A string of sunny days with temperatures reaching the low-90s is
here to stay, and rain is nowhere on the horizon, forecasters
said.
A string of sunny days with temperatures reaching the low-90s is here to stay, and rain is nowhere on the horizon, forecasters said.
Autumn is officially under way but Gilroyans are experiencing what seems to be an endless summer. Rain usually starts falling in October but barely a drop has hit South County since the season began in July. To date, 0.43 inches has fallen this season, according to a Gilroy Dispatch rain gauge. Historically, about 1.2 inches have fallen by Halloween.
“Everybody’s staring at zero going into October,” said Diana Henderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. “We’re just starting what we would consider to be the rainy season.”
The 30-year annual seasonal average is 21.11 inches, according to the NWS. In the 2006/2007 season, only 9.75 inches of rain fell, less than half the annual average. In 2007/2008, that number improved to 14.5 inches, still far below the annual average.
Meanwhile, county reservoirs are at half their capacity, which may sound grim but is about average for this time of year, according to Santa Clara Valley Water District statistics.
“Our reservoir capacity just dipped under 50 percent,” said Susan Siravo, spokeswoman for the water district. “Over the summer, they were hovering around 50 percent capacity. But usually by this time, we haven’t had rain in so long.”
Winter storms dropped 7.68 inches of rain on the region in January.
“We kicked off the year looking really good,” Siravo said. “But then it was such a dry spring, one of the driest on record.”
This summer, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proclaimed a statewide drought after two years of below-average rainfall totals, low snowmelt runoff and the largest court-ordered restrictions on water transfers in state history. An active fire season began early this year, burning tens of thousands of acres across the state.
When half the county’s drinking water comes from the Sierra snowpack through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the other half comes from locally captured rainfall, the water district has had to tap into its reserves these last two years, something it didn’t have to do even during the last drought cycle in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Siravo said. An underground aquifer in Kern County holds extra reserves from the Sierra snowpack.
“It’s there if we need it,” Siravo said. “We did need to use it the last two years and we’ve never had to do that before. But that’s what the water’s there for.”
Before 2007, the county received 13 years of strong rainfall, Siravo said.
Although the district isn’t yet feeling the squeeze, “we’re in the mode of preparing for the worst,” Siravo said. The water district has launched a conservation campaign to encourage residents to voluntarily restrict their water intake, before the district has to impose mandatory restrictions.
“Like many other Bay Area counties, Santa Clara County … has been seeing its annual water demand exceed its water supply,” said Rosemary Kamei, water district board member. ” … unless we conserve more, we will need to resort to mandatory conservation if there is another dry year. As a result, the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which is the county’s water wholesaler, is asking the public to voluntarily cut back their water use by 10 percent.”
The water district offers free house calls to residents who want to learn how to make their homes more water efficient and a number of water saving tips in its Web site.
“When it comes to saving water, there is no time to waste,” Kamei said.
