H2O - Still Not Enough

With ever more hopeful headlines about the drought like this one

But you would have to be reading the Wall Street Journal to get the rest of the story

Even with reservoirs brimming, it will take time for California to recover from other effects of drought. In addition to weakened forests, groundwater levels have been drawn down sharply in many southern parts of the state, said Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis.

Mr. Lund said between 10 million and 15 million acre feet of water has been pumped out there over the past five years, or the equivalent of three Shasta reservoirs.

“Some parts of the San Joaquin Valley might never recover from drought because groundwater levels are so low,” Mr. Lund said.

But lest we think all is doom and gloom, here is a glass-half-full story from the SacBee

Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City, is leading a troupe of lawmakers today on a tour of the Sites Reservoir, a $4.4 billion proposed water storage project four decades in the making.

Unlike most of California’s reservoirs, Sites would be off-stream and collect water from the Sacramento River via a 14-mile pipeline. Backers of the project say Sites could add 500,000 acre-feet of water to the state’s system per year, which Gallagher says is enough to serve 1.2 million families.

Gallagher get the Voice of the People prize for today.  Note 10M divided by 500K equals 20 reservoirs needed to have the groundwater backup that we just used up over the last five years.

Comments

[fred]

https://skibums.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/kirkwood-calif-2-19-11.jpg

https://usatunofficial.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/screen-shot-2011-12-28-at-11-31-50-am.png?w=1000

[fred]

ps: This is 2011 but the snow pack is at 18 and a half feet in some areas before this weekend's snow storm.

[Joe]

Today's Merc has a piece by Peter Glieck that hits on exactly my points only better. He is a professional after all:

Given the massive series of storms bringing rain and snow to California over the past month, people are asking, “Is the California drought finally over?” The term “drought” means different things to different people, but let me suggest that “Is the drought over?” is the wrong question.

The end of the drought does not mean the end to California’s water problems. Here are some more appropriate questions and answers.
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Will this year’s rains reverse the massive overdraft of groundwater aquifers in the Central Valley? No. This may be the biggest water problem California faces: our use of groundwater often exceeds natural recharge. During the past five years, that imbalance has been enormous. It’s like a bank account in perpetual overdraft and the balance continues to go down.
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Let’s take the lessons learned during the drought and prove, for once, that John Steinbeck was wrong when he wrote in East of Eden:

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

Peter Gleick is a hydroclimatologist and chief scientist at the Pacific Institute, Oakland. He wrote this for The Mercury News.
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Click through as the full piece is well done. One thing he isn't covering is the growth in the state for commercial and residential usage

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/13/gleick-is-the-drought-over-wrong-question/

[Joe]

Duh.

Despite an enormous snowpack and more rainfall than California can store in its reservoirs, the state’s drought regulators say the water crisis hasn’t ended.

The staff of the State Water Resources Control Board proposed keeping statewide drought emergency controls, which expire Feb. 28, in place for another 270 days.

“Some reservoirs remain critically low and groundwater storage remains depleted in many areas due to the continued impact of prolonged drought,” the board’s staff said in a report this week. “Precipitation cannot be counted on to continue, and snowpack levels, while above average for the current time of year, are subject to rapid reductions as seen in 2016 and before.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article130562194.html#storylink=cpy

[Cassandra]

More reservoirs, less HSR.