The slope of a 1920s La Mesa home went from a drab lawn to lush floral color with climate-appropriate plants, winning recognition from the Helix Water District as the runner-up in its 2023 WaterSmart Landscape Contest.
We’re living in a pivotal moment in history, on the cusp of either sinking into a dark period of growing poverty, accelerating ecological destruction, and worsening conflict, or moving forward to a new age of equity, sustainability, and stewardship of the only planet in the universe where we know life exists. I believe a positive future is not only possible, but inevitable, but solving our current crises and moving along the path to that desired future will require new, concerted, and sustained efforts.
It was just before dinnertime on Day 16 of the worst heat wave in Phoenix history, and the temperature outside Karen Shute’s suburban home was 117 degrees.
Inside, Shute mixed two cocktails and sat down with her friend at the kitchen table. To save on her electric bill, Shute kept her thermostat around 80 degrees during the summer, but she decided she’d treat her friend that evening. She got up and turned it down to 77.
The slope of a 1920s La Mesa home went from a drab lawn to lush floral color with climate-appropriate plants, winning recognition from the Helix Water District as the runner-up in its 2023 WaterSmart Landscape Contest.
Joanna and Larry Henning created the country garden with climate-appropriate plants. Photo: Helix Water District
The contest promotes beautiful, water-efficient landscapes and rewards people for their inspiring gardens. Joanna and Larry Henning created the country garden with climate-appropriate plants.
The Hennings bought the property in La Mesa‘s historic downtown area in 2017. Its landscape was covered in weeds and poorly maintained trees. The couple wanted a new landscape that would fill in the expansive slope and be water efficient while staying true to the character of their home.
Before the landscape makeover. Photo: Helix Water District
After the landscape makeover. Photo: Helix Water District
Planting an area this large with new plants can be expensive. But the couple were creative and resourceful, sourcing their plants for the new landscape design. Larry Henning used succulent cuttings from friends and family to plant most of their new landscape.
They supplemented the landscape with carefully chosen specimen plants, including protea, sages, and plumeria. These choices create the landscape’s variety of interesting shapes and colors. Five years after starting the project, even the slowest growing plants are fully grown and have transformed the landscape.
Plants receive water from inline drip irrigation with pressure-compensating drip emitters. Photo: Helix Water District
The landscape uses water efficiently to provide enough water for the plants to flourish without waste. Watering schedules are controlled using a smart weather-based irrigation controller. It automatically adjusts for rain and weather changes. Plants receive water from inline drip irrigation with pressure-compensating drip emitters.
Pressure compensation is essential for sloped landscapes because it maintains even watering rates all along the slope and prevents overwatering areas at the bottom of the landscape, where pressure is higher. Mulch covers the drip system, which protects the soil and slows evaporation.
The view from the patio. Photo: Helix Water District
The landscape delivers ample curb appeal. From the street, trees frame the landscape, filled with shades of green and pops of color. Viewers can also see agave, cacti, and dozens of other succulents. Many display long cones of flowers. From the front patios, the garden provides a tranquil space for the family to enjoy.
District officials selected the landscape for special runner-up recognition due to its impressive transformation and efficient use of color and irrigation.
Helix Water District holds its landscape makeover contest annually. Entries are accepted starting every February through mid-May. For entry information, go to landscapecontest.com.
(Editor’s note: The Helix Water District is one of the San Diego County Water Authority’s 24 member agencies that deliver water across the San Diego County region.)
Human-caused global warming made July hotter for four out of five people on Earth, with more than 2 billion people feeling climate change-boosted warmth daily, according to a flash study.
Western Colorado rancher Bill Fales said he thinks that California will come for Colorado’s water someday soon.
Santee homeowners Edie and Tate Thomas created a beautiful landscape with California native plants to save water, beautify their home, and support the region’s wildlife. Their effort won the 2023 Padre Dam Municipal Water District landscape makeover contest.
Buried large unglazed clay pots in their yard called ollas, allows watering the plants with minimal water loss. Photo: Padre Dam Municipal Water District
In 2018, the couple began working on their makeover project. Edie Thomas is an architect, and Tate Thomas is a contractor. They took advantage of their building and design skills by creating a topography to capture and preserve the rainwater falling on their yard.
Their landscape is irrigated through underground rock ravines that collect rainwater in a rock-lined underground cistern reservoir which flows water to plants through gravity. They also buried large unglazed clay pots in their yard called ollas, which have above-ground access points to refill them with water. Plants wrap their roots around the porous ollas, which seep water out as needed, watering the plants with minimal water loss.
Edit Thomas advises other homeowners to do the same with their landscape topography.
“I always recommend people visualize a single drop of rainwater falling at the highest point of your landscape,” she said. “Watch where gravity takes that raindrop and plan your landscape around that flow.”
The pair also use drip irrigation about once a month along with occasional hand watering during extended dry periods.
A wide variety of California native plants are featured in the winning landscape design. Photo: Padre Dam Municipal Water District
Long nature walks and information from the California Native Plant Society inspired the Thomas’s to use native plants for most of their landscape, mixing colors and texture to be visually appealing. They have been richly rewarded with an ecosystem of butterflies, caterpillars, bees, birds, and bunnies. They describe their design concept as “playful chaos.”
The sidewalk in front of the garden is designed to be a community space for those walking by. The large California Coastal Live Oak provides shade to the retaining wall, designed as a place to sit and rest. Visitors can browse through books from the couple’s Little Free Library. Water-efficient herbs growing in the planter boxes under the tree are offered to those who pass by.
Edie and Tate Thomas spend most evenings on their patio, enjoying the space and watching their ecosystem thrive. They look forward to watching the plants grow and mature in the coming years and even decades.
“It’s so rewarding to see people come by and rest in the shade or take some rosemary for their dinner,” said Edie Thomas. “I love that we get to give a small square of land back to nature and that our neighbors enjoy it as much as we do.”
(Editor’s note: The Padre Dam Municipal Water District is one of the San Diego County Water Authority’s 24 member agencies that deliver water across the San Diego County region.)
A new study from UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher emeritus Peter Bromirski uses nearly a century of data to show that the average heights of winter waves along the California coast have increased as climate change has heated up the planet.
A new study from UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher emeritus Peter Bromirski uses nearly a century of data to show that the average heights of winter waves along the California coast have increased as climate change has heated up the planet.
The study, published August 1 in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Oceans, achieved its extraordinarily long time series by using seismic records dating back to 1931 to infer wave height, a unique but accepted method first developed by Bromirski in 1999. The results, made more robust by their 90 years of statistical power, join a growing body of research that suggests storm activity in the North Pacific Ocean has increased under climate change.
If global warming accelerates, growing winter wave heights could have significant implications for flooding and erosion along California’s coast, which is already threatened by accelerating sea-level rise.
When waves reach shallow coastal waters, some of their energy is reflected back out to sea, Bromirski said. When this reflected wave energy collides with waves approaching the shoreline, their interaction creates a downward pressure signal that is converted into seismic energy at the seafloor. This seismic energy travels inland in the form of seismic waves that can be detected by seismographs. The strength of this seismic signal is directly related to wave height, which allowed him to calculate one from the other.
In using this relationship to infer wave height, Bromirski had to filter out the “noise” of actual earthquakes, which he said is easier than it sounds because earthquakes are typically much shorter in duration than the ocean waves caused by storms.
Bromirski developed this novel way to calculate wave heights out of necessity. Seeing patterns or trends in phenomena such as storm activity or big wave events associated with climate change requires many decades of data, and the buoys that directly measure wave heights along the California coast have only been collecting data since around 1980. Of particular interest to Bromirski were the decades prior to 1970 when global warming began a significant acceleration. If he could get his hands on wave records stretching back several decades before 1970, then he could assess the potential influence of climate change.
Since no direct wave measurements going back that far existed, Bromirski began a search for alternative sources of data in the 1990s. In 1999, he published a paper detailing his method of deriving historic wave heights using modern digital seismic records. In the process, Bromirski learned that UC Berkeley had seismic records going back nearly 70 years at the time. The problem was that these records were all analog — just sheets and sheets of paper covered in the jagged lines of seismograph readings.
To work in the many decades of seismic records held at UC Berkeley to create a long-term wave record using this method, Bromirski needed to digitize the reams of analog seismograms spanning 1931 to 1992 so that he could analyze the dataset as a whole. The process required the enthusiasm of multiple undergraduate students, a special flatbed scanner, and multiple years of intermittent effort to complete.
Finally, with the digitized seismic data spanning 1931-2021 in hand, Bromirski was able to transform those data into wave heights and begin to look for patterns.
The analysis revealed that in the era beginning after 1970, California’s average winter wave height has increased by 13% or about 0.3 meters (one foot) compared to average winter wave height between 1931 and 1969. Bromirski also found that between 1996 and 2016 there were about twice as many storm events that produced waves greater than four meters (13 feet) in height along the California coast compared to the two decades spanning 1949 to 1969.
“After 1970, there is a consistently higher rate of large wave events,” said Bromirski. “It’s not uncommon to have a winter with high wave activity, but those winters occurred less frequently prior to 1970. Now, there are few winters with particularly low wave activity. And the fact that this change coincides with the acceleration of global warming near 1970 is consistent with increased storm activity over the North Pacific resulting from climate change.”
The results echo an increase in wave height in the North Atlantic tied to global warming reported by a 2000 study.
If California’s average winter waves continue to get bigger under climate change, it could amplify the effects of sea-level rise and have significant coastal impacts.
“Waves ride on top of the sea level, which is rising due to climate change,” said Bromirski. “When sea levels are elevated even further during storms, more wave energy can potentially reach vulnerable sea cliffs, flood low-lying regions, or damage coastal infrastructure.”
To see how his results compared with atmospheric patterns over the North Pacific, which typically supplies the California coast with its winter storms and waves, Bromirski looked to see if a semi-permanent wintertime low pressure system located near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands called the Aleutian Low had intensified in the modern era. A more pronounced Aleutian Low typically corresponds to increased storm activity and intensity.
Climate change is contributing to more extreme temperatures, but also larger winter waves in California, according to research led by Scripps Oceanography researcher emeritus Peter Bromirski. 🌊 📈 Learn more about the study published in @JGROceans. ⬇️ https://t.co/lt4OfLotCB
— Scripps Institution of Oceanography (@Scripps_Ocean) August 1, 2023
Per the study, the intensity of the Aleutian Low has generally increased since 1970. “That intensification is a good confirmation that what we are seeing in the wave record derived from seismic data is consistent with increased storm activity,” said Bromirski. “If Pacific storms and the waves they produce keep intensifying as climate change progresses and sea-level rises, it creates a new dimension that needs to be considered in terms of trying to anticipate coastal impacts in California.”
(Editor’s Note: Story by Alex Fox, at UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The San Diego County Water Authority has partnered with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to better predict atmospheric rivers and improve water management before, during, and after those seasonal storms.)
