A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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Snowfall is declining globally as temperatures warm because of
human-caused climate change, a new analysis and maps from a
NOAA climate scientist show. But less snow falling from
the sky isn’t as innocuous as just having to shovel less; it
threatens to reinforce warming, and disrupt food and water for
billions of people. … Less snow falling from the sky
also means less snow piling up into snowpack — a deep,
persistent cover of snow that accumulates during the
winter. … The threat to water supplies from declining
snow is most pronounced in climates subject to more extreme
boom-and-bust cycles of precipitation, like the Mediterranean
climate found in California and other parts of the American
West.
The next chance at showers in the valley will be on Thursday
night and into this weekend as a cold storm system drops
into the region from the north. Valley rain totals will be on
the lighter side (generally 0-0.25″ expected) and Sierra snow
totals will range from 6-12″ above 4,000-5,000 feet. Although
these storms will bring decent snowfall totals, Northern
California has yet to see an atmospheric river system akin to
those last year that dropped multiple feet of snow in the
Sierra. By Sunday, high pressure is set to become the
dominant feature over California, which means dry conditions,
and although this week will bring wet weather to much of the
region, it will be a while longer before a major atmospheric
river slams into the state this far south.
Want to produce a huge amount of lithium for electric vehicle
batteries — and also batteries that keep our homes powered
after sundown — without causing the environmental destruction
that lithium extraction often entails? Then the Salton Sea may
be your jam. Companies big and small have been swarming
California’s largest lake for years, trying to find a
cost-effective way to pull out the lithium dissolved in
scorching hot fluid deep beneath the lake’s southern end. Now a
new federal analysis suggests even more of the valuable metal
is buried down there than we previously understood. -Written by LA Times columnist Sammy Roth.
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A Utah nonprofit group is proposing legal protections and water
conservation measures like Nevada’s to save the rapidly drying
Great Salt Lake. The United States Geological Survey considers
a water level of 4,198 feet the “minimum healthy level” for the
lake, but it’s mostly been lower than that since 2000. Today,
the lake sits at 4,192 feet, according to the Utah Division of
Wildlife Resources. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its
surface area since 1850, according to a 2023 Brigham Young
University report.
Valle de Guadalupe is a semi-arid wine-making subregion in Baja
California, which is a desert where the land is freckled with
agave, cactus and chaparral alongside grapevines and olive
trees. It lies a two-hour drive south of San Diego.
… Water woes are another looming factor. Rain has always
been scarce here, and signs are growing that the valley’s
demand for water is overwhelming its
infrastructure. Unlike many wine regions in California
that are able to rely on varying sources of water, Valle de
Guadalupe has the Guadalupe Aquifer, a body of porous
ground or sediment that holds groundwater, as its only source
of water. Depending on the rainfall each year, the water table
rises and falls. But since 1995, the general trend has
been more water being sucked out of the aquifer than going in
…
It takes a village to raise suckers, and the Klamath Tribes are
growing hundreds of the bottom-dwelling fish in constructed
ponds near Chiloquin, Oregon. On a bright October morning, a
crew has gathered to return a small number of them to the
Sprague River, a tributary of Upper Klamath Lake. Two
technicians take turns transferring netfuls of fish from kiddie
pool-sized holding tanks to a waiting truck. Fisheries
Technician Charlie Wright sits perched next to the tank,
verifying that each fish has been fitted with a passive
integrated transponder, or PIT tag, which allows biologists to
track where they go and how well they survive.
Ari Parker’s mother, who passed away earlier this year at 100
years old, often asked her daughter the same question Pajaro
and Watsonville residents have asked since the 1950s: Is the
levee replaced? Parker, a Watsonville City Council member,
represents the northeast corner of the city near where the
Salsipuedes and Corralitos creeks split. Her mother was born
and raised in Pajaro. Both mother and daughter have experienced
more than a lifetime’s share of floods and levee breaches over
the years — two generations whose lives have been shaped under
the constant threat of preventable disaster.
The governing board of the Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency is
meeting in closed session Friday to discuss a 36-page complaint
against manufacturing giant 3M and more than a dozen other
businesses in October 2020, accusing them of poisoning the
state’s water supply with their products. The lawsuit
claims that from the 1960s through the present, the company has
manufactured and distributed “fluorosurfactant products” —
known to the average consumer as chemicals that create Teflon
coating, “Scotchgard,” stainproofing compounds, waxy surfaces
and aqueous film-forming foam (“AFFF”), a firefighting agent
used to control and extinguish Class B fuel fires.
Leigh C. knew that the homeowners insurance on her home in
Black Forest, Colorado, an area just northeast of Colorado
Springs, would be renewing soon. But when she opened her new
bill, she thought she had misread the number. “I called them to
see if that was a mistake,” she told CNBC Select. Looking at
the itemized numbers, Leigh found that her annual property
insurance premium renewal jumped 124% from $3,767 to $8,361.
Even though she volunteers for United Policyholders, a
nonprofit that advocates for homeowners insurance policyholders
after major disasters, Leigh had trouble believing her eyes.
… In its press release, State Farm specifically
cited “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure” as one of the
reasons it would no longer accept new applications for property
insurance. Government officials have also noted the tie between
homeowners insurance availability and climate change.
More than 50,000 residents of Santa Cruz County are reliant on
a single water source: the dwindling Mid-County Groundwater
Basin, which the state deemed “critically overdrafted” nearly a
decade ago. Now local agencies are embarking on efforts to
boost the ability of the basin to capture more rain during the
wet months along with an ambitious plan to replenish the
basin’s drinking water supply with recycled wastewater. A
number of agencies — including Soquel Creek Water District, the
City of Santa Cruz Water Department, the Central Water District
— and several thousand private well owners share the
underground basin, a reserve made up of a group of linked
aquifers, in an area that encompasses the Eastside of Santa
Cruz, Live Oak, Soquel, Aptos and Capitola.
On Nov. 3, 2023, the U.S. Forestry Service temporarily
interrupted the water flow to Taylor Creek from the Fallen Leaf
Lake dam for three days. This raised concern from community
members regarding the spawning kokanee salmon and the future of
their eggs. University of Nevada, Reno Professor Sudeep Chandra
says the flow into the lake also attracts kokanee to the stream
for spawning and that while this interruption could impact
reproduction, another concern is ensuring warm water invasive
fish species don’t move across the ecosystem, becoming fully
established in Taylor Creek and Fallen Leaf Lake.
It may be hard to be-leaf, but during the winter months, 90% of
vegetables come from fields in Yuma, Arizona. With 230,000
acres of land used for agriculture, Yuma county ranks third in
the nation for vegetable production, according to Visit Yuma.
But with drought conditions and water shortages in the West,
agriculture is at risk. To help address these issues,
researchers in Arizona evaluated water efficiency and salt
balances for 14 common crop varieties in the Winter Lettuce
capital, coordinated by the Yuma Center of Excellence for
Desert Agriculture. The study took place over seven years and
the results were published in a paper in November 2023.
A cyberattack over the weekend on the Municipal Water Authority
of Aliquippa has international implications. Aliquippa
would seem to be an unlikely target for international cyber
criminals, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is
investigating the possible attack by an anti-Israeli Iranian
group on the water authority. On Saturday, the
nondescript water authority building in the woods on the
outskirts of Aliquippa became the target of an international
attack. A piece of computer technology that monitors water
pressure suddenly shut down and a message appeared on its
screen. … Deluzio says the Aliquippa attack raises
concerns about more attacks within the United States and the
vulnerability of our critical infrastructure, especially in our
poorer communities.
It was the last session at a recent One Water Summit in Tucson,
Arizona, and some of the Indigenous youth speakers about to
present were not sure if anyone would show up. The three-day
One Water Summit, which takes place annually in different U.S.
cities, brought together top leaders from the Environmental
Protection Agency, key Colorado River stakeholders, and others
discussing recent political actions and highly-debated
solutions to water issues like drought, flooding and clean
water. Would those important figures be interested in hearing
from youth? It turns out, yes. After youth speakers presented
during a session focused on Indigenous-based water solutions,
several attendees in the room were in tears. The young
panelists’ words were that powerful.
A Pacific rock crab scuttling along the ocean floor will one
day become a part of a vast, critical stash of carbon that lies
off the coast of Northern California, which scientists have now
measured for the first time. This reserve holds untold
millennia worth of the would-be greenhouse gas, according to a
study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The
Pacific Ocean seafloor has exceptional carbon-caching
prowess, highlighting the importance of leaving this hidden
reservoir undisturbed, scientists say. Doug George, an ocean
scientist with NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management who
co-authored the study, is impressed by the “phenomenal amount
of carbon trapped in just the top layers of the seafloor.”
[The San Diego County Water Authority, the region’s water
supplier] dropped a 360-page lawsuit on San Diego’s boundary
referees – the Local Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO
– just weeks after it said Fallbrook Public Utilities
District and Rainbow Municipal Water District could ditch the
Water Authority. But the Water Authority won’t tell me how much
it spent suing everybody. … David Edwards, the Water
Authority’s general counsel, said in an email that the Water
Authority has the information I requested — the total cost per
hour and hours spent on the litigation, a copy of the contract
with Meyers Nave, and what part of the agency’s budget from
whence this expense came – but those records are “exempt from
production.”
In the past two weeks, iNaturalist users have recorded over
2,000 observations of the California newt, and another 400 of
the similar-looking rough-skinned newt—signaling the start of a
busy breeding season for the golden-eyed amphibians that travel
to and from water bodies. But for Sally Gale, the founder of
the Chileno Valley Newt Brigade, a North Bay volunteer group,
the real surprise has been that nearly all the observations her
team made were babies: newts just one or two inches long,
likely making their life’s first forays outside of their
birthplace of Laguna Lake.
So flash forward to the last section of the book, is all about
Arizona, where I grew up. And there the issue, obviously, is
not too much water, there’s too little water. I talk
about the Central Arizona Project, which is a canal that brings
Colorado River water hundreds of miles across the desert into
Phoenix and Tucson. Most of the book focuses on the farmers
there who because they’re the ones who are feeling the impacts
of the water shortages in the Colorado River. They’re finding
themselves–some of these cases, some of my sources and
characters in the book, are people who are being cut off from
their water supplies. One of them’s a young farmer, he’s in his
30s, he just had his first kid, he’s a fifth-generation grower,
and he’s now realizing that he doesn’t, he’s not going to have
any water, at least not the way he thought he was going to.
Past El Niño years won’t help meteorologists determine what
this winter will look like, the National Weather Service said
in a Tuesday morning update, because conditions this year are
not typical. An El Niño was declared in May,
meaning sea surface temperatures are warmer than normal in the
equatorial eastern Pacific. This region of the ocean
typically drives large-scale atmospheric patterns that impact
us locally, said Courtney Carpenter, warning coordination
meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento,
in a video update. Here’s what El Niño conditions mean for
California, and what meteorologists predict winter in the
northern parts of the state will be like, as of late November:
