"The ground is literally sunk in some places by 10 or 15 feet over the past decade," said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist. As thirstier crops like almonds and pistachios came into vogue, relentless pumping of groundwater made Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas of the nation, just in time for Tulare Lake to come back from the dead with a vengeance. Water was always a concern in Tulare County, but mainly because there was never enough. Tulare Lake was once the biggest freshwater body west of the Mississippi until farmers consumed so much of the Sierra Nevada runoff that it dried up and, over the decades, the lake bed became crop land. "But when the snow melts, there's nowhere for it to go besides here."
"This is just from the rain," Sealy said of the flooded fields. It's pretty scary."Įven scarier when you realize the standing water that's there now is just the beginning of their ordeal. That's a lot of food that we provide for up and down California and all around the nation. "All of the crops are completely flooded and ruined," resident Martina Sealy told CNN as she held her baby daughter and gazed out across white-capped water, where vast fields of cotton and alfalfa had grown all her life. There are growing areas of green - designating flooding threats - each day on the maps posted by the National Weather Service California Nevada River Forecast Center.
"Potential for prolonged warm and dry conditions, especially by mid-late next week, will test our recor snowpack and lead to prolonged high flows as additional energy will help to melt snow in deeper mid-elevation areas." water-in-snow-sierra-snow-lab
"The warming trend into this weekend will ramp up snowmelt throughout the area," the NWS forecasters said. The National Weather Service in Reno was predicting temperatures in or near the 60s for Truckee for the next seven days with a high of 65 by Thursday. "Primarily through things like warm atmospheric rivers where we get rain falling on top of them that can cause rapid flooding and catastrophic consequences downstream.prolonged warm periods are also a concern." "Flooding is a concern with these deep snowpacks," he told KPIX. Andrew Schwartz, the lead scientist at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, is among those who are concerned what the coming months holds once the 700-plus inches or nearly 60 feet of snow that has fallen since October in the mountains begins to melt off. TRUCKEE - The forecast for temperatures in the 60s and possible rainshowers next week around the Tahoe Basin could be heralding the beginning of the feared snow melt after an epic winter in the Sierra.ĭr.
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