Extreme storms like the massive bomb cyclone that drenched the San Francisco Bay Area last October are likely to become more powerful in the coming decades as climate change alters atmospheric conditions.
The Bay Area could see between 26% and 37% more water from these mega-storms by the end of the century, according to a new study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory commissioned by the city.
Poseidon Water’s long-running, controversial effort to turn the ocean off Huntington Beach into tap water for much of Orange County suffered a potentially fatal blow Monday, April 25 when staff for the California Coastal Commission released a report saying the project should not be built.
Citing a range of economic and social factors, including environmental damages from the proposed plant and the company’s track record for slow-walking environmental projects that would offset harm caused by its existing desalination plant in Carlsbad, the staff recommended that the commissioners vote against approving the project May 12 when they hold a public hearing in Costa Mesa.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District recently completed the Manchester Avenue Potable Water Pipeline Project. In total, 3,700 linear feet of aged potable water pipeline was replaced along Manchester Avenue, Rancho Santa Fe Road and Encinitas Boulevard.
The pipelines previously serving water in this area were installed in 1961 and were approaching the end of their lifespan.
In a letter sent Friday, the seven states that use the Colorado River agreed with the U.S. Department of Interior and recommended that federal water managers take an emergency action aimed at stabilizing a dwindling Lake Powell, one of the main storage reservoirs on the river.
Earlier this month, federal water managers warned the states, including Nevada, that they were considering an emergency action to hold water back in Lake Powell, an attempt to stabilize the reservoir at serious risk of losing the ability to generate hydropower and deliver water to Page, Arizona, a city with roughly 7,500 residents, and the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation.
The recent storm that brought wet weather to the Bay Area last week dumped an “impressive” amount of snow on the Sierra Nevada for the month of April, said the National Weather Service.
The storm dumped 31.1 inches of snow, increasing April’s snowfall total to 76 inches — “almost double what we received January through March,” the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab tweeted Friday.
Snowfall totals also slightly increased California’s snowpack in the last week to 35% of average as of Friday — up from 28% of average on April 15, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
A new bill aimed at bringing relief to farmworkers affected by the drought is now one step closer to becoming law.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D–Sanger), aims to provide financial assistance to farmworkers struggling to afford basic necessities. Wednesday it passed in a state senate committee, four to one.
The Long Beach Water Commission may upgrade the city’s water shortage level next week, which would bring with it new restrictions on when residents can water landscaping.
Updating the city’s water shortage stage comes as California heads toward its third straight year of drought. The proposal to go to Stage 2, which would limit landscape irrigation to two days per week year-round, would take the city back to water conservation rules not seen since June 2016.
The latest Spring snowstorms helped increase California’s water supply and lake levels, but the Golden State continues to face drought conditions.
April’s wet weather in northern California have increased water levels at lakes like Folsom Lake.
“The particular storm of this week increased the rain and snow over northern California by about 5-10 percent,” said Meteorologist and forecaster Jim Mathews with the National Weather Service.
Heavy snow in Northern California has given a recent boost of moisture to a region grappling with drought.
The Central Sierra Snow Lab at the University of California, Berkeley said Friday that more than 16 inches (43 centimeters) of snow fell in the past day.
“We are now at 61% of our normal #snow #water equivalent for this date,” said a tweet from the lab specializing in snow hydrology and climatology.
The spring storm had triggered warnings from the Oregon border down through the southern Cascades and the northern Sierra Nevada. But the late-season precipitation was welcome after a dry winter.
Spirits live here. That’s what Paiute and Shoshone tribal members say about the Owens Lake playa, an arid, eerily flat expanse along the eastern Sierra Nevada range that is prone to choking dust storms.
It is best known as the focal point of a historic feud that began in the early 1900s, when Los Angeles city agents quietly bought up ranch lands and water rights for an aqueduct to quench the thirst of the growing metropolis 200 miles to the south.
L.A. diverted so much water via the aqueduct system that the 110-square-mile lake dried up and it was nearly impossible for local farmers and ranchers to make a living — a scandal dramatized in the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.”
