There goes January! Can you believe it?

Ok...well, here we are...so, a hearty welcome to February! Let's make the most of this month by checking out our " heartfelt" (get it?) first newsletter of February...here we go!

A Word...Or Two...Or Three...

by ds stringer, CEO

"WASTE NOT...WANT NOT"

My goodness, what a lot of rain we've had in January! Of course, we're already asking if the drought is over...or at least,, close to being over...for now.

Well...yes and no...

Here's the good and "sort of" bad news...

California's drought is not over, but a cavalcade of atmospheric river storms over the past three weeks has brought substantial relief to the state's water crisis in at least the short term, with big recent boosts to snowpack and reservoir levels.

How much rain is needed to end California drought?

Even if we got normal rainfall through the rest of the rainy season, we would only finish the rain year with a surplus of 1.5 to 2.5 inches of rain. That is not enough rain to end the drought. The last major (six year) drought for Southern California ended after the 2017 rainy season.

Read this informative article on this subject by by Alastair Bland of Cal Matters...

"Sorry, the drought isn’t over 

In some places, it might feel like the drought is history. Take San Francisco. Its water supply — Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, in the Sierra Nevada — is 80% full, the ground is saturated and near-record rainfall has occurred in recent days.  

“Drought is in the eye of the beholder,” said Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “If you’re in San Francisco, and you rely on surface storage from Hetch Hetchy, this is great … But if you’re in a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, where massive pumping of groundwater has dried out your well, it will take successive years of rain like this to make a difference.” 

The American River at Discovery Park in Sacramento was flooded on Jan. 9, 2023. A series of strong rainstorms has inundated the region since New Year’s Eve. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters

The San Joaquin Valley’s groundwater basins, where thousands of wells have run dry, are just one example of drought impacts that can take years to reverse. California’s aquatic ecosystems are another. Drought has harmed a variety of fish species, and it will take years for them to rebound. Some, like Delta smelt and winter-run Chinook salmon, are endangered and, faced with an array of human-induced stressors, probably never will recover. 

Determining when a drought begins and ends is tricky. While many experts refer to California’s 2013-2016 drought, as though it had a clear beginning and an end, others, like Mount, feel that particular drought hasn’t yet ended — the current drought is just an extension of it.

After all, most years in the past 15 have produced an underwhelming amount of rainfall. Since the big water year of 2006, only three — 2011, 2017 and 2019 — have been notably wet. Many climate experts believe California’s predominant weather pattern in the future will be one of steady drought conditions broken periodically by very wet interludes. 

“This might well be just another case of a wet year followed by a string of dry ones,” Mount said.

Reservoir levels rising

Water is rapidly flowing into the state’s reservoirs.

Lake Oroville — the largest reservoir of the State Water Project, with a capacity of 3.5 million acre feet — was 28% full in early December and now is just shy of 50%. That’s an increase of 700,000 acre-feet, and experts predict it could rise by almost 500,000 more before February. (Each acre-foot is enough to support two or three families for a year.) Still, Oroville and most of the state’s other major reservoirs remain mostly empty. 

While a single very rainy season could refill even the largest of California’s reservoirs, the same cannot be said of the Colorado River’s huge reservoirs. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which hold 50 million acre-feet combined, have been declining for decades. Seven states and 40 million people — almost half of them in California — draw from these reservoirs, and even several wet winters in a row will not come close to refilling them. 

Among the many problems with this onslaught is that so much rain has fallen in such a short time. This doesn’t just damage structures and harm people; it also makes it challenging to store the water. In any rain event, much of the water will fall downstream of any dam, making it difficult or impossible to capture. 

But even the torrents of water entering the reservoir system cannot necessarily all be retained in storage. That’s because allowing reservoirs to fill so early in the year would create flood risks later in the winter. 

To avoid this, the outflow gates in some dams are being opened wider to let water out faster and prevent overflow.

This strategy is especially necessary at smaller reservoirs, like Folsom Lake. Outflow through the dam was running somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 cubic feet per second in early December, said Michael Anderson, a climatologist with the Department of Water Resources. Recently, he said, state reservoir operators were releasing roughly 30,000 cubic feet per second from the dam. Most of this water eventually flows to the ocean. It may seem like water wasted, but it also could mean a city saved.

Not quite record rainfall 

By the numbers, this blast of wet weather has been stunning, if not necessarily record-breaking. The San Francisco Bay Area has taken a heavy pounding. About the day this wet spell started, on Dec. 31, a near-record 5.46 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco, missing the 1994 one-day record by a tenth of an inch. Between Dec. 26 and Jan. 9, more than a foot of rain fell in San Francisco. That’s more than half of the city’s long-term water year average of 22 inches. In the East Bay’s Tilden Regional Park, 17 inches of rain fell in about the same span.

In Beverly Hills, the recent storms have delivered 11 inches of rain, bringing the Los Angeles County city to about 16 inches for the season. The Sacramento International Airport has received 7 inches of rain since Dec. 27 and as of Jan. 10 was at about 208% of normal for this date. Locations near Santa Barbara recently recorded up to 15 inches in a day, according to Anderson. In San Diego County, 4.5 inches have fallen since the end of December. And in the Russian River watershed — at a particularly rainy mountaintop weather station called Venado — 23 inches of rain fell between Dec. 27 and Jan. 11. 

Regrettably, this rainfall has done little to help water supplies, for most of it has flowed into storm drains and either right into the ocean or into rivers that lead to it.

The recent storms have highlighted the need to design and build stormwater systems capable of capturing runoff for landscape irrigation or even treated and used as drinking water. Such systems are expensive and take years to build. Santa Monica is one city that already captures urban runoff and treats it.

Even sinking urban runoff into the ground via rain gardens and bioswales is a better option than letting it escape to sea. Unfortunately, much existing infrastructure, like concrete flood control channels, is designed to usher stormwater quickly off the landscape. 

Double the snowpack

The storms of late December and January have dramatically buffed up California’s snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. It’s now at more than 200% of average for this date, and slightly more than 100% of the amount that usually falls during the entire winter season.

In the last few days, freezing elevations have been quite low – about 5,000 feet. “Which means we’re accumulating a lot more snow,” Anderson said. He added that “automated sensors are registering what they would consider a full season’s snowpack, about what we would expect on April 1.”

Snow and no snow: The photo on the left shows ample snowpack in the Sierra Nevada on Jan. 3, 2023. The photo on the right shows barren ground at the same spot at Phillip’s Station on April 1, 2015, when ex-Gov. Jerry Brown attended the state’s snow survey. Photos by the California Department of Water Resources

That’s great news for much of California. This snowpack is an important natural storage system because when it melts, it feeds the State Water Project, which provides water to 27 million people and 750,000 acres of farmland. It fills reservoirs and keeps rivers icy cold – conditions required by spawning salmon. But climate change is disrupting this cycle. Snowpack averages have been declining at an alarming rate in recent years, either melting early in the season or not falling at all, and research suggests a future of frequent “low-to-no-snow” years. 

Skiers are overjoyed. According to the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, “the latest storm delivered 6 to 7.5 feet of snow in the last few days. Mammoth season total snowfall is 328” at Main Lodge and 441” at the summit — the most snow in the country!” Tahoe’s Northstar Resort has received 69 inches in the last week, with a base depth of 128 inches and a season total of 280 inches.

But snow is a fickle resource, and Anderson cautioned that, with a shift toward warmer weather — or, worse, high-altitude rainfall — this powdery blessing could soon melt away. That, he said, would create “flood management concerns as that snow melts, especially if it melts too quickly.” 

So...there's your answer. We all need to keep up our conservation efforts like learning to live with brown grass or putting in an attractive "desert like" landscaping. We all need to realize, we DO live in a desert...and we need to start acting like we do.

On behalf of the Universal City/North Hollywood Chamber of Commerce...

Dorothy Stringer

Dorothy Stringer

CEO

Black History Month is an annual observance originating in the United States, where it is also known as African-American History Month. It has received official recognition from governments in the United States and Canada, and more recently has been observed in Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Significance: to remember important people and events in the history of the African diaspora

Observed for: 53 years

Also called: African-American History Month

Every wee for the next month, our newsletter will honor an important figure in black history in an effort to honor the significance of this important observation! Stay tuned for some interesting and important reading!