California Gov. Jerry Brown stood on dry ground at the Phillips Station snow-measuring outpost in the Sierra Nevada mountains last April 1 and ordered a 25-percent reduction in urban water use. When the state Department of Water Resources conducts a snow survey on Wednesday at Phillips Station, 90 miles east of Sacramento, the snowpack will be several feet deep. California is in much better shape than a year ago, but drought still covers nearly 92 percent of the state.
“Residents should continue to conserve water due to drought conditions and impacts that are still felt in many parts of the state,” says the DWR. The development of a powerful El Niño weather pattern last fall raised hopes of breaking the drought.
Melt from the Sierra Nevada snowpack provides about 30 percent of California’s water in a normal year. The annual DWR snow survey at the end of March measuresd the snowpack at its maximum depth. Going into this week, DWR’s electronic monitoring of approximately 100 stations in the mountain range said the water content of the snowpack was 88 percent of the April 1 average. A year ago on April 1, the snowpack was 5 percent of average, the lowest level ever recorded.
“From a water supply perspective, the favorable news is that there is a nearly normal snowpack to melt off,” says the government’s weekly Drought Monitor. The state’s reservoirs hold more than three-fourths of their usual inflow for the recharge season.
“However, the improvement has not been evenly distributed, with long-term severe to extreme drought still entrenched across much of central and southern California, as reflected by less frequent storms during the 2015-16 wet seasons; still-low reservoir levels; less robust mountain snowpack and continuing groundwater shortages,” says the Drought Monitor.
The drought is most intense in the agricultural sections of the state, although conditions are better than they were at the start of this year or a year ago, when less than 3 percent of California was free of drought. Some 35 percent of the state is in exceptional drought, the worst dire rating, compared to 45 percent on Jan. 1. California is the largest grower of fruits and vegetables in the country.
Drought centered in the Oklahoma Panhandle returned to the wheat-growing southern Plains after being washed away by fall and winter storms, said the Drought Monitor. “Unless significant precipitation occurs soon, a much broader area of the central and southern Plains, extending eastward into the middle Mississippi Valley, may be ripe for expansion of dryness and drought during the next few weeks.”
The USDA’s Ag in Drought site said drought affected 7 percent of winter wheat acreage, including 11 percent of Kansas’ crop, the No. 1 state for winter wheat, and 16 percent of Oklahoma’s, often the No. 2 crop.