It may take a while for California’s snow to melt, NBC 7’s Ramon Galindo reports.
The rain we’ve seen lately might be letting up, but California's historic drought is sticking around. Despite all the snow and rain in Southern California lately, all of California remains under some form of drought.
“For us here in San Diego most of the locations we track are basically right at the cusp. So we’re right near the yearly total. It will basically just take one more storm and we’ll already be at what we consider the normal one-year amount,” said Brian Adams, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego.
The drought situation locally is much improved compared to a few months ago, according to Adams, but California remains under a drought emergency declaration.
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor map shows most of the state is in a ‘moderate’ drought. A year ago, the situation was direr as some regions of California were in an ‘extreme’ drought.
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“We’ve got a ton so far so we can definitely be thankful for that. As far as the drought situation going forward, we need to keep a close eye and see how our reservoirs respond to not just the rain we just received, but also a lot of the snowfall because eventually that will melt and make it down into our reservoirs so we can finally use more of it,” said Adams.
Reservoirs and snowpack are not the only factors determining our water supply. Even a large rainstorm is not enough to refill man-made lakes after a multi-year drought, but it does help. The Otay Reservoir in South San Diego County is at 82% capacity.
Local
Southern California gets much of its water from the Colorado River. The river didn’t benefit much from our recent storms. The wet start to 2023 got us closer to being out of drought, but we’re not quite out of it yet.
