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  • 4 weeks later...
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Posted
  • Location: Camborne
  • Location: Camborne

Wildfires Rage across California

 

 

The explosive fire behavior that many Californians have been fearing all summer came to fruition over the weekend about 70 miles north of San Francisco, as the Valley Fire metastasized from an estimated 400 acres on Saturday to 50,000 acres on Sunday (see timeline at bottom of this page). The fire roared across the community of Middletown on Saturday night, prompting hasty evacuations and apparently destroying large parts of the town. One death has been confirmed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and four firefighters from a helicopter crew were hospitalized with second-degree burns. Officials have had trouble confirming the amount of damage as the fire continued to rage nearby, but the National Interagency Fire Center reported in its daily update on Monday that at least 412 structures had been lost. The fire was zero percent contained, and close to 20,000 people have had to evacuate.

 

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3112

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  • 1 month later...
Posted
  • Location: Camborne
  • Location: Camborne

Giant Sequoias Struggle with Drought

 

In the summer of 2014, biologist Nathan Stephenson was surveying giant sequoias in a clearing in Sequoia National Park. He looked up at the crown of a mature giant sequoia, hundreds of years old, and noticed that half of its leaves had turned brown.

 

In 35 years studying giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada, Stephenson had never seen a mature giant sequoia with that many brown leaves. He looked in the park’s records, which go back 120 years.

 

http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2015/11/17/giant-sequoias-struggle-with-drought/

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Posted
  • Location: Camborne
  • Location: Camborne

Tens of millions of trees in danger from California drought

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California's forests are home to the planet's oldest, tallest and most-massive trees. New research from Carnegie's Greg Asner and his team reveals that up to 58 million large trees in California experienced severe canopy water loss between 2011 and today due to the state's historic drought. Their results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-tens-millions-trees-danger-california.html#jCp

 

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  • 5 weeks later...
Posted
  • Location: Camborne
  • Location: Camborne

How Much Will El Niño Help to Quench California’s Grinding Drought?

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With hillsides greening up fast, and chunks of coastline falling into the sea, it’s obvious that generous rains (and mountain snows) have returned to large parts of California this winter. But it remains an open question exactly how much this winter will help the state recover from a brutal four years of drought.

We can thank El Niño for the moisture return. One of the three strongest El Niño events since reliable records began in 1950 is still keeping sea surface temperatures (SSTs) much warmer than average over the central and eastern tropical Pacific. Those warm waters will continue to generate showers and thunderstorms thousands of miles east of their usual equatorial home. In turn, that displacement will keep forcing the atmosphere to adjust in ways that reverberate for thousand of miles, including northward into North America.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/how-much-will-el-nio-help-to-quench-californias-grinding-drought

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Posted
  • Location: Upper Tweeddale, Scottish Borders 240m ASL
  • Location: Upper Tweeddale, Scottish Borders 240m ASL

Thanks for pointing out these updates Knocker - interesting to follow how the drought waxes and wanes.

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Posted
  • Location: Camborne
  • Location: Camborne

This week in... More water for state and federal projects, but La Niña looms

As California’s wet season winds down, drought conditions in much of the state look better than last year. The Department of Water Resources (DWR) recently announced its fourth increase of the State Water Project (SWP) allocation, up from 45% in March to 60%, citing improvements in reservoir levels. Likewise, the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the Central Valley Project (CVP), increased water allocation for the Friant Division contractors of Class 1 from 40% to 50% [1]. South-of-Delta agricultural and urban contractors, on the other hand, saw no change in their initial water supply allocation of 5% and 55%, respectively.

Yet, signs of relief are weakening. Statewide snowpack has been melting relatively quickly; snow-water content decreased from 87% of normal on March 30 to only 60% of normal on April 20. The National Weather Service, Climate Prediction Center, predicts that El Niño will finally transition into ENSO-neutral conditions during late spring or early summer of 2016. Recent forecasts also suggest an increasing chance of La Niña during the second half of the year, potentially causing below-average precipitation next year in California.

Amid these developments, the State Water Board held an informational workshop on urban water conservation measures to solicit input on potential adjustments to the drought emergency regulation extension. Possible action to adjust the conservation requirements would likely be taken in May 2016.

[1] Class 2 water is allocated after all of Class 1 water, referred as the “firm yield”, has been made available. Therefore, it is unlikely that Class 2 contractors will receive CVP water this year.

 

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Posted
  • Location: Alston, Cumbria
  • Weather Preferences: Proper Seasons,lots of frost and snow October to April, hot summers!
  • Location: Alston, Cumbria

And with the advance of Summer it is unlikely that California will get any significant rainfall from now until October. California sits between latitudes 30 and 40N on the Pacific seaboard of the US and as such has a Mediterranean -type climate with some winter rainfall and hot dry summers. 

In recent years California along with many parts of the Mediterranean have had some really severe droughts, in large part due to the dominance of the subtropical high pressure belt being centred near 35N in winter (in addition to being dominant across Mediterranean latitudes in summer).  This is related to a northwards shift in sub-arctic storm tracks as a consequence of retreating Arctic ice and a predisposition towards high zonal index with strong Westerlies in higher latitudes. This helps to ensure the subtropical high pushes a few degrees further north than it otherwise might.

El-Nino is usually associated with strong Westerlies being pushed into higher latitudes but the expectation of rain is because the strong zonal flow would normally mean less of a pronounced "ridge" over the Rockies. This ridge means rain-bearing fronts are carried northwards away from California, so the absence of this ridge over the Rocky Mountains ought to promote increased rainfall in the region. However, due to climatic changes the storm tracks and Westerlies are further north anyway and the high-zonal index circulation has the subtropical high at 35N in winter. In this situation strong Westerlies associated with El-Nino means dry fine weather dominates California and much of the southern USA winter and summer. 

There is little sign of change to the warming Northern Hemisphere in the next year or so, California's drought problem is not going to go away and indeed it is likely to get worse. 

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