Headline
Unimpressive El Niño leaves California in water limbo
United States

Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle
The rain storms and blizzards that were supposed to come with El Niño were conspicuously non-biblical in California this winter, leaving the state in an ecological limbo that has regulators thinking about easing water-use restrictions in some places but not in others.
While the weather cheered ski resorts hit hard by the historic drought and brought some reservoirs to their highest points in years, in the end it dropped less snow than average in the Sierra, where more than a third of the state’s water comes from.
The water content of the snow statewide is 87 percent of average for this time of year, according to electronic measurements taken Tuesday, a benchmark when the spring melt historically begins and water spills into the reservoirs
Related Content
Science Source
| AMS Journal of Climate
Is There a Role for Human-Induced Climate Change in the Precipitation Decline that Drove the California Drought?
Richard Seager, Naomi Henderson, Mark A. Cane et al
Science Source
| AMS Journal of Hydrometeorology
Indications for Protracted Groundwater Depletion after Drought over the Central Valley of California
S.-Y. Simon Wang
Science Source
| Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
EEE 2013: Causes of the Extreme Dry Conditions Over California During Early 2013
Hailan Wang and Siegfried Schubert
Science Source
| Nature Climate Change
California from drought to deluge
S.-Y. Simon Wang, Jin-Ho Yoon, Emily Becker and Robert Gillies