By Gabrielle Canon 4 January 2024 (The Guardian) – In the first snow survey of the season, California came up short – just 25% of the historical average – despite a spate of strong storms that caused flooding and landslides along the coast in late December. On Tuesday, officials measured a depth of just 7.5in at a […]
By Brendan O’Leary 13 May 2023 (The Cool Down) – It’s no secret that our warming atmosphere has resulted in extreme weather all over the world, but there’s also a less noticeable consequence at work as well. Rising ambient temperatures mean that thousands of coniferous forests in California will be unable to replenish their numbers once they die. What […]
By Robyn White 23 May 2023 (Newsweek) – A ghost lake in California could expand to the size of Lake Tahoe. Lake Tulare in the San Joaquin Valley used to be the largest freshwater lake in the Western U.S. It dried up some 80 years ago when the land was re-developed for agricultural purposes. But […]
By Scott Dance 11 May 2023 (The Washington Post) – Weeks after the surface of Lake Powell sunk to an all-time low, the key Colorado River reservoir is rising more than a foot a day — on track to deepen by some 70 feet in the coming months. Spring flows into the lake are among the […]
By Terry Castleman 10 May 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – After a series of atmospheric rivers and cold weather hit California, this year’s snowpack was one of the biggest in history. “This year’s result will go down as one of the largest snowpack years on record in California,” Sean de Guzman, manager of the Department of Water Resources’ snow surveys, said […]
By Jess Thomson 5 May 2023 (Newsweek) – The long-dried basin of Lake Tulare in California has rapidly refilled in the wake of intense rainfall and snowmelt. The speed and scale of the southern San Joaquin Valley lake’s return can be seen in images taken from space by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA‘s Landsat […]
By Evan Bush 2 April 2023 (NBC News) – People have worked for a century to make California’s Tulare Basin into a food grower’s paradise. That pastoral landscape now looks more like the Pacific Ocean in many areas. Months of atmospheric river storms have pummeled the area and saturated the basin’s soil, which sits about […]
By Hayley Smith 14 February 2023 (Los Angeles Times) – For decades, Californians have depended on the reliable appearance of spring and summer snowmelt to provide nearly a third of the state’s supply of water. But as the state gets drier, and as wildfires climb to ever-higher elevations, that precious snow is melting faster and […]
By Denise Chow 1 December 2021 (NBC News) – The Sierra Nevada snowpack, a major source of water for California, could largely disappear in 25 years if global warming continues unchecked, according to a recent study. The worrisome findings, published 26 October 2021 in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, have serious implications for California’s […]
By Diana Olick 21 March 2019 (CNBC) – Skiers in the western U.S. are enjoying one of the best seasons in years. But experts warn that years like this are quickly becoming the exception, not the rule. Snow sport seasons are getting shorter, due to warmer temperatures. That is already having a distinguishable financial impact […]
