Lake Oroville is getting lower (Image: Rich Pedroncelli/AP/Press Association Images)

They have been measuring the snowpack at Phillips in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California on the first day of April every year since 1941. It is the day the winter build-up of snow should have peaked. Typically, the researchers’ dipstick finds 1.5 metres of snow. This year, for the first time, there was none – only dry earth.

The state’s governor, Jerry Brown, made the journey for the annual measurement so he could stand at the snowless spot and declare he was imposing a 25-per-cent cut in water use across the state.

California is running out of water. This January was its driest since records began over a century ago, according to Jay Famiglietti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The current drought in the Sierra Nevada, which provides a third of the state’s water, began in 2011. It is a record-breaker and may be the worst for a thousand years. With low precipitation and higher temperatures – which means more winter precipitation falls as rain, rather than snow – the snowpacks are faltering.


Mourning lawns

Alternative sources are doing no better. Underground water is being pumped dry, especially in the agricultural heartlands of the Central Valley, where farmers are allowed to pump as much as they want. And the Colorado River, which waters much of southern California, has been suffering from 14 years of low flow. Its two great reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are at their lowest levels since the Hoover dam was built on the river 80 years ago.

Climatologists predict that persistent “megadroughts” are going to be a feature of climate change in the American West. And California, with the West’s largest population and the country’s biggest agricultural output from irrigated fields, could suffer the worst.

Maybe it is doing so already. Brown certainly thinks so. “We are in a new era,” he told reporters, as he surveyed the snowless scene. “The idea of your nice little green lawn getting watered every day, those days are past.”

Golf courses and lawn sprinklers will be a particular target in the crackdown, said his officials, although details will be decided locally. Large farms in the state have already been forced to cut water use. Water, they used to say out West, flows uphill to money. But no longer, it seems.