Even while power outages, flooding, and downed trees plagued
Mendocino County during the first weeks of 2023, we could take
comfort in the fact that on California’s drought-ridden soil,
rain is good news. Lake Mendocino hit its highest amount of
water storage in more than a decade, and our past month of
precipitation is on track with or better than “normal”
conditions over the past 30 years. … A high water
table and a near-full reservoir can no longer be taken at face
value: water managers, well users, and those who watched
Governor Gavin Newsom deliver a speech on water rights from the
bed of Lake Mendocino in 2021 know better than to expect a
couple weeks of rain to reverse decades of water
insecurity. According to a table from the California
WaterBlog, drought can be considered “over” in only one area of
impact this month: soil moisture.
La Niña brings cooler than normal and wetter than normal winter
weather for the Pacific Northwest…usually. Cold storms with
high amounts of rain and mountain snow, along with a few more
rounds of lowland snow, keep the precipitation above average
and temperatures below. Cooler and wetter than the average for
the Pacific Northwest, La Niña also creates drier than average
winters over the southwest United States; most often, a drought
builds. Not this year! Our rare, third-consecutive La Niña
winter has been filled with variability.
California is experiencing one of its wettest winters in recent
history following a series of atmospheric rivers that hit the
state in rapid succession. The recent downpours and deluges
wreaked havoc on many parts of Northern California. But north
of San Francisco, the town of Petaluma was spared the worst of
the storms. There, the rain has been a boon for newts. … What
the newts need now is a safe way to get to their rendezvous
points. In many places, busy roads lie between newts and their
breeding grounds. In Petaluma and other parts of the San
Francisco Bay Area, thousands of newts are killed by cars each
year as they try to cross these roads. The carnage in Petaluma
is so severe that a group of local residents has taken it upon
themselves to stop it.
For the first time in nearly two years, the entire state of
California is not experiencing “abnormally dry” conditions —
though most of it is. The U.S. Drought Monitor, in a weekly
update published Thursday, reports 99.36% of the state in at
least an “abnormally dry” status, as of Jan. 17, down from 100%
a week ago. Better news: None of the state is in “extreme” or
“exceptional” drought. In the northwest corner of the state,
the majority of Del Norte County is drought free. A move in the
needle, however slight, means the string of heavy rainstorms
have temporally improved drought conditions. It does not mean
the drought is over.
The current wet spell, made up of a parade of atmospheric
rivers, is a welcome change from the last three years of record
dry and warm conditions. For very good reasons, the focus
during these big, early winter storms is first and foremost on
flood management and public safety. There is of course also
great interest in the potential of these storms to relieve
water shortages for communities and farms. What is not always
appreciated is the role of these early winter storms in
supporting the health of freshwater ecosystems. For millennia,
California’s biodiversity evolved strategies to take advantage
of these infrequent, but critical high flow events. Benefits
from recent storms are now being realized throughout the state,
from temperate rainforests of the North Coast to semi-arid and
arid rivers in the south.
Despite several weeks of torrential rain and flooding,
California is still facing a severe multi-year drought. That
has many people thinking about how to better capture winter
floodwaters to last through the dry season. An innovative
approach at two California reservoirs could help boost the
state’s water supply, potentially marking a larger shift from
decades-old water management approaches to a system that can
quickly adapt to precipitation in a changing climate. At issue
are rules that, at face value, seem perplexing to many
Californians. Even in a chronically dry state, reservoirs are
not allowed to fill up in the winter. … Two sites,
Folsom Reservoir and Lake Mendocino, are rethinking this by
using weather forecasts to guide their operations. Instead of
sticking to set rules, they only empty out if a major storm is
forecasted for the days ahead.
NOAA’s hurricane hunters might be just as busy now as they were
during hurricane season. However, it’s not hurricanes they are
flying through, but the atmospheric river systems plaguing
California since Christmas week. Atmospheric rivers may not
make headlines in the same way hurricanes do, but they can have
extreme consequences. “Atmospheric rivers can span the whole
Pacific. They are long and narrow, but they’re way larger than
hurricanes,” Atmospheric River Reconnaissance Coordinator Anna
Wilson said. They are crucial to the West Coast. Half the rain
and snow the West gets comes from atmospheric rivers, which are
plumes of moisture coming in from the Pacific Ocean. And they
cross an area with very few observation sites, making them
challenging to forecast.
As rain has deluged our parched state since New Year’s Eve,
many Californians have found themselves asking a familiar
question: Is this somehow because of El Niño? In the California
imagination, the climate pattern known as El Niño has an almost
mythological status as a harbinger of prolonged wet spells,
while its counterpart, La Niña, is associated with drought. The
past three years have been La Niña years. The continuing
procession of storms this winter has drawn comparisons to the
famed wet winter of 1997-98, when rain driven by El Niño
drenched the Golden State. Californians are bracing for one of
the season’s most intense storms to date on Monday and Tuesday.
But Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that El Niño hasn’t taken over —
yet.
The torrential rainfall across much of central and northern
California may have helped to pull a tiny piece of the state
out of drought. Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that
while 97.93 percent of California is experiencing some degree
of drought, the remaining 2.07 percent is only classified as
“abnormally dry.” … However, a lot more rain would be
needed to drag California out of its
decades-long megadrought, as short-term fluctuations in
how dry an area is at a given time is drastically different to
the long-term trend of dryness across the state.
A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power,
downing trees, dumping massive amounts of water. Now, that last
one, massive amounts of water – it’s interesting because all
that rain is hitting in a state that has been stricken with
drought. Some California residents are watching this precious
resource wash away and wondering, why can’t we save the water
for later, for times when we desperately need it? Well, Andrew
Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor at UC Santa Cruz,
attempted to answer that question in an op-ed for The LA Times.
And we have brought him here to try to answer it for us.
Professor Fisher, welcome.
The City of Rio Dell is experiencing an ongoing hazardous
materials spill as heavy rainfall infiltrates outdated sewer
pipes that were damaged during the 6.4 magnitude earthquake
that struck on December 20. An estimated 140,000 gallons
rain-diluted wastewater has spilled out of a manhole cover at
the end of Painter Street, near the city’s wastewater treatment
plant, and the spill is continuing at a rate of about 50
gallons per minute, according to Rio Dell City Manager Kyle
Knopp.
A powerful winter storm unleashed heavy rain and
strong winds across Northern California on Wednesday,
triggering evacuations and power outages, and heightening fears
of widespread flooding and debris flows. … Wednesday’s
storm is the third atmospheric river that’s hit California in
the last two weeks. The successive storms have brought a deluge
of water to the drought-stricken state, prompting Gov. Newsom
to declare a state of emergency to “support response and
recovery efforts.” … The series of atmospheric rivers that
started toward the end of December was somewhat surprising
after one of California’s driest years on record, which left
reservoirs drained and soils parched.
The storm door is open — at least for now. An atmospheric river
battered Northern California this past weekend. The North Bay
was largely spared, but torrential rain across much of the
region lifted streams over their banks, trapped cars as
roadways became routes for kayaks and canoes, and flooded homes
and businesses from San Francisco to Sacramento. The National
Weather Service says another “truly … brutal system” will slam
Northern California on Wednesday. This time, Sonoma County
appears to be in the path. That could mean fierce wind gusts,
intense rain, flooded roads, mudslides and power outages. By
Friday, the Russian River is expected to reach flood stage in
Guerneville.
A successive series of powerful atmospheric river storms poses
a growing threat to California as the ground becomes more
saturated, river levels rise and heavy winds threaten the power
infrastructure. This week’s storms are expected to dump intense
levels of rain in a fairly short period of time. The greatest
potential for disaster is in Northern California, which has
already been battered by several destructive storms — including
one this weekend that caused a deadly levee breach. But each
new storm, including one set to arrive Wednesday, adds new
pressure.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood at a podium placed on the
sandy bottom of Lake Mendocino, a basin built to hold more than
20 billion gallons of water. It was spring, which meant that
the reservoir should have held water from the winter rains that
in past decades provided water to millions of Californians.
Instead, on this afternoon in 2021, the ground was dry and
cracked. Newsom was there to declare a drought
emergency. … Now, the watershed and the reservoir
where this drought began have become the proving ground for an
innovative water agreement that aims to make more of scarce
supplies. Creators say the program could become a prototype for
accords elsewhere in the state and in the West, a beacon of
collaboration in a place where water can be contentious.
They’ve been pushed to the brink of extinction by dams,
drought, extreme heat and even the flare of wildfires, but now
California’s endangered winter-run Chinook salmon appear to be
facing an entirely new threat — their own ravenous hunger for
anchovies. After the worst spawning season ever in 2022,
scientists now suspect the species’ precipitous decline is
being driven by its ocean diet. Researchers hypothesize that
the salmon are feasting too heavily on anchovies, a fish that
is now swarming the California coast in record numbers.
Unfortunately for the salmon, anchovies carry an enzyme called
thiaminase, which breaks down thiamine — a vitamin that is
essential to cell function in all living things.
With more storms barreling toward Northern California, south
Sacramento County communities near the Cosumnes and Mokelumne
rivers are on edge for new flood evacuations this week. Point
Pleasant residents were ordered to evacuate on Sunday and
Wilton residents were told to remain prepared to evacuate if
they haven’t already even as reclamation district officials
raced around the clock to shore up levee breaks ahead of the
storm system expected to arrive Wednesday. … Levees are
crucial along this 80-mile river because there’s no dam to slow
the flow from headwaters in the Eldorado National Forest, said
Jay Lund, vice-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at
the University of California, Davis. Consequently, he said,
flash flooding is a common after warm storms like the one this
past weekend that produced more rain than snow.
On December 14, NOAA announced recommendations for funding
through the Restoring Fish Passage through Barrier Removal
grant program. In California, NOAA recommended over $21 million
to fund transformational projects across the state that reopen
migratory pathways and restore access to healthy habitat for
fish. Of that total, NOAA recommended more than $13 million
(approximately 60%) for projects led by California Trout, the
largest freshwater conservation organization in California. The
award recommendation would fund two of CalTrout’s fish passage
projects in the Mt. Shasta/Klamath ($9.9 million) and the South
Coast ($3.2 million) regions.
