Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
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Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
Time is running out to register for next Thursday’s Water
101 Workshop and go beyond the headlines to gain a
deeper understanding of how water is managed and moved across
California. Plus, only a handful of seats remain for the
opportunity to extend your ‘beyond the headlines’ water education
experience on the optional watershed tour the next day!
To replenish California’s
chronically depleted aquifers, the state’s Department of Water
Resources is taking a hard look at a new line of attack: Pairing
more sophisticated reservoir operations with groundwater
recharge. Water managers are aiming to make greater use of the
increased floodwater that’s expected to come with flashier, more
intense storms and earlier snowmelt.
The Colorado River system’s immediate outlook got even worse
this week when federal forecasters downgraded the expected
inflows into Lake Powell to just 27 percent of
average. … The news comes days after the
Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages water
and dams in the American West, released a bleak warning
for levels at Lake Mead. … Meanwhile, officials from the
seven states in the Colorado River Basin have blown past two
separate deadlines to update river operation guidelines that
will expire this year. The Bureau of Reclamation and its parent
Interior Department have said they will decide for the states
in the absence of an agreement. … In a statement Wednesday,
the Bureau of Reclamation said its staff is keeping a close eye
on the forecast.
… [A] rapidly-shrinking snowpack is undercutting plans from
the governor’s office and White House, exposing the limits of
California’s water playbook and leaving the state on
the precipice of drought. The early-season heat wave
now gripping the state is wiping out much of its remaining
Sierra Nevada snowpack, which acts as a frozen reservoir to
dribble out roughly a third of California’s water supply
throughout the spring and summer. … The Department of
Water Resources said on Wednesday that it got permission from
the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees flood control,
to fill up Lake Oroville past the usual safety limit
meant to accommodate possible floods to capture remaining
snowmelt.
The analyst for California lawmakers advised Wednesday for the
Legislature to lean into its oversight role of an upcoming
water plan to firm up water supply throughout the parched
state. The Legislative Analyst’s Office in its
report focused on an update to the water quality control
plan for the San Francisco Bay-Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. That plan will create water quality standards
intended to protect fish and wildlife in the Bay-Delta, along
with the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their
tributaries. … The analyst’s office noted that the State
Water Resource Control Board likely will approve an updated
Bay-Delta plan this year.
As California has endured increasingly severe droughts, a
long-running federal research program has used planes to
survey, and help explain, the growing toll on the landscape:
how many trees have died, what areas are being hit hardest and
where wildfire risk is greatest. The state Aerial Detection
Survey, run by the U.S. Forest Service, however, has become a
casualty of the Trump administration. … The research flights,
which for decades crisscrossed California’s forests to assess
their health, ground to a halt last year because of funding and
staffing reductions, federal officials say.
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought—an extended period of
limited or no precipitation—is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
During California’s 2012–2016 drought, much of the state
experienced severe drought conditions: significantly less
precipitation and snowpack, reduced streamflow and higher
temperatures. Those same conditions reappeared early in 2021
prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom in May to declare drought emergencies
in watersheds across 41 counties in California.
