Engaging Data has a nice data display for this. It more clearly shows the capacities of the individual reservoirs [1]. They also have displays for the current snowpack [2] and rainfall [3]. After a very slow start, this year's precipitation is finally up to the median.
If you want to understand why California has so much trouble with water, pay special attention to the rainfall totals web page. It shows how many years got N inches of rainfall. Best year was more than 200% of median rainfall, and worst was 40% of median. And it is historically common to have many sub-median years in a row.
This hides one major component, however: ground compaction. When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts, and the capacity is never regained, which means you now have far less capacity in the aquifer for a particular area.
It will only get worse in overdeveloped areas or areas that overdraw their water for agriculture and industry.
"Further inland in California’s Central Valley, excessive pumping of groundwater for agriculture has caused the land to sink significantly. Since the 1920s, sections of the San Joaquin Valley have sunk by as much as 8.5 meters (28 feet). Groundwater pumping becomes even more problematic during droughts, exacerbating subsidence problems. Data from 2015 showed some spots subsided at rates as high as 600 millimeters (2 feet) per year."
Also damns slowly fill with silt over their finite lifespans. When the orriville dam is past it’s useful life, there is little alternative for central CA.
interesting view - as environmentalist around here are promoting initiatives to reduce use of concrete etc to allow more water in the ground -> that would be useless then ?
> When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts, and the capacity is never regained, which means you now have far less capacity in the aquifer for a particular area.
Now that i think it over, if you're not suppose to use it (the capacity below water table) due to compaction, that capacity is useless, so it doesn't matter if it disappers ?
It is not because you remove the water that you immediately compact. This takes time, so, you are probably going to lose more capacity if you do not refill within 5 years or if you refill every year.
I have no ideas about the scale, both in space and time.
Porous concrete has been useless. It clogs up eventually and loss it's ability to transport water.
The groundwater disappearing is a problem if you build up ag/industry/development based on the groundwater availability and then lose that source of water with no economical alternative.
It also seems crazy in certain areas, such as where the ground freezes in winter. All those little pores will freeze and break, turning the entire concrete mass to powder.
People hate unneeded work, so in the old days, if there were large boulders of granite in fields to clear, they'd hand drill holes in the top. Then, over a few winters, the freezing water would break the granite.
It's less of a problem than you would think as water that's liquid will drain through it and snow etc doesn't expand. You generally get pot holes because water pools in an a layer and then expands and contracts, but if it's draining that's not a problem.
Also, air entrainment has long been (~1930's) used as a means of freeze thaw resistance because it allows some deformation without cracking. Porous concrete has similar flexibility.
There are technologies that have different advantages and weaknesses vs. porous concrete. For instance, TruGrid holds fine gravel in place using tiles made of recycled water bottles. It's ADA approved for wheelchairs, and certified compatible with stiletto heels (by someone that must have an absolutely bizarre certification facility).
The compaction associated with installing permeable concrete is in the top 10's of inches of ground at most. Typical aquifiers are 10's-100's of feet below ground surface, so that doesn't matter.
California has particularly terrible drainage. Although engineers and installers around here are correct when they point out that soil heaving is a real issue (everything is clay, and so it expands and contracts a lot), it's mostly gross incompetence from what I've seen.
The contracts we ended up signing with geological engineers, etc, all limited liability to the price of the contract. So we paid $10K to a useless engineering firm to get obviously broken designs approved by the local planning office and environmental review (the plan reviewers are also completely incompetent from what I've seen -- think "water likes to flow uphill", or "I dropped out of grade school because I don't understand trigonometry" incompetent).
The broken plans ended up costing us $150K, and now I'm good with a shovel and earth-moving equipment and material relocation logistics. It's probably illegal for us to touch the drainage without a permit, but we also are apparently legally liable if we don't maintain / repair it.
It's not just us: Tons of roads wash out, basements flood, suburban yards end up with sinkholes that could swallow a car, drains clog, roads flood, bridges wash away, etc, etc. This sort of thing happens on a widespread basis every few years.
Anyway, tl;dr: If you want to reduce the environmental impact of construction and drainage in California, mandate legal liability that includes damages + replacement / upgrade costs to a working system, and spread that liability across the engineering firms and planning commissions that are approving these plans.
If it were as simple as water removed can never return, then all ground would eventually become impermeable over time as periodic dry seasons incrementally do their work.
Some aquifers are as he says and others aren't. Some aquifers readily refill when it rains while others cannot, or cannot on human-relevant timescales.
Water linger is what is needed. There are ways to accomplish that. But it means undoing decades of making that not happen. Then once you figure out the water linger problem you have to figure out the soil fungus/plants/animals. So it does not just all run off again. Probably the worst thing we did was decimating the beaver population. That takes time to fix.
if groundwater lowering categorically caused a lower capacity for water that was impossible to reverse in every case, the earth would not have any aquifers at all. We can see this is untrue. It's therefore not likely there's no nuance.
Historically, who was draining those aquifers? It seems that pumping large amounts of water out of the earth is a relatively new thing. On planet timescales anyway.
Historically artesian wells, possibly during earthquakes as well you'd see water leaving an aquifer. The volume on the other hand seems totally inconsistent with what we pump on a daily basis from something like the Ogallala
I absolutely do not know the process for aquifer formation, however:
* the ice age left immense amounts of water behind, including hidden under ground ice bergs that took thousands of years to thaw
* if you had a lake in a place, that sort of saturation would lead to an aquifer I think. Then the lake disappears, but the saturated ground remains, hidden from the air and sun, until drained
Yeah I have no idea what they are referencing either. Ice sheets are called as such because they sit on top of the continents. Apparently North America was actually compressed downwards by the last sheet and is still basically rising back up.
Maybe they are thinking of permafrost or something? I'm not sure how deep that gets at the Northern reaches like Svalbard. But most of the land on earth is not permafrost for a long time now.
The California Water Project was intended to have enough capacity for three years of drought. It was when we started having 4-6 years of low rain that it got bad.
I don't know if they still have it, but at one time the California Department of Water Resources' control center had a sign "California Drought Control Center" on one side, and "California Flood Control Center" on the other. The sign was turned over every few years as appropriate.
This obliquely hits the explanation for why climate change will be a disaster for modern society.
Virtually all infrastructure has been built for local environmental conditions that, on average and with the exception of highly localized catastrophes, has been relatively unchanged through human experience. Now that is changing for everyone everywhere all at once. It's very easy to say "just build aquifers for 4-6 year droughts!" But this also has to be done with the just-as-easy-to-declare "just build storm surge walls", "just build the grid to be resilient to ice storms", "just grow different crops" etc.
This is going to take a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of resources (resources we probably don't have). We're also not really sure what the new normal will settle on, so new infrastructure could still prove inappropriate 2 decades down the line.
Recent human experience. Local climates were never in steady-states during human experience. California is a great example: during the industrial age it's been in an unusually wet period.
> Drought is intrinsic to the natural climate of California.[6] Across the Californian region, paleoclimate records dating back more than 1,000 years show more significant dry periods compared to the latest century. Ancient data reveals two mega-droughts that endured for well over a century, one lasting 220 years and one for 140 years. The 20th century was fraught with numerous droughts, yet this era could be considered relatively "wet" compared against an expansive 3,500 year history. In recent times, droughts lasting five to 10 years have raised concern, but are not anomalous. Rather, decade long droughts are an ordinary feature of the state's innate climate. Based on scientific evidence, dry spells as severe as the mega-droughts detected from the distant past are likely to recur, even in absence of anthropogenic climate change.
Not only dry periods, CA periodically has extreme wet periods that come once every century or so. In the 1860s the Central Valley turned into a giant lake, 300 miles long. Sacramento was completely under water. To this day the original Sacramento is 15 feet underground, the new built on top of the old after the great flood.
"I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain.
The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away.
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
We largely do have the resources, it's just that they're all playing video games, trying to get people to click ads, fleecing people out of their retirement money, doing drugs, posting on Reddit, watching TV, posting on Instagram, managing their brands' social media accounts, lobbying against more infrastructure, etc.
You're right that it's going to be massively disruptive to how we currently live our lives. A good chunk of us are going to need to find new jobs. IMHO the trigger will be when money becomes worthless, when we see the first billionaire die from a climate-related natural disaster and money can't save them. But I'd question our inability to save ourselves. In the Great Depression we built huge swaths of infrastructure in very short time periods - the Hoover Dam was constructed in just 5 years, the Golden Gate Bridge in 4. That was with 90-year-old technology; when we pull out the stops, we can do even better today. The Oroville Dam spillway was reconstructed over 6 months [1], while Foster City just built a new levee around the entire city in 3 years [2].
So much rain flowed straight into the sea that I will have no sympathy for anyone who complains about the drought when the next one hits.
California should have built more reservoirs to accommodate for longer droughts if 4-6 year is the new normal.
What seems like missed opportunity is mainly just south central valley agricultural propaganda. Apologies if I unload too much information here.
"Additional surface water storage, while having some economic benefit, is not as valuable as expanding key conveyance and recharge facilities. Aqueducts, canals, and interties that allow users to buy and sell water, especially between the agricultural and urban sectors, are the most valuable. " [1]
and
"As Delta exports are restricted, scarcity increases for agricultural users south of the Delta. Some of these costs would be offset by revenues from sales of water by senior water-rights holders to urban areas and higher-valued agriculture." [1]
ie: Water limitations at the delta effect how many almonds or pistachios we can produce and sell (or rather, the agricultural monopolies).
As I've highlighted in another comment, locations for another surface-level reservoir are scarce, and offer diminishing returns at best. "No reservoir can reliably deliver more than the reservoir’s average annual inflow (minus evaporation)[...]"
Most easy, cheap, and effective reservoir locations in California already have reservoirs." [2]
Our best tools are to: conserve water, protect our ground water aquifers (that actually make up the majority of our water supply), and hope we can hold/reverse climate change enough to keep temperatures low enough to generate snow pack every year in the mountains.
Aren't the issues of monopoly and water usage separate? More water would equal more economic activity which is good. But all the profits would accrue to one place because there's a monopoly, which is bad.
It seems like California is mismanaging on two fronts, one it should build more water storage to stimulate more economic growth, two it should break its monopolies so the benefits of that growth are more widely spread.
The (perhaps overly kind) reading is that OP thinks they should complain about California politicians who refuse to build more water infrastructure instead of complaining about drought.
The real problem agriculture has in California is that we have moved from heavy labor crops to things like Almonds that are heavily automated. Sadly, Almonds take a ton of water, so really the answer is to grow less Almonds.
But they don't want to hear that. They are also against funding these insanely expensive reservoirs of course too.
There's nothing wrong with growing almonds! Almond are valuable. It's alfalfa that's the problem. You can't grow almonds in the Midwest, but alfalfa grows fine. Just stopping alfalfa buys at least fifty years of predicted snow and rainfall reduction, for a crop that's just shipping to Saudi Arabia.
This is yet more bullshit California politics, part of why I left. It’s the same thing as Californians eternally blaming the long-dead Ronald Reagan for the problem of visible homelessness in their state.
Bring up that CA finally has plenty of water this year and they bitch about how actually it’s “too much” after a decade of bitching about “not enough.” It’s like they never heard the Goldilocks fairy tale or simply cannot relate what comes out of their mouth to the most basic critical thinking. Really, it’s not enough of an unpredictable and uncontrollable weather pattern for ten years and when that finally lets up it’s TOO MUCH. And it’s the farmers’ (they vote R) fault too!!1 Okay, California.
They have been actively working to mitigate just that for the last few decades at least. It is challenging and expensive work despite how easy it is to ask why we don't just collect all the rain that hits the land. Last year with the historic rainfall, LA county captured enough rain to meet the drinking water needs of 5 million people.
I'm not sure that the existing reservoirs are being managed optimally. As I recall, perhaps incorrectly, there are mandatory outflows for maintaining endangered smelt populations.
Not just ag land, but the California Water Project and Aqueduct, which feeds both Los Angeles and SoCal agriculture.
One of the major themes of Mark Reisner's book A Dangerous Place, which explores the scenario of a major Hayward Fault earthquake (that's the fault running along the San Francisco Bay's eastern shoreline) would be massive levee failures in the California Delta, and the knock-on consequences of massive salt-water intrusion on not only the Delta but farming and southern California as well.
The state has been releasing water in order to leave room for this winter’s snowfall.
We still have a lot of risk: the snowpack is part of our reservoir system, but warm summers have been melting the snow faster than usual. So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity.
> So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity.
How likely is this to happen? As far as I understand it, the US, and specifically California, has mostly regulated away it's ability to build any additional infrastructure. This may be overstated, hard to know as someone not living there.
> The project was certified by Governor Gavin Newsom in November 2023 under SB 149, a new law that provides certified projects streamlining benefits regarding legal challenges filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.[10][11] Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 with final design expected to be done in 2025 and be completed in 2030.
If it was not for discretionary exemptions to regulations, it would likely not have been possible. It's also quite dystopian to have regulations that can be overwritten by executive discretion. This is a recipe for corruption.
Law-permitted discretionary exemptions are reasonable in extremis which I think California’s water situation is, a couple of good years notwithstanding. People can find any number of ways to be corrupt as well all know.
Since you’re not in the US: California’s woes are vastly overstated. There are indeed real problems, but the government here is remarkably clean — shockingly so by the standards of East Coast States (original colonies) and in general California has a good track record of dealing with many major issues. We can all list unresolved longstanding problems we hate (my list is pretty much prisons, schools, housing NIMBYs and prop 13) but as a general rule they do ok.
Also this is non partisan. Geographically CA is mostly “MAGA red” but corruption etc is pretty thinly and uniformly spread around.
It’s hard to visualize vast quantities, but for people who live in the rural American west, an acre-foot is relatively easy to grasp. People know the land area of property they live on or farm in acres, and they can imagine what it would look like if that area was flooded with a foot of water.
If a farmer knows they have a 100 acre field and they know that their corn requires 2 feet of water per year, they know that they must acquire 200 acre-feet of water.
If the state’s rivers are overflowing and the farmer wants to flood their field and help to recharge the groundwater [1], acre-feet is the unit they’d use to calculate how much water they can accept (depending on how many feet tall their levees are).
California is 100 million acres and there are 10 million acres of crops.
Acre-foot is not an obsolete unit - it is frequently used in American when measuring large amounts of water for agriculture and reservoirs. It's about 325,000 gallons.
An acre-foot is evidently supposed to represent the expected water usage of a suburban house. 1.5 million acre-feet is 1.85 trillion liters, or the volume of 740,000 olympic swimming pools. None of those numbers really help me except that it's about 1.5 million households worth of water.
There's also ground compaction. People don't understand that when the underground water table drops, the ground compacts and you never get that capacity back, ever.
It is not like that. While ground compaction can happen in some circumstances, it takes quite some time to happen and its likelihood depends a lot on the type of soil.
He’s referring to subsidence. The buoyant weight of soil is less than the dry weight, so it does compact when the groundwater is drawn down lower than ever before (as it has been for decades, getting lower and lower). It’s an irreversible process.
The California Aqueduct is currently dealing with problems relating to subsidence - what used to be a smooth downhill grade is now slumping in the middle. The capacity of the canal is reduced and without intervention it would eventually be unable to flow uphill.
> California decided building things was bad, invented CEQA, and now here we are.
Mmm, that might be glossing over the part where they decided to build farms in the desert, with water from other states, to grow animal feed and food for other countries.
I'd argue it's probably not the population or CEQA causing shortages, but our overzealous ag policies coupled with use-it-or-lose-it water laws and byzantine inter-state water compacts. Oh, and cyclical sustained draughts.
Residential households aren't really the ones using most of the water. It's ag (and other industries). Building new reservoirs and dams affect a lot of working communities too, not just silly things like nature. Meanwhile much of California's ag output is excessive, with a lot of it going to exports or waste, and much of the rest targeting unnecessarily high levels of animal production.
Our farm output is like < 1% of our national GDP, but they use 30-40% of our water. We already make way more food than Americans need. If we keep ramping up ag production and keep building reservoirs, we'd just keep propping up an over-producing industry that mostly serves the interests of huge ag conglomerates, not Californians or Americans.
But this doesn't really fix anything. It's a very expensive band-aid. If there's not enough water in the upstream rivers and there are periods of sustained drought years, you can't just overfill an infinite number of reservoirs and still have enough water to last through subsequent years. Evaporation and other losses will deplete them naturally over time unless we pump enough of it underground or into other closed systems. And dams/reservoirs do have huge environment and community impacts that we really shouldn't just hand-wave away for the sake of the farm and meat lobbies.
This is the sort of really difficult problem that (IMHO) the federal government should step in to tackle at the national level, possibly via a Constitutional amendment. The clouds and rivers don't care about our state borders, and our really antiquated water rights frankly need to be eminent domained away from private interests and state-level fights and managed at a national level... but there is no easy way to get there from here, nor an easy way to avoid that fight =/ It's probably as difficult a political fight, or perhaps even more so, than peace in the Middle East... there's nobody we can bomb.
Building more dams is, as far as I can tell, neither necessary nor sufficient for resolving California's continued water crises. But I'm not an expert. My undergrad was in environmental science, where we lightly studied these topics, but not to any great depth. Offhandedly, it seems to me "more dams will solve California's countless water crises" is a rather extraordinary claim that requires some evidence. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though, if you have any additional details to share?
> I'm not convinced that this is a problem of insufficient storage (reservoir capacity)... do you have a cite (or at least a explanation) for why you believe that?
As a Californian, I know we have water crises more years than we don't. I'm a little stunned that people who don't know that throw around confident beliefs about California water management.
That doesn't seem to address the reservoir capacity question. It also notes that Lake Mead was very low (meaning there was insufficient rainfall, rather than insufficient storage).
I agree that California has water crises often... that wasn't something we disagreed on at all. And for what it's worth, I lived there for a couple decades, through many of the droughts.
I just don't think what you presume to be obvious and self evident (more dams will fix it) is necessarily true.
Since the 1970s per-capita domestic water use in California has declined so dramatically that new reservoirs aren't really needed for population centers. Example: EBMUD service area population grew 10% in the last 15 years but water deliveries fell 25%. The reservoirs and pipelines EBMUD already owns are sufficient for a population of 4 million but we only have 1.4 million residents.
That's only true if those 10 additional reservoirs are capturing water that the original 10 were not capturing. You could also end up with 20 1/4 full reservoirs.
The underlying problem in California is that not enough rain is falling within the state's watersheds for everything people want to use it for. Adding more capacity won't double the amount of water available.
Adding more storage can help if it means less dumping at peaks or if they capture water in other areas. But reservoirs have been running half full for years before the heavy rains this year and last. The root of the problem is not enough water for too much demand.
Hmm... even though they're all above historical averages right now, it looks like they're only about 79% full (mean of the capacities in the graphic). Unless they get sustained high precipitation over several years, the reservoirs might not reach capacity.
If they build more reservoirs but the rains don't keep up, a lot of it would still be lost to evaporation.
80% of all water used by humans in California are for agriculture. The pistachios and alfalfa are what use up all the water, not the generic population.
The population of CA, meaning the number of people who need water for drinking and growing food, has doubled in the past decades. Meanwhile, the state budget has ballooned to six times what it was circa 1985.
Choosing to starve because you just picked the last fruit off the low-hanging branch is plainly irrational, especially since reservoirs are an aquaculture investment, not a burn pit to shovel money into. The smart business decision is to build wherever gives the best balance between comparative cost and usefulness, regardless of absolute cost, and then make whatever the cost is back through selling the rescued water. If the ruling class is generally right that the state is still a desirable abd growing place to live outside of the regular desperation for more water then this is about as close to a guaranteed return as these things get.
Of course it is. Usage naturally stops growing during a supply shortage concomitant with a contraction of the original primary consumer. If your goal is prosperity, consumers tightening their belts is a negative signal, not a positive coincidence.
... or it's a demonstration of reduced waste and/or shift to less water-intensive agricultural uses. Is there a particular reason to believe it's one vs the other?
Is emergency rationing and price hikes an indicator of a shortage or of "reduced waste"? As for "less water-intensive agricultural uses", again, shifting to a less desired product to rescue your margins after your costs increase is a step backward for the prosperity of your customers, not forward.
California has always had weather volatility. Some years the reservoirs are empty by June, other years there is so much water most of it is released into the sea because the reservoirs can only retain a small part of it.
We should be building more reservoirs. Back to back wet winters are not the norm. Need a lot of buffer for the next time it doesn't rain as much for 5+ years.
San Jose is trying to 10x the size of the reservoirs but an Indian tribe is claiming that land is “sacred”. I guess it’s like the Navajo Indians claiming the moon as sacred and asking NASA to not land on it.
You could additionally store more water in the soil. Dig some basic water harvesting earthworks in the mountains, maybe plant a few select species and within a few years all the mountain streams will flow for much longer during a drought. As a bonus it will leave a lot more trees alive when the wildfires come through. Of course this is impossible in California, even if it didn't violate environmental laws (it does), a project like this would be sued and propositioned to oblivion.
Where I live, the population has grown since the 1970s, but the reservoir capacity has gone down (sedimentation). Doesn't seem politically feasible to build a reservoir anymore.
So pretty clear the environmental damage caused by a new one is not worth it. Rather, conservation of our groundwater and reducing wasteful agricultural practices in the south central valley would be our best bet at ensuring drought-time water security.
Interesting concept, I haven't seen that before. Whether it would work here (I live in the Sierras) though, my guess would be probably not for two reasons. One is temperature, as you mention. Our higher mountain lakes do freeze over, but I'd expect you need colder temperatures than what we see on average for something like that. Running water typically doesn't freeze here, even during the coldest part of the Winter. The second reason is scale. Only a portion of the water that falls on the Sierras lands up high, and much of that is captured in snowpack , which is a pretty key piece of the water storage puzzle already.
These things melt more slowly than a snow pack, making them useful for preserving water over a full growing season.
I suspect there are ways to enhance the effect of letting water freeze in a column in layers. Do people make artificial snow up there? If so they can probably leverage similar techniques to make these things.
Which every sane scientist and individual predicted a few years ago. But were shouted down by climate change zealots as blasphemy. I remember climate change lunatics used to post pictures of 'bare' mt rainier. Now, not so much...
If you want to understand why California has so much trouble with water, pay special attention to the rainfall totals web page. It shows how many years got N inches of rainfall. Best year was more than 200% of median rainfall, and worst was 40% of median. And it is historically common to have many sub-median years in a row.
[1] https://engaging-data.com/ca-reservoir-dashboard/
[2] https://engaging-data.com/california-snowpack-levels/
[3] https://engaging-data.com/california-precipitation-levels/