Western USA drought worst in modern era

Weatherman said:

WetEV said:

Weatherman said:

If anything, warmer water temperatures would enhance the summer monsoon by providing higher humidity and more moisture to the air. Mountain and desert areas of California will likely get more rainfall this summer than they would in a normal year. More rain and more cloud cover would mean less hot daytime highs, although nighttime lows would be warmer with the higher humidity.

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It might be interesting to check your predictions at the end of summer... Want to provide a short list of locations to check?

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Coastal areas? San Diego and Los Angeles

Mountains? Big Bear, Mammoth Lakes, South Lake Tahoe

If you want to pick a location out in the desert: Palmdale, Needles, Bishop

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Nubo said:

GRA said:

...along with the usual stories about people parking their cars on their lawns to wash them...

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Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself is there? In fact I plan to do this soon as my car is filthy. I wash it maybe 4 times a year and each wash probably takes less water than a shower; but no sense letting it run to the sewer. I don't water the front yard at all so the occasional few gallons does go a long way towards keeping the rather hardy Gazanias alive. I replaced the grass with them several years ago.

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Weatherman said:

If anything, warmer water temperatures would enhance the summer monsoon by providing higher humidity and more moisture to the air. Mountain and desert areas of California will likely get more rainfall this summer than they would in a normal year. More rain and more cloud cover would mean less hot daytime highs, although nighttime lows would be warmer with the higher humidity.

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One environmental group has tested the irrigation water for oil field chemicals. Over the last two years, Scott Smith, chief scientist for the advocacy group Water Defense, collected samples of the treated irrigation water that the Cawelo Water District buys from Chevron. Laboratory analysis of those samples found compounds that are toxic to humans, including acetone and methylene chloride — powerful industrial solvents — along with oil.

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NeilBlanchard said:

This video series popped up while I watched the video above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svNg5w7WY0k&index=1&list=PLCeA6DzL9P4vhMbHjDUmL2hlEPMssyL1i

You will be amazed watching this - it is like a whole TED conference rolled into one, and it's down homey, and no production values.

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GRA said:

Every little bit pushes the start of fire season back just a little further.

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First off, it’s rapidly intensifying. El Niño is about self-reinforcing feedbacks between the ocean and the atmosphere, and from all accounts, this one has its foot on the accelerator pedal.

If it continues, the impacts will be felt around the globe—here’s my detailed rundown of what to expect. Among them: drought in Australia, Southeast Asia, and perhaps India, with flooding in Peru and Southern California.

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mjblazin said:

We in Texas have had a few bad storms and loss of life/damage, but the drought is substantially over. In one month we went from 65% of state in extreme drought to under 2% with more rain on the way. Now 65% of counties with 90% of population, of state has no indications of any drought. Additionally the ground, not the aquifer, is water soaked meaning as the rains end in a few weeks we will keep temps cooler and limit the summer losses. All forecasts indicate fall will have above average rains. To my knowledge, most authorities credit El Niño.

El Niño gives and takes away.

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SYDNEY (AP) — California has turned to the world's driest inhabited continent for solutions to its longest and sharpest drought on record.

Australia, the land poet Dorothea Mackellar dubbed "a sunburnt country," suffered a torturous drought from the late 1990s through 2012. Now Californians are facing their own "Big Dry," and looking Down Under to see how they coped.

Australia also faced tough water restrictions — along with dying cattle, barren fields and monstrous wildfires that killed 173 people. But when the rains finally returned, Australians had fundamentally changed how they handle this precious resource. They treat water as a commodity to be conserved and traded, and carefully measure what's available and how it's being used. Efficiency programs cut their average daily use to 55 gallons, compared with 105 gallons per day for each Californian.

The lesson: long droughts are here to stay, so societies had better plan ahead, says drought-policy expert Linda Botterill of the University of Canberra.

"We can expect longer, deeper and more severe droughts in Australia, and I believe the same applies in the U.S.," Botterill says. "As a result, we need to develop strategies that are not knee-jerk responses, but that are planned risk-management strategies."

California water officials now routinely cite Australia's experience. Felicia Marcus, who runs California's Water Resources Control Board, can describe the stormwater-capture system watering soccer fields in Perth in minute detail.

But Californians may find Australia's medicine tough to swallow.

Australians are accustomed to living in a dry land, expect government intervention in a crisis and largely support making sacrifices for the common good. For much of their history, many Californians have enjoyed abundant water, or were able to divert enough of it to turn deserts green, and lawyers make sure property rights remain paramount.

From an Australian perspective, California's drought response has been "absolutely pathetic," says Daniel Connell, an environmental policy expert at The Australian National University.

Australia's drought response was hardly perfect, and some of its gains might be slipping away, but Americans suffering their own "Big Dry" may benefit from some comparisons:

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WHOSE WATER IS IT?

AUSTRALIA: Overuse and drought had depleted Australia's main river system, which winds across four states that produce a third of the nation's food, and ran so low by 2002 that the Murray River had to be dredged to reach the sea. The government capped entitlements, canceled inactive licenses, bought back hundreds of billions of gallons from irrigators and strictly metered usage to make sure license holders use only their allocation. Availability now affects price as shares are traded on an open market worth $1.2 billion a year in U.S. dollars.

The water that farms, industries and towns get depends on what's in the river; in drought, it can dwindle to virtually nothing. But entitlements can be bought and sold, keeping agriculture afloat. A farmer of a thirsty crop like cotton might not profit when both the share of water and the price of cotton are low. But if an orchard grower in desperate need buys that water, the cotton farmer can live off the sale while the orchard owner reaps a profitable harvest.

CALIFORNIA: Nearly 4,000 so-called senior water rights holders who staked claims before 1914 or own acreage abutting a river or stream get priority. In drought, authorities must completely deny water to most other claimants before they touch the water of these senior water-rights holders. San Francisco has stronger water rights than many other cities because in 1902, Mayor James Phelan hiked up the Sierra Nevada and tacked a water claim to an oak tree along the bank of the Tuolumne River. Gov. Jerry Brown calls the system "somewhat archaic."

"Revising the water-rights system is a thermo-nuclear issue in California," said John Laird, California's secretary for natural resources, but if water shortages go on, "almost everything has to be on the table."

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WATCHING THE FLOW

AUSTRALIA: Thousands of gauges across Australia measure rainfall, authorities in each state and territory measure surface water at stream gauging stations, and underground water is monitored through a complex process involving the drilling of bores and controlled pumping tests. Water data collection agencies report to the federal Bureau of Meteorology, which publishes the data online.

CALIFORNIA: The legislature last year required monitoring to be phased in gradually, eventually showing for the first time how much groundwater is being pumped. But roughly a quarter-million California households and businesses still lack water meters, and aren't required to until 2025. The state relies on an honor system: Rights holders self-report their use of river and stream water every three years. Gov. Brown's budget proposed last week would require monitors and annual usage reports.

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TIGHTENING THE TAP

AUSTRALIA: All major cities imposed limits or bans on watering lawns and washing cars, and inspectors fined rule-breakers. Public-service campaigns and water-saving appliances also reduced household water use from 85 gallons per person per day in 2000 to 55 gallons per person today.

CALIFORNIA: After voluntary cutbacks fell short, Brown's administration mandated a statewide 25 percent cut in water use by cities and towns, and ordered more farmers to stop pumping from rivers and streams. Marcus said the one piece of advice that seemed universal in both Australia and California "was conserve, conserve, conserve, as early as you can, because it's the cheapest, most economical way to buy time" while tougher water-saving measures are phased in.

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DO MORE WITH LESS

AUSTRALIA: Australians began conserving long before their drought. In 1995, Sydney's water authority was ordered to slash per-capita demand by 35 percent by 2011, and it met that target by reducing pressure and leaks in pipes, boosting businesses' water efficiency, and offering low-cost, water-saving technologies in homes, such as dual-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads and rainwater tanks for gardens, toilets and laundry. With government rebates, these devices became common across Australia.

Such efficiency measures can be implemented quickly, economically and easily, says Stuart White, an Australian sustainability expert who has advised Californians on drought response. "In some cities, it's quite possible we would have reached death's door if it hadn't been in place."

CALIFORNIA: Communities across California offer rebates on drought-friendly plumbing and appliances, and a growing number of local ordinances are being rewritten to allow families to recycle water from rains and from showers. But the rooftop-rain collectors, stormwater cisterns and bathwater-recycling for gardens common in Australia remain rarities.

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MIRACLES OF TECHNOLOGY

AUSTRALIA: Billions were spent on desalination plants in major cities, and many are not operating because cheaper water is now available in Australia, prompting critics to dismiss them as expensive and power-hungry flops that will create greenhouse gases and worsen the continent's climate-change woes. Supporters say the plants will protect the country from the next inevitable drought.

CALIFORNIA: Brown has called for conservation while focusing on an ambitious, $17 billion plan, opposed by environmental groups, to build 39 miles of tunnel to take Northern California water to Southern California's bigger farmers. Desalination plants also are envisioned: San Diego's would be the biggest in the Western Hemisphere.

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AndyH said:

CALIFORNIA: Brown has called for conservation while focusing on an ambitious, $17 billion plan, opposed by environmental groups, to build 39 miles of tunnel to take Northern California water to Southern California's bigger farmers. Desalination plants also are envisioned: San Diego's would be the biggest in the Western Hemisphere.

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• • • Buckminster Fuller said:

      You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
      To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

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Estimated Drought Impacts to California Agriculture, 2015

Source:Howitt RE, Medellín-Azuara J, MacEwan D, Lund JR and Sumner DA. 2015. “Preliminary Analysis: 2015 Drought Economic Impact Study,” UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.

The drought is expected to be worse for California’s agricultural economy this year because of reduced water availability, according to our preliminary estimates released today.

The study, summarized below, estimates farmers will have 2.7 million acre-feet less surface water than they would in a normal water year — about a 33 percent loss of water supply, on average. The impacts are concentrated mostly in the San Joaquin Valley and are not evenly distributed; individual farmers will face losses of zero to 100 percent.

Expanded groundwater pumping will offset more than 70 percent of this surface water deficit, according to our modeling of how farmers are likely to respond. This leaves a shortage of 2.5 million acre-feet — 9 to 10 percent of the amount normally applied to crops — compared with a net water shortage of 1.5 million acre-feet in 2014.

The estimates, prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, also show that farmers will fallow roughly 560,000 acres or 6 to 7 percent of California’s average annual irrigated cropland.

Economically, the drought seems on track to reduce crop, dairy and livestock revenues by $1.2 billion this year. Pumping costs are expected to reach nearly $600 million. Overall, the drought is estimated to cause direct costs of $1.8 billion — about 4 percent of California’s $45 billion agricultural economy. When we account for the spillover effect of agriculture on the state’s other economic sectors, the total cost of this year’s drought on California’s economy is $2.7 billion and the loss of about 18,600 full- and part-time jobs...

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mwalsh said:

Not to toot my own tooter, but our water use is down over the previous two years. Though I'm not entirely sure how we did it.

Certainly, for the last year at least, I've been putting a bucket in the shower to catch the water that comes out before it gets hot. I use this to wash our cars, which I've also stopped doing every week this year, going to every two weeks instead (unless I really can't stand how dirty they are). Speaking of getting hot shower water, on laundry days I've also been hitting the shower while filling the washing machine - the washing machine drains the cold to tepid water out of the pipes leaving the shower water piping hot immediately.

Also on the laundry front, our new washer has 4 load settings instead of 3, the extra one being for (and I forget how they word it exactly) "tiny" loads (anyway, one below small). and since it's just the two of us at home and we're neither clothes horses I can do a fair number of loads with this new setting. However, when I have larger loads, I've been setting one below where my gut tells me I should be - so when I have what I feel is a "large" load I'll set the washer to "medium" and see what I end up with as a water level. Usually it seems right on, but on the rare occasion I don't feel there is enough water I'll reset to the next size load and allow the drum to fill some more.

We've also cut back on watering the yard, since spring and summer weather has been milder the last few years overall. BTW, we've never had grass, just plantings that are reasonably water friendly. This year we're going to run a drip system instead of sprinklers to see if targeted watering helps us conserve any on that front.

Oh, and I quit washing my solar panels, but am seeing a small reduction in solar production as a result - I haven't hit 40kWh at all this year so far, peaking at around 38kWh instead. Not really an issue, since I always seem to be ahead in what I do end up producing, and obviously for the greater good.

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