Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 10 November 2023
If you read a newspaper or watch or listen to TV or radio news, you have heard that the drought in the State of California is one or more of the following: finally ended; maybe ended; only seemingly ended; not ended at all. Worse than the confusion these apparently conflicting statements represent is the fact they are all true.
I could write you a thousand words supporting each of the scenarios complete with references and images from the various drought monitoring agencies and departments.
I explained the reasons for this confusing situation earlier in the year in a post titled Doubts About Droughts . According to Drought.gov “in the early 1980s researchers found more than 150 published definitions of drought, reflecting differences in regions, needs, and approaches.” In short, there is no single referenceable metric by which to determine if an area, such as the State of California, is in a drought.
During the last water year, California received a great deal of precipitation.
The rain and snow came not only from the atmospheric rivers in the above graphic, but from a rare tropical storm that came up through the Gulf of California — Hurricane Hilary – which dropped inches of rain on the deserts of Southern California and Arizona/Nevada.
How much precipitation?
So, 141% of the historical average for rain, and 237% of the historical average for snowpack. That’s a great deal of extra water for a state that is generally dry. Generally dry, you ask?
The following image shows the Köppen climate types found in California. All of California consists of types described as dry, hot, desert, semi-arid, or Mediterranean, with the exception of the High Sierra, which are “dry-summer subarctic and tundra”. California’s very long-term climate is dry and warm-to-hot. It is natively dry.
On a personal note: I have recently returned from a trip to southern Italy, Greece, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Turkey – and they have Mediterranean climates and they are dry and dusty but with a two-month rainy season. Physically, they look very much like the rolling hills of Southern Californian deserts, complete with broad arroyos that flood when it rains. Scrub brush and cactus grow there.
The Köppen types tell us that California does not need a drought to be dry. It has been dry for a very longtime. And, it is expected, climatologically, to stay dry. If California suddenly switched to the climate of the U.S. corn belt, which is Köppen type Dfa — D (Continental) f (No dry season) a (Hot summer) – that would be climate change. But hot/warm and dry is normal and is not a change at all.
So why all the fuss when California is dry for a year or two or three? Why cry “endless drought in California”?
“Half of all fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. come from California, and the state effectively produces all (at least 99 percent) of America’s almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, and walnuts. California is also the nation’s leading grower of lima beans, lemons, kumquats, raspberries, strawberries, and spinach…” [ source ]
California is the most populous state with over 39 million people making their home there. The Greater Los Angeles/San Diego Megalopolis, alternately the Southern California Megaregion, alone has 23.76 million residents.
Agriculture and people consume a lot of water.
On the Köppen map above you can see a horizontal line that goes right across the state, right up near the top of the image. That line is made up of three county northern borders but can be considered the line separating Southern California from the rest of the state (opinions vary…). What climate type prevails in Southern California with its approximately 24 million people? The red and pink areas ( BWh and BWk) are outright deserts. Brownish and tan areas are “arid” which means dry (BSh and BSk). The remaining two, yellow and greenish-yellow, Csa and Csb, are mediterranean climates which typically have dry summers and wet winters, with summer conditions ranging from warm to hot and winter conditions typically being mild to cool.
As seen from space:
The greenish coastal hills are brush covered and dry most of the year. There are pine forests in the higher elevations in the mountains around the Los Angeles Basin but these forests are hot and dry during the summer too. That encouraging looking great big lake, center bottom, is the Salton Sea – salt water like the Dead Sea in the Middle East. But the green areas extending to the north and south of the Salton Sea are the Imperial Valley, an important agricultural area for irrigated crops (using water from the Colorado River). The rest is, as it appears, a great big desert.
California has reservoirs for two reasons: 1) To store rainy season water for the rest of the year – for drinking and agriculture and 2) As flood control infrastructure. Here’s the current (as of 9 November 2023) conditions of the state’s major reservoirs:
The good news is that most reservoirs are above historical averages – which only means that they have not been drawn down by the demands of this past summer. Of course, they mustn’t be kept too full, as the rainy season is coming and an overfull and overflowing reservoir is worse than an almost empty reservoir. [see here and related Oroville Dam stories from Spring 2017 – and the disaster in Libya in September]
And finally, pay almost no attention to mass media and governmental sources showing images from Drought.gov:
Most of the mass media have been touting the one labelled “U.S. Drought monitor: California” (lower left) which shows no drought, just a little “abnormally dry”. But the Long-term Multi-Indicator Drought Index (top left) shows much of the state wet and maybe too wet. The Short-term Multi-Indicator Drought Index is a mixed bag. And the 1-week change map shows no change.
Take your pick.
One thing we can be sure of is that California is better off to have had the rain and the snow. But can we say that “The Drought” is over? Not exactly clear, is it?
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
I grew up in Los Angeles and am familiar with the climate there. My brothers and I sailed Tom Sawyer-style rafts on the lake where our local park was usually found — a lake that formed when the heavy winter rains came. When those rains came, sometimes houses would slide down the slopes into the canyons, arroyos would flood and wash out roads and highways, and the drainage ditches – designed to carry away the flood waters — would fill and the water would flow into the sea. Almost every year. One year a bunch of us “hippies” from UCSB went down to Carpenteria to fight the flooding.
The rest of the year was hot and dry – every year the brush on the hills somewhere above Hollywood and Malibu would burn and fill the air with smoke, adding to the smog.
If you are still curious, go to the WestSide Drought Tracker and use the selection list on the left to cycle through all the many maps showing differing views of various drought metrics.
That’s a mediterranean climate.
Thanks for reading.
# # # # #
California is supposed to get pounded with rain starting next week.
doonman ==> It’s the rainy season….
I lived in both northern and Southern California during my Navy days in the 1970s. Every summer it was hot as hell and dry as a bone, even in the north. The summer was when all the wildfires burned out the previous winter’s grasses. Then every winter it rained like hell, and that is when all the flooding and mudslides where expensive homes were built partially on stilts were destroyed – not only because of the rain, but also because of the denuded slopes devoid of grass cover from the previous summer’s wildfires. Then by the end of rainy season in the spring, the hillsides were carpeted again with lush grasses, which by midsummer created massive fuel sources for the summer wildfire season.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat. Every year. That’s “normal” in coastal California, no climate change necessary.
Duane ==> and sometimes, more of the same!
The issues of living in a Mediterranean climate are water management and wildlands management, both of which The Green Blob are theologically opposed to.
Dams and aqueducts are technological solutions, which are the antithesis of Green.
Logging, grazing, or controlled burns are Interfering With Nature, another sin in the Church of Green. Who cares that the terrain was managed by Indians for their own purposes since the end of the last Ice Age, i. e. as long as it ever existed.
“Logging, grazing, or controlled burns are Interfering With Nature, another sin in the Church of Green.”
True, here in the Northeast, the greens are trying to stop all logging. The state of Wokeachusetts has had a moratorium on logging on the state’s almost million acres of forest for this entire year and it should continue for several more months- because the greens and woke now run the state 100%. There is no resistance, other than a few people who are 100% ignored. No politicians have the guts to challenge this new reality.
Tom and Joseph ==> Without controlled logging and forest management, the west coast forests burn. Managed grazing, with sheep and goats, kept the underbrush controlled and prevented fires in the Northeast.
And of course, if there are forest fires as a result, guess what will be blamed.
wild fires are rare in the American Southeast which is heavily forested and those forests are well managed- by the standards of the forestry profession if not by the enviros/greens- they’ve been doing controlled burns there for ages- it’s a huge industry
History shows, throw out a brick, and follow it’s flight path.
Trees are made of wood, wood is fire fuel, it burns. Trees grow more fire fuel every year, building up vast quantities of fire fuel. Eventually that wood will catch fire, and you’ll have a super hot unmanageable fire, just as California has had super hot unmanageable fires for the past two decades. We had super hot fires that burned right into big cities, Santa Rosa and Oakland in addition to the smaller towns (Paradise) which had almost no resources to fight the fires.
Relax, our reservoirs are fully capable of proving all the water needed to carry 20 million people through an extended drought as designed. Oh, wait. That was before decades of silting.
Yeah, and not to mention that there are 40 million here now. Oh well, engineer-politicians never worry about doubling the design load. We just won’t serve water in restaurants, that will handle it.
“But can we say that “The Drought” is over? Not exactly clear, is it?”
Clear as mud. 😉
(Actually, good write up.)
Check with Elon Musk…..he knows everything…sez if the Siberian tundra melts and releases all that gas…..it will be bad…really bad.
What about groundwater? I understand it’s very low. That takes some time to replenish but that’s normal.
A bit more complex than that, if you look at the desperate farmers in the Central Valley, they keep drilling deeper and deeper to find groundwater, as many of the underground reservoirs have been tapped out. So they go deeper.
Problem is though, there are roughly 3 different underground reservoir levels.
First one which is normally enough, gets replenished yearly.
But underneath that top one, further down is an older reservoir. They tapped that one out too, and are now drilling down into the *ancient* water tables that take many hundreds of years to percolate down.
These underground reservoirs have a floor and a ceiling.
Once the water has been depleted, the cavern collapses on itself, never to be refilled again.
https://www.eenews.net/articles/dry-wells-sinking-land-and-fears-of-a-global-food-crisis/
Really depressing article.
Nevermind the fact that the big $$ is in pistachios and almonds.
Think I recall one single almond uses 1.1 gallon of water.
Since we export a substantial amount of the world’s almond production, suffice it to say we are making these farming conglomerates RICH by shipping our water permanently out of state. Some areas are sinking 1 foot/yr. And once the aquifers collapse they don’t come back, gone forever.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-12-22/groundwater-depletion-is-accelerating-in-the-central-valley
Man, that is bullshit.
The only places that have underground caverns full of water are areas of Karst topography, which does not include a single inch of California.
in places where there are caves and caverns full of water, that is not where the wells are drilled into, it would not be safe to drink it.
It is also bullshit that aquifers can or will never refill.
It places where the ground has subsided, it would have to be pumped back in.
But such subsidence is far more of an exception that a rule when it comes to ground water withdraw.
That only happens where that are vast thicknesses of saturated sediment comprising the aquifer. More commonly, aquifers are saturated rock strata. Most of the Earth’s surface does not have hundreds of feet of unconsolidated sediment.
If aquifers are not used, it stays there forever, just like it always did before people learned to make wells.
And it eventually gets salty, as minerals dissolve into it.
After anywhere from a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of years in the rock, all groundwater becomes saline. Many places have little if any potable groundwater.
You can get all gloomy and repeat alarmist malarkey to yourself, and become sure the future is a hopeless mess, if that is what you like to do.
The truth is, we live on a planet covered with and full of water. It rains everywhere, expect where it only snows.
We will never “run out” of water. It is impossible.
Some places and some time intervals have less water than the people living there would prefer, but that is all just a matter of distribution, both in where and when the precipitation falls, and where people choose to live and how they choose to live.
When tens of millions of people move to a desert and plant lawns and leafy trees and gigantic farms of thirsty trees, it uses a lot of water. Duh!
Getting into a tizzy over such FunFacts as how much water it takes to grow an almond, is a waste of mental energy, and nothing more.
Water that is unused evaporates or runs into the ocean, or in the case of groundwater, just sits there forever until it gets salty (but mostly even groundwater is in gradual motion and eventually makes its way to the surface, or into a river, or flows into the ocean while still underground).
Is that a better way to manage it?
Get over it.
If we wanted to, if there was a national will to do it, we could spend a fraction of the amount we spend on highways and stadiums stuff like that, and build huge pipelines and canals to take water from where there is always an excess, to wherever it may be needed, in any amount we might choose to do.
Aquifers are almost never “caverns” full of water.
Stick to facts.
Ignore the minus s . I don’t know why people here sometimes down vote a simple statement of curiosity or another component to complex situations. A simple response to a query would suffice.
Great article as usual but there needs to be one correction. That “…green areas extending to the north and south of the Salton Sea are the Imperial Valley” is somewhat correct. The north side of the valley is The Coachella Valley.
Kevin ==> Thanks — when I was a kid, we could still go to a resort on the Salton Sea, in which even I floated!
Kip, it appears you suffer from the same body-type fate as me; float like a rock. Years ago my competitive-swimmer daughter was teaching me the finer points of the breast stroke. She said I swam like a brick. My chest would just auger into the water.
Dave Fair ==> I do fine in salt water, as long as I keep moving. Made the mistake last year of diving into the fresh water river we sail in to retrieve a floating boat hook — current took me away and I was fighting like mad to stay head above water. I had to be rescued by my wife in her kayak!
Thanks Kip. Looks like California needs more reservoirs, especially in the south, and some nuclear powered desalination plants. Or fewer people I suppose, a lot fewer people.
The same could be said of Eastern Australia, the other side of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. We have non-nuclear desalination plants (courtesy of panic tax spending during a previous drought), all mothballed because they are too expensive to run (and only slightly less expensive to mothball), and a poor record of planning and constructing new dams. Invariably, governments seem to choose the most environmentally sensitive and least locally useful sites for their dam dreams – probably because they intend to use the new reservoirs to supply major urban areas.
Anyway, Kip, you have stimulated me to look for the Köppen classification on my hectare in the Sunshine Coast Hinterlands in SE Queensland – supposedly Subtropical, No Dry Season.
Well, I guess if it never rains, or rains all the time (one or the other is ‘normal’ here), then there is no dry season. Last year almost every month except December was wetter than ‘average’, often well above average: the Mary River had three major floods. Then in December the rains just stopped and turned into drizzle. So 2022 had no dry season. This year every month has been well below average, except August which was about average: all seasons have been equally dry (still have Summer to go though).
I was taught basic summary statistics as I imagine most readers were – and it took me a long time to realise that the ‘average’ or ‘median’ or whatever other measure of the central tendency of your data set you might have is of little practical use. You always need to plan for the extremes – at least they are real, unlike the averages.
macromite ==> Hey, thanks for the climataological summary of SE Queensland. I have been there, in 2000.
California does need more reservoirs, but seldom builds any new ones– lack of political will.
For a glimpse of California’s water history, see the movie “Chinatown”.
That are tearing down dams, not building new ones.
Hard to imagine that changing anytime soon, given the state of mind, and the state of education in most places there days.
All of the Koppen classifications use thirty year averages, the time period that is “averaged” to determine what is “normal” for a given place.
Normal though is a bad choice of wards, because as you note, it is normal for there to be a lot of variability from year to year in the weather. That is one reason that it takes a period along the lines of multiple decades to even define what is typical for a given spot.
Keep in mind too, that there are numerous microclimates that large scale Koppen maps do not show.
The smaller the scale, the more complex these maps get.
When you start zooming in, ever valley and mountain has a welter of climate zones, although in general, the Koppen system is a very generalized classification method.
Just look how much of the US is CFA:
Climate-regions-of-the-US-according-to-the-Koeppen-climate-classification.png (1280×720) (ktsm.com)
Everywhere from western Kansas to Connecticut and down to southern Florida, the same climate?
Koppen was a biologist, a botanist more specifically. His maps focused on factors that delineated such things as where palms trees would and would not grow, etc. IOW, vegetation types.
(On that topic, an investigation and explication into the type called “chaparral” is instructive to the subject of the headline article)
There are other climate classification systems that are more nuanced, even more so that the modifications made to Koppen by Geiger.
The subject of the various classification systems, their pros and cons, and the shortcomings of each, is a great subject for starting a study of climate.
Climate classification – Wikipedia
That was a most excellent read and as a consequence I know so much more about California precipitation than I ever have. Thanks Kip.
Keitho ==> Probably more than you ever wanted to know….
Haha, one of these ‘chewing the cud‘ stories – mulling over and over on something (##) in an attempt to extract goodness out of something you should never really have eaten in the first place
## aka: Magical Thinking
Mediterranean Climate was created by Rome, using slaves expropriated from Greece.
They used those slaves to ruthlessly slash, burn, chop, plough, till, graze, overgraze, fertilise and over-fertilise what had been a temperate rainforest that grew all around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
That forest was on very dodgy ground before ‘Rome Flowered’ – being sheltered by the Atlas Mountains from the relentless blast of hot dry air pouring off the Sahara to the south.
It was also on very ancient and eroded soils that hadn’t been tilled/refreshed by the glaciers and icesheets of the prevoius Ice Age. As the soils of the UK had.
We know they created that desert because deserts have ‘high temperatures’ which reached their peak at around 300AD = the very time of the Roman Warm Period and was to all intents, the time when ‘Rome’ was completely fugged.
We know it was finished because the were starving.
They were eating olives, the most foul tasting ghastly fruit imaginable,
They were eating olive oil which for them, is/was the equivalent of us eating soap
(They hadn’t invented proper soap and used olive oil to clean themselves)
Those olives and the oil were almost exclusively coming from Spain – they had trashed their own locale so badly even olives wouldn’t grow anymore. (THAT really is saying something)
We know they were starving because they came to (what is now) England
Despite its hideous weather compared to southern Europe, England had good soils and hence: Food.
No, the English Climate then was no different to now – there is a grapevine in my Newark garden that you may have seen in a cinema where Tarzan was swinging off it, or possibly as a stunt double in Day of the Triffids.
Romans were eating tiny little songbirds, sparrows, thrushes, finches and robins.
They were importing wheat from ‘somewhere’ down the west coast of Africa
We know they were starving by looking at contemporay Italian cuisine, with so many recipes where stuff is recycled, recooked and reformatted in soooo many different ways.
e.g. Minestrone soup and what is pizza if not a way of brightening up a tomato sandwich with whatever you can lay hands on?
Such as: Ham, chicken, shrimp, dead mouse, some random fungus, maggots, dead flies, beetles and termites.
If ever there was a (lifestyle) recipe for poisoning yourself with your own food, there it is and The Romans munched down on all of it because their lives depended.
They had destroyed all the good stuff. Using humans as slaves. We use tractors, big thanks to John Deere
Also e.g.: What is ‘biscuit’
Trans: bis = 2 and cuit = cooked
Biscuits are things that are ‘cooked twice’.
Errrr, is that not a definition of (ultra) processed food and Just How Bad is that stuff?
While a ‘Mediterranean Diet’ and ‘lifestyle’ is cracked up to be the healthiest thing ever.
wot. just wot!!!
The Mediterranean Climate is a desert climate where people starve and it was created by the very people living in its midst – still desperately clinging onto life by whatever means they can.
Same applies everywhere.
Isn’t Magical Thinking simply ‘magical’
Imperial Valley:
What Has Got To Be the most monstrous and grotesque monument to sheer naked greed and selfishness there ever could be.
That such a huge canal should be dug, running parallel the border with Mexico (also the Colorado River) just before said river drains into Mexico.
That so much water water is so callously stolen by that canal just to cultivate a few strawberries. Acidic blobs of pretentious and belly-ache-inducing water
there are hardly words
Imperial Valley itself is full of words – and BS
Thanks for using the phrase “long-term climate” to distinguish it from the new definition of “climate” which is only 30 years now.
scvblwxq ==> Or, in some arenas, “climate” is “the last year or so”.
Discussing ‘Climate Change’, which was defined as 30 year average of weather, and the Köppen Classification Map. If we base the changes as ‘GOOD’ for areas that have More Life and ‘BAD’ for for areas that have Less Life. Then after 25 or 30 years see where this ‘Climate Change’ is happening and how bad it is.
Here is the map with Major Köppen type has changed at least once in 30 years during the period 1901-2010. http://hanschen.org/koppen/img/koppen_major_30yr_1901-2010.png
Don’t see a lot of Black on the map
http://hanschen.org/koppen/img/area_major_1901-2010.png
In graph form for the changes. A & C have more life, i.e. Good – B Dry (includes cold dry) is still better than D (Snow) and E (Polar) i.e. Bad.
So Good Areas, less than 1/2 percent and Very Bad Polar down 3.5% vs Just Bad Dry up 3% & Snow down 1.5%. Don’t see much Catastrophic going on.
Nothing at all “new” about defining “climate” as the 30 year average of the weather in a given location. Goes back well over 100 years to the 19th century.
Seems like a perfectly reasonable interval for such a purpose.
The real key when it comes to comprehension of what exactly is being discussed, are such factors as knowing the definitions to begin with, where and how theory originated, and, regarding the weather and climate, understanding how even 30-year averages are always changing.
Regarding the natural world and the Universe in general, almost nothing, maybe exactly nothing, has ever stayed just the same over various time intervals.
Yes – “drought” is always a relative or elastic undefinable term determined by local or regional climate normal precipitation volumes and whatever use humans make of the area. If it is a desert and too mountainous to grow irrigated crops, nobody cares. It it is a tropical rain forest and it gets less rain during the rainy season, again nobody cares.
Practically speaking, if an area has a sustained dry period that is outside the normal range for the vegetation that is already well adapted, such that the ecosystem suffers sustained damage, then that would be a drought.
The “dust bowl” phenomenon during the 1930s was always blamed for poor soil conservation practices in the northern Great Plains of the U.S. But the actual underlying cause was that there was a large expansion in the acreage of dry land wheat during the first three decades of the 20th century, with farmers enjoying sustained wetter than normal summers. Then in the 1930s, when precipitation in that region returned to norm (dry), grain crops failed. That left vast areas of tilled ground that no longer had the protective cover of deeply rooted native prairie grasses to retain the topsoil during the dry times. Grain production was only able to resume in that region when dry land grain farms were converted to irrigated farms within the giant Ogallala Aquifer.
Duane ==> The Wiki offers a pretty good treatise on the Dust Bowl. One of America’s great ecological disasters.
All of this makes it clear we need more carbon taxation, mandatory emissions reductions & a fully Democrat controlled government to insure they can sufficiently control the weather.
It’s an existential threat, they know best and will get it done.
Science.
Interesting writeup. Part of my childhood was near the Wanapum dam build up north on the Columbia basin and the flooding along the river when the reservoir filled. In later years it was
to the east on farm ground that came out of a Pick-Sloan project dam. One of the more
interesting things I remember was serious talk about building a canal and diverting the Columbia River south to California due to the agriculture there not having enough water. Now the greens
want to take out the dams, the political focus seem to be in constant turmoil.
Mr Ed ==> If they take out the dams, they will lose constant dependable base-load electricity and go back to the days of whipsawing flooding and water famine.
I truly nutty idea.
California is our #1 Ag producer and it depends on stored water which seriously needs
some upgrades. This issue is far greater than the “climate
change / alternative energy” focus we’ve been on for too long. Most guys in Ag know
about this but the public is clueless.
Snow and ice bonanza.
https://electroverse.info/snow-hits-the-alps-russia-under-snow-chinas-record-blizzards-flakes-to-america/
Steve Oregon ==> Thanks for the link and the snow report from Europe. Very important economically to have Swiss slopes open for skiing for Christmas –good news!
Many Utah ski resorts are planning in opening in the next couple of weeks. Two resorts in Big Bear (in the mountains north of the LA Basin) are open already….most southern California slopes expect to be open in the next three week as well. Northern California slopes all hoping to get open the first two weeks of December.
I’m old, but still ski and looking forward to Timberline Lodge opening at Mt Hood.
69 and been skiing for 55 years.
There’s been no sign of any AGW trend ending the snow and skiing.
Just random variation of snow depths.
How many areas of California were named (this or that) Desert before we started building irrigation systems and dams?
It would seems that for those areas named a “Desert’, drought conditions are normal.
Gunga Din ==> That’s the thing, Gunga. For a desert to be in drought, it has to receive “less than normal” amounts of rain. For some places, that means almost no rain whatever. All those washes and arroyos are forms by the water rushing downslope when the rain does come, as it did in Hurricane Hilary.
The same is true of Crete and Rhodes and other dry Mediterranean islands.
Very nice.
I was hoping the link led to the Hippy’s fighting against Mother Nature.
California has started building a new massive reservoir: “Sites” in Northern Cal near Sacramento. Not sure if everyone knows, but there is plenty of water and rainfall in Northern Cal to sustain the states current and even growing population. Jerry Brown pushed hard to build the what is known as the Peripheral Canal (first proposed in 1940’s) which would take water around the Delta to SoCal and pretty much end all the South’s water problems. BTW it was 80 degrees here just east of San Diego all weekend. In other words a perfect climate. No need for any change!
JD ==> Thanks for the info on the SITES reservoir. Doesn’t look like any construction has actually begun yet…so let’s hope the crazies don’t yet mange to stop or delay it further.