California is in a serious drought. The National Drought Mitigation Center’s drought monitor puts most of the state in extreme drought zones for the first time since 2015.
The latest instance of drought has once again put the state’s water use under the microscope to identify opportunities for conservation, a task that’s expected to become more challenging as the impacts of climate change intensify.
Sonoma County supervisors are expected to offer their formal support Tuesday for a plan to pump 20% less water than normal from the Russian River for the remainder of the year, preserving dwindling supplies in local reservoirs but making less water available to more than 600,000 consumers in Sonoma and northern Marin counties.
Every spring, California farmers brace themselves for signs of wriggling organisms destined to launch multigenerational attacks on their crops.
Many insect species survive the winter as eggs or larvae and then emerge in early spring as the first generation to feed and breed on millions of acres of California vineyards, orchards and row crops. Climate change will complicate farmers’ efforts to control these pests in complex and unpredictable ways.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday expanded a drought emergency to a large swath of the nation’s most populous state while seeking more than $6 billion in multiyear water spending as one of the warmest, driest springs on record threatens another severe wildfire season across the American West.
The Democratic governor said he is acting amid “acute water supply shortages” in northern and central parts of California as he called again for voluntary conservation. Yet the state is in relatively better shape than it was when the last five-year drought ended in 2017, he said, as good habits have led to a 16% reduction in water usage.
In a stark indication of California’s growing water crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday declared a drought emergency in 41 counties, including areas of the Central Valley that had urged action on behalf of agricultural growers.
Newsom’s proclamation dramatically expands the drought emergency he declared in Sonoma and Mendocino counties last month, and now covers 30% of the state’s population.
“With the reality of climate change abundantly clear in California, we’re taking urgent action to address acute water supply shortfalls in Northern and Central California while also building our water resilience to safeguard communities in the decades ahead,” Newsom said in a prepared statement. “We’re working with local officials and other partners to protect public health and safety and the environment, and call on all Californians to help meet this challenge by stepping up their efforts to save water.”
California’s drought conditions have gone from bad to worse in scarcely a month.
In the weeks following April 1, the traditional end of the rainy season, warm temperatures have burned off most of the Sierra Nevada snowpack and left the state’s water network gasping. Instead of delivering a generous volume of melted snow into California’s rivers and reservoirs, the snowpack has largely evaporated into the air or trickled into the ground.
“We got unlucky. A lot of it didn’t make it into the reservoirs,” said Jeffrey Mount, a geologist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.
The Colorado River Basin appears to be out of miracles this spring.
Five years after a “Miracle May” of record rainfall staved off what had appeared to be the river’s first imminent shortage in water deliveries, the hope for another in 2021 “is fading quickly,” says the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s latest report, released Thursday.
That’s one more piece of bad news for the Central Arizona Project. A first-time shortage is now likely to slash deliveries of river water to Central Arizona farmers starting in 2022 but won’t affect drinking water supplies for Tucson, Phoenix and other cities, or for tribes and industries that get CAP water.
Toxic algae blooms. Exposed, barren shorelines. Racing to prevent salmon die-offs. Sinking farmland. Dry wells. Unseasonable wildfires.
Drought has returned to California and the American West.
Following the fourth-driest winter on record and just a few years after declaring victory over the last drought, California is once again prepping for a summer of water insecurity. Conditions already mirror the last drought, but experts and water managers contend the state is better equipped this time around.
Now there’s emerging research to suggest that cosmic rays, or positively charged, high-energy particles from space, might be the mechanism that flips the switch between phases. Cosmic rays come from outside our solar system, but the number and intensity that reach Earth hinge on the magnetic field of the sun.
Beneath the almond and citrus fields of the San Joaquin Valley lies an enormous system of aquifers that feeds some of the world’s most productive farmland. Hundreds of miles north and east, along the Nevada border, is the Surprise Valley, a remote, high-desert region undergirded by cone-shaped hollows of sediment that hold deposits of water. Both of these water systems, along with every other groundwater basin in California — a whopping 515 entities — must create individually tailored plans to manage their water use more sustainably. In scale and ambition, California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) has few parallels. And the work becomes increasingly urgent as the climate crisis makes water shortages increasingly severe.
