California is expected to receive more rainfall by Friday from an atmospheric river storm than what Lake Mead in Nevada—the largest reservoir in the U.S.—can hold, meteorologists have said, as the state continues to face the threat of flooding.
From the backcountry of Campo to the back roads of Ramona, firefighters were ready to roll last fall at even the hint of wildfire.
Two years of below-average rain and high temperatures had left the landscape parched. Something as small as heat from a car muffler could be enough to ignite grass. Firefighters described the region as primed to burn.
San Diego County has seen its fair share of storms over the last year, bringing historic levels of rainfall to the region.
After the driest three-year period on record, California has been battered by extensive precipitation, between a series of unrelenting atmospheric rivers that hit last winter and more recently, Tropical Storm Hilary.
As March rolled into April, Ken Beck was keeping his eye on the snowdrifts piled on slopes around Vallecito Reservoir in Colorado’s southwestern mountains. Snow reports showed there was about 300,000 acre-feet of water in that snow waiting to flow into the reservoir, he said.
Rainy weather moved through the Northstate a little earlier than a normal season on Monday.
According to the Department of Water Resources (DWR), the possible rain we will see on Monday is starting the first fall precipitation about a week earlier than average.
Residents living along Colorado’s northern Front Range and Northeastern Plains experienced a pretty wet year — the wettest, in fact, in 128 years.
And water experts expect this winter isn’t likely to be much different.
Becky Bolinger, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, said those areas had the wettest year since the state started keeping those records 128 years ago.
Los Angeles saw its eighth wettest season in 145 years last winter. The torrential downpours did more than fill aquifers, shrink water waste complaints and ease drought concerns—they also led to the biggest cutbacks in regional residential water use in four years.
The average customer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power used 59.5 gallons per day from Jan. 1–May 31, according to publicly available water use and conservation data from the California State Water Resources Control Board.
Hilary strengthened into a hurricane off Mexico’s Pacific coast Thursday, and it could bring heavy rain to the U.S. southwest by the weekend.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center is reporting that Hilary had maximum winds of 85 mph (140 kph) and was expected to strengthen into a major hurricane and perhaps skim the coast of the Baja California peninsula by the weekend.
Droughts are periods characterized by abnormally dry conditions. But what are megadroughts, and how bad is the one currently affecting parts of the United States?
While there are no clear definitions of what a megadrought is, in general these events are defined as droughts that last for multiple decades, i.e. two or more, according to Ashok Mishra, a professor in the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering at Clemson University.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
