Скачать или смотреть 'Deep Trouble': Water Levels at California's Reservoirs Leaving Towns Dry

The blistering drought that has hit California over the past decade has been somewhat lessened by the recent torrential rainfall across the state.

However, despite improvements in the state's drought conditions and increased water levels in many of California's major reservoirs, a lot more rainfall is needed to completely replenish not only the surface reservoirs but the groundwater stores as well.

If the water stores cannot be refilled, many towns may suffer from water shortages, as seen in Coalinga in Northern California this past fall and Rio Verde in Arizona this week.

"Our community can't rely just on precipitation amounts or atmospheric moisture demand alone to understand how severe a drought is," said Daniella Rempe, a hydrologist and geomorphologist at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas in Austin.

"We have to look underground to see how much water has been depleted from storage belowground in soils and rock. This is where the water that supplies streams and trees during [California's] long dry season comes from.

"Long periods of low rainfall not only dry up the moisture supply for plants, risking fires and large-scale tree mortality events, etcetera. They also limit the amount of groundwater that is stored within the landscape."This groundwater is absolutely crucial to supplying streams in [California's] long, dry summers every year, not just during drought. But what happens during drought is that the rains that would refill this groundwater end up just refilling the dry root zone and either delaying or preventing recharging of the groundwater system that supplies streams and reservoirs," Rempe said.

While the start of 2023 has been a wet one, the rest of the year may not see the same degree of rain for months, putting the reservoirs and groundwater levels at risk of drying out again.