Some people in California and across the West struggle to access
safe, reliable and affordable water to meet their everyday needs
for drinking, cooking and sanitation.
Join the Water Education Foundation, an impartial
nonprofit, in its mission to create a better understanding
of water issues and help resolve water problems through
educational programs.
Learn about the drought now plaguing
California and steps being taken to abate the impacts at our
annual Water Summit
later this month, and gain a deeper understanding of the
state’s biggest watershed relied on by millions for drinking
water during our Northern California
Tour this Thursday.
Register today for
our Water Summit,
hosted this year as an engaging virtual experience on the
afternoon of Oct. 28, to hear a variety of
perspectives detailing the on-the-ground impacts of the the
current drought in California.
Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Southern Nevada on
Monday and is scheduled to talk about climate change and
investing in climate resilience. … Harris is expected to
emphasize that water shortages have a ripple effect on U.S.
farmers, food supply, and economy – and that climate change
will continue to make extreme weather including droughts and
heat more frequent, costly, and harmful, according to the White
House communications team.
In a year of both extreme heat and extreme drought, California
has reported its driest water year in terms of precipitation in
a century, and experts fear the coming 12 months could be even
worse. The Western Regional Climate Center added average
precipitation reported at each of its stations and calculated
that a total of 11.87 inches of rain and snow fell in
California in the 2021 water year. That’s half of what experts
deem average during a water year in California: about 23.58
inches.
Light rain started falling Sunday evening in the Bay Area, as a
week of much-needed precipitation was forecast for the parched
Northern California landscape. One to 2 inches of rain is
expected to fall across the Bay Area over the next week, and
even more could fall across the North Bay as a series of storms
dives in from the northwest, said Rick Canepa, meteorologist
with the National Weather Service. To the east, parts of the
Sierra Nevada could see more than a half-foot of snow by Monday
morning.
The wet winter the American south-west has hoped for as it
battles extreme drought and heat is increasingly unlikely to
materialize as scientists now predict that a phenomenon known
as La Niña will develop for the second year in a row. The
weather system could intensify the worst effects of the drought
… Different regions in the US will experience different
outcomes. Washington state, Oregon, and even possibly northern
California could see wetter conditions than
normal, possibly causing problems if the rain comes as a
deluge.
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.
