The Official Drought Thread

[smokymountainrain]

Our lakes up north are way more than 20-30 feet down this year. Shasta is still about 80 feet below last year, which was also quite a bit below normal.

[bluegoose]

What's the word on California reservoirs after the last few weeks of storms? I remember seeing lots of depressing photos from boaters in California showing their local lakes down 20-30 feet this summer.

Our lakes up north are way more than 20-30 feet down this year. Shasta is still about 80 feet below last year, which was also quite a bit below normal.

We are getting dumped on this week, and the lakes are filling up more than a foot a day. but it is a pretty warm storm and the snow levels are way too high right now. Something like 8,000 feet. Supposed to drop to below 5,000 by tonight, but by then most of the storm will have moved.

[PaloAltoCougar]

Still low . . .

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/res...phsMain.action

It'll be interesting to watch those graphs change over the next couple of days. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the reservoirs start approaching their historical average very quickly. There's going to be a lot of runoff from the current deluge.

[Joe Public]

What's the word on California reservoirs after the last few weeks of storms? I remember seeing lots of depressing photos from boaters in California showing their local lakes down 20-30 feet this summer.

Still low . . .

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/res...phsMain.action

[falafel]

What's the word on California reservoirs after the last few weeks of storms? I remember seeing lots of depressing photos from boaters in California showing their local lakes down 20-30 feet this summer.

[PaloAltoCougar]

[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/

[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]

Depends on what you are comparing it to.

Wyoming

[Jacob]

August in Oregon is dry.

Depends on what you are comparing it to.

[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/n...hidden-crisis/

Here's hoping for a wet winter.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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