A modest storm drenched parts of San Diego County late Monday night and early Tuesday, providing much-need rain in a region where seasonal precipitation totals have been falling behind, says the National Weather Service.
On the rare days it rains in western Fresno County, the soils in Jeffrey Mitchell’s experimental fields soak up the water like a sponge. “The water disappears within less than a minute, even for four inches of water,” he said, laughing.
Mitchell is a cropping systems specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension. His quick-absorbing soils keep the rainfall from pooling and overflowing, like it does in many surrounding fields.
Perennial water shortages in California will likely only grow worse due to climate change. But emerging technologies offer hope—if Californians can stop taking water for granted, says David Feldman, UCI professor of urban planning & public policy and director of Water UCI.
Water shortages will become more severe as both droughts and floods become more intense, with less rain and snow falling during dry seasons and more falling during wet ones. Capturing the excess precipitation and saving it for dry periods will also only get more challenging.
The Ramona Municipal Water District is taking another step to improve its transparency by starting to share monthly status reports and goals from its various departments, officials said.
Water district directors voted unanimously Jan. 11 to approve several new ways to keep the board and public updated about operations.
Some Colorado River scholars say that a plan by the lower-basin states to leave more water in Lake Mead embodies a principle they explore in a recently published article: Dropping reservoir levels have opened a window of opportunity for water-management policies that move the river system toward sustainability.
In December, water managers from California, Nevada and Arizona signed a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, to spend up to $200 million to add 500,000 acre-feet of water in both 2022 and 2023 to Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, which has dropped precipitously low due to climate change and drought.
The heavy rains of the past three months have been truly extraordinary. And while the rains have brought much-needed relief to Marin’s water supply crisis, they are a harbinger of the dangers we still face.
Consistent with the predicted effects of climate change, dramatic swings in rainfall – big storms and big droughts – will be the norm in California.
Research on atmospheric rivers takes flight as UC San Diego’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes taps “Hurricane Hunter” aircraft for specialized scientific missions.
The aircraft will fly for a 13-week period (that began January 5) to glean critical data for improving forecasts of atmospheric river storms over the Pacific Ocean. Those storms, or “AR’s,” provide up to half of the U.S. West Coast’s annual precipitation and a majority of the flooding.
With a parade of storms sweeping California in December, the federal government’s US Drought map has shown severe drought conditions fade across the state in recent weeks, and on the most recent map released Thursday, “exceptional drought” — the most extreme level of drought — completely disappeared from the map.
The map quickly went viral on Reddit, but Jeanine Jones, the drought manager for the California Department of Water Resources, cautioned that the map isn’t an accurate depiction of the overall picture in the state and said that the drought is far from over.
Impacts from climate change and two decades of drought on the Colorado River are fueling fears that states in the Upper Basin – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – could be forced to curtail their own water use to fulfill obligations under the century-old Colorado River Compact to send a certain amount of water downstream to the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
There has never been a so-called “Compact call” on the river. But as evidence grows that the river isn’t yielding the water assumed by the 1922 Colorado River Compact, questions arise about whether a Compact call may be coming, or whether the states and water interests, drawing on decades of sometimes difficult collaboration, can avert a river war that ends up in court.
If it looks like something that could transport you into the future, in a sense it is. A spaceship-sized hoop suspended from a helicopter is actually part of an advanced water detection system. The information it’s gathering, could help determine the future of California’s water supply – and where we store it.
“I’ve seen similar studies that say, ‘Hey, let’s not even think of building more above ground reservoirs. Let’s use all the empty space below,'” says Rosemary Knight, Ph.D., a professor of Geophysics and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
