A series of unusually strong El Niño-fueled storms have helped restore California's largest reservoir, Lake Shasta, to its former glory.
Located in the northern half of the state, Lake Shasta was down to only 29 percent of its normal storage capacity in December. However, for the first time in three years, the reservoir is now at 109 percent of its historical capacity for this time of the year.
With California's ongoing drought, this marks a major milestone for Lake Shasta, which is a key source of water for human consumption and for the fertile farmland of the Central Valley.
"It's just a good year," said Louis Moore, a deputy public affairs officer with the Bureau of Reclamation. "It's what we want. We really want the supply to be available. This is turning into a year where precipitation has been good."
As of March 29, the 21-mile long reservoir held 4.004 million acre-feet of water, which is well above the historical average of 3.668 million acre-feet. What's more is that the amount of water in Lake Shasta has tripled since December alone.
The progress made during this year's rain-soaked March can be seen in a series of images captured from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA's Landsat 8 satellite.
However, to accommodate an abundance of water, the state's Federal Bureau of Reclamation ordered 20,000 cubic feet of water to be released into the upper Sacramenta River per second during a short period of time mid-March. This was the first time since 2011 that the bureau had released water at such a rapid rate, which is normally about 5,000 cubic feet per second.
"We never got to the point where the increased releases drew the lake down at all," spokesman Shane Hunt explained. "We just slowed how fast we were gaining."
While it is certainly good news that the water-starved state has seen some relief, experts warn that California is not yet completely healed. In fact, Southern California hasn't received nearly as much precipitation, with more than a third of the state still experiencing sever drought conditions.
Although more El Niño-driven storms are expected to hit the state, climatologists estimate that Southern California needs as much as 12 inches of additional precipitation.
Even still, it will be some time before California is able to shake the drought, since the state relies on well water for 40 percent of its supply, which takes much longer to replenish.
"Ground water can take anywhere from a year to five years to recharge," said Doug Parker, director for the California Institute for Water Resources. "So we need a number of wet years in a row to really deal with this ground water issue, and to bring that part of the state where it needs to be."
