Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Sparks

California Is Headed for Another Wet Winter

For the first time in four years, drought is nowhere to be found.

California rain.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The 2020s got off to a parched, smoky start in the West. But after three years of unrelenting drought, 2023 brought the region some relief.

Thanks to a very snowy winter followed by a very rainy spring, the worst of the Western drought receded rapidly in the early months of this year, data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows. The extent bottomed out in the early summer, when only one-sixth of the West was experiencing any level of drought at all. It’s crept upward since then to about 45% of the region, but still — that’s the lowest drought level the contiguous Western states have seen at this time of year since 2019.

Most remarkable, in some ways, has been California’s transformation. After years with far too little precipitation, in 2023 California often received far too much. A spate of atmospheric rivers early in the year dumped inches of rain on its lower elevations and feet of snow in its mountains. In April, Hurricane Hilary smashed rainfall records across the southern part of the state.

Two years ago this week, 100% of California was drought-stricken; early this fall, the last patches disappeared (though a small but declining percentage of the state is still considered “abnormally dry”). This is the first time drought has been absent from California since 2019. The most recent time before that was 2011. Before that, it was 2006.

Meanwhile, the uptick in Western drought since summer has been most severe in Arizona and New Mexico, where the vast majority of places are drier than usual and conditions in some areas are becoming more severe. Temperatures in Phoenix rose above 110 degrees Fahrenheit on a record 55 different days between June and September, including an historic 31-day streak that baked the city for almost all of July, the Arizona Republic reported. While the wet winter replenished some of the Colorado River’s dwindling water supply, the temporary boost wasn’t enough to avert imminent cutbacks among the Southwestern states that depend on it.

This precipitation rebound won’t last, of course. The above-average mountain snowpack that piled up from heavy winter snows and kept streams flowing through the spring and into the summer is long gone now. And the decline this year in infernos terrorizing the West is almost certainly a blip in the trend toward ever more devastating fire years, The Washington Post reported last week. If historic patterns hold true, there might not be another fire season this quiet for decades.

“We have just had a respite,” Tonya Graham, the mayor of Ashland, Ore., told the Post. “We have had a little bit of breathing space in this trajectory that is taking us toward higher wildfire and smoke risk and more extreme temperatures.”

But that rest doesn’t look to be over for everyone just yet. Snowpack is already starting to accumulate again. And the National Weather Service forecasts that at least in California and neighboring states, there’s a good chance precipitation will stay higher than normal through the winter.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

Keep reading...Show less
Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Sparks

Trump Will ‘Deal’ with Wind and Solar Tax Credits in Megabill, GOP Congressman Says

“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.

Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.

Keep reading...Show less