Posted on 05/28/2015 12:14:26 PM PDT by BenLurkin
This month's weather suggests how El Niño's building strength is already affecting the United States. It's giving weather scientists reason to be cautiously optimistic that it has the stamina to see it through California's rainy season, which typically begins in October and ends in April.
"Can one big year ease the drought conditions? Yes, it can," said Michael Anderson, state climatologist with the California Department of Water Resources. "It can definitely replenish the surface storage and can have some benefit to starting to replenish some of the groundwater."
...
El Niño is the warming of Pacific Ocean waters along the equator, from Peru to the International Date Line, that causes changes to the atmosphere and can influence weather globally.
Last year, scientists thought El Niño was forming in the Pacific, only to watch it fade out.
There's reason to believe this coming winter could be different, as El Niño appears to enforce its will elsewhere in the country — offering a possible preview of what California could see.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Oh good.
Now California can continue to ignore their water supply problem and build the choo-choo to nowhere instead of desalination plants.
Oh good. Now California can continue to ignore their water supply problem and build the choo-choo to nowhere instead of desalination plants.
++++
You are close. Yes on Choo Choo to nowhere. Yes on No Desaltstion Plants. But you overlook the real “tragedy” : Emperor Jerry won’t have a crisis to kick around anymore. He will be insufferable and unpredictable at the same time.
El Nino will allow Sacramento to continue to dump billions of gallon of water directly into the Pacific Ocean - while demanding that the peasants cease bathing.
And their pg mamas, and cousins, and neighbors and...
Keep hoping, California. Jerry Brown will hope with you.
The whining now will be nothing compared to the whining when there’s too much rain on the crops. They raise the price of our food when there isn’t rain and when there is too much rain. When it’s the right amount of rain, prices don’t go down because they know we’ve bowed down to their already high prices. Remember the drought in Texas when the cattle ranchers were selling off their herds? The market was flooded with cheap cattle but prices continued to rise in your local grocery store meat department.
Maybe they should require proof of citizenship to be able to drink the water.
And the EPA will take over all of it because then it’ll be “wetlands” under the new CWA regs.
Lord, how did we get here?
I remember when the weather reporters started using the term EL NINO. There was a storm in September-November in north Kansas and southern Nebraska.
Our local weather chick stood out in the night air of NW Arkansas and said...”The question that is on everyone’s lips,” (then she turned to the camera with a look of HORROR on her face and said...) “IS THIS EL NINO?”
I wanted to throw a boot through the TV screen, but it wasn’t my TV.
Thank you.
California is building desalination plants, but as this article points out, they may not be cost effective, because this problem comes and goes.
“In 1991 Santa Barbara built a desalination plant, but barely fired it up before the rains came, so they had to moth ball it.
Right now they are bringing it back on line.
The city plans to spend up to $40 million to modernize and reactivate the plant, which was closed in 1992 when the last drought ended. It is among a number of desalting projects being considered along the California coast, including in Huntington Beach and the Monterey Peninsula.
In Cambria, a hybrid desalination plant that began operating in November treats brackish water to make it drinkable. And the nation’s largest desalination plant is being built in Carlsbad for $954 million.
Although it may seem natural to think the Pacific Ocean could be the answer to California’s water crisis, experts say a stampede toward desalination is unlikely.
“It has two big disadvantages: It’s really expensive and it’s energy-intensive,” said Henry Vaux Jr., a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of resource economics who contributed to a 2008 National Research Council report on desalination.
It could also put elected leaders in the unenviable position of sticking customers with expensive desalination bills should stormy weather return.”
That’s what they said last year.
YOUR food?
We may see heavier rains this coming winter because there was a major volcanic eruption in Chile, which could disturb the normal southern summer jet stream patterns and could affect the northern winter jet stream patterns. The result is that the winter storm track could be like the winter of 2010-2011, where much of California ended up with around 200% of normal rain (they had to open up all five spill gates at Folsom Dam east of Sacramento, CA in early February 2011).
“IS THIS EL NINO?”
Has the makings of a SyFy network disaster movie: “Super El Nino”
Excellent!
The perennial El Nino hype is most crap: Strong, weak, middling. Increasing, decreasing, staying the same. Could cause more rain, less rain. El Nino in, La Nina out. blah, blah, blah.
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