© 2024 Public Radio East
Public Radio For Eastern North Carolina 89.3 WTEB New Bern 88.5 WZNB New Bern 91.5 WBJD Atlantic Beach 90.3 WKNS Kinston 88.5 WHYC Swan Quarter 89.9 W210CF Greenville
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
US

Will California's Wet Weather Ease The Multi-Year Drought?

Published December 25, 2014 at 1:06 PM EST
A small pool of water is surrounded by dried and cracked earth that was the bottom of the Almaden Reservoir on January 28, 2014 in San Jose, California. Now in its third straight year of drought conditions, California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have low water levels. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
A small pool of water is surrounded by dried and cracked earth that was the bottom of the Almaden Reservoir on January 28, 2014 in San Jose, California. Now in its third straight year of drought conditions, California is experiencing its driest year on record, dating back 119 years, and reservoirs throughout the state have low water levels. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

It’s been a wet month for California.

Record amounts of rainfall and some snow have led to above normal fall precipitation. But how much is this helping with the state’s severe drought?

Hydrologist Jay Famiglietti is a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He used satellite data to calculate that California would need 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from California’s three year drought.

Famiglietti spoke with Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson about how much progress California is making to ease the drought and what low levels of groundwater might mean for the rest of the nation.

Guest

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

US