With water running out, California sees no relief
LOS ANGELES — Heat waves. Severe drought. Extreme wildfires.
As Southern California braces for unprecedented drought restrictions, longrange forecasts are predicting a summer that will be fraught with record-breaking temperatures, sere landscapes and above-average potential for significant wildfires, particularly in the northern part of the state.
“The dice are loaded for a lot of big fires across the West,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at UCLA. “And the reason for that is simple: The vast majority of the western U.S. is in pretty serious drought.”
Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the temperature outlook for the transition from spring into summer this year calls for above-normal readings for most of the West.
At the same time, the agency also reported that while long-range forecasts had suggested the climate phenomenon known as La Niña was dissipating — raising a glimmer of hope that California might experience a normal winter in 2022 — it now appeared that the “little girl” was hanging on, possibly into a third year.
If NOAA is correct, high temperatures and the lingering La Niña will have major impacts on urban and agricultural water use across the American West, as well as for California’s increasingly extreme fire season.
Already, the federal government has announced that it will delay water releases from Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, as a result of worsening drought conditions along the Colorado River. In an effort to boost the shrinking reservoir, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday that it plans to hold back water to reduce risks of the lake falling below a point at which Glen Canyon Dam would no longer generate electricity.
Unlike its wetter and better known sibling, El Niño, La Niña typically brings dry winters to Southern California and the Southwest.
Now, with California’s rainy season largely in the rearview mirror and a hot, dry summer rapidly approaching, forecasters say La Niña has a 59% chance of continuing through the summer, and up to a 55% chance of persisting through the fall.
Experts say this summer could be a repeat of last year, when fires burned more than 2.5 million acres across California — more than any other year except 2020.
“Last year, one thing that made the fire season especially active were the extreme heat waves that occurred across the West during summertime,” Williams said. “So we’re in a similar situation this year, where we’re going into summer with extremely dry conditions, but we don’t yet know whether there are going to be more record heat waves this year. That’s why there’s still a lot of uncertainty in how the fire season is actually going to play out.”
Warming of the planet due to human activity has increased the likelihood of severe heat waves, and hotter temperatures also worsen drought by causing snowpack to melt earlier in the year, and causing more precipitation to fall as rain, instead of snow.
“The chances of having record-breaking heat waves this year are higher than normal,” Williams said. “But there’s still room for hope that we get lucky.”
Already this year, California has seen 1,402 fires that have together burned 6,507 acres. That compares with 1,639 fires that burned 4,779 acres at this time last year, said Capt. Chris Bruno of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Cal Fire is currently holding trainings in all its programs, from helicopter rescues to hand crews, and is bringing on seasonal employees to support operations with an eye toward reaching peak staffing — which averages 10,000 employees — by June or July, he said.
La Niña’s refusal to move on could also cause problems for places other than California.
La Niña influences climate around the globe, and is cyclical. It can bring drought to some parts of the world at the same time as it brings torrential rain to others.