t work everywhere, the plan could become a model for the entire state.
Everywhere he goes, Anthony Ambrose sees the dead and dying.
They haunt this city’s streets, the browning yards of stylish homes, the scenic grounds of the local University of California campus and dry roadway medians. They’re urban trees, thirsty for water as the state enters the fifth year of the worst drought in its history, and thousands are keeling over.
“It’s definitely not a good thing,” said Ambrose, a researcher at the university who studies forest ecosystems. “They’re not as visual, they’re not as pretty. Along the highway you see a lot of dead redwoods. I feel sorry for the trees.”
A mild, dry winter spell like the one Durango experienced this February is generally accompanied by concerns about snowpack and the coming spring.
Last week on Sunday and Monday, temperatures reached their warmest this month when they climbed to 54 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
The water level at Lake Tahoe continues to rise, but a dry February is putting the brakes on the heavy snowpack that was fueling relief earlier this winter from four years of drought on both sides of the Sierra.
Lake Tahoe has risen to within about 9 inches of its natural rim, but that’s still far short of the average this time of year of more than 2 feet above the rim, National Weather Service hydrologist Tim Bardsley said.
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.
