
Fall snow, rains have 'satisfied the drought debt' in Northern Sierra Nevada - MilnerRoute
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-fall-precip-drought-buster-20161202-story.html
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jpmattia
Latest drought map for CA not included in article:
[http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?...](http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA)

About 88% of the state still in some form of drought.

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helper
And here is a map of California's reservior levels:
[http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...](http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action)

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btilly
Nice! Too bad they don't offer one more bar for aggregated data.

That said, contributions to the snowpack will show up in reservoirs next year,
so reservoir levels will be trailing indicators of final recovery.

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greglindahl
Recent winters have been so warm that early snow has melted very early. So
reservoir levels are less of a trailing indicator than in the past.

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btilly
However if we have significant snow right now, that won't be showing up in the
reservoirs yet. :-)

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positr0n
_... nearly 200% above average for the first two months of the water year_

Two months of twice normal precipitation is all it took to alleviate the
drought? From the dire tone of all the news I read from California it seemed
way worse than that.

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pfarnsworth
Of course, that's called the media for you. The way they made it sound,
California was never going to recover.

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stouset
Of course, that's the average commenter for you. They make it sound like
they're incapable of understanding anything with more nuance than a headline.

This alleviated drought conditions _only_ for Northern California. Not for
SoCal, which is still in dire condition. This also says nothing about the
state of the water table. This is treading well into "a snowball disproving
global warming" territory.

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source99
Maybe this SoCal Newspaper is trying to make it seem like NorCal has enough
water to spare and send it South. Just a theory...

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TrevorJ
I hope this doesn't remove public pressure for a sensible water conservancy
policy in the west.

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TheGirondin
I just found out that LA doesn't reuse their wastewater.

Here this whole time they have been talking about things like building a
pipeline from the Great Lakes and they don't even treat and reuse.

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malyk
There was a huge campaign against "toilet water" when it was proposed.

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hueving
Yeah, I recall the provocative slogan "ass to glass" being passed around.

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niels_olson
Erm, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't Fresno need something like 50 years
of rain to replete the water table?

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floatrock
Something like that. Aquifers are different from reservoirs -- reservoirs are
our above-ground water stores, aquifers are our below ground water stores.

The problem is that while reservoirs can be refilled from the surface
watershed with a good rainy season or two, aquifers take decades of water
slowly percolating down through the soil to replenish. If your rate of
consumption exceeds the refill rate, well, you're in a bit of an unsustainable
situation and the clock starts ticking.

As the drought progressed and surface water became scarce, agriculture started
drilling deeper and deeper wells to access the aquifer reserves. The aquifers
got so drained that there were stories of fracking companies being hired to
drill wells which had depths beyond the capabilities of most traditional well-
drilling machines.

Worse, there's also positive feedback loops at play -- as an aquifer gets
depleted, the ground above it can settle in a way that slows the refill rate
(I've heard it described as the volume occupied by the water goes away so dirt
fills in the small gaps creating more compacted/sealed off soil). If the
refill rate slows down and your consumption rate stays steady or increases
(development!), well, the aquifer's rate of depletion accelerates. Feedback is
a bitch.

The anecdote about fracking companies being called in to drill super-deep
water wells tells you all you need to know about how market forces price the
sustainable consumption of our water reserves.

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elihu
Another interesting thing that can happen (I don't know if this is a concern
in California, but I've heard that it's a major problem in Jakarta, Indonesia)
is that if you're close to the ocean, pulling fresh water from the ground can
result in the fresh water being displaced by salt water which makes the
aquifer useless.

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dubyah
It's a problem in SoCal. They mitigate it by using injection wells in coastal
areas as a seawater barrier. Orange County's initial efforts of using RO
treated wastewater were for seawater barrier injection wells.

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hamandcheese
How long will it be until desalination becomes economical?

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tn13
California's hyper-environmentalism is unlikely to make it politically viable.

California in fact could have invested more in water collection and reservoir
building but they did not. Desalination is pretty distant.

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strictnein
Santa Barbara's just rebuilt their desalination plant.

[http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/...](http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/pw/resources/system/sources/desalination.asp)

(note: .asp!)

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tn13
It is a real old desalination plant from 80s that is being re-activated.

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Ductapemaster
Yeah it was never turned on due to economic reasons. They are currently
retrofitting it with updated pumps, membranes, pipes, etc, and increasing its
capacity. They've definitely hit some interesting roadblocks along the way.

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mmanfrin
Thank goodness. The snowpack is of irreplaceable importance to the ecology of
California. Without the summer melts, California would turn in to a desert.

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eli_gottlieb
Thank God. Now the West has to figure out how to conserve water better to
avoid drying up and burning too much when future droughts occur. Drip
irrigation in agriculture and desalination are both useful technologies for
water sustainability in semi-arid environments.

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pjungwir
Just the other week I finished reading _Where the Bluebird Sings to the
Lemonade Springs_ by Wallace Stegner (whose novels are wonderful by the way),
and in several of the essays collected there he writes about how the defining
characteristic of the West is "aridity". He complains about how we have over-
settled the land, how our presence is based on exploitation, the Gold Rush,
mobility, and impermanence. He talks about how the green that irrigation
provides can't last. "Thoughts in a Dry Land" was from 1991; these problems
aren't new, and I doubt we'll ever "solve" them. And the population keeps
growing. I hope the things you mention do indeed help!

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gkop
The canonical and excellent read on the subject is Cadillac Desert.

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polotics
read Water Knife! (or wait for the movie adaptation)

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plussed_reader
The metric in the headline speaks nothing to the deforestation that is
occurring due to the prolonged nature of the drought.

This kind of headline smacks of shoddy journalism, and is even more suspect
when the publication comes from an area that stands to benefit from a change
to the current status quo.

Let's see their article correlate to the situation in the Stanislaus forest.

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ww520
What about the underground reservoir? What level are they in?

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greglindahl
Terrible. Groundwater is free to anyone who pumps it, so needless to say,
there's been a ton of pumping recently. A bill was passed in 2014 to make
aquifer pumping regulated starting in 2020 or 2024.

