This might be a stupid question, but if "drought" means "abnormally dry" yet an area is in "drought" 90% of the time, does that not just mean the definition of drought is wrong?
It would be more accurate to say that dry periods in california are just "normal weather" and the occasional wet periods are the abnormal weather.
I enjoy the rare periods when it's sunny in the UK, but I wouldn't refer to a typical cloudy period as a "sun drought" because the sun is what's abnormal
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.
It's not quite as simple as that though - in most places, especially California, water shortages are not a simple natural imbalance between the amount of rain that falls and how much flows out in rivers and streams.
If demand is far higher than supply due to overuse by industry that's definitely a water shortage - there isn't enough of it, and something is probably suffering as a result. I don't think that's a useful definition of drought though. If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there's suddenly a drought.
I think the definition of drought is instead current rainfall compared to historical average - which then leads to the question of if the change is just that rainfall has now been low for so long the historical average has changed, or if rainfall has actually improved. I don't think the article addressed this, but I only skimmed it so maybe I missed it.
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
All I'm saying is that people or no people, wet or dry, there is an actual calculation and a drought scale. The conversation seems to be wanting to place 'blame', but you can have droughts anywhere, under a lot of conditions (like people moved in) for lots of reasons.
I looked it up
Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).
A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.
Common Drought Indices
Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):
Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture.
Calculates water supply and demand.
Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):
Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months).
Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
Yes exactly, saudi arabia doesn't have an ideal amount of rainfall for providing water to people and growing crops, but nobody say it's in a "drought".
It would be nice if it rained more in california, but we can't base definitions on what we'd ideally like to happen
Would help if the water heavy industries moved to areas with actual water to spare but that ain't gonna happen when the cost of water management is mostly dumped on tax payers and not companies using it
.. loosely inspired by the California water wars—early 20th-century conflicts over water rights that enabled Los Angeles to access resources from the Owens Valley.
I only found one article. GP linked to the data that the article is based on, showing a day when California was almost drought-free but still had abnormally dry areas.
There’s ample dishonesty to go round, no one has to miss out if they don’t want to.
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
I'm not sure that "effectively zero" is quite right; "approximately zero" seems more correct. And on that note, there are also approximately zero instances in the history of the universe where someone has responded to your comment, but hey look, I'm doing it now!
Bone dry here in Utah. Just as local government has been lowering their guard on the Great Salt Lake issue due to a couple strong snowpack years. Really hope we're proactive in response to the lack of snow.
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
Damn, is this the first time ever the east coast is doing better than Colorado? We’ve had record snowfalls all over Quebec, I spent all day last Friday skiing in a foot of fresh powder. Unheard of on the ice coast*.
*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
Unironically, wet / dry cycles isn't good news for California either.
Research published in the aftermath of the fire examines how this extremely wet to extremely dry weather sequence is especially dangerous for wildfires in Southern California because heavy rainfall leads to high growth of grass and brush, which then becomes abundant fuel during periods of extreme dryness.
I wonder how much of an effect human activity has on these cycles. Obviously, there are cycles within nature that don't include human activity but is this particular "equilibrium" (if we could call it that) the result of human settlements and all that entails or have they always happened this way but without a huge chunk of the population being in the midst of these modulations to witness it and be affected by it.
Huge amount, but maybe not in the way you intended.
Many of California's ecosystems have evolved to expect fires. Humans can't stand fires and aggressively put them out. So fuel that would be regularly burned off in mild wildfires instead builds up into megafires that exceed the limits of what the ecosystem can handle (a lot of California trees are fire-tolerant, but there's a point where the flames get too high and too intense).
So yeah, the human activity that affects these cycles is caused by our cognitive dissonance and fear to phrases like "mild wildfire".
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
Depends on how you quantify human impact. Lodgepole Pine (for example) is fire adapted. That's not something that evolved overnight. So it's safe to say that broad swaths of California have been experiencing a feast-famine cycle since before humanity developed agriculture.
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
what difference does the cause make if the end result is exactly the same as a natural event?
secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
Well, for starters, the Dixie Fire burned nearly a million acres and huge swaths of the Plumas and Lassen National Forests - the largest and most expensive fire in California history. It burned 70% of Lassen National Park.
I agree that forests are an economic resource and would argue that a fire, caused by humans and exacerbated by human forest management, is a devastating outcome economically. These aren’t wildfires that are merely periodically clearing the forest floor allowing for better forest propagation, they’re burning hot enough to kill everything - trees, soil, and anything in between. Along many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California, you can see aspects of slopes that have been burned at various times over decades and see that those forests burned are struggling to come back. I hiked the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this past summer and would argue that I have a decent sense of the status quo of the scope and qualities of the devastation of forest fire in those forests affected by those fires I’ve cited.
What difference does it make?
1. These aren’t forest regenerating/undergrowth clearing events - they’re apocalyptic in their devastation. A million acres unnecessarily burned in the Dixie Fire.
2. Forests are limited, threatened resources. Muir wrote a passage calling the sheep herd he was tending in his first summer in his beloved Sierra “hooved locusts” but managed to rationalize the devastation wrought by those sheep immediately after by reasoning that there still remain thousands of untouched high Sierra meadows. Just as there aren’t a thousand Tuolumne Meadows, there aren’t a thousand Lassen or Plumas National Forests. Every single one is irreplaceable on a timeframe that takes into account forest regeneration and the scale of these fires.
3. Paradise, CA. was completely devastated by the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history - and started by poorly maintained PG&E power infrastructure. Lahaina, Hawaii was utterly devastated in a similar fashion by a fire with a similar causes Even ignoring that our forests are being irrevocably destroyed, human caused forest fires are engulfing and destroying entire communities, killing people unable to evacuate ahead of wind driven firestorms.
4. Besides forest health, threat to life and property, here’s one that I’d actually expect to land: the threat posed by increasingly powerful fires started by humans and exacerbated by human activity (including the forest management you cited) driven by increasingly extreme weather conditions and events is going to make home insurance untenable. People are already being widely priced out of insurance markets whose actuaries are now pricing in risks that include potential for outcomes like every single home in Lahaina/Paradise/Malibu/Santa Monica is devastated.
What does it matter? Well, even handwaving away the devastation wrought on our forests by man made fire, those fires that affect you and your home insurance bill are essentially that complete set of fires that aren’t naturally occurring events. You don’t have to take my word for it - an actuary will have you understanding it sooner or later.
I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.
Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.
The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.
I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.
The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?
California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.
Well, it’s also not what I was thinking about. There were some huge floods. It may have been more than a year ago. When you get to my age, time does weird things.
Nevermind. It’s not something that’s worth any agita. It’s obvious that it’s not something that left many scars.
Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.
Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
People also forget ARkStorm scenarios, which involve rains akin to 1861-1862, submerging the whole of the Central Valley. Likely several times worse in damages than the biggest earthquake possible in California.
I read that recently and meant to look up the reality of that cycle. I mostly pay attention to ENSO but looking it up now I see there is a 15-30 year PDO cycle.
> And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
Ahh but don't you know? A picture is worth a thousand words, so your charts would be upping the measures word count, not reducing it by an order of magnitude
Previous CA resident anecdata, I remember droughts being a normal part of life in central CA 1990-early 2000s. Don't run sprinklers during certain hours, odd/even watering, "the water bill" exclaimations, etc. Like another commentor mentioned I don't anticipate this will last, but it's nice to see the "official" state change even if for a bit.
I recall rather absurd demands such as telling restaurants not to offer water (as if a glass of water makes
any difference) and telling residents to skip showers.
That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.
The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...
I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.
> Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
No, the amount of water conserved through these measures was absolutely meaningless even at scale. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of use.
I remember during one drought, the day the LA Department of Water and Power was going to declare water rationing, we got, some crazy number, 7-8" of rain in the basin.
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
Note that these indicators are looking at the drought monitor which just tracks soil moisture. There are active efforts underway to develop more comprehensive looks at precip and storage (snow, ground, reservoir etc)
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
Ah, my bad, you are right. LA is not the capital of California. Thanks for the correction, appreciate it!
But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.
Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.
From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
No, this is the state where the vast vast vast majority of water is used in incredibly inefficient agricultural practices because those consumers were allocated water "Rights" in a stupid system over a hundred years ago and have never had to pay market rates for water and are therefore not incentivized to do anything to not waste water.
Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
California is richest state in USA, it's is richer than many countries, it can afford such cost. Florida has more than double the desalination plants than California, and it is poorer than California.
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
If the richest state in the USA cannot do effective seawater desalination project to feed itself, but would rather drain out lakes and rivers from 400+ miles away (thus rendering those places unfit for farming, and forcing the locals there to get water from somewhere else long distance off), and the locals of that richest state happily waste that expensively sourced water during drought years, then it is plain and simple mismanagement of precious water resources.
If you aren't yet terrified of climate change, and if you think such mismanagement of natural resources is sustainable in the long-run, you need a rethink, my friend.
The droughts are going to get worse. Case in point: Madagascar.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
Read the last line:
[The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Cadillac Desert is the usual recommendation on how f'd water deals are in the West, the Owens Valley landgrab is merely the opening chapter. No argument there.
It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-infeasible desal techno-saviorism that comes off a bit russian botish.
The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
The warmth partially explains the rain. Storms far across the pacific have formed and traveled east to land on California. Unfortunately it also means, as you said, we can't capture as much of it as snow pack.
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
And is the only state with no drought right now. Although they way they figure it is a bit biased -- it's based on how much water there is compared to historical values, so it's easier to be "drought free" if you've been in a drought for a while.
Yeah hey but for real. The news is focused on California droughts all the time, but my part of flyover country is very, very dry. Like ponds that have never been empty are dry, sort of thing. It's getting bad. . . And we grow all your food.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
California actually produced the most food of any state. :). But I know what you mean, the water is just as critical in the middle of the country as it is on the edges. Water is critical everywhere, and this problem is just going to get worse and worse.
California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.
A 1 square mile state that produced nothing but wheat would beat any other state in terms of “amount of staples produced per square mile,” but it wouldn’t be able to sustain a population. That’s not a useful metric.
Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds.
We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well.
Sure - the problem is that the almond farmers are being incentivized to grow almonds by giving them a significantly below market cost. If the the costs reflected reality, almonds wouldn’t be profitable.
Municipal water users subsidize the growth of those almonds because of a water rights system that was imagined when California was mostly empty.
Agricultural users should be free to pay market rates for their water like everyone else. They will absolutely still be able to make a profit growing almonds since they basically own the market.
California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close.
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
I wasn't aware of the Doheny project, thanks! But it seems that that project timeline is at least as long as the one CCC killed.
With these kinds of timelines and that kind of regulatory risk, I don't think large-scale desalination is going to fix California's drought issues, regardless of whether it could.
We only have one because the Coastal Commision issued one for a plant around 1990 in a previous drought. The permit was maintained through to the current drought, at which point the Coastal Commission tried to get it shut down, but they lost since it was already permitted. Note that maintenance on the plant during the wet years was contentious; I don't know how it polled, but there were vocal people complaining about it, since it was barely used. Had those people prevailed, water would have been much dearer in the most recent drought.
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
> nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres.
Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure?
I've lived in California for 20 years so this is my first year of non-draught. We've been enjoying the unusual prevalence of greenery in Orange County.
In the 70s and 80s there were big beautiful thunderstorms. Lightning would crash down for hours and the torrential fall rains would flood streets in north orange county (tri-city area) again and again. It rained so hard I had to take shelter under a tree when I was 8, due to how the rain and wind was threatening to knock me down. It rained for a week straight once, which was memorable. As was the times the rain ruined Halloween (more than once).
In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.
There has been quite a lot of investment in spreading grounds, aquifer recharging, and stormwater capture. Last year, LA county recaptured enough water to meet the yearly water needs of 2.4 million people.
Went to Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week and there's miles of (bad) water. Unfortunately the Park Service but the kibosh on paddle boarding, etc. Should be a good bloom this spring.
Hot take, but I find it hard to care very much about water shortages, especially near the coast. A single nuclear power plant dedicated to desalinization would fix the whole problem. That this is still politically infeasible indicates to me that the drought is not really a big deal.
“Despite the welcome relief, climate change is expected to intensify weather swings from heavy rainfall to extreme dryness in a cycle that can fuel catastrophic wildfires.”
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
This is really cool but please don't attribute this to the success or failure of any politician.
Remind us who it is you think is doing this? No one in the HN comments as of this writing. And what is a politician going to do about weather? One doesn’t make drought go away with policy.
There was one (now-flagged) comment that personally blamed Gavin Newsom for intentionally depleting the reservoirs as part of some nefarious urbanization conspiracy.
> have no more to do with current politics than Trump did with the recent electromagnetic storms
Greenland has fairly strong aurora. Maybe Trump triggered the solar radiation storm to show Americans what Greenland has that they don't. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
It does rain in deserts, California isn't mostly desert (about 38% by land area), and drought is defined relative to normal rainfall, so even a place that usually has very low rainfall can have droughts.
And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california, his office sued over those Trump-era water rules, arguing they violated environmental protections for endangered fish.... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020. So given those facts, I would argue that yes the current Governor is responsible for what happened 100%.
take a look at SB 79 is a 2025 California state law (Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener) that overrides local zoning limits to allow higher-density multifamily housing near major public transit stops, signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 10th 2025, despite local resistance by residents.
Gavin Newsom ran on building housing, and SB79 is him fulfilling his mandate from voters, "local resistance by residents" is why California has some of the most expensive housing in the world.
Gavin Newsom also vetoed AB 2903, the bipartisan bill for auditing of California's $24 billion spent and squandered on fixing the homeless problem, which only got worse. SB79 is another example of Newsom intent to change zoning laws to allow developers to build high density housing which is what the parent comment was about. if you want to be a shill for the governor, thats your business. It looks like willfull graft to me.
there would be no drought if the 2020 Federal regulations were followed. the only reason there's no drought today is because the federal government stepped in and finally opened up the water lines in the North coming south.
keep in mind there used to be a big freshwater lake (Tulare Lake) in the middle of California for at least ten thousand years.....
> In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california ... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020.
How would diverting water from Northern California, where drought was the worst in 2020, to the Central Valley possibly end the drought?
Filling up reservoirs that are upstream by moving water downstream sounds like quite the magic trick.
1. Trump’s order in 2020 had nothing to do with fire, so it doesn’t support your position that this has anything to do with fires.
2. The water management plan has nothing to do with where water flows to fight fires.
3. A legal fight in 2020 is not caused by a bill that was passed in 2025.
> there would be no drought in 2020
That’s not how droughts work. A drought is a lack of rainfall. Moving water can reduce the problems caused by a drought, but it cannot prevent a drought.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1]
Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area.
The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But
there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
