For our third visiting lecture series, we listened to a guy from NOAA come and speak. I guess he came last year, and the community really liked his presentation, and so Dan Dawson asked if he could come again this year. He spoke to us about the drought that Southern California is facing, and of course with the big question, when will it be over.

There’s no answer to that question yet, unfortunately. He spoke a bit about how difficult it is to predict the end (or the beginning) of a drought cycle, and that any sort of reliable prediction won’t come until at least August of this year. The reason people are holding their breath for this year, is because it is supposed to be an El Niño year, which primarily means wetter. One sign to look for, he mentioned, when looking for the end of a drought, is floods.

Well, ok captain obvious, anything else? Well, it’s not quite as obvious as you might think. Lots of water doesn’t necessarily mean a drought is over. You can have a wetter year, and still be in a downward trend of precipitation for a long term drought cycle. But apparently, a year with numerous and severe floods can be the signal that subsequent years will actually achieve closer to normal levels of precipitation, and that it can actually mean the long term drought cycle is over. (At least for now). So the big question is… is 2014 the year? Will the drought end over the winter between 2014 and 2015 because El Niño is expected this winter?

The answer……….. (drum roll please)……………. we don’t know. There just is no way to tell whether or not the drought will end this year. Of course, we all hope it does, or at the very least, that we get a much wetter winter this year, so that water levels might rise a bit again, but there is no way to tell until it happens.

The talk was very non-technical and interesting, certainly one that kept it interesting by holding the suspense for an answer until the very end. As it turns out, this was the last visiting lecture I saw while up here, because the following week I was worrying too much about the final Watershed Profile Assessment to attend the last one.

Until Next Time,

Joe