California’s dreams of drought relief are drying up
As recently as Christmas, it looked like California’s devastating drought could — if not fully disappear — at least be on track for serious improvement by spring. That’s no longer the case.
California’s snowpack was promisingly high at the start of the year after Pacific storms in October and December delivered a round of heavy rains and deep snows. But it has since dropped below where officials hoped it would be for this time of year after those early-season cloudbursts turned out to be isolated events.
“If you think about drought as an overdrawn bank account, we have had a couple unexpected deposits in October and December,” said Daniel Swain, climate scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But right now we are right back to overdraft.”
Water is crucial to California, an agricultural powerhouse for the U.S. that grows most of its vegetables and houses nearly 12% of the U.S. population — more people than all of Canada. Recurring years of drought can boost the risk of wildfires, disrupt and damage agriculture, and endanger hydroelectric supplies in a region that is already strapped for energy every summer. So much liquid is pulled out of the nearby Colorado River to feed Western cities, town and farms that it now dries to a trickle before it evaporates completely miles before its reaching its mouth in the Gulf of California in Mexico.
The high likelihood that California enters a third year of drought may feel like a cruel joke to a region that at year-end celebrated one of its wettest holidays on record. During the final week of 2021, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range was about 160% of what was expected for that time of year. In La Nina years, like this one, storm tracks often drift north of California, leaving it cut off from replenishing rains and snow. So when the late fall deluge started, drought-relief hope began to rise, bolstering outlooks from the hydroelectric and agriculture sectors.
The state, which had warned in early December that it wouldn’t give any water from the State Water Project to farmers unless drought conditions improved, revised that upward in mid-January. After the heavy holiday storms, it said it would now give water districts 15% of what they requested for 2022 — an optimistic shift.
But then just as quickly as December’s deep snow rolled in, the turnaround came to an abrupt halt. There’s been hardly any snow since early January, which is a bit worrisome, said Richard Waycott, president and chief executive officer of the Almond Board of California. The state had its second driest and ninth warmest January on record, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information.
“That one dry month of January just wiped out whatever head start we had as we head toward the end of winter,” Sean de Guzman, a snow survey and water supply forecast manager for the California Department of Water Resources, said during a recent news conference.
And the February forecast doesn’t look much better. Although it is common for a dry spell of one or two weeks to crop up in a California winter, the current one has lasted several weeks already and could well push deep into February, UCLA’s Swain said.
California traditionally gets about half its annual water in the form of snow and rain in December, January and February. Now, “it looks like two out of the three are going to be busts,” said Mike Anderson, California’s state climatologist. “We’re better off than we were last year but that is not a high bar.”
Not everyone has given up hope. On the hydroelectric side, there’s optimism about the snow still piled up in the Sierra Nevada range, said California Independent System Operator Chief Executive Officer Elliot Mainzer. Lake Oroville, which had dried up so much over the summer that power shut off there, has filled up enough that it can generate electricity again.
“Given the very high levels of precipitation in December, we are in a better position relative to last year’s extraordinarily dry conditions, but it has been very dry since the beginning of the year, and we are watching hydroelectric conditions closely,” he said.
Waycott of the Almond Board of California is also more encouraged heading into this growing season. “Compared to last year, we’re probably in better shape,” he said. “For the growers that were able to get through last year, they’re probably going to be a little better off this year.”
One of the problems last year was that the melting snowpack was sucked straight into the ground, which had dried out because of the record warm summer and fall preceding it. The recent October rains may keep that from happening this year because soil moisture is higher, making the earth less of a sponge, climatologist Anderson said.
But that kind of whiplashing weather — very wet, then extremely dry — can bring another problem altogether: the potential for worse wildfires. That’s because the run-off in the spring could bring enough water for the smaller plants to initially leaf out; then the long, hot summer just turns them into fuel by fall.
“There’s an old joke: It’s a bad fire year if it is dry or wet,” Swain said. “It has more truth in it and it is increasingly true in a warming climate.”
With time running out, the only thing that might stave off the worst effects across California for another year is what some call a “miracle March” — a series of late winter or early spring storms that lay down deep mountain snows and enough rain to fill reservoirs before the critical April 1 date.
“If we were to receive heavy rainfall from now through springtime, obviously it would be a lower intensity season,” said Robert Foxworthy, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “If we get no rain from now until summer, we will probably have much more receptive fuels and have the chance to have a much more intense fire season.”
“If you think about drought as an overdrawn bank account, we have had a couple unexpected deposits in October and December. But right now we are right back to overdraft.”
— DANIEL SWAIN, CLIMATE SCIENTISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES