[LINK] "California Is Finally Getting Rain. Now if It Could Just Hold on to It"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Nick Stockton writes about how California, hoping finally to see more water now that El Niño is here, is taking steps to ensure this water is not wasted.

El Niño has arrived in California, and with it the rains. It’s not exactly monsoon season, but for the first time in a long while the weather is bringing puddles to San Francisco, mud to the valleys (Silicon and Central), and snow to the Sierras. But how much is this precipitation helping the state’s ongoing drought? Short answer: Not so much. Long answer: Not as much as Californians hope, but at least parts of the state are working to bank some of the water from this wetter year for the future.

In drought years, groundwater has always been California’s ace in the hole. It’s a crucial fallback for when reservoirs dry up and snowpack melts away—and it will become even more important in the future. Scientists expect climate change to make dry spells longer, and wet years warmer, resulting in less snowpack atop the mountains. Without it, Californians start pumping their aquifers. Now, after years of drought, those groundwater reserves are starting to dry up.

But El Niño—a warming of the Pacific—generally brings more rain to the West Coast. (That’s when water comes from the sky, Californians.) If that rain gets back into the ground, it recharges the aquifers. Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported how new laws and bonus bond money have engineers developing projects to enhance that recharge. Gallon for gallon it’s the best way to hold onto water—if those engineers can get it back in there at all.

California has never had rules governing groundwater use. Read that again: The state has never regulated how much water anyone pulls out of the ground. (How do you think a well works?) And because aquifers don’t conform to property lines, people have generally acted in their own self interest—slurp out as much water as possible before your neighbors take it.

“When you have a lot of straws in the milkshake, there’s really zero incentive to conserve groundwater,” says Tara Moran, researcher at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Bill Lane Center for the American West.