Water year ends with parched conditions
By Matt Stevens, Los Angeles Times
The year of the brown lawn and shortened showers concludes today, with water officials citing bleak statistics and expressing hope that the next few months will bring the heavy rains California so desperately needs.
“Water year” 2015 was hot, dry and fiery, compounding the misery brought on by a fourth year of drought.
Water watchers keep track of precipitation and storage using Oct. 1 as a starting point. That day is considered the beginning of the wet season and the “water year.”
It was exactly halfway through the 2015 cycle — on April 1 — that Californians were schooled on just how dire the circumstance had become.
On that day, Gov. Jerry Brown stood in a barren field — one normally covered by several feet of snow — to announce historic water conservation restrictions. The Sierra snowpack’s water content measured just 5 percent of normal, obliterating the previous record low of 25 percent.