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A comment on California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem. Parent comment

Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem by allendoerfer on Thursday June 18, 2015 @08:00AM (#9738005)
What he is trying to do is attack the premise of the article. The leaky bucket method does not work if you overflow the bucket once every ten years and then stop filling until the next flood. The bucket would have to be enormous and is therefore not the solution.

I think it is a simple solution that should definitely be used to the full extent.

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Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem by Tloewald on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:15AM (#9738612)
Even without the 38" year the average rainfall still makes the argument work; quoting a 4" deficit and singling out the highest year is disingenuous. The lowest year was also an outlier.
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Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem by airza on Thursday June 18, 2015 @04:33PM (#9741459)
Here is the data that I used, the author's is something rather similar:

http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we13.htm

You can add the following values (from http://ggweather.com/ca2013rain.htm and similar URLS): 2012-2013: 5.85 2013-2014: 6.08

(I actually missed these in my original napkin math, but they make my argument even better, so...)

My point was that if in the original data set, the only way that you get those favorable numbers is if you start at the present and arbitrarily go back until you hit a very high number. Any other averaging of rainfall from the present to a year in the last 20 years looks absolutely horrendous.

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Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem by cbhl on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:13PM (#9739561)
That suggests that what we care about isn't just the average, but also the standard deviation. How big would the bucket need to be? How long is it between droughts? Would storing large tanks of water between years have other risks, and how can they be mitigated?
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