Huge snowpack, blooming desert mark retreat of California drought.
In its latest snow survey completed Thursday, the department found the snowpack for the entire Sierra Nevada was at 164% of average for this time of year.
We have very dry years followed by extremely wet years.” The snow was so deep this year at around 9,000 feet in the central Sierras that a CNN crew was not able to return to the spot they reached two years ago.
"Except for the flagpole and the antenna, you would not know that there is a building there," said Gehrke, according to KTLA.
The governor later ordered residents to sharply curtail their use of water at home.
As hundreds of domestic wells ran dry, many people in rural farming communities and some Californians elsewhere had to drink bottled water and bathe from buckets.
One delightful sign of the retreating drought is a tourist boom in some desert towns from a rare "super bloom" of flowers.
On the downside, the huge snow buildup prompted Los Angeles Major Eric Garcetti last week to declare a state of emergency for the region over concerns of that the melting in the eastern Sierra Nevada would threaten homes in rural areas of Owens Valley hundreds of miles north of the city.
The flood issue is frequently a tense one for Los Angeles, which surreptitiously bought rights to water in the valley and channeled it south more than a century ago.
The emergency declaration cleared the way for the Department of Water and Power to spend up to $50 million to respond to any damage to public health and safety and to protect infrastructure and the environment.

It’s the heart of wildfire season in Florida, and more than 90 percent of the state is in a drought.
The rainy season doesn’t really begin until late May and early June.
But Mr. Zierden points out that it’s more than just rainfall that gets factored into a drought declaration.
“They [The National Drought Mitigation Center] take into account both short and long term rainfall deficits, various drought indices, stream flows, soil moisture, pasture and vegetation conditions.
The current situation is considered a “short term drought”, since the abnormally dry pattern only dates back a few months.
A long term drought, such as the one that recently ended in California, develops after years of unusually low rainfall accumulation.
For example, the recent La Nina, which is a cool spell in the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, was a likely contributor to the warm and dry winter.
“In January that La Nina fell apart, so we’re currently in neutral conditions in the Pacific Ocean.
Right now, there’s really nothing to point to a wetter or drier rainy season this summer”, said Zierden.
April and May are typically two of the driest months of the year in Florida, but average rainfall more than doubles from May to June in most locations.

Special issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science focuses on the Central Valley Joint Venture.
special issue focuses on the Central Valley Joint Venture.
Despite massive losses of habitat, the Central Valley’s wetlands, riparian forests, and grassland–oak savannah woodlands still provide some of the most important bird habitat in North America.
Nearly three million ducks, two million geese, and 350,000 shorebirds continue to overwinter in this region (Shuford et al. 1998; Olson 2014), making the Central Valley an internationally important area for migratory waterbirds in the Pacific Flyway.
Prioritization of conservation actions in the Central Valley for these waterbirds and landbirds is a critical step toward increasing their populations.
Papers in this special issue address the challenges of setting conservation objectives for birds in California’s Central Valley.
These papers use the best available science and local data to set objectives in a manner that is transparent, well-documented, and repeatable.
Sign up for daily email service and you’ll never miss a post!
Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM.
Sign me up!

Drought is history as heavy rain, snow melt recharge rivers.
But as the region enters a flood watch at noon Friday with rainfall of 2 to 3 inches — with the possibility of a localized 4 inches — projected by the National Weather Service, creeks could rise above their banks and rivers could reach into action levels and perhaps even hit flood stage, according to a WeatherWorks meteorologist.
The 18.3 inches of snow that fell in March in the Lehigh Valley "is kind of laying the foundation for the flood watch," Sam DeAlba said from the Hackettstown weather forecasting company.
March’s total so far is about a half-inch above normal, according to weather service figures from Lehigh Valley International Airport.
"Often times we do see these changes from a dry to a wet pattern," he said.
The Lehigh Valley is experiencing a normally wet spring, but the late-season heavy snow and the subsequent melt created "almost kind of like a building-block scenario" toward flood concerns, DeAlba said.
The heaviest rain on Friday likely will be to the south and east of the Lehigh Valley, but 1 to 2 inches is not out of the question, he said.
The weather service advises those in prone areas to "be prepared to take action should flooding develop."
And, as if to put an exclamation point on the changing weather patterns, March will be the just second month in the past 25 with a below-normal average temperature.
Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com.

Drought could mean big year for pine beetles.
It is hard to hike or drive anywhere in North Carolina without seeing a lot of pine trees.
But those trees could come under assault this summer.
"It could very easily happen this year," said NC Forest Service expert Brian Heath.
It’s been 15 years since the last major outbreak, and with the pine trees under stress from drought, it could be a prime time for the beetles to attack in force again.
Property owners should look for small popcorn-sized balls of sap on a tree trunk.
Sap is the only defense a tree has against the beetle.
Drought conditions make it tougher for pine trees to produce enough sap to fight back.
Heath says as the number of pine beetles grow, so do the clarids.
Officials have been placing traps across the state so they can get a count on the numbers of both varieties of beetles.

With Drought Emergency Over, Californians Debate Lifting Water Restrictions.
As California water officials confirmed Thursday that the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada remains well above average, pressure was mounting on the state to lift emergency water restrictions that have been in place for two years.
Two years ago, Gov.
"We’re still in a drought," Hunter says.
Hunter says his county is using on average 20 percent less water than it did at the start of the drought.
Overall, water consumption mirrors the rates of the 1980s, even though Orange County has added a million people.
Marcus, whose board enforces the drought restrictions, wants to see some of them made permanent, like the requirement that utilities publicly report their conservation targets monthly and the tougher penalties against water wasters.
Still, she worried that lifting the order could cause complacency.
"Californians aren’t that respectful of water," Garcia says.
"But it is time to lift; we do have a lot," Schugg says.

Will ‘very substantial’ snowpack prompt Gov.
Jerry Brown to declare the drought over?.
On Thursday, the state recorded 94 inches of snow where Brown stood in 2015 at the Phillips Station off Highway 50 in the Sierra.
The water locked up in all that snow represents the most since 2011, the year before California entered its driest four-year period on record.
“We’ve got a very substantial snowpack,” said Frank Gehrke, the veteran Department of Water Resources official who runs the state’s snow survey.
facebook twitter email Share Snow survey through the years: 1958-2017 Over the years, the California Department of Water Resources has conducted snow surveys to measure snowpack in the Sierra Nevada.
It turns out there is actually a 12-foot building under that snow.
The CHP Valley Division Air Operations Sign up Our Capitol Alert newsletter has updates on what’s new at California’s Capitol.
Sign up here.
Ryan Sabalow: 916-321-1264, @ryansabalow

It might be appropriate that California water managers designate April 1 as the date when the Sierra snowpack is presumed to be at its peak for the season.
It tends to be unpredictable.
But this year’s bounty is no April Fool.
The water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack currently stands at 164 percent of normal for this date (the official April 1 snow survey being held on March 30 this year, fudging for the weekend).
Two years ago, it stood at 5 percent.
The difference is starkly illustrated in satellite imagery that KQED has compiled from Planet Labs, comparing three well-known parts of the Sierra this year, side-by-side with the same spots in 2015.
NASA snow hydrologist Tom Painter says it was like taking the entire average annual flow of the Colorado River and dumping it on the Sierra in about six weeks’ time.
“Our best outlooks using climate models suggest [that] as we continue to put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re going to see, on average, warmer winter temperatures.” Bales says the evidence is already on the ground, the “snow line” (elevation where it becomes cold enough for rain to turn to snow) having moved uphill “a few hundred feet” in recent decades.
Jan. 2015 Jan. 2017 JuxtaposeJS “We’re getting more of those warm storms where the snow line is up 8,000 or 9,000 feet in the mountains.” For the record, that 1983 snowpack was at 230 percent—more than double—the “normal” amount around April 1.
By almost any measure, however, this has been a banner year.

Kansas City saw record rainfall Wednesday that nearly erased the deficit the area had for this year. A total of 1.44 inches of rain fell at Kansas City International Airport Wednesday, setting a new record for the most rain to fall on March 29. The rain was a welcome sight for Kansas City, which was facing moderate drought conditions. The Kansas City area was more than 1.8 inches shy of the normal precipitation for the year. But after Wednesday’s storm, 4.25 inches of precipitation have fallen at KCI so far this year. That’s about a half inch below the normal precipitation of 4.71 inches. Wednesday’s rains didn’t erase the precipitation deficit, but the…

Somalia’s Drought Once Again Has Thousands on the Move.
We have nothing to survive, and I don’t know how long he will survive," Muse said of her son.
With no food at the camp and no money for transport, Muse is preparing another day’s hike to the capital, Mogadishu, to help her son.
He survived the 2011 drought that killed roughly a quarter of a million people in Somalia and she is desperate to save him again.
Somalia’s current drought is threatening half of the country’s population, or about 6 million people, according to the United Nations.
Drought-stricken families are on the move, trying to reach points where international aid agencies are distributing food.
Some are moving to urban areas, others into neighboring countries.
Each day, dozens of new arrivals come into this camp.
He barely sleeps and when he does he has nightmares since his wife died of hunger on the trek to the camp.
"I had no other option but to leave," Salah said, carrying one of his children near his newly erected hut.