With the rainy season come and gone, drought’s withered hand remained firmly fixed on California this month, as it has been, with few exceptions, for the last decade.
Woes pile up. Rain didn’t save us, the snowpack is all but gone, the Coastal Commission says no desalinating sea water, and urban-interface fires have already begun.
It’s almost summer in the Golden State.
Rainfall totals were nearly double the average in Northern California in December 2021. That’s what made the following month such a stark contrast.
January 2022 will go down as one of the region’s driest Januarys on record. Just a few weeks without rainfall was enough to dry out the ground, warm up the air and increase the risk for wildfires.
The Colorado Fire, which began on Jan. 21, demonstrated just how quickly conditions can go from promising to perilous. The fire burned through 687 acres of wildlands in Big Sur within the first two days. As of Jan. 31, the fire was 98% contained.
Despite the rain and snow that closed out 2021, California could be entering a third drought year as weeks of dry winter weather open the new year.
The state has experienced drought in 15 of the last 20 years, according to UC Davis. Experts say California is in the grip of a “megadrought.”
“It looks like, with a warming climate and climate change, it’s going to become more like this,” said Jay Lund, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis and director of the Center for Watershed Sciences.
While dry events in California are not getting drier, extreme wet weather events have steadily increased in magnitude since the middle of the last century, new research shows.
These increased extreme wet events can result in more dangerous flooding and also fuel wildfires.
“Most research after 2015 has been very focused on this climate variability and how it’s going to get worse in the future,” says Diana Zamora-Reyes, a graduate student in the department of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper in the International Journal of Climatology.
Governor Gavin Newsom has released his 2022-23 state budget proposal, the California Blueprint. The $213 billion budget includes significant investment for addressing coronavirus, wildfires, homelessness, and drought. California is currently experiencing a $45.7 billion surplus heading into the next fiscal year. Building on the $5.2 billion dollar investment in water issues last year, the budget proposal includes an additional $750 million investment to address the ongoing drought.
The storms pounding California this week are expected to bring an end to a wildfire season that shocked fire crews with its unprecedented, climate-change-driven behavior.
For the first time ever, wildfires burned from one side of the Sierra Nevada to the other, destroying multiple towns including the Gold Rush-era community of Greenville and the mountain hamlet of Grizzly Flats.
Colorado saw its worst fire season last year, with the three largest fires in state history and more than 600,000 acres burned. But some of the effects didn’t appear until this July, when heavy rain pushed sediment from damaged forests down mountainsides, causing mudslides that shut down sections of Interstate 70 for almost two weeks.
This year, natural disasters across the country — including epochal drought conditions and devastating wildfires in California — have thrown into sharp relief the urgent need for action on climate. Despite the urgency of the issue, proposed legislation in the state to address climate change has either been thwarted or diluted by the powerful fossil-fuel industry’s allies and lobbyists.
With more than a million acres burned fairly early in the fire season, California is entering uncharted territory as the record dry conditions that have fueled so much destruction will soon combine with seasonal winds that fire officials fear will bring unprecedented dangers.
Officials have attributed warming temperatures and worsening drought to the explosive growth of fires, mostly in the mountains of Northern California, this summer.
When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.
Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation’s largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.
The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month. It’s the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
