The past, present and future of the West’s water woes
The American West, excepting the Pacific Northwest, has a very bad combination of precipitation factors for sustaining human life. The first is simply that it doesn’t rain very much; Los Angeles receives, averaged over the past 100 years, somewhere just north of 14 inches of rain per year. New York City gets between 40 and 50 inches per year. … [T]he West experiences long periods of absolutely zero rain, followed by a few weeks of rain that can be incredibly intense. So, even those annual precipitation numbers are misleading for, say, agriculture, which needs consistent water. It also means that the West is very prone to extreme floods…