The Sacramento River Valley, Albert Bierstadt, 1872
With the rainy season off to its wettest start in 30 years according to the National Weather Service, speculation and conversation surrounds whether it will continue. As the recently concluded exhibition California: The Art of Water has portrayed at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, water has influenced California’s identity from pre-statehood to now, in times of abundance and absence.
As Jay Lund, with the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, wrote in a recent California Water Blog entitled “The Coming Droughts of California in 2017” California is a diverse place.
Lund offered in his post, “California probably will experience droughts this year of different types in different places, and no drought at all in some places, simultaneously. Even if conditions this year are very wet, with flooding, parts of California will have drought issues. (This is what makes California a great place to work on water problems.) The first two months of this new water year have been wetter than average in the north and much drier than average in the south. But it is still early days.”
And while the Department of Water Resources (DWR) initial water allocation for 2017 of 20 percent of the requests by the 29 public agencies served by the State Water Project (SWP) is better than last year’s initial allocation of 10%, it is yet to be determined whether winter storms in coming months may boost the initial 2017 allocation.
“October’s storms and subsequent rainfall have brightened the picture, but we could still end up in a sixth year of drought,” said DWR Director Mark Cowin. “Our unpredictable weather means that we must make conservation a California lifestyle.”
