Two weeks of pounding storms, flooding and seemingly endless rain has lessened the severity of California’s drought but didn’t make it go away.
Numbers released Thursday morning show the entire state remained in abnormally dry conditions and 95% was in some type of drought.
“Just because we’ve had this rain doesn’t mean we’ve eliminated the drought,” said Cindy Palmer with the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay area office.
A map published Thursday shows a state still in trouble, but mostly in severe drought rather than extreme.
So many atmospheric river storms have drenched California since Christmas the state climatologist, Michael Anderson, has taken to numbering them. But even with all this rain, the state isn’t back to what used to be normal at this time of year, he said.
Here’s what to know:
California drought data released
- How much rain has fallen? According to the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center, overall since Dec. 26 the state has on average gotten 8.61 inches of precipitation.
- Has it helped the drought? Last week 71% of the state was in severe to extreme drought conditions. As of Wednesday, the US Drought Monitor said that had fallen to 46%.
- What would fix the state’s ground water deficit? Several years of above-average precipitation, said Michael Anderson, California’s State Climatologist.
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Is California’s drought over?
The short answer is no. Years of much lower-than-normal rain and snowfall mean almost all of the state remains in a severe water deficit – but it’s better than it was.
As the state has become hotter and drier, a wet month or even a wet winter isn’t enough to make up for years of extremely low rainfall.
“If someone doesn’t get paid for months on end and then gets a normal paycheck, that’s not going to make up for the deficit in their bank balance,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability.
Rain does help refill the state’s underground aquifers but much of it is not soaking into the ground but instead running off, mostly because the storms are coming so close together. In previous decades winter storms were more spaced out, allowing the water to soak into the ground.
“If you dump a gallon of water over a straw there’s only a certain amount of water that can go into the straw,” Zachary Hoylman from the Montana Climate Office at the University of Montana said in a briefing Wednesday.
How long has California been in drought?
The latest drought in California has lasted three years.
“That time period … was the second driest three years on record for California,” said Brad Pugh, a meteorologist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.
But really the state has been dealing with extremely low water conditions for a decade, said Diffenbaugh.
“We had a record-setting drought from 2012 to 2016, then 2016 to 2017 was a record wet year that caused flooding and how we’ve been back in yet another record-setting drought since then,” he said.
Will this at least fill California’s reservoirs?
California’s reservoirs are filling up and the state’s snowpack, which accounts for 30% of the state’s water supply, is doing well.
Across California, snowpacks are at between 192 and 267% of normal for this date, according to the state Department of Water Resources.
Reservoirs are beginning to reach their historical averages but most are still well below full.
Can California catch and store more rain in reservoirs?
It’s not possible to capture every bit of water that falls in the state and save it for later, said Jay Lund, an engineering professor with the University of California-Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.
“It’s simply not economical,” he said. In 2014 the state budgeted $2.7 billion for new water storage on top of the 1,500 reservoirs it already has. But even if every proposed reservoir in that program were built, it would still only increase water storage by 10% and water delivery by 1%, he said.
The bigger issue is that on average California has been pumping water out of underground wells every year than flows back into the state’s underground aquifers. About 80% of that water goes to agriculture.
“In some places the water tables have fallen hundreds of feet,” said Lund.
Filling up that deficit isn’t something even weeks of heavy rain can do, he said.
As that’s impossible, the only real solution is to reduce water demand in the long run. And that, said Lund, is going to mean “permanently fallowing irrigated land.”