El Niño Storms Enable California's Lake Shasta Swell To Historic Capacity
There have been a series of extraordinarily strong El Niño storms in Lake Shasta, the largest reservoir in California, which has enhanced its water storage.
While the storage capacity of the lake had dwindled to just 29 percent of its normal capacity last December, it has now shot up to 109 percent of its historically recorded capacity for this season.
Hence, given its drought conditions, this rise in the storage is of major importance for the lake in the northern part of California. Lake Shasta is an important source of water for consumption and for irrigation in the Central Valley.
"It's just a good year," said Louis Moore, a deputy public affairs officer with the Bureau of Reclamation. "It's what we want. We really want the supply to be available. This is turning into a year where precipitation has been good."
On March 29, the 21-mile long reservoir was documented to contain 4.004 million acre-feet of water, much above the historical average of 3.668 million acre-feet. Since December, the water in the lake had risen by three times.
The state's Federal Bureau of Reclamation ordered that 20,000 cubic feet of water should be released into the upper Sacramenta River every second in a short period by mid-March. Usually, the release is just 5,000 cubic feet per second.
"We never got to the point where the increased releases drew the lake down at all," spokesman Shane Hunt explained. "We just slowed how fast we were gaining."
However, the entire state does not indicate that things have changed completely. Southern California has not received much rainfall, even as more than a third of the state is still reeling under drought.
Southern California needs about 12 inches of rain, according to climatologists.
"Ground water could take anywhere from a year to five years to recharge," said Doug Parker, director of the California Institute for Water Resources. "So we need a number of wet years in a row to really deal with this ground water issue, and to bring that part of the state where it needs to be."
