rainfall – Enviro Updates

SuzanneMarch 14, 2022Waterdrought, rainfall, Russian River, water conservation, water supply

Despite significant early season rainfall, Russian River watershed diversion curtailments likely to resume in April

Katherine Minkiewicz-Martine, SOCONEWS

Curtailments on Russian River watershed diversions will likely resume this April as the outlook for a “miracle March” in rainfall looks grim.

Curtailments for certain water right holders were suspended in October after Sonoma County received significant rainfall, however, flows from the October and December storms are starting to taper off, according to Sam Boland-Brien, a supervising engineer with the California State Water Resource Control Board, Division of Water Rights.

“It’s going to be a really dry summer,” Boland-Brien said.

Boland-Brien and other experts from the California Department of Water Resources, Sonoma Water, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Sonoma County Farm Bureau convened on March 10 for a virtual drought town hall to discuss water supply and drought conditions for the coming summer season.

The March 10 event was the first in a planned series of drought town halls as the county navigates through another year of dry conditions. Future town halls will focus on specific topics such as the Russian River, water quality, river recreation and groundwater conservation.

SuzanneJuly 15, 2018July 20, 2018Climate Change & Energy, Waterflood protection, floodplain, rainfall, watershed restoration, weatherLeave a comment

Floodplain restoration catching on amid predictions of wetter years ahead

Henry Fountain, THE NEW YORK TIMES

For years, there has been a movement in California to restore floodplains, by moving levees back from rivers and planting trees, shrubs and grasses in the low-lying land between. The goal has been to go back in time, to bring back some of the habitat for birds, animals and fish that existed before the state was developed.

But in addition to recreating the past, floodplain restoration is increasingly seen as a way of coping with the future — one of human-induced climate change. The reclaimed lands will flood more readily, and that will help protect cities and towns from the more frequent and larger inundations that scientists say are likely as California continues to warm.

“We thought we were just going to plant some trees out here and get some birds to move in,” said Julie Rentner, executive vice president of River Partners, a conservation group that is restoring hundreds of acres of farmland on the outskirts of Modesto in the Central Valley, where agriculture has overwhelmed the natural environment. “Now we’ve got this whole much larger public benefit thing going on.”

Researchers say it is unclear whether climate change will make California drier or wetter on average. What is more certain is that the state will increasingly whipsaw between extremes, with drier dry years, wetter wet ones and a rising frequency of intense periods of precipitation.

Climate models agree that “this really big increase in wet events is quite likely,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles and an author of a recent paper on the expected changes. “There’s just so much more moisture in the atmosphere in a warming world.”

SuzanneJuly 6, 2018July 12, 2018Waterdrought, rainfallLeave a comment

Drought conditions spread over much of California

Guy Kovner, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Sixteen days into summer, with wildfires raging over the bone-dry landscape and more scorching hot days ahead, it might feel as if California is on the verge of another drought.

The official word from weather authorities shows much of the state trending in that direction.

Abnormally dry or drought conditions prevail over 85 percent of California, including the coast from Monterey County to the Oregon border, the U.S. Drought Monitor said Thursday.

Nearly all of Lake County and parts of eastern Napa and Mendocino counties are now in moderate drought, authorities said.

The coast of central and southern California, from San Luis Obispo County to the Mexican border, is in “severe drought,” with the state’s southeastern toe in “extreme drought.”

The contrast is stark with last year at this time.

In mid-2017, on the heels of a drought-busting rainy season, the same report listed 76 percent of California — encompassing everything north of Monterey County — free of drought or abnormal dryness. Abnormally dry and moderate drought conditions were mostly limited to a coastal strip running south from San Luis Obispo County.

SuzanneOctober 15, 2017Climate Change & Energy, Land Use, Sustainable Livingdevelopment, fire, fire danger, global warming, rainfall

El Diablo in Wine Country

Mike Davis, Blog, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
In 1942 Alfred Hitchcock recruited the author of Our Town, Thornton Wilder, to write the screenplay for Shadow of a Doubt, an innocence-versus-evil thriller set in an ‘idyllic American town’. After considering various candidates, Hitchcock and Wilder selected Santa Rosa, a picturesque agricultural community of 13,000 people, 55 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. The following year, Santa Rosa was introduced to millions of filmgoers in a series of establishing shots that began with aerial views of its pretty countryside and ‘all-American’ downtown. Wartime restrictions had precluded set-building and the exterior locations were all real, but it was difficult to believe that sunny Santa Rosa hadn’t been confected by Norman Rockwell on a Hollywood back lot.
Seventy-five years later, we contemplate another aerial view, this time of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park neighbourhood. The scene, a thousand homes incinerated to their foundations, resembles the apocalypse Kim Jong-un keeps promising to bring to America. Especially shocking to Californians, these were not homes in the combustible foothills or mountains where fire danger traditionally lurks, but on the plain, next to a freeway, schools, fast-food outlets – the kind of landscape where most of us live. Altogether, in one terrible night, Santa Rosa (population 165,000) lost more than 2800 homes and businesses to what is officially known as the Tubbs Fire. But it’s premature to cite losses or add up body counts since, as I write, twenty fires still writhe across the Wine Country, and an army of exhausted firefighters fearfully awaits the return of the Diablo winds.
Although the explosive development of this firestorm complex caught county and municipal officials off guard, fire alarms had been going off for months. Two years ago, at the height of California’s worst drought in five hundred years, the Valley Fire, ignited by faulty wiring in a hot tub, burned 76,000 acres and destroyed 1350 homes in Lake, northern Sonoma, and Napa counties. Last winter’s record precipitation, meanwhile, did not so much bust the drought as prepare its second and more dangerous reincarnation. The spring’s unforgettable profusion of wildflowers and verdant grasses was punctually followed by a scorching summer that culminated in September with pavement-melting temperatures of 41ºC in San Francisco and 43ºC on the coast at Santa Cruz. Luxuriant green vegetation quickly turned into parched brown fire-starter.
Read more at: El Diablo in Wine Country « LRB blog

SuzanneAugust 30, 2017Climate Change & Energyflooding, ocean warming, rainfall, weather

Op-Ed: It's a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly

Michael Mann, THE GUARDIAN
What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane Harvey? There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding. What we know so far about tropical storm Harvey Read more Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot (15cm) over the past few decades (see here for a decent discussion). That means the storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.
In addition to that, sea surface temperatures in the region have risen about 0.5C (close to 1F) over the past few decades from roughly 30C (86F) to 30.5C (87F), which contributed to the very warm sea surface temperatures (30.5-31C, or 87-88F).
There is a simple thermodynamic relationship known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation that tells us there is a roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5C of warming. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Harvey intensified were 0.5-1C warmer than current-day average temperatures, which translates to 1-1.5C warmer than “average” temperatures a few decades ago. That means 3-5% more moisture in the atmosphere.
That large amount of moisture creates the potential for much greater rainfalls and greater flooding. The combination of coastal flooding and heavy rainfall is responsible for the devastating flooding that Houston is experiencing.
Not only are the surface waters of the Gulf of Mexico unusually warm right now, but there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast. Human-caused warming is penetrating down into the ocean. It’s creating deeper layers of warm water in the Gulf and elsewhere.
Read more at: It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly | Michael E Mann | Opinion | The Guardian

SuzanneAugust 27, 2017Agriculture/Food System, Habitats, Waterflood protection, floodplain, migratory birds, rainfall, riparian habitat, salmon, seasonal agriculture, wetlands

California flood protection starts giving rivers more room

Ellen Knickmeyer, ASSOCIATED PRESS
After more than a century of building levees higher to hold back its rivers, California took another step Friday toward a flood-control policy that aims to give raging rivers more room to spread out instead.

The plan, adopted by the flood-control board for the Central Valley, a 500-mile swathe from Mount Shasta to Bakersfield that includes the state’s two largest rivers and the United States’ richest agricultural region, emphasizes flood plains, wetlands and river bypasses as well as levees.

Backers say the changing strategy will better handle the rising seas and heavier rain of climate change, which is projected to send two-thirds more water thundering down the Central Valley’s San Joaquin River at times of flooding.

The idea: “Spread it out, slow it down, sink it in, give the river more room,” said Kris Tjernell, special assistant for water policy at California’s Natural Resources Agency.

Handled right, the effort will allow farmers and wildlife — including native species harmed by the decades of concrete-heavy flood-control projects — to make maximum use of the rivers and adjoining lands as well, supporters say.

They point to Northern California’s Yolo Bypass, which this winter again protected California’s capital, Sacramento, from near-record rains. Wetlands and flood plains in the area allow rice farmers, migratory birds and baby salmon all to thrive there.

For farmers, the plan offers help moving to crops more suitable to seasonally flooded lands along rivers, as well as payments for lending land to flood control and habitat support.

SuzanneAugust 8, 2017Climate Change & Energyclimate science, ghg emissions, global warming, ocean conditions, rainfall, sea level rise, weather

Scientists fear Trump will supress new climate report

Lisa Friedman, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Read the draft of the Climate Change Report.

The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.
The draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies, which has not yet been made public, concludes that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now. It directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain, and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.

“Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,” a draft of the report states. A copy of it was obtained by The New York Times.

The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air. “Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” they wrote.

The report was completed this year and is a special science section of the National Climate Assessment, which is congressionally mandated every four years. The National Academy of Sciences has signed off on the draft report, and the authors are awaiting permission from the Trump administration to release it.

Environmental Center of Sonoma County

Tag: rainfall