The Official Drought Thread

[LiveCoug]

Thanks JL for merging.. My bad..


All others. Blow it out your ass...

Is it cool if I make my obligatory Colombia reference any time anyone refers to California as Cali?

[Jacob]

Seems like the wettest August on record in my part of the country. It's like we moved to Oregon. But record wetness here is still not very wet.

[TripletDaddy]

Seems like the wettest August on record in my part of the country. It's like we moved to Oregon. But record wetness here is still not very wet.

In utah it has been a bizarre month for weather. heavy rain every week, lots of lightening and thunder, colder temps, very few hot days. Feels more like October. good news is lots of greenery and no raging fires.

[USUC]

In utah it has been a bizarre month for weather. heavy rain every week, lots of lightening and thunder, colder temps, very few hot days. Feels more like October. good news is lots of greenery and no raging fires.

The bad news is my vegetable garden is stagnant due to the lack of direct sunlight.

I do hope this points to a snowy winter ahead.

[TripletDaddy]

The bad news is my vegetable garden is stagnant due to the lack of direct sunlight.

I would have more sympathy for you if would post a picture of Lake Powell's lower water levels.

[USUC]

I would have more sympathy for you if would post a picture of Lake Powell's lower water levels.

With all the rain up north, Powell's water levels are probably rising. I don't have pictures though

[RC Vikings]

Our average rainfall for August is right around 1/2 inch, right now we are close to 4 inches for the month. Farmers can't cut their wheat because it's too wet and it's no good even if they could cut it. Barley seed has gone to crap and the farmers can't meet contract specs. Anheuser Busch is scrambling for barley seed so you may see a spike in beer prices down the road. Lawns and golf courses are green and the fire danger is low. Sucks that it is poor boating in California right now.

[Pelado]

Our average rainfall for August is right around 1/2 inch, right now we are close to 4 inches for the month. Farmers can't cut their wheat because it's too wet and it's no good even if they could cut it. Barley seed has gone to crap and the farmers can't meet contract specs. Anheuser Busch is scrambling for barley seed so you may see a spike in beer prices down the road. Lawns and golf courses are green and the fire danger is low. Sucks that it is poor boating in California right now.

You beer lovers better stock up now.

[MarkGrace]

Seems like the wettest August on record in my part of the country. It's like we moved to Oregon. But record wetness here is still not very wet.

August in Oregon is dry.

[Jeff Lebowski]

This year has been really weird. Northern Utah and Colorado above normal. Southern Utah dry. And California gets that odd high pressure ridge parked over the state for months on end and has the worst drought in ages.

Yes, life is going on. But one more year like this and the water won't come out when the faucets are turned on. That would be an environmental and economic catastrophe. The only reason they didn't run out of water this year is because of increased groundwater pumping. But that won't last forever either.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140819-groundwater-california-drought-aquifers-hidden-crisis/

Here's hoping for a wet winter.

[Jacob]

August in Oregon is dry.

Depends on what you are comparing it to.

[MarkGrace]

Depends on what you are comparing it to.

Wyoming

[Jacob]

Wyoming

Average average number of rainy days where I live is 1.6 days in August.

Anyway, the comment wasn't really a comparison to the driest part the year in Oregon. Ya know.

[MarkGrace]

Almond consumption contributing to drought in California.

This week another large study added to the body of known cardiovascular benefits of eating almonds. Every ounce eaten daily was associated with a 3.5 percent decreased risk of heart disease ten years later. Almonds are already known to help with weight loss and satiety, help prevent diabetes, and potentially ameliorate arthritis, inhibit cancer-cell growth, and decrease Alzheimer's risk. A strong case could be made that almonds are, nutritionally, the best single food a person could eat.

Almonds recently overtook peanuts as the most-eaten "nut" (seed, technically) in the United States, and Americans now consume more than 10 times as many almonds as we did in 1965. The meteoric rise of the tree-nut is driven in part by vogue aversions to meat protein and to soy and dairy milks, and even by the unconscionable rise of the macaron. But the main popularity driver is almonds' increasingly indelible image as paragons of nutrition.

The only state that produces almonds commercially is California, where cool winter and mild springs let almond trees bloom. Eighty-two percent of the world’s almonds come from California. The U.S. is the leading consumer of almonds by far. California so controls the almond market that the Almond Board of California’s website is almonds.com. Its twitter handle is @almonds. (Almost everything it tweets is about almonds.)

California’s almonds constitute a lucrative multibillion dollar industry in a fiscally tenuous state that is also, as you know, in the middle of the worst drought in recent history. The drought is so dire that experts are considering adding a fifth level to the four-tiered drought scale. That's right: D5. But each almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce, as Alex Park and Julia Lurie at Mother Jones reported earlier this year, and 44 percent more land in California is being used to farm almonds than was 10 years ago.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/ar...n-nuts/379244/

[PaloAltoCougar]