Editor: So much rain and snow! How can California still be in a drought?

Isn’t the California drought over after more than two months of atmospheric currents and bombardment amid a massive snowpack in the Sierra and more precipitation for the rest of the month?

The US Drought Monitor reports that yes, 17% of California is now drought free. Most of the rest of the state is also fairly wet, although it remains somewhat “drought” as the term is defined by the Drought Monitor.

Only 17%? How is that possible? We’ve had more rain and snow than all of winter 2019, when the state was last declared drought-free.

Cognitive dissonance is the result of the word “drought,” which scientists use to describe a range of measurable conditions in soil, atmosphere, plants, rivers, and reservoirs. For most of us, however, the drought ends when it rains.

Think of the Great Plains in the 1930s. Now, The was a drought that everyone could understand. When the rain stopped in 1930, the ground dried up and was blown away. Needy farmers moved to the San Joaquin Valley from Oklahoma and neighboring states. In 1939 it finally rained again. The drought was over, the soil recovered, corn and wheat grew, the US became the breadbasket of the world, and everything was back to normal.

Unfortunately, much of this story is a myth and irrelevant anyway to the terrain and hydrology of California in an era of heat waves, longer summers and urban life.

Drought was never the right word for the drought in this state. Californians need a term that not only describes how much water comes in, but also how much we use each day and how much we save for later. We need a word or phrase that says how long we can take a shower, whether farmers can keep growing pistachios, or whether the forests and cities will burn again in the summer.

Instead of drought, we should talk about water debt and describe periods of rain as winning the water lottery.

And isn’t a wet winter the same as winning the lottery? Most jackpot winners expect their lifestyle to change forever. But then they pay off their debts and taxes on their profits and indulge in some extravagance. Before they know it, they’re back where they started – except now with a taste for luxury they can no longer afford. This keeps them in debt.

California has developed a fondness for almond groves and lawns that need water in amounts we’ll never have, even after a wet winter lottery. This year’s rain and snow will help pay off some of our water debt by refilling once-empty reservoirs in Northern and Central California. But that hasn’t changed conditions at Lakes Mead and Powell on the Colorado River, which supply much of Southern California’s water. Since 2000, when these reservoirs were last full, we’ve brought them down to almost zero. They were filled by a previous jackpot that happened during the 20th^St Century, which geological records tell us was an unusually wet period.

We continue to draw from some of our largest water bank accounts, the aquifers under the San Joaquin Valley. To recharge it, we need to invest a lot more land and money into floodplain restoration so winter rainwater can run off over time and seep into the ground, as was the case until the early 1900s^St Century at the formerly huge, but now vanished Tulare Lake and Buena Vista Lake. Meanwhile, even some empty aquifers disappear as dried underground layers compress and lose their ability to hold moisture. It’s like we won the lottery, quit our jobs, forfeited our winnings, spent all our savings, and then the bank burned down.

This is not a unique story in California. At the end of the Dust Bowl drought, the rains returned, but farmers wanted more and began pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water source the size of a large lake that has formed over thousands of years. As in the San Joaquin Valley, overpumping is depleting the Great Plains’ groundwater at an alarming rate, and without better management, it could all be gone by the end of this century.

We don’t often label this kind of exhaustion as a drought. But the US is building up a national water debt that can never be managed the way we manage our more traditional debt. We can always print more money, but we can’t print more water. We have to do better with what we have.