Fall snow, rains have 'satisfied the drought debt' in Northern Sierra Nevada

And here is a map of California's reservior levels: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...

Only the Northern part of the state has satisfied the drought.

> On Nov. 3, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that about a quarter of California was out of drought conditions, the best outlook the state has had since spring 2013, when 64% of the state was considered in “moderate drought” or worse.

>The picture in Southern California, however, remains bleak. A bark beetle infestation that took hold in the southern and central Sierra Nevada during the drought has killed more than 100 million trees and is moving north, increasing the danger of wildfire.

200% above average is not twice normal, it is 100% + 200%, that is x3

This helps the current drought condition. It does not, as mentioned below, replenish the water table, or other more long term ailments of overpopulation. So both are correct.

200% above the normal rate in a short period considering the rain season isn't over can replenish at least the immediate natural water reservoirs.

The ground has a limit to how much water it can contain if the natural reservoirs are full the water will evaporate.

Effectively smart water management involves draining your water sources to the amount that will be replenished otherwise you waste your rainy season.

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

We also had a rainy season last year - these reservoirs were significantly filled relative to 2015 levels throughout summer/fall of 2016

Everyone wants a 'sensible' policy, no one agrees on what 'sensible' means.

And no one wants to give up their water rights.

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.

With the prop system of CA, who knows?

I thought the state was being responsible for the last while, and then the last election just pushed in $18B unfunded spending on the General Fund via Prop 51.

The water table is a seperate but related issue. And it would take a large amount of rain, and time to replenish. Not likely to happen faster than use, especially with the asinine ag well exemptions.

I think you mean replenish. Replete is an adjective.

I'd believe that. This article is about the Northern part of California.

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.

50 years of rain would do alot for Fresno, especially if it was constant.

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.

Probably depends more on the price of energy (solar?) than on the absolute reductions in energy requirements for desalination. The Israeli's have been making great strides in making more economical plants, but they're still off on price for agricultural use.

Water costs need revising to properly incentivize efficiency.

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!

It seems the opposite is happening. For a while LA was promoting water saving but it seems they have stopped. a lot of my neighbors also have restarted their sprinklers. I think things have to get much worse before there will be action.

Unfortunately there's zero reason for a farmer to invest in this due to western water law. Speaking for Colorado anyway, and I think many are similar, if you conserve water, yay for you but there's no incentive. Someone with a junior right just gets more water for themselves. You can't sell it and you can't store it. You either use it or you don't In that case the most economic thing you can do is to buy the cheapest irrigation system possible, regardless of the waste and of course the cheapest is the one you already have.

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.