VIDEO – Hell or High Water: How Stockton Can Prepare for the Risk of Flood Disaster? – River Partners/Restore the Delta 1/26/23
Panelists included local and state government entities, community leaders, flood experts and esteemed researchers. Topics included: Stockton’s Growing Flood Risk, Flood Risk from the Community Perspective, The View from the Capitol, and Planning and Building Solutions.
Storms dumped snow on California. Will it bring a reprieve from the drought? – Guardian 1/27/23
But as most Californians relish a sunny reprieve from stormy skies this week, officials and scientists are hoping for more snowstorms in the forecast before spring. Strong starts don’t always guarantee strong finishes, especially as spikes in early-onset warm weather become more common.
“It is definitely good news – but good news that needs to be met with cautious optimism,” said Dr Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and manager of UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory….
“We are in a really good spot right now and that is very exciting, but as we learned last year, a lot can happen over the course of several months,” he added, noting the letdown of a dry winter in 2022 that followed the previous December’s dump of snow. “The season is definitely not over.”Fighting a Flood of Misinformation about CA Water – Doug Obegi, NRDC 1/26/23
For more than a decade, the science has been clear that we need to reduce diversions from the Bay-Delta in average and drier years, leading the Legislature in 2009 to adopt State policy to reduce reliance on the Delta by investing in water recycling and other sustainable local and regional water projects (which are cost-effective and also generate other benefits, like good paying jobs developing these drought resilient water supplies).
Whiplash weather: What we can learn from California’s deadly storms – Earth Matters, Stanford 1/25/23
Rosemary Knight, a professor of geophysics at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, noted that we could be taking advantage of the vast natural infrastructure just below ground.
There are roughly 140 million acre-feet of available space in California’s groundwater aquifers – roughly equal to the capacity of 30 Lake Shastas. Surface water reservoir capacity is modest by comparison, with a combined available capacity of about nine Lake Shastas, Knight said. Agricultural fields and orchards with sandy channels could be strategically flooded during rainfall events to allow water to trickle through an intricate subsurface network, refilling the aquifers below.