In some places, more than an inch of precipitation fell Friday in Northern California while other places, including Sacramento, saw only a fraction of that. Whatever came down in the first rains of the season were a mere drop in the bucket.
After a very warm and dry October for Northern California, some big changes are coming for the first weekend in November. Most of this week will be warm, sunny and dry with high temperatures well above the average of 70 degrees. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday will see highs close to 80 degrees and remain rain-free.
The two dozen major fires burning across Northern California were sparked by more than 12,000 lightning strikes, a freak weather occurrence that turned what had been a relatively mild fire season into a devastating catastrophe
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Nowhere has California’s dry winter hit harder than the state’s far north.
In a handful of counties along the rural Oregon border, where late-season rains have done little to sate the parched forests and dusty plains, hundreds of farmers are at risk of having their irrigation water shut off — and watching their crops wither in the field.
The Klamath Project, a U.S. government-operated waterworks that steers runoff from the towering Cascades to more than 200,000 acres of potatoes, alfalfa, wheat, onions and other produce on both sides of the state line, is running low on supplies. The local water agencies served by the project say they may not have water to send to farms beyond next month.
A partnership of numerous Northern California agencies intends to file an initial plan on Wednesday to acquire the Potter Valley project from the Pacific Gas and Electric Co., multiple sources confirmed.
Expanding and intensifying drought in Northern California portends an early start to the wildfire season, and the National Interagency Fire Center is predicting above-normal potential for large wildfires by midsummer.
Mountain snowpack has been below average across the High Sierra, southern Cascades and the Great Basin, and the agency warns that these areas need to be monitored closely as fuels continue to dry out. The agency also cites a warm, dry pattern in Oregon and central and eastern Washington, and assigns all of these areas a higher-than-average likelihood of wildfires in July.
Temperatures will remain above seasonal norms in Southern California on Saturday as offshore gradients relax. A return of onshore flow will result in slight cooling at the coast and in coastal valleys, but interior areas will be slightly warmer.
April showers may be more scarce than normal north of Point Conception in California, according to an outlook produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
With unusually dry, hot weather continuing for weeks on end and the driest February in the Bay Area in 156 years, nearly a quarter of California’s land area now is under drought conditions, federal officials announced Thursday.
Altogether, 23.3% of the state is in “moderate drought” — up from 9.5% last week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
