The drought second-guessing comes amid a near-record dry January and February. While most of the focus on the return of the drought has been on Southern California, downtown San Francisco and downtown Sacramento have also gotten close to negligible precipitation this year.

Californians depend on the Sierra snowpack for significant amounts of water supply when it melts in spring and early summer. While overall conditions aren’t as dire as at the peak of the 2012-2017 state drought, some data are daunting. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that water in the Lake Tahoe region snowpack is one-fifth the average level seen in late February. Strikingly, at the Fallen Leaf measuring station at the 6,242-foot-level, the Times reported there was no snowpack at all.

There was better news elsewhere. The National Weather Service told the Times that the snowpack at the Heavenly Valley site at the 8,534-foot elevation was nearly half of normal. The Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Yosemite Valley was at 79 percent of capacity earlier this month, water officials said.

Still, the overall picture was troubling enough that state leaders are being urged to make permanent the unprecedented mandatory conservation rules ordered by the governor in 2015 and partly suspended in 2017. In an editorial last week, the San Francisco Chronicle called for “strict 25 percent conservation orders for cities and towns, along with a long list of prohibitions for ordinary citizens and businesses.”

30-year-plus drought in Southwest called possible

The skirmishing over conservation policies and second-guessing over whether it was premature to call the drought over last year are dominating the headlines for now. But some climate scientists warn that this short-term focus is questionable. They note that just as global warming has changed the basic weather patterns in Alaska by thawing the permafrost normally seen year-round in much of state, the American Southwest could face a harsh new default long-term weather pattern. On science websites, there’s a debate over whether the “mega-drought” that a February 2015 NASA study warned about has already begun.

According to Ben Cook, climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the study’s lead author, “Natural droughts like the 1930s Dust Bowl and the current drought in the Southwest have historically lasted maybe a decade or a little less. … What these results are saying is we’re going to get a drought similar to those events, but it is probably going to last at least 30 to 35 years.”

Cook put the current chances of the Southwest facing a drought that lasted more than 30 years at 12 percent.

Felix Kogan and Wei Guo of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a paper published in August 2015, argued that the dry weather seen in the Southwest from 2006-2015 already fit the definition of a “mega-drought.” The claim was based on how dry, hot conditions had created unusually heavy “vegetation stress” – the negative effects that severe climate conditions can have on a plant’s metabolism, growth or development.

“Among Western states, California was the most severely drought-affected, especially in 2014, when areas of stronger than moderate vegetation stress reached 70 percent,” Kogan and Guo wrote.

Last week, meeting in Sacramento, members of the state Water Resources Control Board put off for the time being a decision on whether to make the old drought conservation rules permanent.

But the move looks inevitable. Water board chairwoman Felicia Marcus said at the meeting that such restrictions are “the least we should do,” according to an Associated Press report.

“It’s already a less dire situation, given the precipitation we have received so far this winter. But it would have to rain almost every day — storm after storm after storm — in March for there to be no drought rules this summer,” Max Gomberg, a top official with the State Water Resources Control Board, told the San Jose Mercury-News.

A Los Angeles-based National Weather Service official, however, wasn’t ready to give El Nino much credit for providing relief. Meteorologist David Sweet told the Los Angeles Times that downtown L.A. had actually received only about half the normal 10 inches of rain it would typically get from Oct. 1 to the end of February. This contradicts the expectations of weather authorities, the Times noted:

“Though experts predicted that the Pacific warming phenomenon known as El Niño could bring consecutive downpours to Southern California between January and March — now some say as late as April — nothing of the sort has occurred since the first week of the year.”

Dry south benefits from heavy rains in north

Nevertheless, this dry period isn’t as bad news for the region as it might seem because the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California gets 30 percent of its water from Northern California via the State Water Project’s 444-mile-long aqueduct. As of Feb. 22, the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which feeds the state water system, was 94 percent of normal.

Meanwhile, a Monterey-based National Weather Service forecaster thinks El Nino could have a March rally.

“There was a lot of hopeful anticipation that we were going to end the drought this winter, and that we’ll be able to wash our cars and water our lawns,” Bob Benjamin told the Mercury-News. “People are saying what happened to the floods? I bought all these sandbags. But remember: the winter is not over. There is still a good potential for us to reach or exceed our normal rainfall this year.”

Stanford climate scientist Daniel Swain, writing for KQED earlier this month, isn’t so sure. Swain says this El Nino has been much different than past events:

Northern California and the Pacific Northwest have gotten soaked, while Southern California has been left pretty dry (with a few notable exceptions). While a veritable “parade of storms” has indeed inundated the northern reaches of the state with very heavy precipitation … even leading to some minor flooding at times, many of California’s most populous cities haven’t witnessed an especially remarkable winter to date. … [T]his isn’t quite the blockbuster year that many had hoped for (especially in the south).

The result is likely to be another year of pressure from water officials to keep showers short, let lawns go brown and wash vehicles less often.

The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.