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15 Feb ’12
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Came across these pictures, have they really had that much rain there? This is shasta lake in NorCal
This pic was taken just 3 months ago in January
I can't imagine the groundwater has been replenished at all but good that the reservoirs are filling, SoCal is still pretty low though
15 Feb ’12
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The empty reservoir is the iconic image of California’s severe four-year drought. California’s big reservoirs actually rise and fall every year, filling with rainfall and snowmelt in the winter and developing a “bathtub ring” in the summer as they supply farms and lawns through the dry season. For three winters, though, rain and snow failed to fill the reservoirs: from 2013 through 2015, Shasta Lake never reached capacity, entering the dry season already depleted.
Hoping that this winter would be different, I scraped an image every hour from two Caltranstraffic cams that happen to capture Shasta Lake in the background. Stitched together, they show California’s largest reservoir rising 144 feet and tripling in volume between December and May as it swells with rainfall and snowmelt.
Here’s the same bridge from a different camera. This camera is on top of a mountain and seems to get blown around in bad weather, so it’s all over the place.
The reservoirs may have refilled, but we’re not off the hook. California is still in a drought, and climate change will make severe droughts more frequent. Much of the state’s groundwater has been overdrawn beyond any hope of recovery, so we’ll have a much smaller cushion next time the rain stops. And an essential feature of the water system is that snowpack in the Cascades, Klamath Mountains, and Sierra Nevada melts gradually over the early summer, replenishing the reservoirs as farms ramp up usage—but that snowpack is still well below average, which means that Shasta Lake will likely be alarmingly low again by the end of summer.
21 Apr ’16
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According to NOAA, El Nina could start towards the end of summer and bring more rains for Northern Cal (but not so much for Southern Cal). A map on their site was showing a reduction of the drought for Northern Cal - https://www.climate.gov/enso
(it's raining for the 3rd. day here in Northern Cal 🙂
15 Feb ’12
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Has the ground water started recharging at all?
15 Feb ’12
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Surprised they are doing this already
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - California moved on Wednesday to dramatically roll back strict mandatory water conservation rules imposed at the height of the state's multi-year drought, after a wet winter eased conditions in parts of the state.
The state Water Resources Control Board voted to end mandatory conservation of up to 36 percent in many communities, moving instead to a system under which only regions where a shortage of supply is anticipated will have to conserve.
"We don’t want to cry wolf but we also don’t want to stick our heads in the sand," said water board chair Felicia Marcus. "This is a compromise."
The wet weather has eased but not ended a four-year drought that has led farmers to idle land, made rivers too warm for salmon and caused wells to run dry.
Under an order by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown last year to cut water use by 25 percent statewide, Californians saved enough to supply 6.5 million people for an entire year.
But storms powered by the El Nino ocean-warming phenomenon dumped considerable precipitation in Northern California and much of the Sierra Nevada, swelling reservoirs, building crucial snowpack in the mountains and prompting consumers to complain that cutbacks were unnecessary.
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