Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley Now at Epicenter of Worst California Drought in Decades

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The cracked-dry bed of the Almaden Reservoir is seen on Friday, Feb. 7, 2014, in San Jose, Calif.

Image: Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

By Andrew FreedmanApr 24, 2014

The weekly U.S. Drought Monitor is out, and the statistics are exceptionally grim for California and parts of the Southwest.
For the first time in the 15-year history of the monitor, 100% of California is experiencing "moderate" to "exceptional" drought. A majority of the state (77%) is experiencing "extreme" to "exceptional" drought, which are the two most severe categories. That was up nearly 10 percentage points compared to just one week ago.
The worst drought category now extends across all of Silicon Valley and Monterey County, where water managers are announcing cutbacks to summertime water deliveries, and are putting in place water restrictions that could impact everyone from individual households to high-tech manufacturers of computer chips.

See also: California Suffers Astonishingly Fast Snowpack Melt as Drought Intensifies

The extent of the drought's aerial coverage is noteworthy considering that California is the third-largest state in the country.

The drought is certain to get even worse

The drought is certain to get even worse now that the wet season, which wasn't even all that wet, has ended. Unusually mild air temperatures combined with a thin snowpack has already melted much of the state's mountain snows, which typically provides a large portion of the water used for irrigating farmlands and running faucets in the state's more populated areas.

Drought Monitor map showing the extent and severity of drought conditions in California. The darkest red areas show the more severe drought conditions.

According to the Drought Monitor's weekly update, the small city of Montague, which is located in north central California, "risks running out of drinking water by the end of summer and has requested that all outside watering be curtailed until further notice." The Drought Monitor is jointly produced by federal agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Agriculture.
The drought summary statement accompanying the Drought Monitor map, which was written by Richard Heim of the National Climatic Data Center, noted that this is the first time in more than 80 years of water deliveries from the Montague Water Conservation District that this situation has occurred. Many farmers in the Shasta Valley have already started irrigating their fields, due to the shortage of spring snow runoff, the monitor said.
The summary quotes a weather observer in Siskiyou County, Calif., regarding how dire the water supply situation already is.

“Our snow pack is pathetic, rainfall is way below normal, (low) stream flows are running at 2-3 months ahead of normal depending on the area, well levels have dropped severely and many wells are dry in spring or have levels typical of late fall, surface water irrigation supplies are non-existent to extremely limited in many areas, and the situation is only getting worse daily (especially after 3 consecutive years of drought).”

The California drought is part of a larger multiyear drought that is affecting many Western states, with a severe drought also refusing to let go of Texas and Oklahoma. In New Mexico, the drought summary says, the October 2010-March 2014 was the third-driest such 42-month period in the 1895-2014 record.

Precipitation in the High Plains region of Texas for 42-month periods, showing the all-time low between 2010-2014 (see circle and arrow).

Image: National Climatic Data Center

And in the Texas Panhandle, the same 42-month period was the driest such period since 1895, beating the droughts of the 1950s and the 1930s "Dust Bowl" era, which have long been considered the benchmark events for officials to plan for as a worst-case scenario when designing water management programs.
The California drought was most likely caused by a mixture of natural climate variability and some component of manmade global warming, although to what extent global warming played a role is still under debate in the climate science community. A recent study found that global warming may have contributed to the stuck weather pattern that kept diverting storms away from California during the crucial winter wet season, but this is still a subject of active ongoing research.
While California is not expected to see significant drought relief anytime soon, rounds of severe thunderstorms may affect Texas and Oklahoma through the weekend, potentially dumping heavy rain. However, these rains will not be widespread, limiting their drought relief potential.