Here's an pretty good article about California droughts, couple years old but current when talking about California & droughts.
History shows California subject to extreme droughts
If you are reading this from anywhere in California, stop, look in the mirror and say, “I’m a champion.”
It’s an indisputable claim, because experts say Californians are the worldwide leaders at capturing water.
Our state has its own man-made circulation system — concrete canals and pipes that bring water from faraway mountains to farms and population centers. We’re the only place in the world with anything like it.
But, like a lot of champions, we might be getting complacent, cruising to victories over a bunch of easy-to-beat weather patterns.
Because as scientists slowly piece together clues unlocking the region’s ancient climate history, they are learning that California’s past is marked by stifling, soul-crushing droughts that lasted 30 years or longer and brought complex societies to their knees.
We may already be in what climatologists call a megadrought.
On average, Los Angeles gets about 15 inches of rain each year, according to the Western Regional Climate Center.
In 2011, we got 12 inches.
In 2012, we got 8.
In 2013, we got 2.
And halfway into the current rainy season, we’ve had less than 1 inch.
The weather has been so dry that state officials announced this month that they won’t send any water into the canals of the State Water Project unless rain comes soon.
No one can say for sure if we are in a megadrought. We only know that, at this rate, we’ll eventually run out of water.
“You crawl into these things, and you crawl out of them,” said Bill Patzert, a mathematician and oceanographer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories who is considered the foremost expert on the interaction between the ocean and weather patterns. “But I can guarantee that we’re eventually going to find ourselves in a bad one.”
And this is probably not due to human-created climate change, Patzert said. It’s just garden variety variation in a climate that is much more erratic than most of us realize, he said.
Just how bad can it get?
By aging old tree stumps in Lake Tahoe, climate researcher Susan Lindstrom found a dry period that lasted an estimated 1,300 years until it finally started getting wetter around 4000 B.C.
And, more recently,
an extended dry period that began about 1,050 years ago likely helped cause the absolute collapse of intricate Southwest American-Indian societies.
What’s more, a flood in 1605 was so severe it turned the Central Valley into a lake.
The last 150 years of weather represent some of the most peaceful, reliable periods of rainfall in the region’s history, concluded
paleoclimatologists B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam, in their recent book “The West Without Water.”
Put succinctly, Ingram and Malamud-Roam concluded that we have drastically underestimated the severity of the West’s weather.
Using their own research and cross-referencing with other scientists and scientific disciplines, they say California’s water supply can turn seemingly on a dime, and then stay changed for long stretches of time.
Those turns are primarily determined by the Pacific Ocean.
Entire article:
http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20140215/history-shows-california-subject-to-extreme-droughts
