California Only Has One Year of Water Left - NASA Water Specialist

Earlier this year, the governor of California declared a State of Emergency in January as a result of an ongoing drought. Now a NASA scientist has declared the state may only have a year of water left. “We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.”

Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, in which he painted a dire picture of the state's water crisis. 

“As our ‘wet’ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions,” he wrote. 

Famiglietti pointed out that the state has “been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011.”

“January was the driest in California since record keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows,” he writes. “We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.”

Last month, scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University portended a "remarkably drier future" in California and other Western states that includes “megadroughts”  which would start as early as 2050 and each of which could last decades.

Famiglietti pointed out that the volume of the combined snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins totalled 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. 

“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes. “California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega­drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

The drought has elicited some municipalities to enact water rationing, a practice Famiglietti thinks should be expanded.

“Immediate mandatory water rationing should be authorized across all of the state's water sectors, from domestic and municipal through agricultural and industrial,” he writes. “The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is already considering water rationing by the summer unless conditions improve. There is no need for the rest of the state to hesitate.”

“The public is ready,” he adds countering the concerns of politicians of enacting unpopular legislation. “A recent Field Poll showed that 94% of Californians surveyed believe that the drought is serious, and that one-third support mandatory rationing.”