As California navigates a critically dry water year, many business-as-usual elements are getting a second look. One such transaction is a proposed water sale by the Merced Irrigation District.
The mercury could soar to 112 again Thursday in the San Diego County deserts, but cooler weather will arrive on Friday, according to the National Weather Service. The high pressure that has caused sweltering conditions since Tuesday will be replaced by a low-pressure system, which will also bring a slight chance of rain Friday night through Saturday morning everywhere except the deserts, forecasters said.
New research showing how global warming intensifies extreme rainfall at the regional level could help communities better prepare for storms that in the decades ahead threaten to swamp cities and farms.
The likelihood of intense storms is rising rapidly in North America, and the study, published Monday in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects big increases in such deluges.
“The longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability,” said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.
An efficient, low-resolution machine learning model can usefully predict the global atmospheric state as much as three days out.
The U.K. had its driest May in 124 years and sunniest spring on record, increasing the threat of a summer drought and compounding conditions that have been made worse by climate change.
The country had 9.6 millimeters of rain in May, which is just 16% of the average for the month and the least since 1896, according to early data by the U.K.’s Meteorological Office. It also recorded 573 hours of sunshine during Spring, which is due to end May 31. That makes it the sunniest spring since records began in 1929.
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.
Temperatures will soar well into the triple digits in the San Diego County deserts Tuesday and the blazing conditions are not expected to let up until this weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
UC San Diego researchers have confirmed that climate change helped produce the historic 43-day ocean heat wave that drew big crowds to San Diego beaches during the summer of 2018.
The finding was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, in a paper that says the phenomenon could not be solely attributed to natural variations in the weather.
Though the last couple of weekends have seen wet weather, it hasn’t been enough to keep up with the yearly average in time for summer in California. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is tested regularly by employees of the California Department of Water Resources, has yielded some grim results so far in 2020 in terms of snow-water equivalent.
On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we’re discussing a new study from Columbia University about an emerging climate-driven megadrought in the Western US.
