The California Drought - is there a way to break it?

November 28, 2014.  Joe Lizura Blog.  Not to be sarcastic, but have you heard that California is in a drought?  It's a big one for sure with major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno and San Diego facing shortages that may require even more water restrictions.

Folsom Lake during a normal year of rainfall

Around the state, there are farmlands and dairylands that have been abandoned, and mile after mile in the central valley normally very fertile lush farms are nothing more than dirt.

Up and down the state, reservoirs are nearly empty, and in some smaller towns where well water dried up months ago, daily water truck deliveries are now the norm.

A dried up Folsom Lake in January

So after three years of drought conditions, and lots of media coverage saying that it will take years to end the drought,  the question is how long "really"will it take for the drought to end?  Is it possible to end the drought in one year or will it take two or three years of heavy rains to finally restore our reservoirs to their normal levels?

The answer to that question is somewhat surprising because the answer really doesn't have much to do with how much rain falls as it has to do with how quickly storms come back-to-back, and here's why.

Having spent 25 years in California as a meteorologist, one thing I can tell you for certain is that our reservoirs fill up not by rainfall, but by run-off.  So equally as important, if not more so, is how quickly storms come in a row.  In order to maximize the impact of storms, they have to come one after another, because the first storm in a series soaks into the ground, which allows subsequent storms to be "run-off" which fills reservoirs.

So for example, let say the Sacramento area normally gets 25 inches of rain a year (that's actually how much they average annually), and the rain falls evenly from October thru April with a storm every other week. The run-off would be quite low because there would be too much time for the ground to dry out between storms - meaning a large part of each storm would be needed just to get the ground soaked again before the run-off begins.

Whereas, if you were to get all 25 inches of rain in just 8 weeks, the run-off would be huge and the reservoirs would be the recipients of more than enough rainfall to end the drought.

Now with that said, there are two other issues - one helps end the drought and one hurts it.  The first issue is how cold the storms are - the colder the better because the snow pack that builds up in the mountains will melt continuously over the spring with run-off over soaked ground.  The other issue is where the storms enter the state - if the storms soak northern California where the reservoirs are located, then clearly that would mean run-off going into reservoirs because that is where the water storage reservoirs are located.  If the storms come into Southern California, that would be the worst case because there are relatively no storage reservoirs in the southern part of the state, and all of that run-off would directly into the ocean.

So, the summary of all of this is that yes you can end a multi-year drought in one year, but it will take several key things happening in our favor - so let's keep the fingers crossed!

Joe Lizura
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