A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 20, 2007
2. Supply
RAIN IN
Sitting down? A winter storm is on its way; A Canadian cold front is expected to bring rain, snow, thunderstorms and lower temperatures to the Southland - Los Angeles Times
WATER CONSERVATION:
County seeking $7.5 million -
WATER STORAGE:
Deal cut to store water in aquifer - Monterey Herald
Column: You call this a drought?; Researchers find evidence of far longer dry spells - Ventura County Star
RAIN IN
Sitting down? A winter storm is on its way; A Canadian cold front is expected to bring rain, snow, thunderstorms and lower temperatures to the Southland
By Ari Bloomekatz, staff writer
After about 150 days of dry weather that has frustrated firefighters, devastated crops and contributed to
A storm moving into the Southland from
The cold front arrived in
Generally, average September temperatures hover at 74 degrees in downtown
"The storm is pretty unusual. It's pretty much our first winter storm of the season, and it's barely fall," said Oxnard-based meteorologist Edan Lindaman of the National Weather Service.
The storm, which was over
Meteorologists predict that the storm will reach Point Conception, near
A deep marine layer preceding the storm is expected to produce widespread drizzle.
The real activity, Lindaman said, will be late Friday, when the storm moves inland toward
The last measurable rain in downtown
John Abatzoglou, a researcher with the Desert Research Institute in
The storm was part of a jet stream but broke off, making its way south, and will now probably pick up moisture from the tropics, Abatzoglou said.
"It's almost like a storm you would expect in winter. It's a very deep storm, it has cold air aloft and will tap into some subtropical moisture," he said.
"Cold air is essentially up north of us, and I believe what is happening is this system is bringing a lot of cold air down and getting pinched off," he said. "This is the type of air mass that should be up around 50 degrees latitude but will really be at about 35 degrees latitude."
Bill Patzert, a climatologist with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, said the storm Wednesday was responsible for temperatures in the 60s in
Patzert cautioned that the expected precipitation in the Southland over the next few days will not be an indicator of a wet winter or even a full break in the dry spell that has plagued
Patzert, Abatzoglou and other weather experts have predicted a dry winter, saying enhanced upwelling in the eastern Pacific indicates a La Niña condition.
Normally, La Niña conditions mean a dry winter and dry year, Abatzoglou said, noting that 10 of the 12 La Niñas since 1895 have produced an average of about 85% of the region's normal levels of rain.
Widespread rain in the Southland over the next two days, especially precipitation greater than an inch, could bring relief to firefighters battling blazes fueled by the dry weather.
"A good dousing of water on those fuels might be really beneficial for the fire season," Abatzoglou said.
Firefighters across
Rain is "always a benefit," Richards said.
"But on the converse side of that is: Too much rain in fire stricken areas can cause mudslides. Once an area is burned out, it has nothing to hold the soil in place. All the foliage is burned up, so all the moisture sinks right to the soil, which causes it to slide down the hills." #
WATER CONSERVATION:
County seeking $7.5 million
By Darren Simon, staff writer
The Imperial Irrigation District has $50 million to spend on helping an
The Imperial County Board of Supervisors wants a 15 percent cut of that money.
This week county officials went before the IID Board of Directors and requested the district provide $7.5 million to help fund the building of what is expected to become an industrial park that could attract thousands of jobs.
The problem is the county’s request may be premature as IID has yet to decide what system it will use to determine how to divide the $50 million.
THE ISSUE
The money in question is tied to the water transfer pact between IID and San Diego County Water Authority.
The agreement calls on IID to fallow farmland, in essence leaving some land barren, for the first 15 years of the water transfer as a way to conserve water.
Recently IID and SDCWA settled a dispute over how the fallowing program has impacted the Valley, and that agreement sets aside $50 million to help address the economic impacts of idling farmland.
Already $3.5 million of that money has been set aside to help farm-service providers hurt by the first two years of fallowing and to create a fund for training programs that help ag workers.
A citizens committee called the Local Entity led the effort to determine how best to divide the first $3.5 million and only recently, after a year of work, has that committee determined how to distribute funds.
That same citizens committee likely won’t be involved in deciding how to distribute the remaining funds or in addressing the county’s request for $7.5 million.
“This request from the county is part of a broader decision the district will have to take up on how best to proceed after the Local Entity,” IID spokesman Kevin Kelley said.
“For example, will there be a new Local Entity, or will the (IID) board become the Local Entity?” Kelley said.
THE COUNTY’S REQUEST
The county wants the $7.5 million to help with the building of roads, lighting, water lines and sewer lines — the basic infrastructure elements — in what has become known as the
The industrial park is generally located between Brawley and
The proposed industrial park is a key focus for the county in attracting new industry. County officials said the industrial park would bring good-paying jobs to a workforce that is ready for new opportunities.
The problem facing the county, supervisors Chairman Larry Grogan said, is that it does not at this point have the funding, about $88 million, to build the
“A stumbling point at this point is that they (developers) would have to provide their own sewer and water,” Grogan said.
He said the fallowing mitigation funds could prove key to getting work started.
“This gives us a real nice seed to get this project started,” Grogan said.
The IID board has requested the county develop a business model for the use of the $7.5 million and then return to the district to continue discussions.
IID Director John Pierre Menvielle said he thinks spending a portion of the fallowing mitigation funds on the
“We need to be moving forward for the economic benefit of the county,” he said. #
http://www.ivpressonline.com/articles/2007/09/20/news/news02.txt
WATER STORAGE:
Deal cut to store water in aquifer
By Kevin Howe, staff writer
California American Water and the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District have reached agreement with state and federal authorities over transferring
The water company and district had applied for water rights in the river to pump some of it into the
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and state Department of Fish and Game had filed protests against the project, which had been scheduled for hearing before the state Water Resources Control Board on Monday.
The agreement limits pumping to no more than 2,426 acre-feet per year from Dec. 1 through May 31, and only if stream flows required to keep the river aquifer recharged are met, said Cal Am spokeswoman Catherine Bowie. The company must also submit annual reports to the Water Resources Board, Fish and Game and Fish and Wildlife Service.
The
Agreement was reached following meetings among the four agencies this week in
http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_6945555?nclick_check=1
Column: You call this a drought?; Researchers find evidence of far longer dry spells
By John Krist, Star columnist
To say the past year has been dry in
Low rainfall in
For more than half a century, it's been more important to pay attention to snowfall in the Rocky Mountains, and in the northern and central
The geographic diversity of those major sources has always served as a sort of anti-drought insurance policy. Odds were thought to be pretty long against simultaneous subnormal snowpacks across a region encompassing a third of the continental
But it turns out there is a lot we don't know about what's possible when it comes to drought in the West. And for water managers starting to get nervous as the current dry weather continues, there's plenty more reason for worry waiting in the wings.
Imagine, for example, that this drought continues not for a few years or even a decade but for 60 years. There's not a water system anywhere in the West that's equipped to keep the taps flowing during six decades of drought.
It's not clear that building such a system would even be possible. Where, for example, would you store a 60-year supply for
But, according to a recent report published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the upper
To reconstruct prehistoric rainfall patterns, scientists gathered core samples from living trees and cross-sections from stumps and fallen logs to develop a climate chronology based on tree-ring width. Using those annual growth patterns to gauge seasonal precipitation, the researchers then calculated
There's nothing particularly startling about the researchers' conclusions. Climate scientists have known for a long time that the past century, the period widely regarded as "normal" from a hydrological standpoint, has been anything but.
The natural variability of precipitation patterns in the West over the past thousand years encompasses several megadroughts unlike any in living memory, more successive years of sparse rainfall and runoff than the designers of dams, reservoirs and aqueducts ever imagined. And scientists are finding increasing evidence that those megadroughts are associated with the sort of higher-than-average temperatures that are predicted to become more common over the next few decades as the buildup of greenhouse gases warms the planet.
Yet, most patterns of settlement in the modern West are predicated on what turns out to have been an anomaly — an oddly wet series of years in the early 20th century, when plans were laid for the water projects that would make the region's subsequent population boom possible.
Building more dams and enlarging existing reservoirs — the object of a full-court publicity push launched this month by
The price of failure may also be read in the prehistoric record. Right around the time of the multidecade
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/sep/20/you-call-this-a-drought/
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