After two dry years, the California is in desperate need of rain and snow. October marks the beginning of California’s new water year, which will run through Sept. 30 next year.
This also signals the transition from the long, dry summer months to the wetter time of year. But new research is showing a delay to California’s rainy season.
On the northern edge of the Mojave Desert, a new trauma has awakened old concerns: What happens if a town’s water gets shut off? The question keeps Danny Tolbert awake most nights. Two years ago his taps ran dry after a 7.1 earthquake nearly brought down his house and community. That was three months before his stroke, before he learned how diseased his heart was.
Just hours before the Caldor fire threatened to level the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, the massive blaze performed a staggering feat: burning from one side of the Sierra to the other.
It seared through crests and valleys, over foothills and ridges — and also at elevations of 8,000 feet or higher.
Dangerously low water levels at Shasta Lake were captured on drone video by ABC10 reporter John Bartell and photojournalist Tyler Horst on Tuesday.
Shasta Lake is California’s largest reservoir, capable of holding 4,552,000 acre feet of water. Right now, it has 1,186,057 acre feet of water stored. Breaking that down into percentages, the reservoir is at 26% capacity and 42% of average for this date.
A federal judge Monday threw out a major Trump administration rule that scaled back federal protections for streams, marshes and wetlands across the United States, reversing one of the previous administration’s most significant environmental rollbacks. U.S. District Judge Rosemary Márquez wrote that Trump officials committed serious errors while writing the regulation, finalized last year, and that leaving it in place could lead to “serious environmental harm.”
In case you hadn’t heard, California is once again in a drought.
But don’t take our word for it. The pictures tell a chilling (or, rather, incrementally heating) story. Boat slips on dry land. “Bathtub rings” around lakes. Juvenile salmon cooked to death in warming rivers. And the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on Monday that outlines just how much damage has been done and who’s to blame: “It is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.”
Moving both irrigation and our limited natural rainfall through your yard into storage areas via the use of various landscaping features borrow Mother Nature’s engineering. This is especially important during hot, dry summer months. If your yard is perfectly flat, you must move soil and features around to create more water-retaining contour areas.
A California water myth which becomes especially pernicious in droughts is that California is “running out of water” (Hanak et al. 2009). Viewing California’s supply and demand pressures in terms of fixed water requirements perpetuates this myth and invariably places undue attention on building additional supply infrastructure. Instead, managing water as a scarce resource suggests a balanced portfolio of water trading, investments in conveyance, smart groundwater replenishment, and demand management. With such a balanced portfolio, 1) California’s water supply situation is not broadly dire, and 2) California’s vast and interconnected water infrastructure and groundwater resources can minimize most problems from the state’s highly variable climate.
As crews continue to combat wildfires in Northern California, the southern part of the state is preparing for extreme heat and elevated fire danger.
The National Weather Service on Wednesday issued an excessive heat warning across portions of Southern California’s high desert, with the Apple and Lucerne valleys preparing for temperatures that could climb as high as 120 degrees by the weekend — potentially the hottest of the year so far.
Droughts are common in California, but this year’s is much hotter and drier than others, evaporating water more quickly from the reservoirs and the sparse Sierra Nevada snowpack that feeds them.
The state’s more than 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be this time of year, according to Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
