Get ready for more dry years, reports the Daily Bulletin. According to an article by Wesley G. Hughes, NASA oceanographer Bill Patzert believes we are in a nine-year long drought and the next nine don't look a whole lot better.
Paztert, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has appeared frequently as an El Niño/La Niña expert on local and national news programs. He says the nine-year long dry spell is the result of something he calls the Pacific Decadal Oscillation:
Patzert says the last nine years are consecutively the nine driest in a century, and that can be traced to the oscillation.
"We haven't had a big El Niño in a decade," he said, and it is having a profound effect on the water we depend on from the Colorado River and that is delivered to Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet.
He predicted temperatures will continue to rise in the region. Even in cooler years such as the one we are in now, temperatures will spike for a few days, resulting in dangerous triple-digit temperatures and heavy water use.
Patzert says a crisis is looming, and the only solution is for all of us to reduce water consumption by 50 percent, something he calls doable....
* * *
In other water related news, we came across a very informative blog called Aquafornia, which deals with Southern California water issues. One link to an article in the Stockton Record about so-called "megadroughts" was particularly alarming.
According to the Record's piece, the 20th Century may have actually been an anomaly in terms of precipitation in California and appears to represent the wettest century in the past 4,000. And between 900-1500AD there were two megadroughts, one of about 140 years and one that lasted over 200 years.
So, many of the water supply assumptions urban planners and developers had when Southern California was assuming its amorphous, sprawling shape may have been utterly wrong.
Posts
