Posted on 04/17/2017 11:42:54 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
From the California Dept. of Water Resources
Northern Sierra Precipitation Sets Water Year Record Atmospheric Rivers Pushed Total to 89.7 Inches since October 1
SACRAMENTO – Never in nearly a century of Department of Water Resources (DWR) recordkeeping has so much precipitation fallen in the northern Sierra in a water year. DWR reported today that 89.7 inches of precipitation – rain and snowmelt – has been recorded by the eight weather stations it has monitored continuously since 1920 from Shasta Lake to the American River basin.
Source: https://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/precipapp/get8SIPrecipIndex.action
Today’s total surpassed the previous record of 88.5 inches recorded in the entirety of Water Year 1983. The region’s annual average is 50 inches. California traditionally receives 30 to 50 percent of its annual precipitation from atmospheric rivers (ARs), long and relatively narrow “rivers in the sky” laden with moisture that blow in from the Pacific. The West Coast experienced 46 ARs between October 1 and March 31, the first six months of Water Year 2017. Nearly one-third of the total were “strong” (13) or “extreme” (3) ARs. DWR’s 5-station San Joaquin index is keeping pace with Water Year 1983’s record total of 77.4 inches in the region. Today’s total of 68.2 inches among the stations is 194 percent of the average precipitation recorded by today’s date during the water year and far exceeds the San Joaquin annual average of 40.8 inches.
The six-station index in the Tulare Basin, often called ground zero of California’s five-year drought, which officially ended in most of California on April 7, has recorded 178 percent of the amount of precipitation that normally falls by this date during an average water year. Total precipitation so far is 45 inches, about 1.5 times the average annual precipitation of 29.3 inches in the basin. The snow water equivalent of California’s snowpack is far above average throughout the Sierra Nevada — 176 percent of the April 13 average. DWR will conduct its final snow survey of the season on May 1 at Phillips Station in the Sierra 90 miles east of Sacramento.
fyi
The problem with a drought is that you cannot engineer your way out of a drought, but you can engineer you way out of floods.
To bad gov. Moonbeam isn’t going to lift the drought restrictions
This drought was touted as proof of man-made global warming.
So is this rain.
Whatever it is, it requires a massive tax and redistribution solution, at the very least.
And yet in mid April the beautiful green hills are starting to turn brown. Still quite nice now but by May the green will be gone again.
Now Cali will let all that beautiful drinking water flow into the Pacific Ocean.
We call these Trump ducks. They have the President’s hair style.
Send some of that rain this way... we are crispy crispy crispy down here in FL, haven’t seen rain in months, have had fires to the north and south and am getting nervous about the dry swamp with all of its built up tinder nearby. My orange tree dried up [something I have never seen happen before], and my bromelieds have all curled up to wait it out.
Yes they do.
I’ll tell people, thanks.
Looks like two Mandarin drakes...probably hanging out together hoping someone will release a couple females. Closely related to the North American wood duck but I don’t know if they are close enough to successfully interbreed.
Beautiful shot- love the black swirls in the water against the spring green.
Thank you for the replies. I am very interested in becoming a competent bird watcher with pictures and keeping a journal.
It is basucally El Nino. Causes an enormous amount of water vapor to enter the Pacific equatorial regions. It can take awhile for this vapor to fall out as rain and for some of it to reach up into the temperate regions. Dominant wind patterns of the tropics and temperate latitudes move in opposite directions around the globe. There is evidence that during some phases of the cold ice age period, more El Nino’s occur. And actually if you analyze the climate physical possibilities, strong El Nino’s could coincide with the fall back into the ice age. So basically, the Equatorial Pacific Ocean rejects or expells solar heat via El Nino. At some future point they should stop as we near the bottom of the cold period. At that point Oceans will be too cold to even warm up enough from solar heat to cause El Nino’s. So basically Cali will be longing for the drought days soon. And there are other things affecting the Pac NW, but that is probably classified intel at this point in time. Sorry for the long post but could not sleep here in Texas. We get the El Nino rain earlier.
Too much rain due to acc-we need to increase taxes. Not enough rain due to acc-we need more taxes. Not enough wind to power the windmills that produce electricity at 10x the cost-we need more taxes-—seeing a pattern here?
I grew up in Southern California. The record of cyclical water feast or famine is written in and on the land. It is a cycle with varied duration of either feast or famine that has been repeating for thousands of years. El Ninos and La Ninas are part (not all) of the pattern and they too have thousands of years history around the Pacific Ocean basin.
What should a smart California do now?
1. Improve and build up its water storage capacity with reservoirs sufficient for the next drought and do not rely even now on the current precipitation levels. 2. Keep building desalination plants along the coast. 3. Quit feeding “excess water” to San Francisco bay instead of the farmland in the Central Valley, which just forces draining of the underground water supplies to where the land keeps subsiding.
This year was a weak La Nina in the Pacific. In other words, the water in some parts was a little cooler than normal. Next year will probably be a weak El Nino.
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