drought

The monsoon rains that are the lifeblood of India's farmers may be unaffected by forecasts of an El Niño weather pattern at mid-year, a top weather official told Reuters. The rains usually arrive around June 1 at Kerala, a state at the southern tip of India, the second-most populous nation in the world, and retreat by September from Rajastan, which borders Pakistan in northern India, some 2,000 kilometers away.

For the fifth week in a row, drought has expanded in the winter wheat-growing central and southern U.S. Plains, says USDA's Ag in Drought website. Some 26 percent of winter wheat land is moderate to severe drought, up 2 percentage points in a week.

In the wettest winter in California in 20 years, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains is 185 percent above average, says the LA Times, according to measurements by the California Department of Water Resources. In the Southern Sierras, the snowpack is even higher — at 201 percent above average.

Corn, sorghum and other cereal grains are selling at record prices in East Africa, where drought has shriveled crops, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. High food prices "are severely constraining food access for large numbers of households with alarming consequences for food insecurity," said an FAO official.

Snowstorms since late December dumped the equivalent of 17.5 million acre feet of water on the Sierra Nevada, says the Los Angeles Times, pointing to estimates by University of Colorado researchers. "That figure amounts to about a third of what the researchers said was the drought’s 54 million-acre feet shortfall in the snowpack" during the five-year California drought.

After two weeks of moderate to heavy rain and snow, drought is on the wane across the United States. Only 16 percent of the nation is in drought, down 3 points since last week and a drop of 8 points since the start of the year, said the weekly Drought Monitor.

Drought is depriving millions of Somalis of enough to eat, the nation's president said in an appeal for international aid. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, created by the USAID, said famine is possible in Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen, all in East Africa. Armed conflict has aggravated the effects of drought.

Nearly 40 percent of California, the northern part of the state, is free of drought, a startling change thanks to heavy rain and snow since the Oct. 1 start of the wet season, says the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor. But moderate to exceptional drought covered the central and southern parts of the agriculturally important Central Valley of the nation's No. 1 farm state.

Powerful snow and rain storms are filling reservoirs "and all but ending the five-year drought across much of northern California," says the San Jose Mercury News. It quoted Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis, as saying, "California is a dry state and probably always will be in most years but we certainly don't have a statewide drought right now."

One of the largest family-owned wineries in the United States, Jackson Family Wines, is facing climate change head-on, even as experts predict falling grape yields because of shifting weather patterns, says The New York Times. The makers of Kendall-Jackson chardonnay, a “supermarket staple,” the Jackson clan has deployed high-tech water-efficiency programs, drones and old-school falcons to manage pests in the wake of California’s drought and higher temperatures.

The California Department of Water Resources is to conduct its first "media-oriented manual snow survey" of the 2017 water year today in the Sierra Nevada, with the state potentially headed for a sixth year of drought. A week ago, the snowpack held 10.5 inches of water content statewide, 72 percent of average, one month into the three wettest months of the year, according to electronic monitoring.

More than 900 people packed a Modesto hearing, "most of them determined to stop the state's plan" to roughly double the flow on the lower Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced rivers from February to June each year, says the Modesto Bee. "Farmers and wataer managers said the plan would put people out of work while doing little for fish."

One-third of the land growing winter wheat is in drought territory, triple the portion that was affected two months ago, says USDA's Ag in Drought report. Dry conditions are a threat to establishment — and potential yields — of the crop, which is planted in the fall, lies dormant during the winter and is harvested in the spring.

"Damages to crops appear to be irreversible and rangeland conditions remain generally poor" in east Africa, following scant rainfall during the October-December rainy season, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in a special alert that describes support for agriculture as an urgent need. "Food insecurity is expected to significantly deteriorate by early 2017."

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.

By a 3-to-1 margin, the Senate passed and sent to President Obama a water infrastructure bill that changes how much water is shipped to Southern California and San Joaquin Valley farmers from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The bill was criticized by environmentalists and the fishing industry, reports the Los Angeles Times, and a court challenge is likely if Obama signs the bill into law.

Civil conflicts and their consequences, including refugees needing food in neighboring countries, are a factor in 21 of the 39 countries that need food assistance, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in a quarterly report. Warfare in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Nigeria has disrupted food supplies for at least 40 million people, it said.

A bipartisan water bill that includes drought relief for California could be put to a vote in Congress before the end of this week, said House and Senate leaders after agreeing on terms of the $558 million package. California Sen. Barbara Boxer said the bill tramples on the Endangered Species Act in order to divert more water to agriculture at the expense of salmon and the imperiled Delta smelt, said The Associated Press.