Thousands of acres of exposed lake bed have become the unintended beneficiaries of lush marshlands that are homes for endangered birds and fish at the outlets of a agricultural and urban runoff that used to flow directly into the Salton Sea.
It’s been a month since Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to sue the Trump administration to block stepped-up federal water diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to agribusiness and urban areas further south.
Waters off the California coast are acidifying twice as fast as the global average, scientists found, threatening major fisheries and sounding the alarm that the ocean can absorb only so much more of the world’s carbon emissions.
Southern California will get a chance to dry out this week after a string of storms dumped rain and snow across the region over the last few weeks.
“Basically, we’ve got an area of high pressure moving in from the West, and it’s deflecting the storms to the north,” said David Sweet, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
The weather is expected to stay dry through at least Sunday, forecasts show. Temperatures are also expected to warm up later in the week, with highs in the mid-60s to lower-70s on Friday and Saturday, according to the weather service.
As back-to-back atmospheric rivers have made umbrellas a necessity across the state — and with more rain on the way in California this weekend — a new study reveals the connection between the weather phenomenon and the economic effects of localized flooding.
Atmospheric rivers, the storms that carry moisture from the tropics to the mid-latitude regions, have long been linked to the ecological impacts they have on a region. But when the storm passes, what’s left in its wake?
Dangerous fire weather is returning to broad swaths of Northern California at the same time as Southern California is expecting its first winter storm of the season to produce widespread rain.
And the two events are related.
Red flag warnings sounding the alarm for fire weather for parts of the Bay Area and northern Sacramento Valley will go into effect from 4 a.m. Wednesday through 7 a.m. Thursday for strong, dry winds coming from the north and northeast. Velocities of 20 to 30 mph are expected, with gusts as high as 45 mph and perhaps in excess of 60 mph near such locations as Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Diablo.
A gas-burning generator at a Huntington Beach power plant could keep firing until as late as 2023, following a state commission’s recent vote.
The AES facility was scheduled to close by the end of next year, but the California Public Utilities Commission voted unanimously last week to extend its operating life for up to three additional years.
Pushing back the plant’s retirement would delay remediation of the site, as well as prolong the practice of “once-through” cooling — a process that uses seawater to cool the coastal energy transformers, which can kill fish and other marine life.
Westlands Water District, a sprawling San Joaquin Valley farm district with ties to the Trump administration, is poised to get a permanent entitlement to a massive quantity of cheap federal irrigation supplies.
Westlands is the first in line to permanently lock in its contract for Central Valley Project deliveries under a 2016 law. Other valley farm districts are expected to follow, but as the project’s biggest customer, Westlands arguably has the most to gain.
The deal would entitle Westlands to annual deliveries that are roughly double what the entire city of Los Angeles uses in a year.
Supreme Court justices, both conservative and liberal, appeared skeptical Wednesday of a Trump administration argument that the federal Clean Water Act should not apply to sewage plant wastewater that flows into the ground and eventually seeps into federally protected waters, such as rivers or oceans.
The case from Hawaii has emerged as a major test of the federal anti-pollution law’s scope even as the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump cuts back on enforcement. If justices side with environmentalists, their ruling could extend federal regulation to water treatment plants across the country.
“There are 200 different definitions of drought,” said climatologist Bill Patzert. “If you’re a firefighter with no rain in the month of October, and there are strong Diablo and Santa Ana winds, it’s a drought.”
Southern California got no rain during October, and it was desiccated by super-dry Santa Ana winds.
The jet stream that fed cold air into the Great Basin last week, fueling strong Diablo and Santa Ana winds in California, could have been delivering the first rain storms of the season from the Gulf of Alaska if it had been positioned about 500 miles to the west.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
