Forty million people depend on the Colorado River for water, but that vital resource is in peril. The river’s storage system has shrunk to an estimated 41 percent capacity as of June 2024.
The river, which irrigates 4 million acres of some of the most productive agricultural land in the United States, may never fully recover due to climate change, according to scientists.
The U.S. and Mexico are experiencing another border dispute, and this one is about water. The conflict stems from an 80-year-old treaty where the countries agreed to share water from the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. However, because water is in more demand but scarcer than ever, sharing has not been going to plan.
The U.S. and Mexico signed a treaty in 1944 stipulating that Mexico send 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the U.S. every five years from the Rio Grande, and the U.S. send 1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico from the Colorado River each year. But water levels are lower than ever, and Mexico has “sent only about 30% of its expected deliveries, the lowest amount at this point of any four- or five-year cycles since 1992,” said Reuters.
In the three years that Adel Hagekhalil has led California’s largest urban water supplier, the general manager has sought to focus on adaptation to climate change — in part by reducing reliance on water supplies from distant sources and investing in local water supplies.
The Salton Sea is a terminal saltwater lake. It’s a flooded basin with no natural outlet, similar to the Great Salt Lake or the Aral Sea. And the Salton Sea is shrinking.
One of the reasons for that is the Imperial Water Transfer deal that has brought hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water to San Diego over the last two decades. The deal, signed 21 years ago, meant the Imperial Valley began transferring excess water from the valley’s farm fields to San Diego’s water taps.
Known for its glowing swaths of yellow, orange and red, the U.S. Drought Monitor has warned farmers, residents and officials throughout the nation of impending water scarcity every week since 1999.
Backed by data on soil moisture, temperature, snow cover, meltwater runoff, reservoir levels and more, the map has become an essential instrument for determining the outlook of water supplies, declaring drought emergencies and deciding where and when government aid should be distributed, among other things.
A significant early-season heat wave headed for western North America is threatening to deliver stifling temperatures that could break records, prime the landscape for wildfires and kick off a sizzling summer.
A powerful high-pressure ridge, or heat dome, will bring unusually hot temperatures to the Golden State by the middle of this week before spreading into the Pacific Northwest and Southwestern Canada, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA. Temperatures could remain well above normal across much of the region for as long as 10 to 14 days.
Researchers have found that 2023 was the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in the past 2,000 years, almost 4°C warmer than the coldest summer during the same period.
Although 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record, the instrumental evidence only reaches back as far as 1850 at best, and most records are limited to certain regions.
Wildfire weather has become more frequent in the Western United States over the past five decades, with some of the largest jumps in California, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit news outlet that reports on climate change.
A few weeks ago, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology declared that the Pacific Ocean is no longer in an El Niño state and has returned to “neutral.” American scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been more hesitant, but they estimate that there is an 85% chance that the Pacific will enter a neutral state in the next two months and a 60% chance that a La Niña event will begin by August.
After massive downpours flooded California’s rivers and packed mountains with snow, the state reported Monday the first increase in groundwater supplies in four years.
