There is still a chance that April will only have an average amount of rain, rather than the two or three times normal amounts that we have been experiencing. Of course doing that requires that there won’t be any more rain this month because we had the average amount of rain for the entire month yesterday.
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On the left coast, the reservoirs are beginning to spill because they still have to provide flood control. This is true of Shasta, Folsom, Whiskeytown, Oroville and HetchHetchy. Basically all northern California reservoirs. Central and southern California not so much. Factor in the Sierra snow pack at 80% and the Colorado river basin at 45%, the drought is not over. The long term forecast has the high ridge over the great basin (shunting storms to the north) breaking down which might improve the Colorado Basin’s outlook. Carlsbad Desalinization plant came online last December so things are looking up.
The drought, however, is not over.
The problem is that due to global warming, the rainfall is coming as rain rather than as snow. The water storage system in California wasn’t designed for that, it was designed for water to enter it over a longer period of time as the snow melts. So we’re not going to have a problem with water here in the Bay Area over the upcoming year, but the Central California farmers are still screwed because the snowmelt water is not going to be there for them during the summer.
We maybe need to build more reservoir capacity to capture these rains, but the core problem is, where? All the good places to build reservoirs have already been built. The remaining places that reservoirs could be built are either in national parks, wilderness areas, or just aren’t big enough to make much difference.
To those who exclaim over the recent CA rain and declare the drought to be over, I try to describe the problem like this: We get rain, that like money in your checking account. We’ve been drawing water out from the aquifers, that’s like money from your savings account. We have hardly anything going into the savings account for several years, the snow pack has been awful. And once the aquifer has been completely drained, it often is unable to refill. So any kind of rain or snow is wonderful, but we have no buffer for the heat that is coming, we are one check away from being homeless… (or water-less)
In addition to everything else, the wildfires reduce the capacity of the watershed to retain water, and more of the water that comes down as rain just flows back to the ocean rather than being filtered through the soil and entering the aquifers. Most of what grows is just fuel for the next round of fires.
Alaska is having the same problems in the south as the rain clears away the snow cover and cause the temperature to rise – the snow reflects heat away, but the dark ground absorbs it. The ridge pushed a California bound series of storms into the ‘Pineapple Express’ that provided the rain that deprived Anchorage of snow for the start of the Iditarod.
We are experiencing the wrong amounts and types of moisture at the wrong times of the year, and cashed our “retirement accounts” to cover daily expenses. There are damn few options left.