California Keeps Struggling With Getting Enough Winter Rain And Snow

Officials with the California Department of Water Resources
measuring Sierra Nevada snow on February 28.
An on and off winter has left the snow at about 85
percent of normal, so they're a little short

California is experiencing an on again off again wet season, and that has implications for how the state will handle both droughts and wildfires through the rest of the year.  

If a water shortage were to develop in California, it wouldn't be just a California problem. The reservoirs near the mountains depend on snow melt to stay full and ready to provide water to homes and farms. 

If farmers don't get enough irrigation from the reservoirs, that would damage crops, causing shortages and add even more inflationary pressure to your grocery bill, which is already too high, I'm sure. 

A lack of snow would help cause an earlier and longer-lasting and worse wildfire season. Severe fires would take federal resources to help manage.  And that federal help has suddenly become quite unreliable user the Trump administration. 

THE SITUATION

We do know things are not nearly as dire as they were in the 2010s, when several years of far below normal snowfall in the mountains - and a major lack of rain in the valleys - plunged California into one of its worst drought crises in memory. 

This year, it has been snowing in them thar mountains, but in sort of an unsettling on and off pattern. 

Large storms in early winter got the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains off to a rousing start, leaving the  amount of snow up there as of January 1 actually a smidge above average.

Then January, a traditionally stormy, cold month in those mountains, was sunny and warm.  Some of the snow actually melted. 

Some storms did come in during February, which helped. The result is as of this week, the northern Sierra Nevada mountains are doing OK, with the snow there more or less normal.  But the central Sierra Nevada are somewhat below normal and the southern Sierras are doing even worse. Taken as a whole, the Sierra Nevada snowpack was at about 85 percent of where it should be this week. 

You can sort of see a pattern in what I just described. Storms are more or less coming in, but there are big gaps in this storm parade, and many of those gaps feature sunshine and springlike air that melts some of the snow. 

Snow-eroding winter heat waves are becoming more common in the Sierra Nevada, yet another sign of climate change. 

The Sierra Nevada has maybe a month and a half to collect major new snows before the wet season wanes 

There has been a recent change in the weather pattern that is sending storms into almost all of California over at least the next two weeks.  I don't see signs of a "March miracle" in which phenomenal amounts of snow pile up.  But it looks like those mountains will make gains in the amount of snow that's up there. 

Still, reservoirs are still in pretty good shape given a near average 2024 and a whopping amount of snow in 2023. 

However, the fact that the snow melts so quickly could mean the ground will become bare in many areas prematurely, which could in turn herald another earlier than average start to the fire season. 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It's been a weird  year in southern California, too, which as we know led to absolute disaster by January. 

Drought continues in southern California. The 
darker the shade of orange or red, the worse
the drought conditions are. 

Pretty much no rain fell there through the first half of the "rainy" season. The first substantial rain of the season hit on January 26, which was way too late. 

Considering how the drought, combined with ferocious Santa Ana winds caused what will go down as the worst wildfire disaster in Los Angeles history. 

The rains finally tamped down the wildfires - for now, anyway. The rains in late January only amounted to an inch or so in Los Angeles, barely over a third of normal for the month. 

February's Los Angeles total was 2.66 inches, just slightly below average. But the rain shut off again starting February 15, and no measurable rain had fallen until Tuesday, when nearly a half inch of rain fell on L.A. 

That change in the weather pattern I mentioned gives southern California some more chance at more rain this month. But again, we don't know how long that rainy period will last or whether it will provide a huge boost.

As of Thursday, northern California was pretty much drought-free but widespread drought still plagued the southern half of the state.   This month's rains do not seem destined to fully erase that problem. 

Mauna Loa Eruption Shuts Down Key Climate Monitoring Site

The Mauna Loa Observatory, the world's premier site for
measuring carbon in the atmosphere, has been shut
down by the volcano's eruption. 

 You might have heard that the big Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii is erupting for the first time in 38 years.  

One big problem this eruption has caused is it has temporarily shut down the worlds premier atmospheric carbon monitoring site. 

As Yahoo News reports:

"The Hawaiian station goes back to 1958 and is the main site for the famous Keeling Curve that shows rising carbon dioxide levels from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas that tracks with rising temperatures. Levels of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa have increased 33 percent since 1958."

The monitoring station is at an elevation of 11,300 feet and has a 131-foot tower that collects air to measure levels of carbon dioxide, radiation and other substances, reports Yahoo News. 

The lava flows are not threatening the actual monitoring station, but the eruption cut power lines further down the mountain. Also, lava crossed the road leading to the observatory. 

The world has something like 300 carbon monitoring stations, so measurements will continue. But Mauna Loa is regarded as the most accurate and cleanest. That's because there's no big population centers nearby. There's not much vegetation around, either. 

And the elevation is so high that it really helps grab a good sample of the atmosphere. It's too high up to contaminate measurements with day to day pollution from cars, houses, factories and such. 

 I'm seeing conflicting reports about whether this is the first time the volcano has screwed up carbon measuring on Mauna Loa. Another Mauna Loa eruption in 1984 halted measurements for 36 days, but that time away was short enough so that it didn't really mess up records, says Yahoo News. But Hawaii News Now says this is the first time in 60 years or more that measurements were interrupted.

The Keeling Curve is named after Charles David Keeling, who in 1958 started taking carbon dioxide measurements atop Mauna Loa.  The Keeling Curve demonstrates the carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere are currently higher than they've been in 3 million years. 

His son, Ralph Keeling, told Axios that scientists are scrambling to find a similar location to Mauna Loa to take CO2 readings, at least on a temporary basis. 

"In the long run, but I don't know how long, the station will be up again. So the record will continue as before, and we'll have some kind of gap where the data is slightly different or missing," Keeling said. 

Incidentally, some very large volcanic eruptions can temporarily change the climate. Tambora, in 1815, caused a world-wide chill down, leading to New England's "Year Without A Summer" in 1816.

To a lesser extent, Pinatubo in 1991  cooled the world by 1 degree Fahrenheit for a year or two after its eruption.  That almost, briefly wiped out all the heating from climate change at that point in history. 

Most volcanoes, when they do affect the Earth's climate, cool it. But last January's massive Tonga eruption might have the opposite effect. It injected lots of water into the dry stratosphere, which might temporarily accelerate global warming for the next couple of years or so. 

Mauna Loa's eruption is producing lots of lava, but smoke and ash are not rising particularly high in the atmosphere, so this event won't affect the world's climate in any measurable way.