When I lived there, and lived through several droughts and water restrictions, I wondered at the open canals through the desert that they used to bring the water from the sources. The evaporative losses must be tremendous - and yet, AFAIK, to this day they've not enclosed or piped the canals to conserve the water.

A very large percentage of water in the west is used for agriculture and irrigation, and many crops grown in the desert with irrigation could more easily be grown somewhere else, especially alfalfa, which is grown just to be food for cattle. This is a big waste of water IMO, but the farmers who grow it complain endlessly if their ration of water ever gets reduced. They also grow rice in the desert, and this is not necessary at all.

yes, it's very dry and numerous fires around us (AZ). Area fires like that are pretty normal out here every year. I'm planning to water the brush on my land in the next few days. I ordered another 50' of hose from W just last night (will be here tomorrow) and ordered an early water delivery for Wed. (I'll probably use up most of what i still have in the tank). temps this past wk were up to 117. this coming wk will be a cool wave - a day or 2 with a high of only 109.

my son, 2 gsons and a nephew were here last week and went up to lake Powell and spent 2 or 3 days on a boat. they didn't mention low water levels but I will email my son and ask if they noticed it being low. I haven't heard anything on the news about low water levels, but then I haven't been listening to the news much lately.

The NWS here especially the night crew is excellent on explaining things. Last year there was various articles about the drought that was starting in the west. They used historic records along with maps to show what had happened in past droughts in that area. Their conclusion was that the drought may expand as it had in the past into areas east of here. Perhaps as far east as Ohio as it did in the 1930s and 1950s. Looking at the records they concluded that the cycle was past due.

California only emerged from a prolonged drought (10+ years) a couple of years ago and they are now considered to be entering a "megadrought" or a period of extreme dryness that has not been seen since the 1500's. Most of this has been attributed to manmade causes, including the human impact on climate change. Much of the Colorado River basin is experiencing similar conditions, including record breaking temperatures that only exacerbate the issue.

The further north you go the less serious it is. But even in the often damp and significantly cooler PNW, summer drought is a recurring issue.......very little rainfall (like almost none) occurs during summer but is typically offset by winter rains and melting snowpacks refreshing reservoirs and lakes. Still, it is not uncommon to have watering restrictions imposed after a dryer winter.

All 3 west coast states - Washington, Oregon and California - are major agricultural states and the lack of water can have a significant impact on crop production and food prices.

This is a reminder that huge populations only started to live in DESERTS in the last century. We only think this is 'normal'.

Yup, sure am. Considering buying water from a tanker service for gardening.

Lars, what's more is that some of that alfalfa grown in the SWUSA desert doesn't even get fed to domestic cattle. Grown here & shipped overseas.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/02/453885642/saudi-hay-farm-in-arizona-tests-states-supply-of-groundwater

Directly impacted, no, I'm on the east coast. But I am expecting to be indirectly impacted by increased food prices -- it's only a question of when and how bad.

In Colorado we ARE having record high temperatures....but it rained twice yesterday. ♥ Tonight....79% chance of rain. Then tomorrow....still raining. Friday....says 1/2" of rain! Everything is SUPER lush and green! The wildflowers are out in abundance....

"Yup, sure am. Considering buying water from a tanker service for gardening."

Haha. I did this once myself. We'd just completed a major landscaping project, including a good patch of grass, when that particular draught led to water restrictions. I investigated getting a bona fide water tank for a tanker to fill but they were ugly and pretty pricey.

My solution - an above ground swimming pool! It was much, much cheaper than a tank. We had an out of the way unplanted area to put it, close enough to where the tanker's hose could reach. I checked with the liquid capacity of the service's truck, which I recall was a bit under 5000 gallons.

I got pool sized to hold about one truck load and a submersible pump to empty it. Hoping that the water restrictions wouldn't last too long, I didn't disconnect the sprinklers from the house water to use with my pool, instead I just hose-watered by hand. Every evening, into darkness, when I got home from work. Hose end sprinkler attachments for grass and densely planted areas, and just standing and watering holding a hose otherwise. It did work though the novelty of my idea wore off.

Good luck. We've gone to draught resistant plantings now so we should be mostly okay. That's something to consider if you haven't done it already, although you do need water to get new plantings established.

Wide swing between years of heavy rainfall and years of little rainfall and resulting shortages have been documented in the West for several centuries.

It's true that in California most of the water is used for agriculture. And similar to what I think is a silly but perhaps controlled outrage above about alfalfa being grown in Arizona and sent to the Middle East, California is a sole or primary source of many important food items that feed the entire country.

Should we radically cut back things like almond and pistachio production, green veggies, fruit and table and wine grapes, and all the items that we nearly sole source for the entire country and keep what we grow in our state? Because our limited water is feeding other parts of country and the world?

No, of course not. But we need to deal with it better, learn to store more water, and learn to use it more efficiently. And accept (as those in the water business do) that our rainfall is very cyclical, prone to wide year to year variations, and that draught years are to be expected.

This IS the future for us all, so get used to it. Al Gore was 100% right and I was a firm believer going back to the early 90's. Every year our monthly temps break records and some are the hottest months ever recorded. Every year we have droughts altho not like they are having in the west. When will people wake up? If not for themselves, for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

"Al Gore was 100% right and I was a firm believer going back to the early 90's."

Al Gore is a HUGE hypocrite. Not exclusively but especially when it comes to environmental things. I give him credit for nothing at all,

Remember his "Unfortunate Truth" involvement? Do you remember the next year when the major Unfortunate Truth that was revealed was that his personal residence was the single largest residential consumer of electricity in the state of Tennessee?

How about his parading as a Tennessean when he was born, raised, and educated pre-college exclusively in Washington DC?

Elmer, Thank you for the great suggestion. I will show my husband. We have very little lawn, but an abundance of roses and lavender.

And, as for Al Gore, it's not as though he discovered global warming- he surely did profit from it though. We have been warned for ****decades****, but refuse to change our ways.

An Inconvenient Truth...

If anyone is keeping score it's the fossil fuel industry which made the most money off of global warming and they still are. They along with the gop are the world's 2 major groups who spent decades making fun of Gore. The real joke was on us, that's the real inconvenient truth, nyuk it up.

vgkg, I understand and agree with what you're saying, but it takes two to tango. Industry made money, consumers (me included) slurped up cheap energy.

"Mother Nature" is the only one keeping an accurate score. There are too many variables for humans to deal with ... although that doesn't absolve us from doing our best....

I am in Minnesota believe or not. About an inch of rain in 2 months and last rain was excactly one month ago of a 1/2 in. Got a little today, not much maybe a tenth or two. My surface water source dried up so I'm hauling water day after day.

I wonder what the caused the drought 1200 years ago they say was worse than now? I'm not sure where the earth is in it's 26,000 year axial precession but heard it changes the earth climate too.

But I do know I need to sink a well, and pray to the sun god so he doesn't disappear behind the moon again. I sacrifice a rat when he hides and seems to work to bring him back. It's so HOT, see where we are now?

"An Inconvenient Truth..."

Thanks for the correction. I hope my meaning was conveyed, I'll leave it as is so as not to orphan your welcome comment.

"groups who spent decades making fun of Gore"

He's an easy target. His consistent duplicity and personal Inconvenient Truths and slippery integrity aside, do you remember his comment in the last 1990s that he "took the initiative in creating the internet".

The truth is it was an opening of what had been an already in existence top secret defense related project called ARPA Net that was developed from the early 70s to the early 80s. A parallel would be the GPS system, developed for bomb and missile targeting that was opened to public use first at an intentionally degraded positional accuracy, then eventually at full resolution.

the alfalfa fields around me (tons of acres of them) are disappearing to be replaced by ticky tacky developments and commercial bldg. It's not the AZ I moved to so many decades ago. All around me they're raping the desert to put in their concrete buildings. The air quality is worsening and people are planting - grass! so now we have mosquitoes too. They're totally wiping out the natural and the wildlife are disappearing.

temps here used to be several degrees lower than the big cities. now they're running the same.

I'm in Seattle so very different here. No fires but hotter and dryer than the Seattle that I grew up in. As a kid, summer started in July after the June rains were done. This year we had low 80s temps in April! And smoke from Eastern WA fires is so bad in late summer that you can't go outside. Toto, we're no in Kansas anymore.

Lake mead is at its lowest level since the 1930’s. Here in Las Vegas we have been mandating no front yard lawns in new construction since 2006 and are working to get rid the commercial strips of lawn. We havn't had a front backyard lawn for 20 years and don't miss it. The population has grown so much the notion of making the desert bloom like a rose with the required watering just isnt workable. Personally I'd much rather see residential and commercial landscapes use less water than doing away with the great food production regions of California.

I am not an Al Gore fan and this isn't about him except his warnings which have come true. I have no grass on my 1/2 acre, just herbs, wildflowers, vinca, and pachysandra. We have many large trees and bushes for wildlife. . I compost and have forever. But life is going to get increasingly difficult with weather events like the scorching heat in the west where raptors are literally falling from the sky.

Lily, his warnings weren't "his warnings". They were politically calculated statements from PR advisers. And far from being novel or original with him.

Lily, Global warming was posited by the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Svante Arrhenius in the late 1800s.

From Wiki:

Arrhenius was the first to use principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are responsible for the Earth's increasing surface temperature. In the 1960s, Charles David Keeling demonstrated that the quantity of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions into the air is enough to cause global warming.[3]

Greenhouse effect[edit]

In developing a theory to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius, in 1896, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.[3][22][23] These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused CO2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming. This conclusion has been extensively tested, winning a place at the core of modern climate science.[24][25] Arrhenius, in this work, built upon the prior work of other famous scientists, including Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall and Claude Pouillet. Arrhenius wanted to determine whether greenhouse gases could contribute to the explanation of the temperature variation between glacial and inter-glacial periods.[26]Arrhenius used infrared observations of the moon – by Frank Washington Very and Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh – to calculate how much of infrared (heat) radiation is captured by CO2 and water (H2O) vapour in Earth's atmosphere. Using 'Stefan's law' (better known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law), he formulated what he referred to as a 'rule'. In its original form, Arrhenius's rule reads as follows:

if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

Here, Arrhenius refers to CO2 as carbonic acid (which refers only to the aqueous form H2CO3 in modern usage). The following formulation of Arrhenius's rule is still in use today:[27]

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My step father, born in 1930 was no scientist or engineer. He was an IBM salesman and he was well versed in these issues, making this dinner table conversation on the regular. He read Time Magazine, the Economist, the NYT and Scientific American, nothing special.

Al Gore and the Skoll Foundation (Jeff Skoll was the first CEO of eBay) which backed Gore's film, popularized Global Warming, but anybody who was reading a serious newspaper should have been aware of the situation long before it became a cause célèbre and a moot point as far as I am concerned. We blew it folks, big time.

If anyone is keeping score it's the fossil fuel industry which made the most money off of global warming and they still are. They along with the gop are the world's 2 major groups who spent decades making fun of Gore. The real joke was on us, that's the real inconvenient truth, nyuk it up.

This comment is really bothering me. As I showed above, Global Warming was first discussed at the turn of the 20thC. It was a perfectly mainstream topic of news and conversation in the 70s for people who consumed media aimed at college graduates (McNeil Leherer, NPR, NYT, etc.). Demonizing Republicans is a nonsense, especially if you are the sort of person who needed Al Gore and a massive money making publicity campaign to get you on board. Frankly, I see no difference between those who made fun of climate change science in the early 2000s and those who were unaware of it before. Both parties are irresponsible and ignorant. Self-righteousness is seldom righteous.

some produce prices are showings signs of stress ... beyond inflation. and the quality isn't 'normal'

Last night, after I got home from work I went searching for a lake I used to go to with my family and friends in N. NV, Lake Lahontan. Apparently it had all but dried up in 2016 but as of last year it had made a comeback, somewhat. I also found an interesting video on Lahontan cutthroat trout and how they saved it. Funny how a search takes you way off course sometimes. I also learned about Pyramid Lake and learned things I had no idea about, like the fact that they have a hatchery for those fish.

We are 50+ miles away from the Willow Firè that has burned 2,400 acres so far. I fear fire more than earthquakes now. We have taken out water thristy plants and replaced them with drought tolerant ones. Almost every year the water company raises our rates. I would like to move someplace where I don't have to worry about drought and lack of water and fires.

As I understand it, that fire is burning in a mostly uninhabited remote area. California has a lot of dry, heavily overgrown, extremely flammable remote places. I know other regions have the same too. Just like years of heavy rainfall or draught, fires are a needed and natural ecosystem phenomenon.

Where the human risk to life and property intersects with recurring natural events like fires is when people want to live in such areas. The risk comes with the location. There are exceptions, as up in the Wine Country a few years ago when human caused fires tragically occurred during a period of high winds. That sadly subjected otherwise relatively more fire safe locations to destruction.

There's a balance or compromise to be found somewhere and who knows what it is.

Wish I could send you all some of our rain right now. Last two days were super hot and last night when I got home I actually watered a few of my potted flowers out front. They were dry as a bone.

Deja vu Caflowerluver. Felt the same worry living in central Texas on the edge of west Texas in the mid 80's. When you need to drill down 900 ft to get water it isn't natural and a big issue was water rate increases even then. I didn't feel secure in this environment and was added to my motivation to move, paranoid or not I'd stock pile water just in case the one and only well in town bit the dust, so back to the land of 10,000 lakes I went.

The good news/bad news assessment about our to-be-expected draught conditions this year is this - the fact that we have a relatively dry climate with mild weather and usually no rain from April to October is precisely why this area has so much population. A lot of our water comes from snowfall in distant mountains.

People like the predictability of weeks and months of good weather. It's also why there is so much agriculture in California and thus so much agricultural use of water - the consistent weather allows those in the ag business to grow crops here year after year that can't be produced elsewhere.

I hate the overused and trite cliché but I think a major paradigm shift in water sourcing and use is needed. High tech solutions - recycling waste water into ground aquifers, more desalination plants, more efficient use of water for growing food, no more lush lawns in arid areas, etc, It's beginning - fewer fields are irrigated with overhead spraying. More orchards and vineyards use drip emitters. Other changes in the water system side are happening. It's slow.

Interesting conversation. We are experiencing very hot, dry weather in Alberta.

The lakes I went to as a child are not the same and haven’t been for many years.

Elmer, is there a reason you keep using the word draught (draft) in your comments? I am not saying it is wrong as you may have a reason for using it.

Lazy spelling and inattention. It's a word I only use every 5-7 years and I forget the correct spelling in the interval.

Thanks for halping me out. ;-). Seriously.

There's a funny thing I've noticed from year to year concerning the public information releases and TV interview FYIs from the authorities concerning each year's seasonal fire danger.

First remember that we have wide swings from not nearly enough to waay too much.

In drought years (yay, spelled it right), they will often caution that the trees and undergrowth are exceptionally dry because of the lack of rain and so fire danger is extreme. In years when we have heavy rainfall, they caution that the trees and undergrowth are exceptionally dense because of greater than normal growth caused by the exceptionally heavy rainfall and so fire danger is extreme.

If these cautions have a reasonable basis in fact, the take-away is that fire danger is always extreme. I don't know what's right or not but I wonder if these agencies - the likes of which are the National Weather Service, the Parks Service, etc - ever listen to themselves and catch the silliness of what they say from year to year.