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After years of history drought levels and a steady recovery in 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown officially stated Friday that California's drought is over. For now at least.

Extreme to exceptional drought - the most severe levels - have lifted in the entire state since it first appeared on Jan. 28, 2014 , according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.

The Drought Monitor, which collects data from 50 different weather indicators, last showed a drought map that was clear in December 2011.

This article was originally published on Aug. 7, 2014 and is updated periodically. Changes have been made in the text to reflect the latest developments.

Follow @kyleykim on Twitter.

Copyright © 2017, Los Angeles Times

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275 California drought maps show deep drought and recovery

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After years of history drought levels and a steady recovery in 2017, Gov. Jerry Brown officially stated Friday that California's drought is over. For now at least. Extreme to exceptional drought - the most severe levels - have lifted in the entire state since it first appeared on Jan.

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April 11 (UPI) -- New research suggests California's weather is defying the odds.

Meteorologists expected precipitation debts accrued during California's historic drought to last decades, but a new analysis suggests the debts could be erased this year.

Between October 2011 and September 2015, California experienced its driest four-year spell since scientists began tracking precipitation totals in 1895. Multiyear droughts are rare, two-year recoveries are even rarer. The effects were supposed to be long-lasting.

"The odds of the state completely recovering from its extreme dryness within two years are estimated at less than 1 percent," Eugene R. Wahl, a paleoclimatologist at the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, said in a news release. "But, that may be what's happening right now if very wet conditions continue into spring."

Extreme El Niño conditions have buoyed rainfall totals during the last two years. As a result, the state's drought recovery has been faster than 80 percent of the bounce backs from similar dry spells.

Though official precipitation records only date back to 1895, researchers can use paleoclimatic data from soil cores, rock samples and other geochemical signatures to track historic precipitation totals and droughts.

Research suggests the drought between 2011 and 2015 was especially historic for two of California's climate regions, the San Joaquin Drainage and the South Coast Drainage. Scientists estimate the two climate divisions hadn't experienced a comparable four-year dry spell since at least 1571.

Models estimated the chance of the two regions recovering from such a spell in less than two years was effectively 0 percent.

The finings, detailed in the Journal of Climate, may force climate scientists to recalibrate prediction models as climate change increases the likelihood of both megadroughts and extreme precipitation.

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California's drought and recovery defying climate odds

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April 11 (UPI) -- New research suggests California's weather is defying the odds. Meteorologists expected precipitation debts accrued during California's historic drought to last decades, but a new analysis suggests the debts could be erased this year. Between October 2011 and September 2015, California experienced its driest four-year spell since scientists began tracking precipitation totals in 1895.

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California Gov. Jerry Brown has asked restaurants not to serve water unless diners ask for it. He's letting lawns at the state Capitol turn brown. Farmers in the Central Valley are getting just a trickle of the water they usually do. Conspicuous water wasters - commercial and residential - face fines of $500 a day.

Even Lady Gaga is pleading with Californians to conserve.

All of California is in a state of emergency because of the prolonged drought, now in its third year. And it's more than just Californians who are feeling the impact - the state uses its scarce water to provide the nation with more food than any other state.

Here's a guide to what's causing the drought and what it means for all of us.

Drought is part of life in California.

In the last century, the state suffered seven multiyear droughts.

This drought is particularly bad.

By this spring, California had experienced its driest three-year stretch since 1895.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento and Fresno logged their driest year ever recorded in 2013.

California's climate varies tremendously, from temperate rainforests on the North Coast to the extreme aridity of Death Valley. Conditions now are so dry that all of the state is considered to be in a drought. More than 80 percent of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought, according to the United States Drought Monitor.

An extreme drought happens once every 20 to 50 years and wreaks havoc on crops. An exceptional drought, meanwhile, comes every 50 to 100 years, causing true water emergencies by draining reservoirs, streams and wells.

Just look at this map.

Blame the severity of the drought on the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge."

That's the cheeky nickname for a high-pressure area - think of it as a mountain of air - that sat for months over the eastern Pacific Ocean. The name was coined by Daniel Swain, a doctoral student at Stanford University who writes The California Weather Blog.

The ridge sent storms that normally would hit California up over the Alaskan panhandle and the Yukon, leaving California unusually dry. The ridge extended from British Columbia down the coast of California, blocking storms from making their way to the Golden State.

The state saw low rainfall last winter and during the latter part of the previous winter, which has left the already thirsty state parched.

Aside from being ridiculously resilient, the ridge is also a bit of a mystery. Such high-pressure areas commonly develop in the winter, but they usually break down, allowing storms to get to California. Climatologists don't know why this ridge persisted so long.

Many farmers are getting walloped.

California farms, which guzzle 80 percent of the water used by humans in the state, are feeling the heat. Farmers in the dry Central Valley alone may stand to lose $810 million this year from keeping their fields idle, according to the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. They'll also spend an extra $453 million on pumping water out of the ground. The state likely will lose 17,100 agricultural jobs because of the drought.

California moves vast quantities of water around the state, but some of it just isn't available this year. The Central Valley Project usually sends water from the northern half of the state to the dry San Joaquin Valley. Many farmers who depend on it are getting none of that water this year.

The State Water Project, which is a significant source of water for 750,000 acres of farmland, is delivering 5 percent of the water that farmers have requested.

About 428,000 acres, or 5 percent of the irrigated cropland in the Central Valley, Central Coast and Southern California, won't be planted this year, researchers at UC Davis predict.

This has started to affect the price of fruits and vegetables in the United States.

California produces nearly half of the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States.

That means the drought already is starting to hit our pocketbooks as farmers idle land, driving up prices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts fruit prices may rise as much as 6 percent this year, while vegetables may go up as much as 3 percent nationwide.

For instance, the majority of the nation's lettuce is grown in California. Between April and May, prices for the leafy green went up 1.9 percent.

The popularity of almonds has only compounded the problem.

Some farmers in these areas have invested in lucrative crops that have to be watered year-round or they die.

In the past 20 years, nut trees, like almonds, have become more popular to plant because the crops are lucrative. In a dry year, a nut tree still needs water to survive, while an annual crop, like rice or tomatoes, could not be planted that year and the field left fallow.

Some farmers now are uprooting nut trees before they're past their prime because they don't have the water to keep them alive.

With water a scarcity, there's a drilling frenzy to scoop up groundwater, causing the ground to sink in the Central Valley.

In some areas of the state, the groundwater has become so overtaxed that the earth is literally sinking. Between 2008 and 2011, parts of the Central Valley subsided more than 2 feet, as this startling visualization by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows.

Groundwater is an important source of water for the state in wet years and dry years, accounting for about 40 percent of water used in normal years and up to 60 percent in drought years, according to the California Water Foundation.

Some 75 percent of Californians rely on groundwater for at least a portion of their drinking water. Yet, California lacks a comprehensive groundwater management plan, which all other dry Western states already have.

Two bills in the Legislature right now seek to move the state toward local management of groundwater.

The drought is also causing fish evacuations and wildfires.

The ecologically important Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta also is feeling the drought.

In June, rainbow trout and steelhead trout had to be released from two hatcheries at a much younger age and smaller size than usual. The reason: Scientists predicted that by midsummer, the water in the hatcheries would be too warm for the fish to survive, because there is so little mountain runoff. Chinook salmon have been trucked to San Pablo Bay so they won't have to navigate parched rivers and streams on their way to the ocean.

Wildfire risk also is up statewide. This year, there had been 3,400 wildfires as of July 19, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. That's an increase of 36 percent over the five-year average.

In May, more than a dozen wildfires raged in San Diego County. The wildfire season there is usually in the fall following the hot, dry summer.

The state and federal governments have put hundreds of millions of dollars into aid.

In March, Brown signed drought relief legislation worth $687 million. It included $25.3 million for food and $21 million for housing for those like farmworkers who are out of work thanks to fallow fields. In February, President Barack Obama announced the federal government would chip in $183 million to the parched state.

When will the drought end?

When El Niño shows up, maybe.

That's when warm waters develop in the Pacific Ocean, which often bring wet winters to California. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now puts the odds of El Niño at 80 percent.

But there's a big catch.

California needs a strong El Niño to reliably deliver that rain. Right now, it's shaping up to be weak or moderate.

In search of El Niño, meteorologists scrutinize current sea surface temperatures, air patterns and ocean currents around the globe, using computer models to analyze how all those factors interact.

They're trying to forecast what the sea surface temperature will be for a large expanse of ocean along the equator south of Hawaii, known as the east-central Equatorial Pacific. If that water is warmer than usual for a solid three-month stretch, it's El Niño - the warmer it is, the stronger the El Niño.

Get used to these droughts.

It's difficult to link any one weather event - like the current drought - to climate change.

Whatever happens this winter, it is highly likely that Californians can expect even more extreme droughts in the future, thanks to climate change.

Southern California will get drier, climate scientists predict. Northern California will get hotter. Some snow won't fall as snow anymore - it'd become rain. The snow that does fall will melt faster. That could shrink the Sierra Nevada spring snowpack by as much as 90 percent. (Play with this map from Cal-Adapt to watch it disappear over time.)

The loss of snow doesn't affect just the annual family snowball fight. When the snowpack - often called California's largest reservoir - melts in the spring, it is an essential source of water for farms and cities.

That means less water for all of us.
This story was edited by Andrew Donohue. It was copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.

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Why the California drought affects everyone

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California Gov. Jerry Brown has asked restaurants not to serve water unless diners ask for it. He's letting lawns at the state Capitol turn brown. Farmers in the Central Valley are getting just a trickle of the water they usually do. Conspicuous water wasters - commercial and residential - face fines of $500 a day.

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Last summer, a narrow, rock-rimmed stretch of the Sacramento River near here turned into a mass graveyard for baby salmon.

Upstream releases of water from Shasta Dam were so warm that virtually an entire generation of endangered winter-run Chinook was wiped out. The eggs never hatched, or if they did, the emerging young soon died.

A similar disaster could unfold this summer. And if the drought drags on for another year or two, wild populations of some of the state's most prized fish are likely to vanish.

"We're going to be losing most of our salmon and steelhead if things continue," said UC Davis professor emeritus Peter Moyle, a leading authority on California's native fish. Also in danger are the long-suffering delta smelt, whose numbers have plunged to what he called "the last of the last."

"It would be a major extinction event," Moyle warned.

The drought's toll on California has been measured mostly in terms of idled cropland, dried up domestic wells and brown lawns. Less visible but more devastating has been damage to native fish that struggle for survival in the best of times.

Four years of drought - and the accompanying relaxation of environmental standards by state regulators - have compounded the harm of dams and diversions that long ago thwarted fish migration and destroyed habitat.

Spawning winter-run Chinook would never choose to hang out on the outskirts of Redding on a day when the city baked in 111-degree heat. They would prefer to swim in the cold, spring-fed waters of the McCloud and other Sacramento tributaries to the north.
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But for about 70 years, those historic spawning grounds have been out of salmon reach, blocked by the towering concrete face of Shasta and the buttresses of its smaller sibling, Keswick Dam.

"This is as far as fish can go on the Sacramento main stem," fishery biologist Ryan Revnak said as he steered his boat upriver toward Keswick, which regulates flows from Shasta's hydropower plant.

Revnak, who works for the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, pointed out the gravel beds where the salmon built their nests, called redds. A female, close to death after laying her eggs, hovered in shallow water near the bank. A dead male, his procreative work also done, floated by.

Salmon eggs and emerging fry need cold water to survive. The river temperature shouldn't top 56 degrees. Last year in the spawning grounds below Keswick, it climbed above 62 degrees. Only 5% of the 2014 brood stock lived.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the dams, had miscalculated the volume of cold water in Shasta and didn't have enough to maintain the proper river temperature. The problem wasn't just that the drought had slashed runoff that fills the lake; the computer model used to predict cold water storage was wrong.

Federal agencies are trying to avoid a repeat this year by rationing Shasta's cold water releases so managers don't run out while the eggs and young develop over the next few months. But stretching the cold water reserves has meant lower releases this summer, nudging up the river temperature a degree or two during peak spawning.

And long bouts of 110-degree days in Redding could further warm the river. "There's a lot of uncertainty" in the plan, said Maria Rea, assistant regional administrator for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. "I don't have a high confidence that it will work."

If it doesn't, an industrial-looking complex near the base of Shasta Dam could be the winter run's last hope.
::
One wall of the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery is lined with incubation trays holding hundreds of thousands of winter-run eggs and young in different stages of development: fertilized eggs, eyed eggs that resemble pink jelly beans with two miniature fish eyes, sac fry feeding on their yolks, tiny infant fish that wiggle like a mass of gray worms.

Tanks of juveniles fill the main building. Adults are held in outside tanks, enclosed in zippered tents so they can't leap out.

Livingston is a conservation hatchery, opened in the late 1990s to maintain a genetically diverse population of wild winter-run. In a typical year, the hatchery traps up to 120 returning adults in the Sacramento and spawns them with the precision of a champion horse breeder.

The average female lays 5,000 eggs, which are divided into two or more sets. Each set is fertilized with sperm from a different male whose DNA has been analyzed to avoid inbreeding.

The tanks and egg trays are bathed with circulating water released from the dam. Last summer, hatchery managers had to use chillers to maintain the proper temperature. They may have to do the same this year.

To counter the drought losses, Livingston has ramped up production. The hatchery team is spawning 300 adults this year and come winter will release twice as many juveniles into the Sacramento as it normally does.

But even in good years, only a tiny fraction of those young hatchery salmon survive to adulthood and return to spawn. And if river conditions aren't right, their offspring will perish.

Facing that grim scenario, Livingston last year established a captive brood stock, which the hatchery will raise for the entire three-year life cycle of the fish. If worse comes to worst, it will function as a fall-back population. "You can't give up trying," said Assistant Hatchery Manager John Rueth.

In the meantime, he added, "All of us keep praying for this massive El Niño."
::
About 90 miles to the south, Carson Odegard and Justin Fairchild put on wet suits while standing on the back of a pickup truck parked not far from the DeSabla Powerhouse in upper Butte Creek Canyon. They walked for a mile on catwalks atop an old water flume, then descended to the creek on an oak-studded slope covered in brush and so steep the pair had to use ropes on the hike down.

They were ready to start their weekly snorkeling survey of another run of salmon that the state Fish and Wildlife Department is nervously monitoring.

Butte is one of only three tributaries of the Sacramento River where wild populations of the once bountiful but now threatened spring-run Chinook can still be found.

The Butte group is by far the largest. But this spring, biologists counted only 1,950 "silver bullets" as they passed through a Chico fish ladder on their way upstream, where the salmon hold until they start spawning in late summer. It was one of the lowest counts since the 1990s, when government agencies launched a restoration program that has so far poured $50 million into improving fish passage and habitat.

The number dipped even lower in June, when several hundred salmon died after a lower stretch of the creek hit lethal temperatures. Now there are about 1,500 spring-run waiting to spawn. Most are in a few remote miles of the Butte, downstream of a deep pool formed by a quartz-streaked rock bowl.

Fairchild, a Chico State environmental sciences graduate in his third summer on the Butte, and Odegard, a Chico State biology student, cover the most arduous part of the 11-mile snorkeling survey: the upper 2 miles. "There're a couple of guys who hate this section," said Fairchild, referring to others on the crew who prefer to work the tamer, downstream portions.

The pair jumped about 15 feet off a rock ledge into the pool, fed by a narrow chute of tumbling white water that acts as a natural barrier to migrating fish.

They swapped out the data logger in a thermograph that records the pool temperature every 30 minutes, and then swam downstream, searching for salmon carcasses. They take notes on waterproof paper, and if they encounter a carcass they take tissue samples for lab analysis. This day they came across no dead salmon, a good sign.

State Fish and Wildlife scientist Clint Garman has worked on the Butte project for 16 years. He consults weekly about creek conditions with other government biologists and the Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which diverts water from the west branch of the Feather River into Butte to boost hydropower production.
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With Central Valley heat climbing into the triple digits last month, they decided to increase releases of the cold river water to try to keep the creek temperature out of the danger zone. (The June die-off occurred when PG&E temporarily shut down the diversion to repair a leaking canal.)

After mid-August, overnight temperatures in Butte's upper drainage start to drop and the team can relax a bit.

In a state as extensively plumbed as California, the fate of fish can be more dependent on water managers than nature. As the drought has deepened, state and federal water officials have repeatedly pushed regulators to relax flow and water quality requirements to free up more supplies for agricultural and urban use.

In response, the State Water Resources Control Board has issued a dozen such orders for just the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta - even as the numbers of some delta fish species have crashed to record or near record lows.

Officials of the reclamation bureau, which delivers water to Central Valley growers, say they sought the changes to balance demands for shrinking supplies and to keep water in upstream reservoirs. Releasing more flows in the spring to help delta fish "would have just hammered those storage levels and we would have been in an even worse [situation] coming into the summer," said Ron Milligan, operations manager of the Central Valley Project.

Environmental groups have protested the changes and recently filed a lawsuit to reverse them.

"I'm despondent about the impacts we're seeing. Delta smelt are as close to extinction as you can be without being extinct," said Jon Rosenfield, a conservation biologist with the Bay Institute.

"I know there's pain in the ag sector," he said. "But it's temporary. If we lose salmon or delta smelt ... it will have permanent consequences."

bettina.boxall@latimes.com
Twitter: @boxall
MORE ON THE DROUGHT: L.A.'s shade balls go viral - but the Internet has mixed opinions California drought: Climate change plays a role, study says. But how big? Another toll of the drought: Land is sinking fast in San Joaquin Valley, study shows

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The drought's hidden victim: California's native fish

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Last summer, a narrow, rock-rimmed stretch of the Sacramento River near here turned into a mass graveyard for baby salmon. Upstream releases of water from Shasta Dam were so warm that virtually an entire generation of endangered winter-run Chinook was wiped out. The eggs never hatched, or if they did, the emerging young soon died.

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California's persistent drought threatens to take a heavy toll on the environment as well as the economy.

Welcome storms that just swept across the state will certainly provide some respite, but more are desperately needed. The latest snowpack readings are coming in at less than a third of normal and March is usually winter's last gasp.

"The short-term impacts are obvious. But the real question is going to be what the longer term effects will be, especially for terrestrial wildlife. That depends on how long and how severe the drought becomes," said Dan Yparraguirre, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. "Ultimately all species will be affected. It's a matter of degree."

The threats are as diverse as the environment itself. Among those: plummeting salmon runs, disease outbreaks in waterfowl and big horn sheep, the loss of newborns in big game, reduced hydropower generation, bark beetle invasions and firestorms fueled by deadwood in stressed forests.

Moreover, there are potential risks to water quality, fears of increased air pollution in the already dusty Central Valley, and a possible buildup of salinity in rivers that could be detrimental to fish and humans.

"Animals are only in as good condition as the resources allow them to be," said Craig Stowers a state biologist.

Fish are clearly threatened, particularly salmon runs that rely on steady flows of cool water. But with little extra to release out of reservoirs, river temperatures could rise and literally fry out-migrating juveniles. That's one reason why water managers are holding back a small pool of water for this summer just in case. Some streams and rivers have also been closed to fishing.

Further out, the valuable commercial salmon fishing industry could be shutdown to preserve stocks. That occurred in 2008-09, leaving boats dry-docked to give what was left of the winter-run a chance to rebound in the ocean before returning upstream to spawn. Some rivers and streams are already closed to recreational fishing.

The state is preparing to undertake fish rescues - capturing them in shallow waters and trying to safely transport them to deeper waters closer to the ocean.

Ironically, the Delta smelt - the most maligned species in the state's water wars - thus far appears safer. That's because winter flows in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are not carrying it toward the deadly state and federal pumps near Tracy. No pumping restrictions are in place to protect the smelt currently, but that's only because there is so little water to push out of the delta and on to Central Valley farms and Southern California cities.

These fish protection strategies, however, have come under fire from those who believe overzealous safeguards should give way to policies that prioritize use for farms and cities. Congressional Republicans have mounted a campaign to do just that, plus build more reservoirs.

"Congress can't pass a bill to make it rain, but we can pass a bill to put an end to the water shortages that have been caused by misguided regulatory decisions," Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, said in one floor debate.

State and federal refuges are also drying up. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has said it can deliver only 40 percent of normal supplies to those preserves that provide valuable habitat for hundreds of waterfowl species. It's also a double-whammy: rice growers, whose flooded fields are routinely occupied by birds, are also seeing less water. And that also means later in the fall there will be less dry land food sources and habitat for nesting birds that stake out spots in the Sacramento Valley.

Disease is another mounting concern. Every time animals crowd together, such as now as they compete for shrinking wetlands, deadly diseases can spread.

"The potential is pretty sobering," said Holly Heyser, editor of California Waterfowl magazine. There was an outbreak just recently in the Tule Lake refuge near the Oregon border.

Similar fears are unfolding out in the Mojave Desert desert as officials scramble to provide more watering holes for bighorn sheep. The bighorn are gathering around the few full human-provided watering holes, called "guzzlers." But the tight quarters could lead to an outbreak of a deadly pneumonia type of disease. The concern is not without justification - last summer at least 33 bighorn were killed by pneumonia in the Mojave Desert.

"We're figuring out how to make sure there is enough water in this tough time," said Chuck Bonham, director of the state Fish and Wildlife Department.

Bonham's department manages about one million acres of refuges that are also used by bird watchers, duck hunters and others. The problem is the state's water supplies, some of which are delivered by the Bureau of Reclamation, are being squeezed.

"We're figuring out how to do more with less," Bonham said.

The drought's effects may linger for some time, particularly with bigger game, from deer to bears. Healthy animals can withstand some deprivation of food and water. But females especially, if weakened over time, would then produce few offspring. And those young would have a lower survival rate.

Large predators that feed on smaller animals could find dinner harder to come by. If the eagles, bobcats and coyotes are forced to switch prey, that could result in declining numbers of the smaller animals and much more competition for food. Bears, with the springlike temperatures for much of the last two months, have been prowling for limited food and not in their annual hibernation pattern.

Animals with short life spans that produce large litters may see drops in population. But since they produce so many young, the impact may temporary.

Their home forests are in danger on a number of fronts.

Mark Schwartz, a plant ecologist at the University of California, Davis, explained that low soil moisture content stresses trees to such a point that they lose some of their natural disease fighting capabilities. As a result, they are more vulnerable to invasions of pests like the notorious bark beetle,

"As a consequence, tree mortality increases and we have more dead wood - fuel for wildfire," he said.

That scary scenario is already happening in other parts of the West, he said.

"I am on the edge of my seat when drought happens, as, eventually, it will trigger one of the big outbreaks of pests or pathogens that we have seen ravage forests of the desert Southwest or Northern Rockies," Schwartz said. "Thus far we have been fortunate. I hope we continue to be fortunate."

mike.gardner@utsandiego.com* (916) 445-2934

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California's persistent drought threatens to take a heavy toll on the environment as well as the economy. Welcome storms that just swept across the state will certainly provide some respite, but more are desperately needed. The latest snowpack readings are coming in at less than a third of normal and March is usually winter's last gasp.

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Impacts of Drought | USGS California Water Science Center

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U.S. Geological Survey - Water Resources of California. Your direct link to all kinds of water-resource information, drought, rivers, streams, ground water, water quality, and many other topics.