State officials tell residents not to revert back to pre-drought habits even after parade of storms from strong El Niño weather system

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Forced by drought to conserve water, Californians were warned against reverting to old habits on Tuesday as the first of several storms spawned by a record-tying El Niño began drenching the state.

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A series of storms lining up over the Pacific Ocean was welcome news in parched California, despite their potential for causing flash floods and mudslides. But authorities cautioned that even the wettest of winters can’t replenish depleted reservoirs and aquifers unless everyone keeps pitching in.

California’s water deficit is so deep after four years of drought that a “steady parade of storms” like these will be needed for years to come, said Mike Anderson, climatologist for the state’s department of water resources.

“We’re at least on a good trajectory,” he said. “We’ve got to keep it going.”

The current El Niño – a natural warming of the central Pacific Ocean that interacts with the atmosphere and changes weather worldwide – has tied 1997-1998 as the strongest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said, citing statistics that go back to 1950.

El Niños usually bring heavy rains to California, although it remains to be seen whether people should expect anything like a repeat of 1997 and 1998, when storms killed 17 people, wiped out crops, washed out highways and pushed houses down hillsides.

“DarthNiño may finally have California in its sights,” said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private Weather Underground.

“A parade of strong Pacific storms characteristic of a strong El Niño event will batter the state this week and will likely bring damaging flooding by the time the second storm in the series rolls through on Wednesday,” Masters said.

However, Masters and meteorologist Ryan Maue of the private WeatherBell Analytics don’t believe this first storm is as powerful as some other Pacific storm systems, and they caution that the storms now following it may land elsewhere.



The current forecast calls for a “kind of a nice level of bombardment” over the next two weeks – probably not enough to cause the tremendous flooding of 1998, but then again, that year’s floods didn’t peak until February, Masters said.

Altogether, the storms hold the potential for massive amounts of precipitation for a very parched state, but water managers won’t be able to fully estimate this year’s snowmelt until 1 April, when the snowpack is typically at its deepest.



“Mother Nature has a way of surprising or disappointing us,” department of water resources spokesman Doug Carlson said, insisting that conservation must continue.

Californians used 20% less water this past November than they did in November 2013, before Governor Jerry Brown declared the state’s water emergency, the Water Resources Control Board announced on Tuesday.

That falls short of Brown’s 25% conservation mandate for a second straight month, although board chairwoman Felicia Marcus said the state remains on track to meet his overall goal.



“The fact that per-person water use dropped to 75 gallons per person per day on average is proof that Californians are clearly thinking twice before turning on the tap,” Marcus said in a statement.



