At the annual “Watershed Event” fundraiser for the Sacramento River Watershed Program, Elissa Lynn, Sr. Meteorologist for the state Dept. of Water Resources, offered a rundown of where we stand at the start of the official “water season.”
The short version: It’s bleak.
As I noted last week, Lake Oroville, a key reservoir on the Feather River, stood at 31% of capacity as of midnight on September 30. Readings from the same hour showed the state’s largest reservoir, Shasta Lake, at 30%; Folsom Lake (American River, east of Sacramento) at 28%; and San Luis Reservoir, east of Silicon Valley at 12–yes, twelve percent of capacity.
Capacity figures by themselves can be misleading. We expect reservoirs to be low this time of year, right at the end of the dry season. But as DWR was taking these readings, Oroville, to use one example, was at 49%–less than half–of “normal” for this time of year.
So, much depends on the coming winter. Even with all the advanced tools that forecasters have at their disposal in this first decade of the 21st Century, it’s hard to say how much water we’ll wring out of the skies this winter. Lynn says we’re in a “La Nada” pattern, meaning the Pacific Ocean isn’t giving a strong signal for either El Nino or its opposite, La Nina. The two conditions describe the degree–or lack–of cold water upwelling from the ocean depths, which has a strong influence on California’s precipitation patterns.
But Lynn says the consensus among forecasters is “leaning toward a dry-to-average” winter and average won’t get us there. We’ll need several soggy months to make up for lost water and avoid more severe water restrictions throughout the state next summer.
