California is so big “[i]t has different droughts in different places,” Jay Lund, an engineering professor at UC-Davis, told the Los Angeles Times. Rainfall in the northern Sierra Nevada, a water source for much of the state, is 180 percent of average so far in the wet season, but Southern California, which gets half of its water from local sources, is historically dry.
The past five years in Los Angeles were the driest in almost 140 years of record keeping, says the National Weather Service, with half of the usual rainfall. “Northern California typically gets more rain than Southern California does, and the state’s water system is designed with that in mind; it moves water from the Sierra into cities and farms to the south,” said the Times. “But Lund said that even as conditions have gotten wetter, the state has struggled to move surplus water south across the delta. As a result, the benefits have been limited.”
A vast swath of Central and Southern California remains in “exceptional” drought conditions, the most severe rating by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Snowfall is forecast this weekend in the northern Sierras, where snowpack is 57 percent of normal. The snowpack is important because meltwater flows into reservoirs and is a source of water through the warm months.