Huy Fong Foods, the southern California company that produces
20m bottles of sriracha annually, has experienced a low
inventory of red jalapeño chili peppers in recent years made
worse by spring’s crop failure. The cause? Severe weather and
drought conditions in Mexico. … California’s
record-setting wildfires in 2020 severely affected harvest and
the hazardous air quality threatened large portions of the
state’s wine grape crop. Napa Valley winemakers are being
forced to take extreme action, such as spraying sunscreen
on grapes and irrigating with treated wastewater from toilets
and sinks, in order to survive – and some vineyards won’t.
California’s wildfire season intensifies between July and
October when temperatures soar, vegetation becomes bone dry and
desiccating winds develop. The peak season that has been
marked by devastating blazes and smoky skies in recent years is
approaching fast, and many are wondering just how bad it will
be. The consensus among experts is that the next few
months will see above-average fire activity as has been the
case in recent years amid a changing climate marked by hotter
temperatures and longer dry periods.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) today announced $29
million in funding for 44 drought relief projects to improve
water supply reliability, address drinking water quality, and
support water conservation primarily serving underrepresented
and Tribal communities. … Highlights of today’s awards
include: The Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria
in Humboldt County will receive $1.2 million … The
Tuolumne-Stanislaus Integrated Regional Water Management
Authority will receive $525,000 to address drinking water
reliability for underrepresented communities …
During the Moroccan desert summertime drought, fog nets are
being used to provide drinking water to hundreds of thousands
of people in remote mountain villages. Now villagers can
irrigate agricultural fields, turning desertified land back
into green gardens, all thanks to mathematician and businessman
Aissa Derhem. … The drought-affected state of
California, which has already borrowed water-saving strategies
from India, could utilize these nets along the coastlines of
San Francisco, Oakland, Point Reyes, Monterrey, and Santa
Barbara.
After a final wave of cool and unstable conditions this past
weekend across portions of NorCal, a much hotter and drier
pattern is already firmly entrenched as of this writing. Today
actually brought a pretty substantial heatwave all the way to
the coast in NorCal, with even downtown San Francisco getting
into the 90s. Some locations are hitting new daily record highs
as of this writing, though values in the traditionally hotter
inland locations (though toasty) are not that remarkable for
June.
The Marin Municipal Water District has failed to adequately
prepare for severe drought and should create a four-year water
supply, the Marin civil grand jury said in a new report. Last
year, the district faced depleting local reservoir supplies as
soon as summer 2022. While rains in late 2021 nearly refilled
reservoirs, the drought “exposed serious shortcomings” in the
district’s ability to offer a reliable water supply and has
shaken public confidence in the district’s leadership, the
report states.
It’s almost July, which is typically the beginning of
California’s fire season. You’ve probably heard that wildfires
in the Golden State have increasingly become a year-round
danger, no longer limited to a few months a year. But even
still, the start of the traditional summer-and-fall fire season
brings a slew of heightened risks for us to contend with.
… By the time summer arrives, California has typically
gone months without rain, and warm weather has left vegetation
bone-dry. So the fires that erupt then tend to burn hotter and
faster — and are harder to control.
While the lingering La Niña climate pattern is expected to
bring soaking storms and strong hurricanes to parts of the
U.S., it’s a different story here in California. La Niña is
favored to stick around through the end of the year
… Sometimes La Niña splits California in two,
bringing lots of rain to Northern California and drought to
Southern California. This year … a dry La Niña
winter and spring have left 99.8% of California suffering
drought conditions. Now it’s summer, California’s driest
season, and drought conditions are only expected to worsen.
NOAA is predicting a hotter-than-average summer for
the entire state, which will further deplete reservoirs and dry
up already parched land even more.
Over the past several weeks, Northern California has been on a
weather roller coaster, with a series of weak late-season
storms interrupting the periods of hot, dry weather that are
more typical of June. Case in point: After last week’s
mini heat wave sent inland temperatures soaring into the 100s,
a storm system from the Pacific Northwest delivered a potent
dose of cold and thunderstorms to the mountains and farthest
reaches of the Golden State, especially along the coast.
On a map that might grace the walls of a high school classroom,
the watersheds of the American West are distinct geographical
features, hemmed in by foreboding plateaus and towering
mountain ridges. Look closer and those natural boundaries are
less rigid. A sprawling network of pipelines and canals pierce
mountains and cross deserts, linking many of the mighty rivers
and smaller streams of the West. These “mega-watersheds” have
redrawn the map, helping cities and farms to grow large and
productive, but also becoming political flashpoints with steep
environmental costs. … Start in Northern California. The
Trinity River Diversion, a federal project, connects the
Klamath River basin to the Sacramento River watershed.
As California increasingly slips into extreme drought and calls
intensify to reduce water use, the state’s water savings in
2022 remain bleak. The average Californian used 83 gallons of
water per day in April, compared with 73 in April 2020. That’s
far from the 15 percent decrease that Gov. Gavin Newsom has
called for as our reservoirs and the snowpack dwindle. (This
underperformance has persisted since January.) But, as is often
the case with such an enormous state, the overall numbers only
tell part of the story. Yes, the average Californian used 83
gallons of water per day in April, but San Franciscans consumed
less than half of that at 40 gallons per day. Meanwhile,
residents of Riverside County used 137 gallons.
Two bills were recently introduced to prevent illegal cannabis
cultivation efforts, which are using more water than ever in
the wake of a historic California drought. … The [San
Bernardino] county is sponsoring Assembly Bill 2728, introduced
by Assemblymember Thurston Smith, and Senate Bill 1426,
introduced by Senator Anna Caballero, to tackle these concerns.
AB-2728 would increase the fines for illegal cultivation to
$1,000 for each day of violation, and $2,500 for each acre-foot
of water diverted (and if that measurement isn’t specified,
$500 per plant). These stipulations would only take place in a
“critically dry year immediately preceded by two or more
consecutive below normal, dry, or critical dry years” …
Illegal cultivation of marijuana became the focus of law
enforcement over the past few years as farms mushroomed
throughout the state, often creating massive environmental
damage through their use of fertilizers and pesticides and the
illegal diversion of water. … The bill, SB
1426, include fines and possible jail time for tapping
into a water conveyance or digging an un-permitted
well. By including violations of the Fish and Game
Code for polluting waters and harming wildlife, it also targets
the harm done by fertilizers and pest control chemicals, like
carbofuran.
Eureka attorney, landowner and timber operator Ken Bareilles
had been battling state land-use regulations for some 50 years
before he bought his forested property outside Healdsburg in
2015. … Even as he fought to withdraw his plea and
minimize the consequences, Bareilles’ probation was revoked in
2011 for violations of county and state Fish and Game codes.
They included illegal grading, altering a streambed, conducting
timber operations outside his permit area and contributing to
pollution in a stream designated critical habitat for steelhead
trout.
A “dangerous and deadly heat wave” is on the way … More than
30 million people are under heat alerts, and more than 50 daily
high-temperature records could be broken through the
weekend … High pressure will create a heat
dome over the Western US. The dome will trap any escaping
radiation and send it back to the ground, while the sun’s rays
continue to penetrate through. This, combined with arid
soils from an extensive and long-term drought, will allow
temperatures to rise to record levels over parts of California
and the Southwest, with high temperatures from the upper 90s to
over 110 degrees on Friday, the Weather Prediction Center said.
The Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC) is best known for
its main task: creating a free-flowing Klamath River by
removing four hydroelectric dams under the oversight of state
and federal regulators. Part of KRRC’s work is to limit impacts
on the communities that rely on the many benefits the river
provides, including water for firefighting. Our commitment –
and a requirement of this project – is to ensure that dam
removal will not cause a net reduction in regional firefighting
resources. Both during and after demolition of the dams, KRRC
is required to make sure the fire ignition risk that currently
exists will not increase compared to the level of risk facing
today’s Klamath Basin.
UC Berkeley professor Scott Stephens, a member of the PPIC
Water Policy Center research network, has spent over 30 years
studying wildfire in California. He spoke with us recently
about what it will take to preserve the state’s forests in an
era of increasingly catastrophic wildfires.
… Even small fires now can pose threats to life
and property. Are we in a new phase of climate
change? There’s no doubt that climate change is
having an impact, but I estimate that climate change is no more
than 25% of the problem. I think it’s 75% forest structure—I
don’t have a paper to back that up, that’s just my intuition
from working in this field for 30 years.
If you’ve spent your life in California, you’ve heard it dozens
of times: A friend or family member bemoans a cloudy summer
beach day or picnic, blaming “June gloom” or “May gray” for
blotting out the sun. You may have even heard “no-sky-July” or
“Fogust” … Why do low clouds and fog hang around amid
otherwise beautiful weather, making for these dreary summer
days at the coast? The answer is a combination of high
pressure, ocean winds and the temperature difference between
the water and land, according to the National Weather Service.
Amid research linking a highly toxic tire chemical to salmon
deaths in the Pacific Northwest, California officials are
proposing a rule to require tire manufacturers to consider
safer alternatives. The proposed rule by the California
Department of Toxic Substances Control comes after a 2020 study
that identified the chemical 6PPD, which is used to give tires
longer life, as the culprit behind decades of coho salmon
deaths in Washington state. The chemical has also been detected
in California waters — including trace amounts in Lagunitas
Creek, which harbors the largest population of endangered coho
salmon between Monterey Bay and Mendocino County.
In some of the world’s driest places, atmospheric moisture is a
major source of water for native ecosystems. Some algae, plants
and insects in the Israeli and Namibian deserts get much
of their water from fog, dew and humidity.
The spines of some cacti species have evolved to
collect fog droplets. California’s redwood forests derive a
significant amount of their moisture from fog. Some
drought-minded California residents along the coast, perhaps
yearning for a clear ocean view, have suggested harvesting
fog as a water supply. (originally posted in 2015)
As Humboldt County edges closer to summer, most of the North
Coast remains in various levels of drought. In May, 1.36 inches
of rain fell around the Humboldt Bay region, where the average
is 1.58 inches, according to the National Weather Service. At
this point in a normal water year, there would have been 38.58
inches of rain in the Humboldt Bay region since October 1. So
far there has only been 23.95 inches, a deficit of over a foot
of rain.
For 35 days between March and April of this year, Dante
Woolfolk went without any running water in his house in
Brooktrails, a small town nestled amid the leafy canopies of
Mendocino County in Northern California. … Woolfolk’s
experience underscores a gaping hole in California’s low income
safety net: the lack of a long-term drinking water rate-payer
assistance program. The state has been working towards
such a program for years, but these efforts have been shaped by
disagreement over issues like long-term funding sources and
which agency should manage it.
Gobs of oily tar continue to slip past containment booms and
drain into the Smith River, nearly a month after an overturned
trailer spilled 2,000 gallons of the hot asphalt binder onto
U.S. 199 between Hiouchi and Gasquet. Spokesperson Eric
Laughlin with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s
Office of Spill Prevention and Response confirmed with the
Outpost that the toxic goop is actively leaking into the Smith
River, and that the agency received new reports of the material
traveling downstream on Friday.
If you think about the pollution your car causes, chances are
you’re not thinking about the tires. And probably even less
about a faraway creek, where a Coho Salmon is dying. But
researchers at the University of Washington and elsewhere
… say as the rubber wears away from car tires during
everyday driving, it spreads tiny micro particles, including a
destructive chemical called 6PPD. … Now, with
information gathered in part by the [San Francisco Estuary]
Institute, the State of California is stepping in, laying the
groundwork for potential regulations to curb the toxic tire
pollution.
California’s vast network of surface water reservoirs is
designed to hold carryover storage from year to year to ensure
water is available for urban, agricultural and environmental
purposes during dry months and years. But climate change has
begun to affect our reliance on historical weather patterns to
predict California’s water supply, making it even more
difficult for water managers to manage drought conditions and
placing a greater emphasis on better precipitation forecasting
at longer lead times. Learn about efforts being made to
‘get ahead of the storms’ through new science, models and
technology at our special one-day workshop June 9 in
Irvine, Making
Progress on Drought Management: Improvements in Seasonal
Precipitation Forecasting.
Californians can expect to see more yellow grass around
hospitals, hotels, office parks and industrial centers after
water regulators voted Tuesday to ban watering of
“nonfunctional” turf in commercial areas. The State Water
Resources Control Board also moved to order all the state’s
major urban water providers to step up their conservation
efforts. The moves are the strongest regulatory actions state
officials have taken in the third year of the latest drought.
