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Fall snow, rains have 'satisfied the drought debt' in Northern Sierra Nevada
- mmanfrin 10y agoThank goodness. The snowpack is of irreplaceable importance to the ecology of California. Without the summer melts, California would turn in to a desert.
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoThank God. Now the West has to figure out how to conserve water better to avoid drying up and burning too much when future droughts occur. Drip irrigation in agriculture and desalination are both useful technologies for water sustainability in semi-arid environments.
- pstuart 10y agoWater costs need revising to properly incentivize efficiency.
- pjungwir 10y agoJust the other week I finished reading Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner (whose novels are wonderful by the way), and in several of the essays collected there he writes about how the defining characteristic of the West is "aridity". He complains about how we have over-settled the land, how our presence is based on exploitation, the Gold Rush, mobility, and impermanence. He talks about how the green that irrigation provides can't last. "Thoughts in a Dry Land" was from 1991; these problems aren't new, and I doubt we'll ever "solve" them. And the population keeps growing. I hope the things you mention do indeed help!
- gkop 10y agoThe canonical and excellent read on the subject is Cadillac Desert.
- polotics 10y agoread Water Knife! (or wait for the movie adaptation)
- scruple 10y agoThis reminds me of the style of writing in Desert Solitaire, which expressed what seems like many of the same thoughts back in the late 60s about the American west. I'll have to check out Stegner, thanks.
- pjungwir 10y agoAngle of Repose is amazing. Crossing to Safety is really good too, although not about the West. I still haven't gotten to Big Rock Candy Mountain, although I think he might be best known for it.
- maxxxxx 10y agoIt seems the opposite is happening. For a while LA was promoting water saving but it seems they have stopped. a lot of my neighbors also have restarted their sprinklers. I think things have to get much worse before there will be action.
- fred_is_fred 10y agoUnfortunately there's zero reason for a farmer to invest in this due to western water law. Speaking for Colorado anyway, and I think many are similar, if you conserve water, yay for you but there's no incentive. Someone with a junior right just gets more water for themselves. You can't sell it and you can't store it. You either use it or you don't In that case the most economic thing you can do is to buy the cheapest irrigation system possible, regardless of the waste and of course the cheapest is the one you already have.
- niels_olson 10y agoErm, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Fresno need something like 50 years of rain to replete the water table?
- Neliquat 10y agoThe water table is a seperate but related issue. And it would take a large amount of rain, and time to replenish. Not likely to happen faster than use, especially with the asinine ag well exemptions.
- staticautomatic 10y agoI think you mean replenish. Replete is an adjective.
- milcron 10y agoI'd believe that. This article is about the Northern part of California.
- plussed_reader 10y agoWater is an 'all of California' issue.
- milcron 10y agoRight, but the headline "rains have satisfied the drought debt" only applies to the North.
- plussed_reader 10y agoAnd only in a narrowly defined way. It speaks nothing to the continued die off of the forests due to the drought, the battle for water table control with all the private interests, let alone what up stream sources may or may not have been replenished. The 'drought' is far from over.
- floatrock 10y ago
- TrevorJ 10y agoI hope this doesn't remove public pressure for a sensible water conservancy policy in the west.
- ktRolster 10y agoEveryone wants a 'sensible' policy, no one agrees on what 'sensible' means. And no one wants to give up their water rights.
- TrevorJ 10y agoI agree with what I believe is your central point, which is that the issue is difficult and there are no clear answers. This makes it all the more important that we continue to talk about solutions.
- ktRolster 10y agoI agree with what I believe is your central point What part don't you agree with?
- TheGirondin 10y agoI just found out that LA doesn't reuse their wastewater. Here this whole time they have been talking about things like building a pipeline from the Great Lakes and they don't even treat and reuse.
- positr0n 10y ago... nearly 200% above average for the first two months of the water year Two months of twice normal precipitation is all it took to alleviate the drought? From the dire tone of all the news I read from California it seemed way worse than that.
- milcron 10y agoOnly the Northern part of the state has satisfied the drought. > On Nov. 3, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that about a quarter of California was out of drought conditions, the best outlook the state has had since spring 2013, when 64% of the state was considered in “moderate drought” or worse. >The picture in Southern California, however, remains bleak. A bark beetle infestation that took hold in the southern and central Sierra Nevada during the drought has killed more than 100 million trees and is moving north, increasing the danger of wildfire.
- Jenya_ 10y ago200% above average is not twice normal, it is 100% + 200%, that is x3
- justinator 10y agoThe article is actually misleading. It says that Oct. was 4x as much precip. than normal, and Nov. was less than average... then says that for the TWO months together, it's 200% above average. But the data is a spike in one month, then more drought-like conditions in the next. So...
- Neliquat 10y agoThis helps the current drought condition. It does not, as mentioned below, replenish the water table, or other more long term ailments of overpopulation. So both are correct.
- digikata 10y agoThere are techniques to improve aquifier recharge rates, or even actively replenish them by pumping. Of course, it all takes planning and resources to accomplish. http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/ http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/
- jpmattia 10y agoLatest drought map for CA not included in article: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?... About 88% of the state still in some form of drought.
- helper 10y agoAnd here is a map of California's reservior levels: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...
- btilly 10y agoNice! Too bad they don't offer one more bar for aggregated data. That said, contributions to the snowpack will show up in reservoirs next year, so reservoir levels will be trailing indicators of final recovery.
- greglindahl 10y agoRecent winters have been so warm that early snow has melted very early. So reservoir levels are less of a trailing indicator than in the past.
- btilly 10y agoHowever if we have significant snow right now, that won't be showing up in the reservoirs yet. :-)
- f_allwein 10y agoWhat's the unit on the y axis...?
- jpmattia 10y agoTAF usually means Thousand Acre-Feet in water resources. (ie, a unit of volume.)
- source99 10y agoMaybe this SoCal Newspaper is trying to make it seem like NorCal has enough water to spare and send it South. Just a theory...
- hamandcheese 10y agoHow long will it be until desalination becomes economical?
- tn13 10y agoCalifornia's hyper-environmentalism is unlikely to make it politically viable. California in fact could have invested more in water collection and reservoir building but they did not. Desalination is pretty distant.
- strictnein 10y agoSanta Barbara's just rebuilt their desalination plant. http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/sources/desalination.asp http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/... (note: .asp!)
- tn13 10y agoIt is a real old desalination plant from 80s that is being re-activated.
- Ductapemaster 10y agoYeah it was never turned on due to economic reasons. They are currently retrofitting it with updated pumps, membranes, pipes, etc, and increasing its capacity. They've definitely hit some interesting roadblocks along the way.
- snerbles 10y agoAg interests in California have consistently fought for more reservoirs and storage, only to be consistently denied by the state government in recent decades. http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/31/california-drought-why-doesnt-california-build-big-dams-any-more/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/31/california-drought-why...
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- plussed_reader 10y agoThe metric in the headline speaks nothing to the deforestation that is occurring due to the prolonged nature of the drought. This kind of headline smacks of shoddy journalism, and is even more suspect when the publication comes from an area that stands to benefit from a change to the current status quo. Let's see their article correlate to the situation in the Stanislaus forest.
- ww520 10y agoWhat about the underground reservoir? What level are they in?
- greglindahl 10y agoTerrible. Groundwater is free to anyone who pumps it, so needless to say, there's been a ton of pumping recently. A bill was passed in 2014 to make aquifer pumping regulated starting in 2020 or 2024.