NASA: California Has One Year of Water Left
Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.
In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the stateâs water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.
"As our âwetâ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "Weâre not just up a creek without a paddle in California, weâre losing the creek too."
On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in Californiaâs Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.
"Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,â Famiglietti writes.
He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond âstaying in emergency mode and praying for rain.â
Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a âremarkably drier futureâ for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. âMegadroughts,â the studyâs authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.
With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, âimmediate mandatory water rationingâ should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable wayâas opposed to the âexcessive and unsustainableâ groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.
Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for Californiaâs âharrowing futureâ of more and longer droughts âwill require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon,â Famiglietti writes. âToday, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.â
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