Wednesday November 13, 2024
SJV Water via Maven’s Notebook —
A projected increase in the kind of “atmospheric river” type storms California experienced in the historic 2023 water year could be disastrous for the San Joaquin Valley – or its salvation.
The difference depends on whether locals can adapt to the coming changes by absorbing the intermittent deluges and storing that water for later dry times.
Right now, systems in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River watersheds were built to collect and move precipitation that first lands as snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains and then slowly melts through springtime.
A warmer climate, though, will mean more rain than snow, filling rivers and reservoirs more quickly, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, during a webinar hosted by the Sustainable Conservation.
“This is particularly true in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River watersheds,” he said.