Yes, it’s caused traffic jams, power outages and even some floods. But there’s a big ray of good news behind all the rain that California has been receiving this year.
Soaked by relentless storms, California as of this week has less land area in drought status than at any time in the last seven years.
Less than 1 percent of the state — a sliver on the Oregon border — is still classified as being in a moderate drought, according to a new federal report out Thursday.
The last time that little of California was in a drought was on Dec. 20, 2011.
By comparison, a year ago this week, the weekly report, known as the U.S. Drought Monitor, classified 48 percent of California as being in drought status. And this week three years ago, in March 2016, a staggering 97 percent of California’s land was in a drought, much of it in extreme drought status, as the state suffered from the worst drought in its recorded history.
“The storm door opened up in January and has remained open since then,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Saratoga. “The rivers are full, the reservoirs are above historical averages. It’s a good picture.”
California’s five-year drought, which extended from 2012 to through 2016, caused widespread water shortages, wildfires and heavy groundwater pumping from desperate farmers trying to keep their orchards and crops alive. More than 100 million trees died in the Sierra Nevada, and millions of residents were hit with mandatory water cutbacks by cities concerned about running out of water.
The drought ended in the spring of 2017 with huge storms that caused $100 million in flood damages along Coyote Creek in downtown San Jose and wrecked the spillway at Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest dam, in Butte County.
But last winter saw a return to below-normal rain and snow levels. And when this December ended with only half as much rain as historical averages, some people began to worry that the state was slipping right back into a drought.
A wet January and a soaking February have ended those concerns, Null said.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, the source of roughly one-third of California’s water supply, was 161 percent of the historical average for this date on Thursday, up from just 69 percent on New Year’s Day. Every major reservoir in California is at or above its historic average, and some, like San Luis, east of Gilroy, are full.
In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion bond intended to pay for a broad array of water projects, including recycled water, desalination, storm-water capture, conservation and the construction of new reservoirs. Among the projects state officials have approved for funding are plans to expand Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County and to build a new reservoir near Pacheco Pass in Santa Clara County.
How do the storms this year stack up to the past? San Francisco, the best barometer of historic rainfall trends in Northern California, because it has records that go back the furthest, received 7.76 inches of rain in February. That’s double the normal amount, the most in a decade, and the 16th most in 169 years of record-keeping back to 1850.
The reason: The persistent ridges of high-pressure air that blocked Pacific storms from hitting California during the drought are gone. Instead, low-pressure systems are pulling moisture-rich atmospheric river storms in from the tropics, hitting the West Coast one after the other.
Null noted that rainfall this year also is helping to significantly recharge the state’s groundwater, because the storms are steady and repeated rather than all in one or two huge events that run off into the ocean.
All of this means there will be no water restrictions in California cities this summer, water agencies say.
But the good times won’t last forever. They never do, experts note.
“This seems like one of those very good, above-average years,” said Jay Lund, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. “But there’s always going to be another drought. And another flood. Right now, we are in a happy territory between extremes.”
