September 18, 2015
By Noah's S. Diffenbaugh and Christopher B. Field
...But before (click here) everyone gets too excited, it is important to understand this: Two physical realities virtually ensure that Californians will still face drought, regardless of how this El Niño unfolds.
By Noah's S. Diffenbaugh and Christopher B. Field
...But before (click here) everyone gets too excited, it is important to understand this: Two physical realities virtually ensure that Californians will still face drought, regardless of how this El Niño unfolds.
The
first is that California has missed at least a year’s worth of
precipitation, meaning that it would take an extraordinarily wet rainy
season to single-handedly break the drought. Even if that happened, we
would most likely suffer from too much water too fast, as occurred in
the early 1980s and late 1990s, when El Niño delivered more rainfall
than aquifers could absorb and reservoirs could store.
The second is that California is facing a new climate reality, in which extreme drought is more likely. The state’s water rights, infrastructure and management were designed for an old climate, one that no longer exists.
Our research has shown that global warming has doubled the odds of the warm, dry conditions that are intensifying and prolonging this drought, which now holds records not only for lowest precipitation and highest temperature, but also for the lowest spring snowpack in the Sierra Nevada in at least 500 years. These changing odds make it much more likely that similar conditions will occur again, exacerbating other stresses on agriculture, ecosystems and people....
...Add in the fact that the drought and wildfires have hardened the ground, and a paradox arises wherein the closer El Niño comes to delivering enough precipitation to break the drought this year, the greater the potential for those hazards....
