February was an extremely warm month (once again) across California, with temperature records falling on a daily basis. February was also quite dry across the state, with the only precipitation event of any note occurring around the middle of the month.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack — which had been hovering slightly above average through the end of January — started to fall behind by mid-month, and the March 1 snow survey showed statewide snowpack slightly above 80 percent of average for the date. This number is decidedly better than during recent winters, but that’s really only a testament to the abysmal snowpack accumulations during the reign of the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge (of high pressure along the coast).

Change in the Wind

An abrupt change in the prevailing weather pattern is now at California’s doorstep, however. The persistent ridging of the past month or so is rapidly being displaced by a series of powerful storm systems, driven by a remarkable enhancement and consolidation of the Pacific jet stream.

Rain has already begun across the northernmost portion of California, and will continue more or less continuously through Monday. Precipitation will gradually spread farther south on Friday and intensify on Saturday as a very strong cold front approaches the California coast. A robust atmospheric river (arguably of the Pineapple Express variety, given its subtropical origins near Hawaii) will be in place in advance of the front itself, providing plenty of moisture for the impressive larger-scale dynamics to act upon.The nose of a strong jet streak will move inland over Central California before sagging southward over time, adding lift as this storm system sweeps across the state from northwest to southeast.

Thar She Blows

The very moist atmosphere combined with a fairly impressive frontal structure will likely lead to a period of very heavy rainfall across much of California. This setup would likely be cause for significant concern if conditions had been very wet, or if the front was expected to hang up over a given location. Right now, the whole system appears to be fast-moving enough to prevent severe flood concerns — especially given our dry February. But given the high intensity of the expected precipitation, it will be worth watching closely to see if a frontal wave develops on Saturday and stalls the front more than expected. Should that occur, flood concerns would increase considerably.

In addition to impressive upper-level dynamics for this part of the world, a substantial reservoir of cold air behind the cold front will provide quite a bit of instability during and after frontal passage — leading to a decent chance of at least isolated thunderstorms across much of the state beginning later on Saturday. Strong and gusty winds — potentially 40 to 50 mph in some places — will also occur as surface pressure gradients strengthen.

A secondary system will develop rapidly late Saturday and early Sunday over the Pacific just west of California as the jet stream remains situated in an unusually favorable low-latitude position. While this surface low won’t have much time to develop before hitting the coast, it could still pack a substantial punch, particularly in Southern California. In fact, this second system could bring at least a brief burst of widespread heavy precipitation and perhaps thunderstorms to much of Southern California (focused from the Bay Area southward). There are some early indications that stronger surface-based instability could develop later Sunday or Monday across portions of Southern California, which  could lead to the development of some severe thunderstorm activity near the coast.

Rainfall totals through Monday across Northern California will be in the 2-4 inch range in most places (including San Francisco and Sacramento), possibly more than double that (5-8+ inches) in the coastal hills and the northern Sierra Nevada foothills. Most of Southern California will probably see rainfall more on the order of 1-2 inches, with double that in the coastal mountains. Notably, however, this precipitation will fall rather quickly, and may cause more problems that would typically be the case with precipitation of this magnitude. In the Sierra Nevada, snow levels will start out quite high as the warm atmospheric river moves ashore but will plummet later in the weekend as much colder air arrives. Several (2-4) feet of new snowfall is likely above 7000 feet, and lesser accumulations down to 4000 feet or so are likely by Monday as the secondary system moves inland.

Models Waffle

California weather (model) watchers got quite the show a couple of days ago when simulations started pointing toward an extreme precipitation event to develop next week, following this weekend’s still very heavy rainfall. The setup was one strongly reminiscent of that which makes California water wonks nervous: the occurrence of a very persistent and strong atmospheric river event focused upon a narrow stretch of the West Coast. Several model cycles were hinting at the potential for truly incredible amounts of rain and high-elevation snow between March 4 and March 12.

Fortunately, however, it now seems that those really extreme numbers are unlikely to come to pass. While a very impressive atmospheric river is still expected to develop across the eastern Pacific next week and eventually make it to California, it is not presently expected to be nearly as persistent as had been simulated a few days ago. Present models still suggest a storm that would be quite impressive by the low standards set during recent drought winters.

‘March Miracle:’ a Relative Term

In the longer run, it seems likely that a fairly active weather pattern will continue across California for much of March. It’s hard to say at this point whether precipitation this month might approach the remarkable late-season levels of the “Miracle March” in 1991, but it does at least appear likely that California’s snowpack will recover, possibly back to above-average levels in the coming weeks. It’s less clear whether Southern California will be able to make up the seasonal precipitation deficit that has accumulated this year despite the near record-strength El Niño event in the tropical Pacific. Still, it appears increasingly likely that March will at least be able to make a dent — even though it’s quite clear that California’s multi-year drought will persist through the summer.

Daniel Swain is an atmospheric scientist at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. A version of this post also appears on his California Weather blog.

When the numbers come in for the closely watched April 1 survey of snow in the Sierra Nevada, California is likely to fall short of an average year.

That’s a major disappointment in a winter that featured one of the strongest El Niño events on record—warm ocean conditions that were widely expected to produce torrents of precipitation. It’s also a source of concern since the state has historically counted on runoff from accumulated mountain snows for about a third of its water supply.

Earlier this week, the northern Sierra snowpack briefly nudged the long-term average for April 1, while measurements from the southern Sierra were lagging badly, at just 75 percent of normal.

To be sure, both numbers are a huge improvement over last year at this time, when the Sierra Nevada range was virtually barren. But this year, almost-average isn’t going to cut it.

“We really needed more than average—a lot more than average,” says Peter Gleick, a hydrologist and co-founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

“Average snowpack wouldn’t solve the hole we’re in from four years of dry soil moistures and low reservoirs and overpumped groundwater,” he says. “I think a fifth year of drought is now pretty inevitable.”

Still, El Niño conjured up enough rain and snow to slightly dampen Californians’ worries over water. In a survey just released by the Public Policy Institute of California, while 57 percent of respondents still consider water supply to be a “big problem,” water and drought slipped from the top spot among residents’ biggest concerns, yielding once again to jobs and the economy.

Long-Term Outlook Not Encouraging

Gleick attended this week’s White House Water Summit, a confab designed to assess threats to future water security and seek solutions.

Coinciding with that event, federal water managers issued some sobering projections for the continuing impact of California’s changing climate on key watersheds.

Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins:
Mean annual runoff is projected to increase as much as 5.4% in the Sacramento and San Joaquin  Rivers Delta by the 2050s. Moisture falling as rain instead of snow at lower  elevations will increase wintertime runoff by 22% (December through March) and decrease springtime runoff by 27% (April through July).

And moving uphill toward Lake Tahoe, the outlook does not improve:

Truckee River Basin:
Mean annual runoff is projected to increase by from [sic] 5.7% by the 2050s. Warmer conditions are projected to transition wintertime snow into rain, increasing December–March runoff and decreasing April–July runoff. The median date of peak runoff is expected to be 19 days earlier by the end of the century.

Those increases in runoff might sound like a good thing. More water is more water, right?

“I wouldn’t bank on that,” says Gleick, citing both the uncertainty inherent in precipitation models for California and rising temperatures.

“We don’t just care about how much water we get, we also care about when we get it,” he says.

More wintertime and less springtime runoff is a sign that winter storms are dropping more rain and less snow, depleting the state’s “frozen reservoir” and leaving less water during the summer growing season, when farms and cities most need it.

As John Upton writes for Climate Central:

The low snowpack experienced last year is expected to become more common during the decades ahead — even though storminess in the region is projected to increase. Last year’s was the smallest snowpack on record, caused primarily by a shortfall in large winter storms, fueling a withering drought exacerbated by high temperatures.

Within 50 years, snowpacks as diminutive as last year’s could occur on average more than once every decade, said Michael Dettinger, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist.

“What we have to do is a combination of smarter storage and better management of reservoirs, and much more efficient water use,” says Gleick. “There is no one solution to Cailfornia’s water problems.”

The “April 1” snow survey in the Sierra Nevada is always anxiously awaited, in the truest sense of the term. Early April is when the snowpack is generally reckoned to have peaked and the spring melt season is upon us. If there isn’t sufficient snow by now to carry California through its parched summer, there likely won’t be.

This year’s April1 survey (done on March 30 this year for arcane reasons) was a good news/bad news affair.

The good news is that water content (which is what they actually measure, not accumulation) came in at 87 percent of average — that’s a far cry from last year at this time, when Governor Jerry Brown stood on a barren mountainside along Highway 50 to announce California’s first-ever statewide mandatory water restrictions. The snowpack on that date was virtually non-existent, shattering records for “bad” at about 5 percent of normal.

The bad news is that same 87 percent of average, which is to put it another way, 13 percent below normal. After four years of drought, hydrologists have warned, that’s not going to cut it.

“An average snowpack wouldn’t solve the hole we’re in from four years of dry soil moistures and low reservoirs, and overpumped groundwater,” says Peter Gleick, a hydrologist and head of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. “We really needed more than average — a lot more than average.” (There’s more from Gleick on why we should expect more disappointing snowpacks in our recent post.)

It’s hard for many to square the ongoing drought with reservoirs that have filled rapidly in recent weeks, water tumbling down huge spillways in many cases (often a required precaution against possible floods). California has been under a declared state of drought emergency since January of 2014, and water use restrictions have been extended through the coming summer, with some yet-to-be-announced modifications.

Meanwhile, state water managers urge that, “Residents should continue to conserve water due to drought conditions and impacts that are still felt in many parts of the state.”

Spring blizzards are not unheard of. The survey comes just two days after Reno recorded it’s third biggest dumping of late-season snow on record — nearly 7 inches. But once the calendar turns to April, precipitation of all kinds drops off dramatically throughout California and the Sierra.

Scientists still debate the magnitude of the 1906 earthquake that leveled much of San Francisco and surrounds, 110 years ago today. Long referred to as magnitude 8 or greater (using the now retired Richter scale), more recent analyses peg it at 7.9 or even 7.7.

Suffice it to say that the Great San Francisco Earthquake (actually centered off of present-day Daly City) deserved to be called “the big one.” The rip along the San Andreas fault stretched for 296 miles. By comparison, the 2014 South Napa Earthquake was a 7-mile hiccup.

The 1906 quake forever changed the Bay Area’s landscape and culture — but that “slip” of the San Andreas fault was also a game changer in the field of earthquake science.

“At the time of the 1906 earthquake, we didn’t understand that earthquakes occurred on faults,” marvels Richard Allen, who directs the seismological lab at UC Berkeley.

“It seems unbelievable that we wouldn’t understand that at that time but we didn’t.”

The 1600-page report that followed, two years in the making and spearheaded by geologist Andrew Lawson, was a treasure trove of data that Allen says is still used by modern seismologists. (Excerpts and some fascinating graphics from the Lawson report appear in a 2014 look-back from Slate’s historical blog, The Vault.)

Recent years have seen accelerating advances in the science, including a major breakthrough: the development of earthquake warning systems.

Starved of funding and caught up in debates over its design, California’s statewide ShakeAlert system has just advanced from testing into the pilot phase, lagging warning systems that are already fully deployed in Japan and Mexico. ShakeAlert sends warnings to the personal computers of subscribers by sounding an alarm klaxon and by giving a countdown to the shaking with its estimated intensity.

It’s based on the network of in-ground sensors known as the California Integrated Seismic Network, which detects deep underground rumblings in fault zones. Currently the senors are clustered near major metropolitan areas. Scientists aim to double the number of sensors to improve the accuracy of the system. But adding stations is costly and time-consuming. With relatively scant funding, it’s been slow going.

Scientists recently gave the system a boost by launching the “MyShake” network, a crowdsourcing approach harnessing the technology in cell phones.

Globally, more than 100,000 people have downloaded the app (which is only available for Android phones) and registered with the network, including about 12,000 users in California. So far, the smartphone network is only gathering earthquake data—almost overwhelming the Berkeley seismological lab’s ability to sift through it.

“It’s crazy,” says Jennifer Strauss, the lab’s external relations lead. “There’s a lot of data coming in.”

The plan is that eventually, that data will be instantly turned around into actual quake warnings on your phone, seconds before the shaking starts.

“I’m really hopeful that five years from now, everyone will have earthquake early warning,” says Allen. “I think that’s a realistic goal. I would like it to be sooner. If the funding comes in faster it’ll be sooner.

Allen says money is the biggest obstacle. The federal government recently kicked in two rounds of funding that will help. Building out the system and keeping it running will cost tens of millions of dollars. The original state law authorizing the system contained no funding.

As for the next “holy grail” of seismic science—actually predicting when individual earthquakes will occur—most scientists agree that is still decades away.

Explore earthquake basics with new explainers from KQED and the California Academy of Sciences.

In the mid-19th century, there were as many as 10,000 brown bears in California — a greater population density than in Alaska today. The last documented sighting was in 1924. Now all that remains is the profile of the powerful bruin on the state flag.

No doubt some people will freak out at the prospect of the Lower 48’s biggest predator haunting the woods. But there are good reasons to return the animal to the Bear Flag Republic. Grizzly reintroduction would have clear ecological benefits. And it would have cultural benefits, too, by prompting us to rethink what nature is “good for.”

California is already crawling with predators. We have mountain lions in Los Angeles — where the Internet-famous “Hollywood Lion” stalks mule dear in Griffith Park — and one in San Francisco, too, where a cougar was captured on a security camera last summer.

The reappearance of mountain lions is an example of what conservation biologists call “rewilding.” In some instances, like that of the mountain lion, the wild animals find their way back on their own. In other cases, state or federal agencies have made determined efforts to bring back animals hunted and trapped to oblivion or pushed out by development.

The reintroduction of gray wolves to the Northern Rockies in the late 1990s is the best-known rewilding story. Twenty-one years after wolves were returned to Yellowstone National Park, there is an established population and some have migrated as far as Northern California, where, in August, a pack was confirmed in the state for the first time since 1924.

The return of the gray wolf to the rural West has been hugely controversial, marked by serial court cases, Capitol Hill maneuverings, vigilantism (in the form of poaching animals listed as endangered) and fiery debates that have scorched western communities. For many ranchers and hunters, the return of the wolf represents a dangerous surrendering of human control over the landscape. To supporters of rewilding, the success of the wolf is a kind of ecological restorative justice.

Bringing back grizzly bears to California is the latest rewilding idea. Last year, the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based conservation group, filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to consider reintroducing the grizzly in the Southwest and California. The agency denied the request, and now the organization plans to petition the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to bring back the bear.

“Grizzly bears were a common part of the California landscape and had been there for eons, and we wiped them out,” says Noah Greenwald, the endangered species coordinator at the Center for Biological Diversity. “By bringing them back we would be righting a historic wrong.”

Returning grizzlies to California would have real ecological advantages. Wildlife biologists have shown that restoring large predators to a landscape can have consequences that ripple across an ecosystem. This phenomenon is called “trophic cascades.” Imagine: a wolf reappears on the scene. Suddenly, the elk and deer have to be alert. Their newly cautious behavior gives aspen and willow a chance to thrive, which provide fresh habitat for beaver and songbirds. David Mattson, a lecturer at the Yale School of Forestry, says grizzlies would have “demonstrable ecosystem effects” were they reintroduced to California. Brown bears would assist with seed dispersal and soil aeration as they tear into the ground hunting for gophers and voles. Coastal grizzly would move nutrients upstream and inland via their consumption of spawning salmon.

But state wildlife officials are cool on the idea. “Grizzly bears traditionally would roam oak woodlands and even beaches and eat whale carcasses and whatnot,” says California Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Jordan Traverso. “So you’d be introducing them in places where people are now, not the typical black bear habitat. So we are not supportive of that proposal, even a little bit.”

Still, the idea is not as outlandish as it might sound.

A study of Europe published in the journal Science found that large carnivores are successfully sharing landscapes with people. Some 17,000 brown bears (Ursus arctos, essentially the same species as the North American grizzly) live in 22 European countries, making the bear the most abundant large carnivore on the continent. Europe is also home to 12,000 wolves, twice as many as in the United States, despite the continent having twice the population density. The study found that large carnivores “have shown an ability to recolonize areas with moderate human densities if they are allowed, and to persist in highly human-dominated landscapes and in the proximity of urban areas.”

Martin Lewis, a geographer at Stanford who has studied the politics of rewilding, says the problem with grizzly reintroduction is not a lack of suitable habitat. But, he says, “there are questions about coexistence. People can learn to live with them, but there will be trade-offs. There will be encounters, and some of those encounters will be negative.”

Let’s face it. Wolves eat cattle and prized game like elk. Grizzlies sometimes attack backpackers. Mountain lions sometimes go after hikers. Acknowledging such dangers is not being callous toward human life, but recognizes that the lives of these animals, and the role they play in the environment, also matter.

The risks are worth it. The presence of grizzlies and mountain lions and wolves are reminders that nature in its wilder states is not here to serve us, and that wild animals and wild places have their own interests. Can we cohabitate with wild animals though they might pose a threat to us?

Such coexistence will require us to rethink some of our assumptions about wild nature. Do we want nature to always conform neatly to human desires — a garden to be tended by our hands, or an idyllic retreat imagined by the Romantics? Or are we willing to live with a nature that is wilder? A nature that is uncontrolled, unpredictable, and possibly dangerous. One where you could end up as lunch if you’re not careful.

To accept the return of large carnivores will demand a selflessness to which, as a species, we are unaccustomed. It will also require a measure of courage. After all, it’s easy to love a nature that just looks pretty. It’s a much more difficult task to live with a nature that can be threatening — a wolf pack in the pasture, a lion on the prowl under streetlights and, yes, grizzlies in the woods.

Jason Mark is the author of “Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man” and editor of Sierra magazine.

Featured art by Laura Cunningham, author of A State of Change and co-founder of the desert conservation group Basin and Range Watch.

Who says the grizzly bear has vanished from California? On the contrary, it’s nearly ubiquitous in the Golden State—on everything from the state flag to T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Of course, the bears themselves have been absent for nearly a century.

Before the Gold Rush, the best guess is there were probably 10,000 grizzlies in California. But in the space of about 75 years, they were trapped and hunted into extinction. Though no one can say with certainty when the last bear expired, by 1930 even unconfirmed sightings had winked out.

“They can be brought back,” insists Noah Greenwald, conservation director for the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. In 2014, it petitioned the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to expand areas for grizzly recovery into California.

That petition was denied. The agency said it didn’t want to divert resources from its efforts to rebuild the brown bears’ populations elsewhere in the Lower 48. Currently wildlife officials estimate there are no more than 2,000 grizzlies spread across Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Washington (with a much larger population in Alaska).

“Certainly in Yellowstone National Park, which gets more than three million visitors a year, grizzly bears are a tremendous draw there and a real source of joy,” observes Greenwald.

And yes, they can be a source of danger. A female grizzly with cubs killed a hiker in Yellowstone last year—but bear attacks are exceedingly rare. So the Center for Biological Diversity is betting on taking its case directly to the public. It’s gathered about 13,000 signatures on an online petition, and is about to launch the next phase of a web and social media campaign under the banner, “Bring Back the Bear.”

“I do think it’s something—with some education and with further study—something that people could and will rally around,” Greenwald speculates.

Hollywood hasn’t exactly advanced the cause, doing for Grizzlies more or less what “Jaws” did for sharks—last year’s Oscar nominee for best picture being only the latest example. Leonardo DiCaprio’s violent encounter with a mama grizzly was likely the most talked-about scene in “The Revenant.”

There Are Bears—And Then There Are Grizzlies

Right now, the only encounter possible with a native California grizzly, is at the California Museum in Sacramento, where Monarch, the bear that served as a model for the state flag, stands stuffed behind glass walls.

Clearly some prefer their grizzlies that way and they’re not alone. State wildlife officials are, to say the least, skeptical of the bid to reestablish the bears in California.

Listen to the Story:


Yellowstone grizzly recording by Bernie Krause/Wild Sanctuary

Marc Kenyon is a bear biologist; a big, bearded bear of a guy himself, Kenyon heads the state’s Human-Wildlife Conflict Program.

“That grizzly would turn this thing into a tin can in a hurry,” says Kenyon, showing me the trailers his agency uses to trap and transport injured or wayward black bears.

Kenyon’s agency puts the number of black bears in California at somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000—but clearly black bears are not grizzlies, which can easily be twice the size, a thousand pounds or more. And even though the bears would be placed in remote areas, there’s no guarantee they would stay put.

“One thing I can tell you about bears is that bears roam,” says Kenyon. “And they’ll roam a long distance.”

The Center for Biological Diversity has identified nearly 8,000 square miles of potential habitat in the remote Sierra Nevada, with a smaller area near the Oregon border. Kenyon’s not sure it’s enough.

“I can only imagine how far a grizzly bear in California might roam,” he says, “in search for food, in search for mates, in search for its own habitat, its own territory.”

Source: Center for Biological Diversity (Teodros Hailye/KQED)

Even advocates, like nature journalist Jason Mark, concede that this wouldn’t be an easy lift.

“I don’t want to at all underestimate the challenge of something ambitious like this,” says Mark, author of “Satellites in the High Country: Searching for the Wild in the Age of Man.”

He says the hardest part might be “changing the way that we think of what wild nature is good for.”

“Is it good, for us, just as a place to go recreate and watch and look at, or does wild nature have some intrinsic rights of its own?” he asks. “And in that sense the bear does have a right to return to what was once its homeland.”

Mark says the large carnivores could have ecological benefits, aiding in seed dispersal and balancing populations of smaller prey animals.

But Kenyon isn’t convinced that it’s the best thing for species like California’s declining deer population, or even for the bears themselves at this point.

“For a stable grizzly bear population, we’re looking in excess of 200 animals—that can find each other,” says Kenyon. By comparison, the Yellowstone grizzly population numbers about 700.

“If you get down to a density where the animals can’t find each other, you’re lessening the chance for them to breed,” he says, “and then you’re lessening the chance for the species to survive in the long term.”

Grizzlies … in Oakland?

Which brings us to the Oakland Zoo, where construction crews have started work on its California Trail project. The exhibit will feature the state’s iconic critters from big cats to condors, and the centerpiece will be a three-acre grizzly “habitat.”

“You know, unfortunately they tell sort of the sad history of humans and wildlife here in California,” says Colleen Kinzley, who directs animal care, conservation and research at the zoo.

“We want people to be aware of that,” she says. “I mean, despite the fact that the grizzly bear is on our flag and our state seal, many people don’t know that grizzlies existed in California and are really a part of this habitat and environment.”

The zoo is preparing for its first bears-in-residence sometime next year. And Kinzley says the best way to “bring back the bears” in the wild would be to let them come back on their own.

“You can’t just plop a large predator into a location and say, ‘Alright, everybody just get along,'” she says. “The bear will lose if you don’t have complete buy-in from all the different constituencies.”

It would be a long shot, to be sure, but it’s theoretically possible that, say, the tiny population of grizzlies in the Washington Cascades might work their way down into California, much as wolves have drifted down from Oregon.

“It would be a long way off but I think probably easier than getting everyone to agree to bring bears from somewhere and put them in California,” says Kinzley. Kenyon agrees.

In any case, it’s likely that for a long time to come, the only way to see live grizzlies in California will be with a big fence around them.

Featured art by Laura Cunningham, author of A State of Change and co-founder of the desert conservation group Basin and Range Watch.

Urban residents of California beat their goal for saving water in March by turning off their sprinklers when the rain fell.

The State Water Board says cities and businesses cut water use by more than 24 percent compared to the same month in 2013. Board chair Felicia Marcus called it “a stunningly welcome number” after a six-month run of declining conservation. The 24.3 percent mark doubled efforts in February, when much of California was dry, with record-high temperatures.

March is the first month under newly relaxed conservation requirements. Cities are now expected to use at least 20 percent less water, a break from the previous order of 25 percent.

A bright spot continues to be water use per capita by urban Californians, who have throttled back from an average of more than 100 gallons per person, per day in August, to 66 in March, with people in some locations using significantly less.

Officials say it’s an indication that Californians have stuck to some of the water habits they formed during the state’s most punishing drought on record.

An especially soggy March helped depress water use — especially outdoor irrigation — but rainfall in California tapers off dramatically at just this time of year; there’s unlikely to be any “May miracle.”

“We need to keep conserving,” warns Marcus.  “We may not need the same levels of conservation as last year, but we still need to keep all we can in our reservoirs and groundwater basins in case this winter is just a punctuation mark in a longer drought.”

California’s “frozen reservoir” is melting fast.

Unusually high temperatures this spring have acted like a blow-drier on accumulated winter snows, despite a healthy boost during the stormy month of March.

One thing is undeniable: the Sierra snowpack is a lot more robust than the previous winter’s, which was off-the-charts ugly. Around the first of May, water content (which is what really matters) of the snowpack stood at 60 percent of the long-term average. That’s not great news unless you compare it to May 1 of last year, when it was 1 percent. That’s not a typo.

On April 1,  when hydrologists generally reckon the snowpack to be at its peak for the season, it stood at 85 percent of the average for that date.

This spring the most intense period of melting is running about two to three weeks earlier than normal, according to Nina Oakley, assistant research climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno.

“Typically the steepest declines are in late April to early May,” she says. But this year, Oakley says monthly average temperatures in the early spring were running 2 to 5 degrees above normal at the higher Sierra elevations.

Plus there’s a “snowball” effect, or what Oakley calls a “positive feedback,” in which some snow melt leads to more.

“As soon as you start melting enough snow that you expose trees, rocks, soil underneath,” she explains, “these features are not reflective like the snow and so they’ll start to absorb solar energy and facilitate further snow melt.”

The good news is that a lot of this early melt is ending up in reservoirs. The bad news with an early melt is that as consumers start drawing down those reservoirs, there’s less runoff to replace it during the peak growing season, when it’s most needed.

“We try to capture every drop we can,” says Doug Carlson of the state’s Department of Water Resources.

The big Northern California reservoirs are filling fast. The two biggest, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, are both at more than 90 percent of capacity.

But Carlson concedes that significant volumes of water are let go for flood control and to push back encroaching salt water and maintain river ecosystems.

“It’s a big juggling act, frankly, to manage the water resource here,” says Carlson. “We think we’re capturing a good deal of the snow melt right now.”

An early melt can also have environmental impacts, especially on fish. If the cold water pulses come too early, lower flows and higher water temperatures later in the season can make it difficult or impossible for some species to survive.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack is a classic example of what scientists call “high inter-annual variability.” Translation: whatever’s happening this year, don’t count on it next year — or ever.

Given the whipsaw nature of things, it could reasonably be considered a dicey proposition that California depends on the snowpack for about a third of its water supply. With the climate changing, it’s becoming even dicier. Scientists expect the snowpack to dwindle in coming decades, but within that general decline, higher highs and lower lows are likely.

It can’t get much lower than the winter of 2014-15, the nadir of California’s current drought. On May 1, 2015, water content of the Sierra snowpack stood at 1 percent of the long-term average — virtually nil. Using tree ring evidence, scientists estimated that to be the skimpiest snowpack in 500 years. This spring’s snowpack, while considerably more robust, was still below average. The official stance is that California remains in drought.

Use the interactive tools below to trace the highs and lows of the snowpack over time.

Visualization by Geoff McGhee, David Kroodsma, Erik Hazzard and Mitch Tobin for EcoWest, a collaboration of The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University and Sea to Snow.

California water officials say they’re moving to scrap the system of state-imposed water conservation quotas put in place during the current drought.

The system resulted in a cumulative saving among urban consumers of about 24 percent compared to the benchmark year of 2013.

At the same time, Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that makes permanent some of the most basic prohibitions in place since 2014, such as the ban on hosing down sidewalks and watering lawns to the extent that it creates runoff or within 48 hours of any measurable rainfall.

“Now we know that drought is becoming a regular occurrence and water conservation must be a part of our everyday life,” Brown said in a statement.

The rule barring restaurants from serving water unsolicited is being lifted, however. Officials say that was always intended as more of an “awareness” measure than a way to achieve major water savings.

But rather than having state officials assign mandatory saving targets to local water agencies, the State Water Resources Control Board will vote next week on a plan to put conservation more firmly back in local hands. Some local water agencies had pushed back hard on the imposed-quota system, calling it unduly restrictive and tone-deaf to local conditions.

“What the staff is proposing here isn’t a walk in the park,” board chair Felicia Marcus told reporters in a Monday conference call. Instead, Marcus called the new plan “much more tailored to circumstances we’re in now.”

Those circumstances would be the much improved water conditions from a year ago, when reservoirs were scraping bottom and the Sierra snowpack was at an estimated 500-year low.

With conditions remaining stubbornly dry in Southern California, Mark Cowin, who heads the state’s Department of Water Resources says officials are “a long way from calling off the statewide drought.”

So why change the game plan now? Officials called the new proposal “a more nuanced approach” to keeping a lid on excess water use.

Under the staff proposal unveiled on Monday, water suppliers would set local conservation targets based on their own three-year supply projections. Those projections would be modeled on a recurrence of both the drought conditions and demand levels from 2013-14.

Under the governor’s executive order, local agencies will still be required to report monthly water use to the state. Marcus says the state will still be empowered to step in and “second-guess” local agencies, possibly imposing restrictions on those that don’t comply with the proposed system.

Also on Monday, the California senate passed a bill from Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo) that would force water agencies to institute either surcharges or fines for excessive water use during a declared drought emergency. SB 814 now goes to the assembly.

On Wednesday California revised its drought rules, ending a year of local conservation quotas handed down by the state.

The State Water Resources Control Board voted to abandon its formula — decried by some local agencies as a “one-size-fits-all” model — which required each water district to curb water use by a certain state-mandated percentage and instead, let districts determine how much they should save.

Some see the switch as premature.

“I think it’s really important that we make sure to convey a consistent message that we are still in an emergency drought situation,” said Tracy Quinn, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Quinn and a handful of others argued against the change at Wednesday’s State Water Board hearing in Sacramento. Nearly two-thirds of the state is still classified by federal climatologists as being in “severe drought.”

But board chair Felicia Marcus says the state is not giving up its oversight role.

“We also get to watch,” Marcus told KQED. “It’s kind of a trust-but-verify situation that I think is worth considering.”

It won’t be a free-for-all. Under the new system, local suppliers need to apply prescribed hypothetical “stress tests.” Their savings targets will then be based on anticipated water shortfalls over the next three years — assuming the next three mimic the last three in terms of water demand and drought conditions.

“We’re making a shift that recognizes the supply conditions have improved,” said the water board’s Max Gomberg. “We’re setting up something that is going to be in place, really, for the future.”

The board says it’s partially reacting to more than 150 comments it received. In a last-minute reversal, the board did decide to keep the ban on restaurants serving water unless customers ask for it.

Top-Down System Saved Water

As much as local water officials resisted them, the emergency system of state-imposed quotas largely worked.

Over Governor Jerry Brown’s declared nine-month drought emergency, from June 2015 to February 2016, urban consumers saved 1.19 million acre-feet of water, compared to 2013. That’s enough to supply nearly 6 million people for a year, and fell just short of the governor’s 25 percent goal.

Among the state’s 411 largest water districts, 199 or just under half, met or exceeded their cumulative goals.

Standouts included Cambria Community Services District, Menlo Park, Dublin San Ramon Services, Soquel Creek Water District and Santa Barbara — each saved 20 percent more water than state regulators required.

There were also stories of redemption among local utilities that initially fell short, but eventually saved more than required.

The ways in which they turned things around are widely disparate and relied on a combination of deliberate tactics and good fortune.

In the agricultural communities served by the Rainbow Municipal Water District in San Diego County, many farmers switched from growing avocados to less water-intensive grapes. They also got lucky. San Diego County saw baseball games rained out by freak downpours last summer.

“The majority of the rain came from the remnants of Hurricane Dolores and suppressed demands for all of our customers,” says District analyst Cynthia Gray.

For Atwater, a San Joaquin Valley town of about 29,000, the solution came in the form of community volunteers. Two police volunteers and one designated “water cop” issued warnings and notices while they were out on their routes.

The water cop was none other than Atwater’s former mayor Greg Olzack.

The retiree donned a uniform and a city badge while driving around in a police vehicle four to five times a week looking for water wasters, often starting before dawn.

“People ask why I get up so early and I say, ‘it’s like fishing, that’s when they are biting,'” says Olzack. Atwater banned watering altogether on certain days and between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on others.

Olzack and his crew issued 850 citations from July to October, for over-watering or watering on the wrong day.

“You don’t like to fine people but unfortunately that’s how you get people’s attention.”

Larger water agencies such as Santa Cruz and the Oakland-based East Bay Municipal Utilities District used similar strategies, but began lifting water restrictions as soon as the state announced its intent to revise the rules last week. Water agencies face a fundamental conflict in conservation; their revenues are based on how much water they sell. The more their customers conserve, the harder it hits the utilities’ bottom line.

Even State Mandates Didn’t Work Everywhere

Some of the “least improved” water districts — those that met their targets in June and then slipped off the wagon — did so despite issuing thousands of fines.

In December, Vacaville issued 1,950 penalties for residents that used more than their assigned residential allocations, and added an extra 25 percent excessive consumption penalty to the customers’ bills.

The city started off on the right foot, exceeding its goal by nearly 4 percent in June, but by February its cumulative savings had dropped to 13 percent below its goal.

Vacaville Utilities manager Ramiro Jimenez says limiting lawn watering in the summer was easier for residents than trying to squeeze water use in winter.

“By then you’re relying more on indoor savings,” says Jimenez. “When you ask people to use less indoors, like not washing dishes or clothes as often, it becomes tough for people to make that shift — it becomes a lifestyle change.”

Calexico, a border town in Imperial County that lost its conservation momentum over time, blames its shortage on reporting inaccuracies. Officials there say it switched to “smart” meters with software that wasn’t fully operational, and so had to estimate water use.

Neither of these “least improved” districts used tougher measures like public shaming or prohibiting new swimming pools from using potable water.

Questioned by KQED, several districts whose conservation performance declined the most over time cited extenuating circumstances.

Despite the mixed results, it’s clear that the system of enforceable state-imposed water restrictions resulted in substantial savings over all. It’s equally unclear what lifting these requirements will mean for long-term conservation in drought-prone California.

This month officials will formally open the new, expanded Panama Canal. The “inauguration,” as it’s being called, marks the largest modification of the canal since it opened in 1914.

The expansion took nearly a decade to complete and required moving 130 million cubic meters of earth (one cubic meter will fill a pickup truck) — all to make bigger locks to move today’s enormous cargo ships between oceans.

When French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps first envisioned it in the 19th century, the original dream was for a sea-level canal with no need for locks to move ships up and down the steep topography of the isthmus. The French — and the Americans, who completed the job — abandoned that notion when faced with the enormous earthmoving and engineering it would require.

But after the advent of the atom bomb in 1945, scientists were trolling for “peaceful” uses for atomic energy and it struck them that A-bombs might make awesome earthmovers.

“We can move with such explosions great amounts of earth, very cheaply,” Teller boasted in an early promotional film for what came to be known as Project Plowshare. It was managed out of the Lawrence Radiation Lab  (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).

Earthmoving in the Atomic Age

Proposed routes for a canal to be excavated with nuclear explosives:

The Hungarian-born Teller was a key figure in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. For his role in developing the next generation of thermonuclear explosives, or hydrogen bombs, Teller was given the moniker, “Father of the H-bomb.”  But in the 1950s, he turned his attention to finding a role for his creation in civil engineering. And what better megaproject than a whole new canal that would take the biggest ships imaginable?

“We needn’t take a coastline as it happens to be,” he ventured. “We can make a harbor, a water-level canal, even across the American isthmus.”

“Scientists, politicians, they all dreamed,” recalls Tom Ramos, a physicist and unofficial historian at Livermore Lab. “The first image was this new source of energy that would solve much of the energy problems of the country, and apparently the world.”

Ramos says the first notion of how nuclear power plants might work was not with a reactor, but with repeated underground detonations that would create steam to run turbines.

That idea never took hold — probably for the best — but, applied to earthmoving, nukes seemed like a natural. Uses were hatched for mining and what is now commonly called “fracking,” breaking up underground rock formations to free up gas and oil reserves.

Nukes would carve a new harbor out of the rugged Alaskan coastline. Project Carryall would deploy a string of 22 atomic bombs to carve a road cut through the Bristol Mountains in California’s Mojave Desert, shortening the path for the new Interstate 40 and the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe rail line. (There’s a remarkably detailed review of the plan on the Atomic Skies history blog.)

But a sea-level canal was the ultimate megaproject. Teller’s team considered a couple of dozen routes through Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua. They would blast all the way down to sea level with “250 devices in 27 separate detonations of from one to eleven megatons,” according to one scenario. At the low end of that range, each detonation would be more than 60 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And they’d do it, they figured, for (in today’s dollars) less than it took to build the new San Francisco Bay Bridge.

If the Plowshare visionaries had their way, thermonuclear devices would be busy everywhere, as one promotional film described it, “reshaping the geography of the land in dimensions never before possible, to meet the needs of man.”

Listen to elements that have never been heard before now, from Craig Miller’s 1999 interview with Edward Teller.

“It was still very much a spectacle,” explains Scott Kirsch, a University of North Carolina geologist and author of “Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving.”

“There’s a kind of excitement, even as there’s a fear of apocalypse, there’s a kind of technological spectacle associated with the bomb.”

He means that literally. In the early 1950s, Las Vegas residents would gather in their yards to watch distant mushroom clouds from detonations at the Nevada Test Site, 90 miles north of town.

Teller, who died in 2003, went to his grave convinced that nuclear geo-engineering was a missed opportunity.

“Fear,” he cited as the reason in an interview with me at his Stanford office, shortly before his death in 2003. “Unjustified fear of radiation.”

Others begged to differ.

“It was biological insanity,” the late John Gofman told me in a 1995 interview. Gofman (1918-2007) was associate director for biology and medicine at the lab in the early 1960s.

“They’d say, ‘Look, there’ll be some radioactivity here but not to worry. It’s below the threshold of any harm.'” Gofman, who was in many respects Teller’s polar opposite, devoted much of his career to proving that there was no known “safe” threshold for radiation exposure.

At the height of the Atomic Age frenzy, it wasn’t always easy to speak out against the projects, many of which would defy common sense by today’s standards.

“Common sense was a little bit in short supply at the high levels,” Gofman recalled. “Washington was backing it. The five atomic energy commissioners were backing it. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and Senate and House were backing it. This whole crazy idea was getting good backing at all levels of government and science.”

But why? Gofman and others saw Plowshare essentially as PR for the nuclear weapons program.

“It was absolutely thought of as a way to legitimize the weapons program,” he told me.

If that’s the case, it was a strategy that might have backfired.

“Plowshare tests were blasting radioactive dirt over Utah, Nevada and nearby places,” Kirsch recalls. “So, in other words, these were giving the weapons program a bad name.”

Filtered through current-day sensibilities, the whole idea seems like a dusty relic of the early Atomic Age — but as late as 1973, a major conference in Las Vegas was devoted to ideas for nuclear excavation. In the 1990s, Chinese government scientists were mulling over the prospects for major civil engineering projects.

But will anyone actually pull the trigger on nuclear excavation?

“In the U.S., my answer would be no,” says Kirsch, although as writer Ed Regis noted in a 2015 post for Slate:

“Elon Musk, of the rocket firm SpaceX, has recently proposed nuking the Martian polar ice caps to warm up the Red Planet—a Project Plowshare for the new millennium.”

“It would be great to know what other countries are doing,” Kirsch ventures. “I think most would evaluate the hazards as far greater than the possible virtues.”

But not Edward Teller, who as far as can be known, died with his vision intact.

“Everything that can be done will be done, tenfold over,” Teller declared in our Stanford interview. My worry is it will not be done in the United States.”

Indeed, most of Project Plowshare never got off the drawing board.

They did accomplish numerous tests, or “shots,” at one point blasting out a crater in southern Nevada, a quarter-mile across and deep enough to bury a 30-story building. But by the early 1960’s, growing public anxiety over radiation and nuclear test ban treaties made it virtually impossible to gather the data needed to continue.

The Soviet Union dabbled in it — once to snuff out a runaway gas well fire — but for practical purposes, the dream of atomic earthmoving remains just that.

It’s been nearly two years since the South Napa Earthquake rocked the North Bay region — but the revelations keep on coming.

Scientists say data from earth movements that occurred after the major shaking stopped show helter-skelter patterns unlike anything they’ve seen before.

Field teams noted early on that the Napa quake of August 24, 2014 did an unusual amount of damage for a magnitude-6 temblor — and that the event was followed by significant “afterslip,” when the ground keeps moving (albeit a lot more slowly)  after the main event.

What surprised geologists analyzing data in the months to follow was the variety of afterslip, which was greater in some places than others, and moved faster in some spots.

“We found this fault shows multiple slip behaviors at different times,” says Gareth Funning, a geophysicist at UC Riverside and lead author on the study. “We’d not seen anything quite like it before.”

Funning’s team had the good luck to be nearby when the quake struck, and had just taken ground measurements in the valley weeks before. It gave him a unique perspective on ground movement before, during and after the major shaking. One notable finding was that in some spots, there was more ground movement after the quake than during it.

“It can carry on breaking things after the earthquake is done,” says Funning, which might have implications for responders, as well as property owners.

“People might assume that they’re out of the woods for damage, but not necessarily true.” Adding to the confusion is the complex nature of the Napa Valley geology. The 2014 quake broke along various strands of a fault system, as opposed to a single fault line. Funning’s team identified seven places with different types of slip. The complete study is published online in the journal, American Geophysical Letters.

Funning says they also observed a “tentative connection” between the surface geology and the earth movement observed. Areas of bedrock seemed to show more movement during the quake, while places with “softer” geology such as sedimentary material, showed more afterslip.

“So perhaps we could start to look for connections between surface geology and fault behavior,” says Funning. “It’s an intriguing thing that we’re going to follow up on.”

Funning says the 2014 event revealed the West Napa fault to be a “creeping,” fault, one that keeps moving between earthquakes.  The Hayward and Calaveras faults, which run up and down the East Bay, have similar characteristics.

Geologists also look for signs that an earthquake has added stress to surrounding faults, or “loaded” them. Funning says the evidence thus far suggests that the the Napa quake added minor loading to the nearby Rogers Creek fault, slightly increasing the odds of an event on that fault, which slashes diagonally across the North Bay.

Advocates for re-establishing grizzly bears in California are taking their case directly to the public.

Having been rebuffed by wildlife agencies, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity is launching a media campaign to rally support for the idea.

“The mission, really, is to create some awareness around this issue,” says Ronny Northrop, executive creative director at Gyro, a San Francisco ad agency that hatched the pro bono campaign on behalf of the center, aimed at “restoring a sense of wild, maintaining a sense of wild.”

The centerpiece of the campaign is a visually  arresting California “bear flag,” without the bear.

“This is California and here we have this flag with a bear on it that doesn’t even exist and most people don’t know it.”

“This whole tragic irony around this is something that people are gonna respond to,” Northrup speculates. “Like ‘Whoa, I had no idea that the bear on our flag is extinct; that’s pretty messed up.'”

Gyro has produced a series of videos featuring other “iconic” California figures vying for space on the flag: the “yoga mom,” the real estate developer, the cosmetic surgeon, each making their case for why they should be there instead of the grizzly.

“They’re all just sort of out there and a little bit arrogant, and they’re Californians, you know, like, ‘Hey, it should be me. Of course it should be me, right?’ A little bit narcissistic maybe.”

The CBD has gathered a little more than 12,000 names with an online petition that appears to include many supporters from outside California. Its staff is hoping the petition will help convince wildlife agencies to reconsider, though the drive appears to have lost some momentum.

“I do think it’s something that with some education, and with further study, something that people could and would rally around,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for CBD.

Nonstarter?

Among those who are aware of the idea, opinion seems deeply divided. While CBD’s appeal thus far has been aimed at federal wildlife officials, state wildlife managers would doubtless need to be on board to make it a reality.

“We are not entertaining the idea of reintroducing grizzly bears to the state,” wrote CDFW spokesperson Jordan Traverso in declining to participate in a KQED Forum program on the topic. “The idea has been a nonstarter for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.”

Although there are anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 black bears in the state, officials aren’t convinced that California could support a sustainable population of the much larger grizzlies, and are concerned about potential impacts on other indigenous species and, of course, conflicts with people.

I asked Northrop if he thinks his campaign can make a dent in the fear or indifference among Californians, which could be obstacles as daunting as any science-based objections.

“You know what? I’m a dreamer; I certainly hope so. I’ve got a 4-year-old daughter and man, I hope she’s able to experience all she can when it comes to nature and wildlife and the way it’s meant to be here on Earth.”

Read Craig Miller’s story on the debate over bringing grizzlies back to California, and Jason Mark’s opinion piece on the topic.

Lake Tahoe is showing some severe impacts from the changing climate.

Indicators released Thursday in the annual “State of the Lake” report packed a few surprises, even for scientists.

For one thing, the lake has been warming faster than ever recorded. In 2015 the lake’s average temperature rose 0.48 degrees Fahrenheit — and over the last four years, the rise was 15 times faster than the lake’s historic warming rate.

“That came as a surprise to me,” says Geoffrey Schladow, a UC Davis freshwater scientist and lead author of the report.

Given the enormous volume of Lake Tahoe, Schladow is struck by how quickly it warmed. Schladow says if you took the full volume of water in Tahoe and spread it out over California, it would cover the state in 15 inches of water.

“That’s a lot of water,” he notes. “We’re not saying that it’s going to keep increasing at that rate, but the fact that it can change so quickly is disturbing.”

Even more disturbing to scientists is how all this warming has affected the lake’s ability to mix its own waters, a natural process that is thermally driven. The warm winters have stunted that process, meaning that oxygen-rich surface water is not making it to the lake bottom, depriving fish and other life forms of oxygen. Scientists routinely measure how deep the mixing occurs — the deeper, the healthier for the lake — and last year’s level was 262 feet, the most shallow ever recorded. Tahoe’s maximum depth is more than 1600 feet.

“What we’re seeing now is that the climate and the weather are starting to affect the lake more directly,” says Schladow, who notes that Tahoe is only a mirror held up to the rest of the state; if this critical mixing process is shutting down in Tahoe, it’s doubtless happening in other lakes around the West.

For years, scientists have warned that the Sierra would gradually see more rain and less snow because of the warming climate, a trend that has potentially dire consequences for California’s water supply. But the trend of the last few years has been stunning. The report’s authors noted that during the winter of 2014-2015, just 6.5 percent of precipitation at the lake level fell in the form of snow. Decades ago it was more like a 50-50 mix.

It appears that California water suppliers have by and large abandoned mandatory water conservation — and it may be showing up in the latest monthly statistics on water saving in the state.

According to the State Water Resources Control Board, urban customers reduced water use by 21.5 percent in June, compared to the benchmark year of 2013. That’s down from 27.5 percent savings a year ago, when statewide mandatory controls were in place. Savings were down even more compared to May of this year.

After months of state-imposed compulsory conservation levels, local water agencies are now setting their own marks — and setting the bar extremely low.  While state regulators continue to review the numbers reported to them by local agencies, KQED has surveyed major water suppliers in the Bay Area and Sacramento region and most of them have set their compulsory savings targets at (drum roll, please)…zero.

California Water Agencies’ New Conservation Standards

After state-imposed quotas expired in May, local agencies have come up with their own numbers: overwhelmingly zero. (Largest Bay Area suppliers shown.)

‘Round’ Numbers

Northern California’s largest urban supplier, the East Bay Municipal Utility District, had been required to cut water use 16 percent compared to the benchmark year of 2013. Its new self-determined target: zero. The Contra Costa Water District likewise moved its goal posts from 25 percent to zero. The same goes for the City of Sacramento. The Marin Municipal Water District ratcheted back from 20 to zero,  Alameda County from 16 to zero, and well, you get the idea.

Even in Southern California, where severe drought conditions persist, the story is largely the same. The state’s biggest retailer of urban water, the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power had been operating under a 14 percent conservation order. Its new tier: zero.

So far, state regulators have stopped short of saying publicly that this isn’t what they had in mind when they decided to stop assigning water savings “tiers” and allow local officials to come up with their own numbers — especially since state water managers continue to emphasize that the drought is not over, and may well worsen in the months to come.

“Some relaxation of conservation in light of the relief we got last winter and other supply conditions is appropriate and expected,” said water board chair Felicia Marcus in a statement.  “Abandonment of conservation is not.”

Pushback From Locals

Water managers have long argued that they are in a better position than Sacramento to know the level of water cutbacks that local conditions demand. And state regulators largely agree, which is why they’ve handed control back to the locals.

The State Water Board prescribed the formula used to calculate the local quotas. Agencies were to assume that the next three years resembled the last three in terms of drought and water demand. Any shortage (in percentage terms) at the end of those three imaginary years was to become the new local conservation mark. Water Board officials have taken pains to point out that they will closely monitor the new system and that if it does not work to their satisfaction, they are prepared to return to a system of state-assigned quotas.

Many local water managers say they remain committed to conservation with voluntary measures. Jennifer Burke, deputy director of water and engineering resources with the City of Santa Rosa, tells KQED that the city is “committed to water conservation and will continue to offer our many programs, tips and tools as well as continuing to implement water waste prohibitions,” an apparent reference to the handful of water restrictions made permanent by the governor earlier this year. But Santa Rosa has also reset its compulsory conservation mark to zero.

The state-imposed “tiers,” as they were called, never went down well with local water suppliers, as selling less water meant a direct hit to their revenues. It’s estimated that over the past year, local water agencies collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars under the state-imposed cutbacks.

Those suppliers might have to rethink their revenue models given the long-term trends.  A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California shows that overall water use is declining even as the state’s population grows.

Millions of drones could take to the skies over the next decade, doing everything from search-and-rescue to pizza delivery.

But with so many small flying robots whirring through the air, they’ll need a system to manage so much traffic safely and efficiently.

“Ultimately, because of the huge economic pull that’s out there, there’s gonna be a lot of drones transiting the airspace,” predicts Brian Wynne, who heads the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. His group is projecting that drones will be an $86 billion industry within ten years.

“There’s airspace available to do that,” he says, “but we have to have the ability to run those very complex operations. That’s where Silicon Valley comes in. That’s where NASA comes in.”

Those “complex operations” are being worked out by engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, which is developing an air traffic system for smaller, low-altitude drones. They’re now to the point of demonstrating coordinated flight plans at multiple test sites across the country.

“You could think of it as the very first instantiation of what the system may be like across the U.S. and across many partners,” NASA project lead Tom Prevot says of field tests going on now.

Standing in a dimly lit room at Ames before a wall of large screens, Prevot shows off real-time maps illustrating flight details at sites from Alaska to Nevada to Virginia. Partners helping test the system include the likes of Intel, Amazon and Google’s Project Wing.

Wynne calls it the “perfect example of how government and industry collaborate together — quite literally to design the next wave of aviation.”

One challenge is to help drones “de-conflict” overlapping flight paths, in order to avoid midair collisions. This could lay the groundwork for a future where autonomous drones talk to each other directly.

The current phase is known as Technical Capability Level 2. Like Level 1, which took place in 2015, it centers on less risky rural locations, where if a drone happens to fall it will likely land in a field rather than a busy intersection. Subsequent stages will graduate to more challenging populated places.

“It sets the stage to start to figure out when we go into suburban environments and when we interact with manned aviation.” explains technical lead Joey Rios. “So this is one of those key steps forward for us to build that full system.”

That full system presents some unprecedented challenges.

“When you’re talking about the larger (manned) aircraft that are flying in the airspace now, you’re talking on the order of thousands per day,” explains Rios. “But if these door-to-door deliveries are a thing, if public safety operations are a habitual thing, and people are always taking pictures of things, you could have hundreds of thousands (of drone flights) per day, or more. So we need a system that can handle that volume and is probably not modeled on exactly how today’s air-traffic control system is built.”

NASA is set to spend another three years developing the technology before handing it off to the Federal Aviation Administration. It will ultimately fall to the FAA to regulate the oncoming blizzard of small commercial drones.

KQED Science Editor Craig Miller contributed to this report.

1. It’s Probably Not the One You’re Thinking Of

Nope, not Shasta Lake. That’s California’s largest surface reservoir, which is currently bulging with more than 4 million acre-feet of water (Californians use about 40 million acre-feet in a year).

You’re not likely to find the biggest “reservoir” on a map—but you might be standing on it. It’s underground, in the vast aquifers that lie beneath sections of the state, the Central Valley in particular.

“I don’t think anybody’s tried to calculate the complete volume,” says Claudia Faunt, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in San Diego.

But we know it’s big.

People sometimes refer to the Sierra snowpack as the state’s largest reservoir. Even though it supplies about a third of the water that Californians use annually, it’s a “drop in the bucket” compared to the state’s mother lode of groundwater. If you imagine a single bucket of water representing all the water contained in Sierra snowpack in a typical year (granted, this year is hardly typical), you would need 60-to-70 buckets to visualize all the water beneath our feet, contained in various groundwater basins.

2. It’s Big, But There’s a Catch

“It’s huge,” says Thomas Harter, a hydrologist and groundwater specialist at UC Davis. “But that doesn’t mean that we can extract everything that’s down there.”

Nor would that be an especially fruitful exercise, since much of the water that’s down there is not fit for drinking or even irrigation of crops in some cases. And the deeper the aquifer, the more expensive it is to pump it—hundreds or even thousands of feet—to the surface.

“Part of it is so deep that it just gets more and more expensive to extract the water,” says Faunt.

California’s Stressed Aquifers
Zoom in and click on individual wells to see how far the water table has receded in that area between Fall 2011 to Fall 2016.


SOURCE: CA Dept. of Water Resources

3. It’s in Trouble

A team of researchers at UCLA recently estimated that during the recent five-year drought, groundwater was pumped out of the Central Valley at twice the rate of the previous drought (2007-09), eventually taking out enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest man-made reservoir.

But even in “normal” years, scientists say many farmers and water agencies around the state have been pumping groundwater at an unsustainable rate.

“Basically we’re taxing the system beyond what it can take,” warns Faunt. “We’ve been using water at a rate much higher than water’s being recharged to these areas, so you’ve got a loss of storage.”

Over the course of the drought, at least 3,500 wells went dry and Harter reckons that most of those remain dry, despite the record-setting precipitation over the winter. According to state regulators, there are still communities receiving emergency supplies of bottled water after local wells dried up.

4. It’s Not a Lost Cause

Scientists and water planners think the state’s aquifers can be made sustainable, but it will take time and commitment.

New strategies are taking hold to recharge groundwater basins. Since we reported on one of the earliest pilot projects in 2013, farm recharge programs have gained substantial momentum, flooding fields with some of the high river flows in years like this, and using those fields as recharge basins, allowing the water to sink in and replenish aquifers below. In Orange County, water managers recycle urban water to recharge local aquifers.

In 2014, state legislators passed the landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which will, for the first time, require users of groundwater to track and report how much they’re using, and devise plans to do so in a way that doesn’t further deplete supplies. Prior to SGMA, it was essentially open season on groundwater.

As NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti has put it, “It’s not unlike your having several straws in a glass and everyone drinking at the same time and no one really watching the level.”

The first management plans are due in 2020, and full implementation of the law — which could ultimately place some restrictions on pumping — won’t happen for another decade at least.

But as the law’s sponsor, Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis) told Water Deeply, “When you’re digging yourself into a hole, the first solution is to stop digging.”

The importance of the mountain snowpack to California’s water supply is legendary. But according to a new study, its impact reaches far below the Earth’s surface to the state’s tectonic foundations. And that impact can be measured and to some degree, even predicted.

Scientists at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory have made some new revelations about the link between snowfall and earthquakes in California. But it’s not the snow itself that triggers earthquakes, it’s what happens when that snow melts away. The result is a bit like compressing a spring and then letting it go.

The Weight of Water

“The redistribution of water on the Earth’s surface in the form of snow, groundwater, surface water ultimately adds stresses to the Earth,” explains UC Berkeley geophysicist Roland Bürgmann. “It flexes the Earth ever so slightly. And that flexing changes stresses everywhere on the Earth, including on faults.”

Animation shows how stress on California’s seismic faults changes as the mass of mountain snow and surface water is redistributed by season.

To measure these stresses, Bürgmann and graduate student Chris Johnson used GPS and other data to track tiny movements (we’re talking fractions of an inch) in the state’s topography, then mapped them against nine years of seismic activity throughout California. What they found, among other things, was not one general effect but a whole panoply.

“It depends on the fault,” says Bürgmann. For example, on California’s most infamous fault, the San Andreas, the snow load in the Sierra “adds compression” to the fault, in effect squeezing together the tectonic plates on either side, so the fault is “slightly less likely to go.” But in the spring, when that snow melts and its weight is redistributed into rivers, reservoirs and soils below, that loading is reversed and the fault is somewhat more likely to slip before the snow returns.

“The emphasis is always on the ‘little bit,” cautions Bürgmann. “We’re not saying that the San Andreas only has earthquakes in the fall.” A little event in 1906 that you might’ve heard of would seem to confirm that, though Bürgmann says over time, the San Andreas has been a bit more active during the autumn months.

No ‘Quake Season’

Nor are the researchers declaring an “earthquake season” for California.

“It’s not necessarily that every fault is experiencing the same stress that would encourage it to slip at the same time,” says Johnson.

“Every fault has its own orientation,” adds Bürgmann. “It’s at a different stage in its earthquake cycle, and so one really has to consider all those details to make the connection.”

The scientists’ study period did not include the effects of this year’s record-setting snow volume, but did include the large snowpack from 2011.

Bürgmann and Johnson say the data from their work illustrates how stressed California’s faults are, so that very small changes in stress can pull the trigger on them.

As Johnson puts it, “It is advancing the clock on these different faults.” The authors say the work could eventually be factored into forecasting models, to make attempts at earthquake prediction less vague. But connecting single events to shifts in water weight is not in their sights.

In 1975, barely six years after Oroville Dam was finished and its huge reservoir flooded with water, a series of quakes culminating with a magnitude 5.7 temblor shook the area. Did the weight of more than 4 million acre-feet of water and its subsequent rapid release from the reservoir tip the tectonic scale enough to cause the quake? It’s been on the list of suspects for years, but the answer is still a definite “maybe.” The same goes for the 2014 South Napa earthquake, according to Bürgmann, which struck in late summer, as one might expect from the stress model.

“For any individual earthquake, we never know.”

Bürgmann and Johnson’s study was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Drivers of electric cars are quick to tell you how much they love never having to stop at a gas station.

But they still have to stop and plug in. What if you could completely cut loose electric cars to roam this great land, recharging their batteries on the fly?

That’s been a dream of automotive engineers for years, and scientists at Stanford University say it just took a leap forward in one of their labs.

Electrical engineer Shanhui Fan and graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit say they’ve broken through a major technical barrier on the road to what engineers call “dynamic charging.”

Dynamic Charging Gets a Boost

“Generally speaking,” says Fan, with his gift for understatement, “I think what we have done here is really to show that you could charge a moving object efficiently.”

Wireless charging of stationary objects is already becoming ho-hum, finding uses from cell phones to shuttle buses. Ford recently rolled out a wireless system that EV owners can install in their own garages.

Charging moving objects is a lot trickier. Previous work in the United Kingdom and South Korea has used magnetic induction systems, in which a charged coil creates a magnetic field that jiggles electrons in a nearby companion coil, causing it to create its own electric current. It’s what happens when you set your electric toothbrush onto the charging base. But the technology only works over very short distances and breaks down quickly as the two coils move apart.

By adding some off-the-shelf components, Fan and Assawaworrarit have found a way to amplify the voltage and current and keep the two coils humming, even as one of them moves through the field. Their magnetic resonance approach has been called “ingenious,” and while they’ve so far demonstrated it only at very low power—enough to keep two LEDs lit for a few feet—Fan suggests that a scaled-up version could be the answer to charge-as-you-go electric driving. Their work was published in June, in the journal Nature.

Always a Catch

Here’s the catch: it’s not just the cars that would need the necessary hardware. Arrays of charging pads would have to be embedded in roadways to create charging lanes. As dynamic charging cars passed over the pads, they would pick up the magnetic field and charge on the fly. The pads would have to be close enough together to create a continuous field for cars to pass through.

“The technology is not going to be as efficient as just plugging in your car,” says Gil Tal, who directs research at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.

For one thing, cars are parked a lot more than they’re moving—on average 23 hours a day. And much of that time is overnight, the ideal time to plug in while there’s slack demand for electricity and thus, less pressure on the electric grid. Roadway pads would presumably be charged 24-7 off the grid or by nearby solar panels.

“You will have losses,” says Tal. Even with the best of technology, you’ll lose quite a bit of energy.”

The EV age got a significant boost lately by a string of announcements from major players. With great fanfare, Tesla delivered its first car designed for the mass market, the Model 3. Volvo stunned many observers with its plan to build only EVs or hybrids within a couple of model years, and France says it plans to ban internal combustion engines all together.

Along with this momentum, automakers are racing to relieve the “range anxiety” (concern over how far EVs can go on a single charge) that has suppressed EV sales with advances in battery technology and rapid re-charging.

“If I have a car that has 300 miles of range and I only have to pull over every 4-5 hours for 15 minutes, do I really need dynamic wireless charging?” asks Mark Duvall, who heads technology utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto.

Duvall says range anxiety is well on its way to being quelled without dynamic charging.

“A little bit of infrastructure can facilitate essentially continuous travel by electric vehicles,” he says.

Big Bucks

Dynamic charging would be hugely expensive to implement. Two years ago, the British government earmarked $800 million just for early testing of dynamic charging, before even taking it on the road. Laying down a single lane of freeway in California can run about $1 million per mile, with no frills like charging grids.

“Highways are expensive enough as they are,” says Duvall, “which is why many of them are not in the condition that we would like them to be in.”

But neither Duvall nor Tal are dismissing the potential of dynamic wireless charging in general. Both agree with Fan that the potential uses abound, including many that no one has yet thought of. Wearable and embedded medical devices could be recharged as patients go about their daily activities—or it could just turn that line at Starbucks into productive time for your phone.

“I can see many reasons why you would want to improve technology around wireless power transfer, even if you never used it for vehicles,” says Duvall.