... nearly 200% above average for the first two months of the water year
Two months of twice normal precipitation is all it took to alleviate the drought? From the dire tone of all the news I read from California it seemed way worse than that.
Only the Northern part of the state has satisfied the drought.
> On Nov. 3, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that about a quarter of California was out of drought conditions, the best outlook the state has had since spring 2013, when 64% of the state was considered in “moderate drought” or worse.
>The picture in Southern California, however, remains bleak. A bark beetle infestation that took hold in the southern and central Sierra Nevada during the drought has killed more than 100 million trees and is moving north, increasing the danger of wildfire.
It says that Oct. was 4x as much precip. than normal, and Nov. was less than average... then says that for the TWO months together, it's 200% above average. But the data is a spike in one month, then more drought-like conditions in the next.
This helps the current drought condition. It does not, as mentioned below, replenish the water table, or other more long term ailments of overpopulation. So both are correct.
There are techniques to improve aquifier recharge rates, or even actively replenish them by pumping. Of course, it all takes planning and resources to accomplish.
I didn't factor anything, I'm not a climatologist or a geologist I have basic understanding of how things work.
Aquifers get full, ground has a limited amount of water it can hold, if it's dry water is absorbed and it precipitates into the underground reservoirs if it's wet it doesn't.
There is also a risk of the ground becoming too dry and erosion and other mechanism basically compact it to the point where aquifers get effectively cut off from precipitation, or aquifers being drained too far and then refilled quickly which in turn increases the salinity of the water they hold to the point in which it's not drinkable.
That said even 2 weeks of rain can have a very drastic effect on the water ecosystem in a region.
Thats not what he said. He was describing why you aim to drain reservoirs in concert with precipitation, to maximize ground water absorption by prolonging the drainage at a low rate.
Of course, that's the average commenter for you. They make it sound like they're incapable of understanding anything with more nuance than a headline.
This alleviated drought conditions only for Northern California. Not for SoCal, which is still in dire condition. This also says nothing about the state of the water table. This is treading well into "a snowball disproving global warming" territory.
Of course you should read the story because there are huge swaths of California that are very much still in dire drought. The Northern Sierra wasn't where the worst of it was, it is not surprising at all that it is recovering more quickly.
I agree with what I believe is your central point, which is that the issue is difficult and there are no clear answers. This makes it all the more important that we continue to talk about solutions.
I don't disagree, just reiterating my hope that the obstacles you point out don't lead to the problem being passed over as too politically intractable.
I believe they have all of the purple pipe infrastructure in place, and they currently dump the "output" into an aquifer which is not directly tapped [1]
Yes, there is no potable reuse at the moment because their initial plant opened during an election year & valley secession movement, but a pilot plant for indirect potable reuse is in the works and current reclamation efforts still yielded 35.4% of total county sanitation districts effluent per FY 2014-2015.
I thought the state was being responsible for the last while, and then the last election just pushed in $18B unfunded spending on the General Fund via Prop 51.
The water table is a seperate but related issue. And it would take a large amount of rain, and time to replenish. Not likely to happen faster than use, especially with the asinine ag well exemptions.
And only in a narrowly defined way. It speaks nothing to the continued die off of the forests due to the drought, the battle for water table control with all the private interests, let alone what up stream sources may or may not have been replenished.
Something like that. Aquifers are different from reservoirs -- reservoirs are our above-ground water stores, aquifers are our below ground water stores.
The problem is that while reservoirs can be refilled from the surface watershed with a good rainy season or two, aquifers take decades of water slowly percolating down through the soil to replenish. If your rate of consumption exceeds the refill rate, well, you're in a bit of an unsustainable situation and the clock starts ticking.
As the drought progressed and surface water became scarce, agriculture started drilling deeper and deeper wells to access the aquifer reserves. The aquifers got so drained that there were stories of fracking companies being hired to drill wells which had depths beyond the capabilities of most traditional well-drilling machines.
Worse, there's also positive feedback loops at play -- as an aquifer gets depleted, the ground above it can settle in a way that slows the refill rate (I've heard it described as the volume occupied by the water goes away so dirt fills in the small gaps creating more compacted/sealed off soil). If the refill rate slows down and your consumption rate stays steady or increases (development!), well, the aquifer's rate of depletion accelerates. Feedback is a bitch.
The anecdote about fracking companies being called in to drill super-deep water wells tells you all you need to know about how market forces price the sustainable consumption of our water reserves.
Another interesting thing that can happen (I don't know if this is a concern in California, but I've heard that it's a major problem in Jakarta, Indonesia) is that if you're close to the ocean, pulling fresh water from the ground can result in the fresh water being displaced by salt water which makes the aquifer useless.
It's a problem in SoCal. They mitigate it by using injection wells in coastal areas as a seawater barrier. Orange County's initial efforts of using RO treated wastewater were for seawater barrier injection wells.
We do have this in California, and it's not just aquifers that suffer salt water intrusion.
Most people know that LA wouldn't exist if we didn't pump a good chunk of the Colorado to satisfy its thirst. But we also pump a lot of northern california water down there with a massive state aqueduct project.
Currently in the delta between SF and Sacramento, there's a huge infrastructure project going on called the Bay Tunnels. It wants to install a pair of water tunnels upstream of the delta to pump water to these state aqueducts that eventually send it down to LA.
One reason it's controversial is because pumping out that much water upstream of the delta would cause salt water to encroach up the delta, quite literally salting the fields and causing other watershed environmental issues.
Yeah it was never turned on due to economic reasons. They are currently retrofitting it with updated pumps, membranes, pipes, etc, and increasing its capacity. They've definitely hit some interesting roadblocks along the way.
Ag interests in California have consistently fought for more reservoirs and storage, only to be consistently denied by the state government in recent decades.
Probably depends more on the price of energy (solar?) than on the absolute reductions in energy requirements for desalination. The Israeli's have been making great strides in making more economical plants, but they're still off on price for agricultural use.
Thank goodness. The snowpack is of irreplaceable importance to the ecology of California. Without the summer melts, California would turn in to a desert.
Thank God. Now the West has to figure out how to conserve water better to avoid drying up and burning too much when future droughts occur. Drip irrigation in agriculture and desalination are both useful technologies for water sustainability in semi-arid environments.
Just the other week I finished reading Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner (whose novels are wonderful by the way), and in several of the essays collected there he writes about how the defining characteristic of the West is "aridity". He complains about how we have over-settled the land, how our presence is based on exploitation, the Gold Rush, mobility, and impermanence. He talks about how the green that irrigation provides can't last. "Thoughts in a Dry Land" was from 1991; these problems aren't new, and I doubt we'll ever "solve" them. And the population keeps growing. I hope the things you mention do indeed help!
This reminds me of the style of writing in Desert Solitaire, which expressed what seems like many of the same thoughts back in the late 60s about the American west. I'll have to check out Stegner, thanks.
Angle of Repose is amazing. Crossing to Safety is really good too, although not about the West. I still haven't gotten to Big Rock Candy Mountain, although I think he might be best known for it.
It seems the opposite is happening. For a while LA was promoting water saving but it seems they have stopped. a lot of my neighbors also have restarted their sprinklers. I think things have to get much worse before there will be action.
Unfortunately there's zero reason for a farmer to invest in this due to western water law. Speaking for Colorado anyway, and I think many are similar, if you conserve water, yay for you but there's no incentive. Someone with a junior right just gets more water for themselves. You can't sell it and you can't store it. You either use it or you don't In that case the most economic thing you can do is to buy the cheapest irrigation system possible, regardless of the waste and of course the cheapest is the one you already have.
The metric in the headline speaks nothing to the deforestation that is occurring due to the prolonged nature of the drought.
This kind of headline smacks of shoddy journalism, and is even more suspect when the publication comes from an area that stands to benefit from a change to the current status quo.
Let's see their article correlate to the situation in the Stanislaus forest.
Terrible. Groundwater is free to anyone who pumps it, so needless to say, there's been a ton of pumping recently. A bill was passed in 2014 to make aquifer pumping regulated starting in 2020 or 2024.
Latest drought map for CA not included in article: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?...
About 88% of the state still in some form of drought.
And here is a map of California's reservior levels: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...
Nice! Too bad they don't offer one more bar for aggregated data.
That said, contributions to the snowpack will show up in reservoirs next year, so reservoir levels will be trailing indicators of final recovery.
Recent winters have been so warm that early snow has melted very early. So reservoir levels are less of a trailing indicator than in the past.
However if we have significant snow right now, that won't be showing up in the reservoirs yet. :-)
What's the unit on the y axis...?
TAF usually means Thousand Acre-Feet in water resources. (ie, a unit of volume.)
Here's the current water content of snowpack, far below normal: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/snowapp/sweq.action
... nearly 200% above average for the first two months of the water year
Two months of twice normal precipitation is all it took to alleviate the drought? From the dire tone of all the news I read from California it seemed way worse than that.
Only the Northern part of the state has satisfied the drought.
> On Nov. 3, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that about a quarter of California was out of drought conditions, the best outlook the state has had since spring 2013, when 64% of the state was considered in “moderate drought” or worse.
>The picture in Southern California, however, remains bleak. A bark beetle infestation that took hold in the southern and central Sierra Nevada during the drought has killed more than 100 million trees and is moving north, increasing the danger of wildfire.
200% above average is not twice normal, it is 100% + 200%, that is x3
The article is actually misleading.
It says that Oct. was 4x as much precip. than normal, and Nov. was less than average... then says that for the TWO months together, it's 200% above average. But the data is a spike in one month, then more drought-like conditions in the next.
So...
This helps the current drought condition. It does not, as mentioned below, replenish the water table, or other more long term ailments of overpopulation. So both are correct.
There are techniques to improve aquifier recharge rates, or even actively replenish them by pumping. Of course, it all takes planning and resources to accomplish.
http://waterinthewest.stanford.edu/groundwater/recharge/
200% above the normal rate in a short period considering the rain season isn't over can replenish at least the immediate natural water reservoirs.
The ground has a limit to how much water it can contain if the natural reservoirs are full the water will evaporate.
Effectively smart water management involves draining your water sources to the amount that will be replenished otherwise you waste your rainy season.
Until you factor in the farms across the state further altering the local water tables by pulling up water by well.
I didn't factor anything, I'm not a climatologist or a geologist I have basic understanding of how things work.
Aquifers get full, ground has a limited amount of water it can hold, if it's dry water is absorbed and it precipitates into the underground reservoirs if it's wet it doesn't.
There is also a risk of the ground becoming too dry and erosion and other mechanism basically compact it to the point where aquifers get effectively cut off from precipitation, or aquifers being drained too far and then refilled quickly which in turn increases the salinity of the water they hold to the point in which it's not drinkable.
That said even 2 weeks of rain can have a very drastic effect on the water ecosystem in a region.
Where in California is any aquifer full? Or any reservoir? I'm having a hard time connecting your comments to the article.
Thats not what he said. He was describing why you aim to drain reservoirs in concert with precipitation, to maximize ground water absorption by prolonging the drainage at a low rate.
What connection does that have with California? Here, aquifer water is owned in a wildly different way than flowing water.
Of course, that's called the media for you. The way they made it sound, California was never going to recover.
Of course, that's the average commenter for you. They make it sound like they're incapable of understanding anything with more nuance than a headline.
This alleviated drought conditions only for Northern California. Not for SoCal, which is still in dire condition. This also says nothing about the state of the water table. This is treading well into "a snowball disproving global warming" territory.
Of course you should read the story because there are huge swaths of California that are very much still in dire drought. The Northern Sierra wasn't where the worst of it was, it is not surprising at all that it is recovering more quickly.
We also had a rainy season last year - these reservoirs were significantly filled relative to 2015 levels throughout summer/fall of 2016
Maybe this SoCal Newspaper is trying to make it seem like NorCal has enough water to spare and send it South. Just a theory...
I hope this doesn't remove public pressure for a sensible water conservancy policy in the west.
Everyone wants a 'sensible' policy, no one agrees on what 'sensible' means.
And no one wants to give up their water rights.
I agree with what I believe is your central point, which is that the issue is difficult and there are no clear answers. This makes it all the more important that we continue to talk about solutions.
I agree with what I believe is your central point
What part don't you agree with?
I don't disagree, just reiterating my hope that the obstacles you point out don't lead to the problem being passed over as too politically intractable.
Oh, if you want to discuss it, I am available.
I just found out that LA doesn't reuse their wastewater.
Here this whole time they have been talking about things like building a pipeline from the Great Lakes and they don't even treat and reuse.
I believe they have all of the purple pipe infrastructure in place, and they currently dump the "output" into an aquifer which is not directly tapped [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/science/recycled-drinking-...
There was a huge campaign against "toilet water" when it was proposed.
Yeah, I recall the provocative slogan "ass to glass" being passed around.
How do people even claim that? http://www.lacsd.org/waterreuse/
Yes, there is no potable reuse at the moment because their initial plant opened during an election year & valley secession movement, but a pilot plant for indirect potable reuse is in the works and current reclamation efforts still yielded 35.4% of total county sanitation districts effluent per FY 2014-2015.
With the prop system of CA, who knows?
I thought the state was being responsible for the last while, and then the last election just pushed in $18B unfunded spending on the General Fund via Prop 51.
Erm, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Fresno need something like 50 years of rain to replete the water table?
The water table is a seperate but related issue. And it would take a large amount of rain, and time to replenish. Not likely to happen faster than use, especially with the asinine ag well exemptions.
I think you mean replenish. Replete is an adjective.
I'd believe that. This article is about the Northern part of California.
Water is an 'all of California' issue.
Right, but the headline "rains have satisfied the drought debt" only applies to the North.
And only in a narrowly defined way. It speaks nothing to the continued die off of the forests due to the drought, the battle for water table control with all the private interests, let alone what up stream sources may or may not have been replenished.
The 'drought' is far from over.
Something like that. Aquifers are different from reservoirs -- reservoirs are our above-ground water stores, aquifers are our below ground water stores.
The problem is that while reservoirs can be refilled from the surface watershed with a good rainy season or two, aquifers take decades of water slowly percolating down through the soil to replenish. If your rate of consumption exceeds the refill rate, well, you're in a bit of an unsustainable situation and the clock starts ticking.
As the drought progressed and surface water became scarce, agriculture started drilling deeper and deeper wells to access the aquifer reserves. The aquifers got so drained that there were stories of fracking companies being hired to drill wells which had depths beyond the capabilities of most traditional well-drilling machines.
Worse, there's also positive feedback loops at play -- as an aquifer gets depleted, the ground above it can settle in a way that slows the refill rate (I've heard it described as the volume occupied by the water goes away so dirt fills in the small gaps creating more compacted/sealed off soil). If the refill rate slows down and your consumption rate stays steady or increases (development!), well, the aquifer's rate of depletion accelerates. Feedback is a bitch.
The anecdote about fracking companies being called in to drill super-deep water wells tells you all you need to know about how market forces price the sustainable consumption of our water reserves.
Another interesting thing that can happen (I don't know if this is a concern in California, but I've heard that it's a major problem in Jakarta, Indonesia) is that if you're close to the ocean, pulling fresh water from the ground can result in the fresh water being displaced by salt water which makes the aquifer useless.
It's a problem in SoCal. They mitigate it by using injection wells in coastal areas as a seawater barrier. Orange County's initial efforts of using RO treated wastewater were for seawater barrier injection wells.
This is a big concern in South Florida. A number of wells had to be moved inland due to salt water intrusion in the aquifer near the coast.
We do have this in California, and it's not just aquifers that suffer salt water intrusion.
Most people know that LA wouldn't exist if we didn't pump a good chunk of the Colorado to satisfy its thirst. But we also pump a lot of northern california water down there with a massive state aqueduct project.
Currently in the delta between SF and Sacramento, there's a huge infrastructure project going on called the Bay Tunnels. It wants to install a pair of water tunnels upstream of the delta to pump water to these state aqueducts that eventually send it down to LA.
One reason it's controversial is because pumping out that much water upstream of the delta would cause salt water to encroach up the delta, quite literally salting the fields and causing other watershed environmental issues.
More reasons include who's going to pay for it: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-leslie-costs-and-...
50 years of rain would do alot for Fresno, especially if it was constant.
How long will it be until desalination becomes economical?
California's hyper-environmentalism is unlikely to make it politically viable.
California in fact could have invested more in water collection and reservoir building but they did not. Desalination is pretty distant.
Santa Barbara's just rebuilt their desalination plant.
http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/...
(note: .asp!)
It is a real old desalination plant from 80s that is being re-activated.
Yeah it was never turned on due to economic reasons. They are currently retrofitting it with updated pumps, membranes, pipes, etc, and increasing its capacity. They've definitely hit some interesting roadblocks along the way.
Ag interests in California have consistently fought for more reservoirs and storage, only to be consistently denied by the state government in recent decades.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/31/california-drought-why...
That article paints a pretty different picture than your summary of it does.
Probably depends more on the price of energy (solar?) than on the absolute reductions in energy requirements for desalination. The Israeli's have been making great strides in making more economical plants, but they're still off on price for agricultural use.
Thank goodness. The snowpack is of irreplaceable importance to the ecology of California. Without the summer melts, California would turn in to a desert.
Thank God. Now the West has to figure out how to conserve water better to avoid drying up and burning too much when future droughts occur. Drip irrigation in agriculture and desalination are both useful technologies for water sustainability in semi-arid environments.
Water costs need revising to properly incentivize efficiency.
Just the other week I finished reading Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs by Wallace Stegner (whose novels are wonderful by the way), and in several of the essays collected there he writes about how the defining characteristic of the West is "aridity". He complains about how we have over-settled the land, how our presence is based on exploitation, the Gold Rush, mobility, and impermanence. He talks about how the green that irrigation provides can't last. "Thoughts in a Dry Land" was from 1991; these problems aren't new, and I doubt we'll ever "solve" them. And the population keeps growing. I hope the things you mention do indeed help!
The canonical and excellent read on the subject is Cadillac Desert.
read Water Knife! (or wait for the movie adaptation)
This reminds me of the style of writing in Desert Solitaire, which expressed what seems like many of the same thoughts back in the late 60s about the American west. I'll have to check out Stegner, thanks.
Angle of Repose is amazing. Crossing to Safety is really good too, although not about the West. I still haven't gotten to Big Rock Candy Mountain, although I think he might be best known for it.
It seems the opposite is happening. For a while LA was promoting water saving but it seems they have stopped. a lot of my neighbors also have restarted their sprinklers. I think things have to get much worse before there will be action.
Unfortunately there's zero reason for a farmer to invest in this due to western water law. Speaking for Colorado anyway, and I think many are similar, if you conserve water, yay for you but there's no incentive. Someone with a junior right just gets more water for themselves. You can't sell it and you can't store it. You either use it or you don't In that case the most economic thing you can do is to buy the cheapest irrigation system possible, regardless of the waste and of course the cheapest is the one you already have.
The metric in the headline speaks nothing to the deforestation that is occurring due to the prolonged nature of the drought.
This kind of headline smacks of shoddy journalism, and is even more suspect when the publication comes from an area that stands to benefit from a change to the current status quo.
Let's see their article correlate to the situation in the Stanislaus forest.
What about the underground reservoir? What level are they in?
Terrible. Groundwater is free to anyone who pumps it, so needless to say, there's been a ton of pumping recently. A bill was passed in 2014 to make aquifer pumping regulated starting in 2020 or 2024.