As you can see from this US Geological Survey map that there are many areas in the Northern Part of the state that are suffering very badly.
The groundwater situation is much worse in the southern half of the state.
Your link doesn’t work for me John.
A couple a links showing ground water levels show that Northern Ca is in better shape than Central and Southern Ca, not that there aren’t concerns all over:
http://wxmaps.org/pix/soil1.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/Soilmst_Monitoring/US/Soilmst/Soilmst.shtml
Pretty much every post in this thread is both wrong and is at like a 6th grade level w/r/t climatology.
FWIW: The best source regarding drought conditions is http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Home/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA. The drought is, in fact, less severe in some of the key winegrowing regions compared to other parts of CA.
If the strong El Nino continues to develop there should be plenty of water forthcoming, although the current El Nino path is a bit unusual (rare to have strong ninos develop this time of year) so hopefully it doesn’t fail to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to aim a moisture-laden subtropical jet at the CA coast.
Condescend much Mr. Z?
Climatology happens to be something I know a lot about. It makes you wonder if everyone bullshits just as much for the stuff you don’t know as much about and you just can’t tell.
Glad to have your inputs since it is an area where you have expertise. Just not comfortable with insults being your calling card.
I’m not quite sure how you get to your conclusion from that map.
All significant wine areas there are classified as at least “Severe,” including most of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties. Meanwhile all the grape-growing parts of Napa County plus the Sonoma Valley (the southeastern part of Sonoma) are in the “Extreme Drought” band, and all of the Central Coast is in the even worse category of “Exceptional Drought,” which also includes all of the Central Valley (though we don’t really care about that) and the Sierra Foothills. It looks like only the Santa Cruz Mountains have been lucky.
Steve Edmunds said his vines in the Sierra Foothills ripened a month or so early even though the temperatures were not unusually hot. He interpreted that as the plant adapting to the drought, trying to produce a little fruit as quickly as possible. In his case, the drought plainly had a big impact on the vines.
If water was $0.10/gallon there would be no shortage!
Don’t be fooled by the wording - a “severe” drought is between a 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 year drought. See Page Not Found | U.S. Drought Monitor. So yes, it affects agriculture, but it is unusual-but-routine. It falls within the range of typical vintage variation.
The crazy stuff in the Central Coast and Sierra Foothills is the stuff that’s way outside of the normal range - 1 in 50, 1 in 100.
That being said - the drought, while extraordinary, will eventually end, as droughts generally do. The existing weather pattern is already hinting at this; there was abnormal late-season rain in SoCal and a historically wet spring in Texas and much of the Intermountain West. The only reason that the CA drought isn’t already significantly abated is that the change in pattern - probably, but not certainly, related to ENSO - came just a touch too late to alter the course of the rainy season. If a strong El Nino does in fact develop - and El Nino is notoriously hard to predict, so that’s a big “if” - then the deluge is coming in the fall.
I’d be curious to know what veteran winemakers on the North Coast say.
I lived through two multi-year droughts in Northern California in the 70s and 80s, and people are talking quite differently about this one – even contemporaries of mine who still live there and remember the earlier droughts.
Not so far in CA. Doing it elsewhere but missing CA.
As you’d expect - El Nino doesn’t do that much to rainfall in CA outside of the wet season. The signal is super strong in the wet season, though:
Most of California gets essentially no rain between May and October, so the fact that it’s not raining now doesn’t mean anything about the drought.
Napa averages less than 2.2 inches over that six-month span. Even Mendocino County gets only about that much in the five months from May through September.
Particularly when he states most in the thread is untrue but repeats much of it in his own post.
Not true Todd. For example, your post is wrong:
“All signs point to yes but it’s not guaranteed until we’re knee-deep in it, so it’s a tough call. It’s a retroactive call.”
There’s been a whole lot of research on ENSO in the last 10 or 15 years. While El Nino is sort of inherently chaotic and not-superpredictable, that doesn’t mean its guaranteed when you’re knee-deep in it. It means that its future behavior is a mix of random walk and predictability, EVEN when you’re already knee-deep in it. And many ENSO indices are now updated in near real time.
For more info, see: MEI.v2: NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory
David - you are parsing statements to be technically, but not usefully correct.
Thanks John, didn’t need a subscription. The Israel plan might be something Cali needs to go to. It would be expensive to implement, but hey, if people want to live in the desert, there will likely be a cost.
This is the gist, isn’t it? If people moved there, they can move away too.
David Z.,
You can parse drought levels on a county by county level all you want. However, governmental solutions often come on a statewide level. I can’t see the California Governor saying something like, we are going to mandate a reduction in water usage for agricultural reasons by 25% but we will leave the grape growers in Napa and Sonoma alone.
Yep, true. And that goes for agriculture as well. Although I have no expertise of the subject, it will be interesting to see what happens out west.