The month of July kicked off with a dire warning: A rare, long-duration heat event was forecast to bring extreme heat risk across the West, with triple-digit temperatures and dangerous fire conditions expected in much of California for days on end.
That outlook quickly proved accurate — and would end up defining almost the entire month in the Golden State, which would see little relief from unrelenting heat.
Imagine it’s a Saturday morning in Santa Monica in the year 2080. You brew your coffee, open your front door and breathe in the hot, dry air of … San Bernardino?
That’s the potential future if climate change continues unabated, according to a new mapping tool from researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. The tool draws direct lines between an area’s projected climate in 60 years and the places that are experiencing that climate today.
Climate change threatens to dramatically shrink the amount of water California can deliver over the next 20 years and could reduce supplies available from the State Water Project by up to 23%, according to new projections released Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration.
The analysis by the California Department of Water Resources examined a range of climate change scenarios and projected that by 2043 the average amount of water transported through the massive network of reservoirs and canals to more than half the state’s population could decline between 13% and 23%.
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.
