NASA

When drought reduced streamflows and irrigation water allotments, growers in California's Central Valley pumped more water from their wells. Now a study by NASA and Stanford scientists says decades of overpumping permanently reduced the storage capacity of the aquifer beneath the valley by 336,000 to 606,000 acre-feet, which could exceed the capacity of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir that is the primary water supply for San Francisco.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would cancel four NASA climate science missions, which would have measured the flow of carbon dioxide and tracked long-term weather patterns. “Long before President Trump was elected, climate researchers have warned that the nation’s climate monitoring capabilities — which include satellites as well as air- and surface-based instruments — were less than adequate and faced data collection gaps and other uncertainties,” reports The New York Times.

Eight of the 12 months of 2016 were the warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, helping to make 2016 the warmest year globally — the third record-setting year in a row, said NASA. "We don't expect record years every year but the ongoing long-term warming trend is clear," said Gavin Schmidt, direct of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

New data from NASA satellites show that the wettest regions of the world are getting wetter, while drier regions are getting drier, reports The Desert Sun.

Researchers say global climate change added 8 to 27 percent of the severity of the ongoing drought in California, said the Los Angeles Times, citing a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

One of the strongest El Nino weather patterns ever forecast is expected to peak in late fall or early winter but it's too early to say if it will ease the four-year-old drought in Californa.

Astronauts on the International Space Station are the first people to eat food grown in space, says NASA.

NASA research shows 21 of the world's 37 largest aquifers, from Asia and Europe to California's Central Valley, "have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study," says the Washington Post.

Two weeks of rainy and snowy weather "has provided California a foothold for drought recovery but three straight winters of subnormal precipitation will take time, possibly several consecutive wet winters to recharge the reservoir levels and...