Drought

Silver Lake residents heard good news from Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) this week when DWP confirmed that the lake will be refilled probably sometime next spring. Los Angeles City Councilman David Ryu got to the meat of the matter in his opening comments saying, “The most …

Researchers from the nonpartisan group Climate Central have recently published a report on large wildfires in the Western United States after analyzing 45 years of U.S. Forest Services records.  The report, “Western Wildfires: A Fiery Future” has concluded that the average number of annual large wildfires and the total area …

The good news: According to study co-authors Robert Jackson, Stanford’s Michelle and Kevin Douglas provostial professor, and Mary Kang, postdoctoral associate at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, California’s drought-plagued Central Valley harbors three times more groundwater than previously estimated. The bad news: Accessing this water in an …

When the California drought forced hundreds of domestic wells to dry up, the small farming town of East Porterville became the poster child for the parched state. Although the state has spent upwards of $16 million delivering bottled water in areas throughout the Golden State where approximately 2,000 wells have …

The ongoing issue of California’s drought now faces additional issues with the increasing number of dead trees in the Southern Sierra Nevada forests and a budget lacking the resources for fighting massive wildfire disasters. The U.S. Forest Service maintains that, “With the increasing size and costs of suppressing wildfires due …

Four consecutive years of drought and a less-than-hoped-for El Nino this past winter have not been wiped away by one winter’s worth of near average snowfall in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A study published earlier this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, …