New snow blankets the landscape of Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir. Last week, California water officials announced that the statewide Sierra Nevada snowpack was recorded at 190% of seasonal average on March 3. Meanwhile, at a water conference, state officials warned they expect warming conditions to persist and called for partnering on water supply solutions.
Starting Tuesday, the US Bureau of Reclamation will suspend extra water releases from Utah’s Flaming Gorge reservoir — emergency measures that had served to help stabilize the plummeting water levels downstream at Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest reservoir.
Federal officials began releasing extra water from Flaming Gorge in 2021 to boost Lake Powell’s level and buy its surrounding communities more time to plan for the likelihood the reservoir will eventually drop too low for the Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydropower.
The deserts of San Diego County are alit with wildflowers.
Record rains have fallen over most of San Diego County, and as of recently, the same is true of the desert.
It’s been an unusual bloom in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Why? Uncommon summer monsoons in September of last year triggered the first fall blooms, pulling blankets of violet sand verbena up over the desert dunes, according to Jim Dice, Reserve Manager at the University of California, Irvine’s Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center in Borrego Springs.
Few homes in Phoenix and its surrounding communities have the thick grass and carefully manicured shrubs and trees of lawns found in other parts of the US.
Desert residents are uniquely poised to recognize the environmental harms associated with conventional lawns and lean into more climate-friendly landscaping. Within the past decade, Phoenicians have become a catalyst for the growing anti-lawn movement.
Imperial Beach’s new mayor, Paloma Aguirre, is dealing with an old problem in her city: beach closures forced by raw sewage from Mexico.
A recent string of powerful storms in the region has forced lots of raw sewage, trash, tires and other debris across the southern border into California.
Forecasts of a hotter, drier climate for the Southwest U.S. make every effort to save water critical. A new program now available intends to do just that for residents in parts of Southern California. The San Diego County Water Authority, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, are offering free indoor and outdoor residential water efficiency use surveys.
A 1,000-mile-wide atmospheric river that’s forming in the subtropics will brush San Diego County with light rain Friday and Saturday and bring heavy precipitation to the rest of Southern and Central California, further aiding reservoirs and muting the risk of wildfires, the National Weather Service said on Monday.
The storm is part of a major pattern change that also is expected to produce a second warm, moist atmospheric river that will flow through roughly the same areas on March 14, possibly bringing heavier rain to San Diego, which is experiencing its first wet year in three years.
The stubborn La Niña climate pattern that gripped the tropical Pacific for a rare three years in a row is waning, and the odds of an El Niño system forming later this year are getting stronger, according to recent meteorological reports.
The El Niño-La Niña Southern Oscillation, sometimes referred to as ENSO, has a major influence on temperature and rainfall patterns in different parts of the world, with La Niña often associated with drier-than-normal conditions in California, especially the southern part of the state.
The winter of 2023 isn’t finished yet. Not by a long shot.
An atmospheric river storm is likely to hit Northern California late Thursday into Friday, meteorologists and climate scientists said Monday, bringing high chances of heavy rain in the Bay Area, 1 to 3 feet of new snow at higher elevations in the Sierra, and an increased risk of flooding as the warm rain hits the state’s massive snowpack.
Though recent snow and rainfall have certainly improved drought conditions, California water officials still want to make every drop of water count.
That means cutting out the watering of decorative grass — also known as non-functional turf — frequently landscaped at traffic medians or office parking lots.
Decorative grass is becoming a bigger problem for Western water agencies to address as policymakers look to cut back its water usage in statewide bans, proposed legislation and local ordinances.
