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Stanford, NOAA remain at odds about what caused the drought

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The debate may go on for decades. Is climate change the reason for California’s ongoing and future droughts? And what about El Nino? Will the predicted mega storms bring an end to this dry period, or will the rain simply end next spring and not increase water levels?

Right now, 99.86 percent of the state is in drought. “Exceptional drought” marks half of the state, with the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains measuring just five percent of its historical average. Thousands of wells—another main source of water—have run dry; and many of those still functioning have been overpumped so much that the ground is sinking.

The two main organizations that have investigated the drought, Stanford University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have different conclusions about what caused the drought in the first place. Researchers at the Palo Alto campus insist that climate change has helped to set the stage for the drought, while climatologists at NOAA believe the dry weather is just bad luck. Their biggest disagreement is about the cause of a “high pressure ridge” in the atmosphere off the coastline. This pressure zone, they both say, is like a giant boulder in a stream that continually diverts rain and snowstorms away from California. Last year, the ridge reportedly spanned 2,000 miles across and was four miles tall.

Stanford researchers have demonstrated that elevated levels of greenhouse gasses—the real driver of global climate change—has caused this pressure zone to appear much more frequently. At NOAA, they believe the pressure zone is simply the result of natural weather changes. Both sides agree that man-made carcinogens lofted into the atmosphere by industry have contributed to climate change resulting in increasing temperatures not only in the Golden State, but around the world.

A report issued last month by NOAA indicated that climate change may or may not be causing California’s drought, but it does reduce snowfall and that has turned what is a natural weather condition into something much more severe. Droughts have spanned decades—sometimes even hundreds of years—long before people began to change the climate. But climate change can influence future droughts, according to researchers at Stanford, and this may be a peek at how Californians will live in the not-too-distant future.

Is El Nino the solution? Both sides say it’s hard to say. In April 2014, the California snowpack was so low that Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the first-ever mandatory statewide water restrictions. This fall, however, the snowpack is measuring well above average and more storms are on the horizon. The strongest effects of El Nino probably won’t be felt until mid-December at the earliest, and that has everyone wondering if the big storms will finally rescue a parched, thirsty state.

“El Nino-related impacts have been occurring around the globe for months already,” according to NOAA, and in the United States these impacts will reportedly be “strongest from December through March.”

Both sides agree on this point: California doesn’t just need a little amount of precipitation to end the drought, it needs a ton of rain or snow everyday this winter. Every region of the state would need record amounts of rain, meaning that Los Angeles County would need to accumulate about 53 inches of rain this by the end of the year—more than 15 inches higher than the current record for the wettest year ever. Locally, El Nino could bring more rain, but the real place where the state gets fresh water is in Northern California. If heavy rain falls north of Sacramento—where the largest reservoirs are located—then El Nino would be much more likely to end the drought.

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