Friday March 17, 2023
NBC Bay Area —
Even after nearly two months of wet weather along the West Coast, California has still not fully escaped its years-long drought, weather and climate experts with the state’s Department of Water Resources said this week.
The state’s water storage and snowpack levels have risen sharply since the end of December as a result of more than a dozen atmospheric rivers that have doused the state in January and March as well as the heavy snowfall across the state in February.
State Climatologist Michael Anderson said Wednesday that California has seen “pretty fantastic” drought-busting weather patterns so far in 2023, which have also helped saturate the state’s previously arid groundwater basins.
However, he said, the state is still partly at the mercy of conditions in the Colorado River Basin, which provides water to some 40 million people in Southern California as well as Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.