San Luis Reservoir near Los Banos was 47% full or 93% of its historic average. Study co-author, Prof. Lisa Sloan, told me last week that, “I think the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire that our study suggested.”, Back in 2004, Sloan, professor of Earth sciences at UC Santa Cruz, and her graduate student Jacob Sewall published, “Disappearing Arctic sea ice reduces available water in the American west” (subs. The agency notes that a mild but strengthening La Niña is underway and that there is an 85% chance it will continue into the spring. Following another week without rain — and none forecast through the end of this month across Northern California — the federal government on Thursday announced that unusually dry conditions are expanding across a wider swath of California’s landscape, increasing concerns about summer fire risk and the possible return of at least a modest drought this year.

The “500 mb level is often referred to as the steering level as most weather systems and precipitation follow the winds at this level,” which is around 18,000 feet. A major snowstorm is forecast to hit the Sierra Nevada this weekend. All this isn’t “proof” that human caused climate change helped shift and reduce precipitation in California during its record-setting drought. But in Southern California, La Niña has meant dry winters much more often, with 15 out of 22 La Niña winters delivering less than 80% of normal rainfall. "The 20th century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said study co-author Benjamin Cook, a NASA climate scientist, in a statement. “Other outcomes are always possible, just less likely,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center in Maryland. “People generally think El Niño is going to mean a wet winter and La Niña is going to mean a dry winter. The Bureau of Reclamation is sponsoring a round year-long, real-time forecasting competition, focused on western U.S. temperature and precipitation, in partnership with NOAA, NIDIS, USGS, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. CLICK HERE TO TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS. For more on NOAA’s winter outlook for the U.S., which favors these warmer, drier conditions across the southern tier of the U.S., click here. The Sierra Nevada snowpack on April 1 was only 54% of its historic average. And California has had very wet “Miracle March” conditions in years past. California is on edge. You basically have to have at least two dry years in a row before there’s a drought in California. That’s more likely with its warming ocean counterpart, El Niño, he said.

The reason for the dry conditions is a persistent weather pattern that is sending California’s rain toward Seattle. Megadroughts:Will plague the Southwest as climate warms, study says.

Drought in California from 2000 Naturally occurring western megadroughts have taken place many times before.
On Thursday Feb. 20, 2020, the U.S. Drought Monitor report classified 59% of California as "abnormally dry" and 9.5% as in "moderate drought," a significant change from Dec. 31, 2019, when just 3.5% was abnormally dry and none was in drought. But regardless, the same general pattern has played out on average. In a warming world, a larger fraction of total precipitation falls in downpours, which means a larger fraction is lost to storm runoff (as opposed to being absorbed in soil). The most intense period of drought occurred the week of July 29, 2014 where D4 affected 58.41% of California land. That’s doubly true when there is also emerging evidence — documented by Senior Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro and others — that “global warming is increasing the atmosphere’s thickness, leading to stronger and more persistent ridges of high pressure, which in turn are a key to temperature, rainfall, and snowfall extremes and topsy-turvy weather patterns like we’ve had in recent years.”, That’s why it was so puzzling that NOAA’s Martin Hoerling was quoted in the NY Times Thursday saying “to state the obvious, this drought has occurred principally due to a lack of rains, not principally due to warmer temperatures.” He ended by saying, “It is quite clear that the scientific evidence does not support an argument that this current California drought is appreciably, if at all, linked to human-induced climate change.”. The state has had a rough summer. The amount of the state in “moderate drought,” a more serious category, remained the same this week as last week, at 9.5%. By comparison, five years ago, on the week of Feb. 17, 2015, an overwhelming 98% of the state was in at least a moderate drought, and 41% was in exceptional drought, the most severe of the five categories used in the report. The study covers an area stretching across nine U.S. states from Oregon down to New Mexico.

Federal scientists say that La Niña — the phenomenon where Pacific Ocean waters off South America are cooler than normal — is underway this winter. In 10 of them, the Bay Area had a dry winter, receiving less than 80% of its average rainfall. Much of California, including San Jose, Fresno and Los Angeles, receives only about 15 inches of rain a year on average. Parveen talked about the effects of La Niña. After a political scientist unjustifiably labeled his mainstream views “zombie science,” the President’s Science Advisor, Dr. John P. Holdren, explained in an extended debunking how climate change worsens Western droughts even if it doesn’t reduce precipitation (see here and below).

The new report does not mean, however, that California is heading back into the kind of severe drought that the state experienced from 2012 to 2017. Don’t expect much of a winter wallop this year, except for the pain of worsening drought, U.S. government forecasters said. The issue is gaining a higher profile of late. (1) we did not include changes in greenhouse gases other than CO2; (2) maybe we should have melted more sea ice and see what happens; (3) these atmospheric and precipitation estimates do not include changes in land use, in the US and elsewhere. But drought conditions continue to spread across California, with nearly half … A commonly held assumption among many Californians is that La Niña means a dry winter is coming, and in years when the opposite occurs, El Niño, a wet winter is considered more likely. Two-thirds of the United States should get a warmer than normal winter, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted. Latest Coronavirus Impacts: 269 New Cases, 2 Community Outbreaks Reported, LISTEN: Scene in San Diego Podcast – What's a Ghost Kitchen? He wrote: “In my recent comments about observed and projected increases in drought in the American West, I mentioned four relatively well understood mechanisms by which climate change can play a role in drought. This winter season, although California experienced some decent rainfall around Thanksgiving and into December, the storms all but shut down after the New Year, and January and February have been unusually warm and dry. We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while. All nine Bay Area counties are now classified as abnormally dry. "But going forward, we'll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought," he said. All Access Digital offer for just 99 cents! The rest of the nation will likely be closer to normal, NOAA said.

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