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The board of Southern California’s water importer voted Tuesday to buy 20,000 acres of farm islands in the heart of the state’s north-south plumbing system.

The land is owned by a private company that for years has tried to develop a water storage project on the property. But the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California says it has other plans for the four islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which is east of San Francisco.

A new study by NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and other partners has found that in California’s Sierra Nevada, atmospheric river storms are two-and-a-half times more likely than other types of winter storms to result in destructive “rain-on-snow” events, where rain falls on existing snowpack, causing it to melt. Those events increase flood risks in winter and reduce water availability the following summer.

The study, based on NASA satellite and ground-based data from 1998 through 2014, is the first to establish a climatological connection between atmospheric river storms and rain-on-snow events.

 

A sliver of the huge weather system that dumped upwards of 5 feet of snow in Northern California angled through San Diego County Monday, bringing soaking rains, damaging winds and flash-bang lightning.

The system seemed to mock the calendar; with spring only two weeks away, snow wafted on to the mountains and foothills, falling all the way down to the 4,100-foot level in Julian. It was the first major system to hit San Diego since late January, when a powerful windstorm caused power outages and toppled trees, one which killed a woman in Pacific Beach.

Peter Smith is dreaming of a white Independence Day. The longtime ski junkie from Claremont knows that the El Niño weather pattern has yet to put a significant dent in the state’s drought, but a series of storms over the last few months has him fantasizing about a monster ski season that can stretch deep into summer.

If big snow dumps continue through spring, Smith said, his ski club could schedule an extra trip to Mammoth Mountain for the Fourth of July weekend.

For the past five years, as drought sucked dry California’s water sources and depleted its reservoirs, Southern California water managers have turned increasingly to the region’s large out-of-state water source: the Colorado River.

Now, Orange County, which draws up to half its annual supply from the river that snakes from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico, and other thirsty coastal communities are facing increased competition for reduced flows from the drought-strangled Colorado.