California is rapidly plunging back into drought, with severe conditions now existing in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties — home to one-fourth of the state’s population, a national drought monitor said Thursday. The weekly report released by the U.S. Drought Monitor, a project of government agencies and other partners, also shows 44 percent of the state is now considered to be in a moderate drought. It’s a dramatic jump from just last week, when the figure was 13 percent. “It’s not nearly where we’d like to be,” Frank Gehrke, a state official, acknowledged after separately carrying out manual measurements of winter snowfall in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which supplies water to millions of Californians in a good, wet year. Overall, the vital snowpack Thursday stood at less than a third of normal for the date. California lifted a drought state of emergency less than a year ago, ending cutbacks that at the peak of the drought mandated 25 percent conservation by cities and towns, devastated generations of native salmon and other wildlife, made household wells run dry in the state’s…

California is rapidly plunging back into drought, with severe conditions now existing in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties — home to one-fourth of the state’s population, a national drought monitor said Thursday.
The new figures from national drought monitors came amid growing concern among state officials about another dry winter.
The region is now seeing record-setting heat.
The readings detailed Thursday show the drought has worsened to the severe category in 5 percent of the state.
However, Thursday’s figures were far better than those during the peak of the state’s epic dry spell, when 99.9 percent of California was in some stage of drought, and nearly half in the highest category.
But the drought never really seemed to lift in some Southern California areas, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles, noted this week.
When it finally rained, the scorched earth turned into mudslides that sent earth, water and boulders roaring through neighborhoods.
In California’s Central Valley, the nation’s richest agricultural producer, government officials had to install water systems during and after the five-year drought for small towns such as East Porterville after household wells ran dry.
"it never ended," she said of the drought in her area.
Electronic sensors showed statewide snow levels at 27 percent of normal.

NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA — Officials broke ground Wednesday on the $92 million North Hollywood West Groundwater Treatment Project that aims to clean up and restore the use of groundwater in the San Fernando Valley.
The North Hollywood West site is the first of four planned remediation projects in the San Fernando Valley and is expected to be completed by early 2020.
Subscribe Garcetti’s office said the remediation of the San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin advances two key goals of the mayor’s Sustainable City pLAn by reducing the purchase of imported water by 50 percent by 2025 and producing 50 percent of Los Angeles’ water supply locally by 2035.
The San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin is an aquifer that can provide drinking water for more than 800,000 people, but parts of it are contaminated by industrial pollution dating back to the 1940s, Garcetti’s office said.
"This is such a high-value project for people across the city of Los Angeles," Krekorian said.
"For too long, we haven’t been able to utilize the San Fernando Groundwater Basin because of contamination and pollution.
With the North Hollywood West Groundwater Treatment Project, Los Angeles will finally be able to take full advantage of this groundwater resource."
"A local, clean and reliable water supply for the San Fernando Valley is long overdue," Martinez said.
Decades of development have contaminated the valley’s groundwater, forcing families to rely on more costly sources from outside the city.
City News Service; Photo: Shutterstock

It’s been almost a year since Los Angeles residents felt any real rain, and precious little snow is in the Sierras, but water managers say it’s too early for fears that California is sliding back into drought as abruptly as the state fell out of it.
Plunging rods into snowpacks to measure the snow depth, water managers use the event to acquaint Californians with the state of the water supply.
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Southern California wildfires that grew to the biggest in state history in December – normally the rainy season in California – already have made clear the bottom line: The state is far drier than normal so far this winter.
Near-record rainfall last year unleashed widespread flooding and snapped a historic five-year drought.
People in California’s southwest last felt any significant rain in February, the National Weather Service noted this week.
Snowpack in the Sierras, which supplies a steady flow of water in good years as the snow melts, stood Tuesday at one-fourth of normal for this point in the year.
And it’s early in the winter rainy season yet – California normally receives half its rain between December and February.

Why Downtown Is Usually Hotter Than Surrounding Neighborhoods, And What We Can Do About It.
Elsewhere, you’ll see 102 degrees up in Burbank, and 94 degrees out in Echo Park.
Ban-Weiss added that, "Another reason is that cities generally don’t have a whole lot of vegetation.
The pledge came as part of a report—“the pLAn”—which suggests that the mayor’s goal is attainable if the city starts planting more trees and installing more "cool roofs" that absorb less heat.
“It’s a huge challenge.” Ban-Weiss, who’s a part of the city’s cool-down team, told the Times that the solution would likely require a multi-faceted approach.
As reported at Los Angeles Daily News, nearby residents said that the cooling effects could be felt within days.
Ten deg cooler on summer aft pic.twitter.com/UkwgosotyR — LA Street Services (@BSSLosAngeles) May 20, 2017 As Natasha Jenkins, director of communications at GuardTop (the company that produces the seal), told LAist, a newly sealed street will see a dramatic difference in surface temperature.
And, depending on the time of day, you can see anything from a 10 to 40 degree difference," said Jenkins.
Around schools, parks and community centers, we don’t expect as much wear," said Jenkins.
The office expects to have a more defined set of ideas by 2019.

Los Angeles has more public support than Paris for 2024 Olympics, IOC Evaluation Commission report discovers.
Los Angeles and Paris have each been widely praised by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Evaluation Commission in their report on their bids for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympics published today, although some challenges do remain for each city.
But, according to a survey conducted in February by the IOC, Los Angeles has public support of 78 per cent in the city, 72 per cent in California and 64 per cent across the United States.
Los Angeles is warned about the importance of the "successful implementation" of a Games transport strategy, including the Olympic Route Network if the Games is to be pulled-off well.
Concerns are also raised with the "extensive planned upgrades" at the existing velodrome to remove inside pillars and increase seating capacity.
These would require "further discussions" between all relevant parties.
They are also encouraged to consider scrapping a planned second venue for volleyball as it "does not seem necessary".
The report does not consider the suitability of either for hosting the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.
Their respective and highly contrasting Athletes’ Village plans also received largely good feedback.
IOC Evaluation Commission members will now present their findings to the IOC membership at large during a Candidate City Briefing held in Lausanne on July 11 and 12.

Los Angeles Beaches Among State’s Best and Worst for Water Pollution.
Heal the Bay, a local environmental nonprofit group for clean water, released its annual California Beach Report Card in June.
The list measures water pollution at beaches around the state, tracking progress over time and also looking at pre- and post-drought conditions.
The Santa Monica Pier area and Marina del Rey’s Mother’s Beach both received “D” grades on the report card, as the sixth- and ninth-dirtiest beaches, respectively.
Four beaches received “F’ grades, including the San Clemente Pier in Orange County.
The news wasn’t all bad for LA, however.
Four more county beaches also managed to receive “A+” grades.
In Malibu, El Matador State Beach and Malibu Point were included on the list’s honor roll.
Palos Verdes Estates’ Bluff Cove and Rancho Palos Verdes’s Portuguese Bend Cove also received high marks.
Summer dry weather (April through October) scores have been trending upward in LA County from 2011 to 2016, as 93 percent of Los Angeles beaches received an “A” score this time around — much higher than the average of 76 percent over the entire time frame.

The lead-poisoned drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich., has gotten all the headlines, but California has a water contamination problem that endangers far more people, and it has existed for decades. State officials knew for a generation that many Californians lack access to clean, safe drinking water, yet, disgracefully, they did not begin to address the issue until five years ago.

The state Legislature is now poised to chalk up a historic achievement as it negotiates Senate Bill 623, which would establish a fund to subsidize adequate water treatment for most of the roughly 1 million Californians who still need it. It’s the last step in enabling small, impoverished water systems throughout the state to deliver clean water to their customers.

As co-director of the Visalia-based Community Water Center, Laurel Firestone has helped lead an underdog campaign for clean water over the last decade. “This is the moment,” she told me over the phone. “We’re finally at a point where we could actually solve this.”

The state’s bad water is concentrated in the mostly Latino farmworker communities of the San Joaquin Valley, but nearly all of California’s 58 counties include small, rural communities with tainted water. Residents there are forced to take their chances or spend an inordinate amount of their usually small incomes on bottled water.

Farmers bear responsibility for nitrate, the second-biggest contamination source, which enters the water supply from agricultural runoff and manure. Nitrate can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal disorder in infants, and other serious ailments in pregnant women and children.

Racism plays a part in the contamination crisis, but so do poverty, patchwork water systems, and, until recently, an overestimation of the quantity of contaminants required to trigger illness. On top of that, the dominant water narrative in the state pits farmers against fish and environmentalists; clean water advocates have had trouble catching politicians’ attention with their equally important story.

Regardless of the reasons for the crisis, the government’s longstanding neglect of the problem has been appalling. In some cases, as cities with good water treatment facilities grew, they all but surrounded smaller unincorporated communities that didn’t have the funds to fix their contaminated water, yet the larger cities refused to absorb the smaller systems.

As Latino political power and the environmental justice movement have grown, the issue has gained traction. In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation making California the first state to recognize that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable and accessible water.”

“We really did a big campaign to get that established,” Firestone said. “Since then, we’ve tried to build on that in multi-faceted ways.”

One important step was Senate Bill 88, passed in 2015, which empowered the State Water Resources Control Board to require consolidation of bad water systems into adequate ones. In February, the water board began publicly identifying water systems that are out of compliance with state and federal clean water regulations on its Human Right to Water Portal website.

Most tellingly, new water quality regulations issued by regional water boards allowed the state to threaten punitive enforcement actions against farmers whose practices have contributed to nitrate contamination. In response, the farmers are negotiating with legislators over a provision in SB 623 to set a regular fee they will pay into the new water treatment fund.

Impoverished systems can tap an array of federal and state grants for capital improvements to their treatment equipment, but they still lack funding for operations and maintenance. SB 263 will make available the few hundred million dollars a year needed for that purpose. It’s a modest sum for a state with an annual budget of more than $170 billion, and, as water board Deputy Director Darrin Polhemus explained to me, subsidizing “the high cost of operations and maintenance in these small systems is essential.”

In addition to collecting money from growers to finance the fund, the legislation would charge the state’s water users a small fee on their monthly bills, in the same way that telephone users subsidize phone service for the needy. Because this amounts to a tax, SB 623 needs the support of two-thirds of the state’s legislators — a high but not insurmountable bar.

A recent poll paid for by the California Water Foundation found that 72% of Californians are willing to pay as much as an extra dollar per month on their water bills to fix the contaminated systems. This is a powerful indication that Californians want to make good on the state’s groundbreaking 2012 proclamation: Clean drinking water is a human right, and providing it, is an act of simple human decency.

In summer 2010, Los Angeles was losing about 100 gallons of water per person per day to the atmosphere through the evaporation and plant uptake of lawns and trees.
Lawns accounted for 70 percent of the water loss, while trees accounted for 30 percent, according to a University of Utah study published in Water Resources Research.
The results, based on measurements taken before Los Angeles enacted mandatory watering restrictions in 2014, shows a pattern of systemic overwatering in the city’s lawns, and a surprising water efficiency in tree cover.
Evaporation + Transpiration = Evapotranspiration, or ET The water loss that Litvak and Diane Pataki, professor of biology, measured is best described as "evapotranspiration," a measurement that adds together the evaporation of water from soil and the release of water vapor, called transpiration, from plants.
Evapotranspiration (ET) rates depend on several factors, including plant type, temperature, humidity and the amount of water in the soil.
And according to Litvak’s measurements, LA’s soils were an abundant source of water.
Water loss from an over-irrigated lawn is that much and more, because transpiration from the grass pumps even more water from the soil to the atmosphere.
To measure ET from lawns, Litvak devised a shoebox-size chamber that could measure rapid changes of the temperature and humidity above the grass.
"I have been surprised that we can maintain the tree canopy of LA with relatively little water," Pataki says.
"Whether that changed people’s preferences for landscapes in a long-lasting way — that’s something we still need to study."

UCLA-led researchers track groundwater loss during drought in California’s Central Valley.
Crops like almonds cannot be left fallow during dry years without jeopardizing the trees, which during droughts require extensive irrigation in the California Central Valley.
“So, we’re talking about 40 times that amount in the recent drought.” During droughts Central Valley farmers are forced to use wells to replace water that would typically come from the Colorado River basin and the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Higher temperatures during the more recent drought period and the transition from row to tree crops, accounted for most of the increase in groundwater loss between the two droughts, and more than offset the effects of a reduction in irrigated land, Lettenmaier said.
Groundwater usage for crop irrigation in the Central Valley is a well-documented and hot-button issue in California.
Researchers used two methods to track groundwater levels, traditional water balance estimates —which take into account surface water inflow like rainfall and snow melt, soil moisture capacity and evapotranspiration — and data from NASA’s twin satellite system called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment).
GRACE estimates align with the water balance estimates, with some variance.
GRACE data estimates that groundwater loss from 2012 to 2016 was 11.2 cubic kilometers per year, compared to water balance estimates of 10 cubic kilometers per year.
“Although both water balance-based and GRACE-based groundwater volume estimates are subject to errors, the relatively small area of the Central Valley in the eyes of GRACE might also be responsible for that recovery discrepancy,” Lee said.
Researchers hope future studies will address how much actual recovery happened between droughts and whether recovery from the most recent drought is on track to replenish the system.