Sept. 29--California's 2015 water year set many records, but most of the records spelled bad news for a state locked in the fourth year of drought.
On Tuesday, two days before the water world's calendar turns, state agencies and advocacy groups began looking toward 2016 with renewed hope for a strong El Nihat might finally bring significant rainfall to California.
"This is a real sobering period we've gone through," said Department of Water Resources spokesman Doug Carlson. "We hope that a year from now we're looking back at water year 2016 with a great deal of satisfaction to see the drought come down to a halt or at least slowed down in its intensity."
"Pray for rain," he added.
Water watchers keep track of precipitation, temperature and other conditions using Oct. 1 as a starting point. That day is considered the beginning of the wet season. The year stretching from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 is considered the "water year."
The 2015 water year was one for the record books.
On April 1, the day Gov. Jerry Brown announced historic water conservation measures, the Sierra snowpack's water content measured just 5% of normal, obliterating the previous record low of 25%.
Snowpack is important because when it melts, it refills the state's reservoirs during the hot summer months.
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"Gov. Brown standing in a bare meadow where there should have been five feet of snow was a telling symbol of what's special of this year of the drought," said Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California. "This year was more extraordinary [in terms of snowpack] than the last."
The 2015 water year also saw the highest average temperature in 120 years of record-keeping. According to the California Climate Tracker, the state's average temperature was 58.4 degrees -- more than three degrees warmer than average and almost a full degree warmer than the previous high in 1995-96.
"The character of this drought has been to have record and near-record temperatures," said state climatologist Michael L. Anderson. "This drought is definitely warmer than its 20th-century counterparts. And when you run into that, you have a higher demand for water and a limited supply, so it creates greater stress."
As water has warmed, fish such as the winter-run Chinook salmon have died en masse. The delta smelt have been imperiled for years.
"In some ways, the drought really began to bite this year," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank based in Oakland. "We've sort of been muddling through the first three years, but this year we really started to see ecosystem damages."
In recent months, three of the largest and most destructive wildfires in California history have raged across the state. At last check, Cal Fire officials estimated that about 5,500 fires have burned more than 300,000 acres across the state since Jan. 1 -- almost triple the average acreage burned over the last five years.
Fire officials say the lack of water has caused brush and other vegetation to reach "critically low" levels of "fuel moisture." That means that when sparks and burning embers get tossed into the air and land they are more likely to ignite new fires.
"Four years of such parched conditions have predisposed the vegetation to be explosive, and that's not exaggerating -- its explosive," said Ken Pimlott, Cal Fire's director. "The [calendar] year hasn't ended yet, and it's comparing right up there with some of the most devastating fire seasons on record."
Meanwhile, new reports have shown that many of the state's groundwater basins are critically depleted and some land in Central California is sinking at an accelerated pace.
Officials also said that about 1,900 wells had gone dry, leaving people in some of California's most disadvantaged communities without water.
Adding to the dire conditions, California quietly suffered from a fourth consecutive year of below-average precipitation. The state's reservoirs also remain well below average levels. As of midnight Monday, Lake Oroville, a critical reservoir that feeds the State Water Project, was only 30% full -- less than half its historical average.
"It's unsettling from the standpoint that you're having observations [in 2015] that don't always match up with the historic record, so using the historic record as context for what you're seeing makes it a little more challenging," Anderson said. "It makes it even harder to anticipate what comes next."
But there were bright spots, too.
Californians largely responded to Brown's call to slash urban water use by 25%. The state has collectively met and exceeded that target each month since the requirements took affect in June.
To reduce their use, thousands of Californians claimed rebates to rip out their thirsty lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant landscaping. Southern California alone exhausted about $340 million in rebate money quickly.
Public polling has shown that the drought has become a top concern for Californians, and a majority would be willing to pay for water infrastructure or other drought fixes.
"The public response to hitting the conservation targets was really quite impressive," said Lester Snow, director of the California Water Foundation. "That shows a level of engagement on water that we just normally don't see."
Whether the state's water-saving ways will continue is unclear, and are complicated by the prospect of what one expert has called a "Godzilla" El Ni
Strong El Nibring a subtropical jet stream that ferries wet storms over the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America northward, putting a train of storms over Southern California and the southern United States.
The National Weather Service has predicted a 95% chance of El Niontinuing throughout the winter.
But experts warned that mega-storms will flood roads, create mudslides and generally wreak havoc on Southern California.
And since the region is still largely unequipped to capture huge amounts of storm water, large, damaging rain events would do relatively little to end the drought.
Experts have warned not to count on El Nir even one year of above average rainfall to solve the state's water problem quickly.
"We're in more than a one-year hole," Gleick said. "This is the year we started to change things, and whether we continue partially depends on mother nature and how we respond.
"If we have a wet year we could go back to business as usual," he added, "and that would be a big mistake since business as usual doesn't work any longer."
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