Drought

While everyone back home is dealing with ice and snow, we’ve been lucky to have absolutely beautiful sunny and warm weather here in California (sorry for swears).

However, it’s not all fun and games, since California is having this beautiful weather as the result of a terrible drought. We haven’t had rain since July, and before that we hadn’t had any since January of last year. Even our cacti are dying (really – here’s a picture of the one beside our house):

The National Weather Service put together this graph showing typical rain levels in California, which illustrates how bad it actually is:

The scientific reason behind the drought is the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge”, a mass of high-pressure air that’s been hanging around over California. It’s four miles high and and 2,000 miles long, and it’s been diverting all of our rain up north to BC & Oregon.

Unfortunately, we are starting to get into real danger here, and several communities, including the Bay Area (where we live), could even run out of water within the next 100 days. I’m also not sure how this drought will affect farmers – who knows if we will be able to get as much wonderful produce as we’re used to.

What is confusing to me is that no one here even seems to have turned off their sprinkler systems. We turned ours off when we came back from Christmas holidays and realized there had been no rain while we were gone. However, many of the city’s green spaces are still green! And in LA, someone on Twitter posted this photo of the city “watering the sidewalks” as he called it (no that’s NOT rain!).

Lawns are all still green in our neighbourhood too. When we first moved here I was surprised that people even had lawns – after all, we are in a desert. Wouldn’t rock gardens and succulents make much more sense and waste much less water?

If you’re interested in learning more about the drought, you can search on Google News for “California drought”. And feel free to send some precipitation our way!! We’ll take everything we can get. (Note: It is supposed to rain tonight & tomorrow, but won’t be enough to make up for the months of no rain at all)