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More Than 90% of California Out of Historic Drought as Water Year Ends

Less than one week until California’s new water year begins, experts say the state is nearly free of drought — but there is no guarantee that another wet winter is soon to arrive.

The state, according to the Sept. 19 U.S. Drought Monitor, is 93% free of drought, a big improvement since measuring at 72% drought-free three months ago.

Mendocino County Water Districts Preparing For Another Year of Drought

With Oct. 1 marking the beginning of a new water year, Mendocino County officials reported recently that local water districts are preparing for what could be another dry year.

In the latest update from the Mendocino County Water Agency, local water managers are quoted as describing their current status and outlook.

Four in a Row: California Drought Likely to Continue

As California’s 2022 water year ends this week, the parched state is bracing for another dry year — its fourth in a row.

So far, in California’s recorded history, six previous droughts have lasted four or more years,  two of them in the past 35 years.

Despite some rain in September, weather watchers expect a hot and dry fall, and warn that this winter could bring warm temperatures and below-average precipitation.

Opinion: The Colorado River at the End of Water Year 2022: A Status Report

I don’t see how this ends well.

Most of the major players – the ones that matter, anyway, by which I mean Arizona, California, and the federal government – appear boxed in by constraints they can’t seem to overcome, while the water in the Colorado River’s big reservoirs is circling the drains.

California Reservoirs Continue to Rise After Major Winter Storms

California has seen big changes in reservoir levels so far this rainy season and the trend is up for the foreseeable future.

At the beginning of the water year for 2020-2021, some major reservoirs, such as Lake Oroville, were at record lows. California’s well-known reliance on water capture and transport was under severe strain until a record October storm provided quick relief.

 

Precipitation Since Oct. 1 Tops Previous Full ‘Water Year’ in California

More precipitation has fallen on California during its current “water year” than in the full prior 12-month span, the National Weather Service says.

The downpours and mountain storms of recent weeks have helped boost the state’s precipitation volume to 33.9 trillion gallons thus far for the water year that began Oct. 1, compared to the previous water year’s 33.6 trillion gallons, the service said Sunday. Lake Tahoe by comparison contains roughly 40 trillion gallons.

California Snow Drought Ends in Dramatic Fashion, While Other States Still Deal with Shortage

Thanks to multiple atmospheric river events, average snowpack in California has gone from 18% to 98% in just two weeks.
“Increases in snowpack of this size are not common, but also not unprecedented,” Julie Kalansky, deputy director of operations for the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E), explained.
Kalansky pointed out previous studies have shown a jump on this scale can happen about twice every three years, but usually over the course of an entire winter, not just the month of December. While they don’t have the exact rankings for each month of the year, “most of the storm events in the study we referenced for the above calculation were in the second half of December and later into the season,” Kalansky added.
The sudden change gives California its wettest start to the Water Year in more than 40 years, thanks to several drought-denting rain and snow systems pushing through the area in recent weeks. The Water Year runs from October 1 through September 30 of the following year.

The Drought is Going to Stick Around for a Third Year in California, Federal Scientists Project

California is likely to emerge from the winter with little relief from drought, federal climate experts said Thursday, setting the stage for a third year of dry weather and continuing water shortages. The monthly climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that drought conditions will persist in almost all of California through February. With the next three months historically the state’s wettest, the opportunity for drought recovery is essentially lost.

‘Extreme Year’: Past 12 Months Among the Driest Ever in California History

The current ongoing two-year dry period in California, punctuated by the third-driest water year on record for the Central Sierra, is part of California’s overall arid fate so far in the 21st century, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

The Golden State’s hydrology now increasingly resembles conditions in the Colorado River Basin this century, where multiple, consecutive, drier-than-average years are mixed with an occasional wet year. California’s last wet water year was 2016-2017, the second-wettest on record.

S.F. Saw Just 9 Inches of Rain This ‘Water Year.’ Here’s How That Compares to Normal

The water year has officially come to an end — and once again, the Bay Area has come up dry.

How dry? The region received a little more than a third of normal precipitation from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, according to data from the National Weather Service — a common occurrence for the past several years, which bodes ill for a region already at the worst “exceptional” level on the U.S. Drought Monitor map.