California really needs this winter to be a wet one.
The state is now at the beginning of the fourth year of one if its worst droughts on record. The drought has been fueled by a spate of disappointing winter rainy seasons that have left meager snowpacks and diminished reservoir levels, combined with record-warm temperatures that have driven demand for the increasingly precious resource, and spurred a series of conservation measures around the state.
Hopes that the coming winter could finally bring some relief were raised when the first murmurs of an impending El Niñobegan to emerge in March. The climate phenomenon can be associated with amped up rains in the southern part of the state, and so the words “El Niño” became something of a mantra across the parched lands.
“People have latched on to the notion that El Niño will bring about relief,” California state climatologist Michael Anderson told Climate Central. “That seems to be something they’ve grasped onto quite firmly.”
But this winter likely won’t be the one Californians so desperately need, as the budding El Niño is expected to only be a weak event and unlikely to do much to bolster those dwindling water reserves.
However, that news doesn’t necessarily mean that this winter will be as dire as those of recent years past — though that’s a possibility. By virtue of not being under the drying influence of El Niño’s counterpart, La Niña, it’s also possible that California will at least see a wetter winter than they have in the past few years, the first step on the path out of the drought.
“We can’t rule anything out,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a meteorologist with the Climate Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who helps put together monthly El Niño outlooks.
California’s predicament
The drought that now has California in its iron grip didn’t happen overnight, and no matter what happens this winter, it won’t end overnight either, experts say.
The dry conditions have accumulated over the past three years, but really began to metastasize across the state this past winter. Coming in to the season, California had just seen its driest year on record, with some cities measuring precipitation deficits of 30 to 40 inches.
California generally gets about half of its precipitation (in the form of both snow and rain) from December to February. Most of it falls as snow in the Sierra Nevada range, and this portion is critically important, as it provides a sustained flow into reservoirs for much of the state when it gradually melts in late spring and early summer.
But the 2014 water year, which ran from Oct. 1, 2013, to Sept. 30, 2014, “has been one of the driest in decades and follows two consecutive dry years throughout the state,” according to the California Department of Water Resources. The past three years are the driest such stretch on record in the state, Kevin Werner, the western regional climate services director at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, said during a NOAA teleconference earlier this month.
No comments:
Post a Comment