Reservoirs in California are designed to control either rain floods, snowmelt floods or both. And just as record-high temperatures exacerbated the drought this year by causing more evaporation and reducing snowpack, warmer conditions can be expected to make things worse in the future.A recent study, for example, suggests that in the second half of this century, the warming that will result from rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will greatly increase the risk of a severe long-term drought in the Southwest and Plains that could rival or even exceed some of the ancient ones.“Climate change is really weighting the dice” in favor of future megadroughts, said Toby R. Ault, a researcher at Cornell University and an author of the study.Scientists learn about ancient droughts by looking for evidence that can provide clues to temperatures and precipitation at the time. In the spring of 2015, the The drought led to Governor Jerry Brown's instituting mandatory 25 percent water restrictions in June 2015.Many millions of California trees died from the drought – approximately 102 million, including 62 million in 2016 alone.The winter of 2016–17 turned out to be the wettest on record in Northern California, surpassing the previous record set in 1982–83.Adaptation is the process of adjusting to circumstances, which means not trying to stop the drought, but trying to preserve the water given the drought conditions. But farmers would shift to more profitable crops, so with half the water use, profits would only drop about 25 percent, he said.Still, agricultural towns would suffer as they lost much of their economic base. And with a population now close to 39 million and a thirsty, $50 billion agricultural industry, California has been affected more by this drought than by any previous one. This is the most used option, because stopping a drought is difficult given that it is a meteorological process. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. Jerry Brown of California imposed mandatory cutbacks in water use earlier this month in response to a severe drought, he warned that the state was facing an uncertain future.“This is the new normal,” he said, “and we’ll have to learn to cope with it.”The drought, now in its fourth year, is by many measures the worst since the state began keeping records of temperature and precipitation in the 1800s. Statewide reservoir storage is down significantly and impacts of two, going on three, dry years in a row is felt everywhere. Research “just doesn’t give us the mechanism of steady atmospheric circulation keeping one region dry for decades,” Overpeck said.A different kind of analysis led to the discovery of two very long droughts, one that began in the 9th century and lasted about 200 years, and another that began in the 13th and lasted for a century and a half.In the 1990s, Scott Stine, a professor at what is now called California State University, East Bay, took advantage of a decline in the levels of Mono Lake and other lakes and streams in the eastern Sierra Nevadas to study tree stumps, still rooted in the ground, that had become visible after having been submerged for hundreds of years.At some point, water levels must have been low enough for long enough for the trees to grow. The state’s drought is by many measures the worst since record-keeping began, but scientists say that in the more ancient past California had droughts that lasted decades. A record year of precipitation in California certainly brought the state out of the bad situation and more or less back to equilibrium. Matt Black/New York Times photo The drought, now in its fourth year, is by many measures the worst since the state began keeping records of temperature and precipitation in the 1800s. As a result of this, many fish species were threatened. Streams and rivers were so low that fish couldn't get to their By February 1, 2014, Felicia Marcus, the chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board, claimed the 2014 drought "is the most serious drought we've faced in modern times." This limits how much of a reservoir's capacity can be used for long-term storage. “But you don’t have to go back very far at all to find much drier decades, and much drier centuries.”That raises the possibility that California has built its water infrastructure — indeed, its entire modern society — during a wet period.Within that century and a half of relative wetness, the period from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s — a time when California’s population soared by about 50 percent — was even wetter, said Dr. Seager of Lamont-Doherty. And with a population now close to 39 million and a thirsty, $50 billion agricultural industry, California has been affected more by this drought than by any previous one.But scientists say that in the more ancient past, California and the Southwest occasionally had even worse droughts — so-called megadroughts — that lasted decades.
is like asking if New York would plan for the next ice age,” she said.Some research suggests that California would survive, limping along, if a modern drought were to last for decades like the ancient ones.Not surprisingly, given that it uses about 80 percent of the state’s water, agriculture would suffer greatly, the researchers found.
The drought of 1862-65 was a catastrophe for the state of California--a bitter dry period, preceded by unusually heavy rains and accompanied by an untimely epidemic of smallpox.