‘The trend is not our friend’ – Hydrologist says a tough winter is ahead

CORPUS CHRISTI, Tx — If you’ve moved to the Coastal Bend in the past two years, chances are your neighborhood has been under water restrictions the entire time. Friday, October 25 marks 864 days of water restrictions for Corpus Christi Water customers.

Lake Corpus Christi is the second largest player in our water supply. When full, this lake has a capacity of more than 250,000 hectares. Today, Lake Corpus Christi looks like this, when it is less than 40 percent full. In October 2023, Lake Corpus Christi was half full; in twelve months it has fallen more to about 32 percent. You don’t have to be a meteorologist to know what has changed in the past year.

“All of South and South Central Texas missed the rain events.” Greg Waller, Service Coordinating Hydrologist with the National Weather Service, says the reason behind our drought is simple, but the science is not.

He says: “The heavy rain should fall in the Upper Nueces, near Asherton, all the way to the border. The border itself is the Rio Grande.” That simply hasn’t happened and weekly drought monitor updates have shown worsening conditions in the Nueces River basin.

The result is declining lake levels. Our largest reservoir, Choke Canyon, is about 18 percent full, the lowest since it began storing water 30 years ago.

“We need to see organized patterns that, you know, produce organized thunderstorms to generate runoff.” If we see showers in the afternoon, sea breeze-like showers, that is not a favorable environment for generating the runoff that we need,” Waller explains.

According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, we may not get the rain we desperately need anytime soon. “I use the expression: the trend is not our friend,” he adds. The seasonal precipitation outlook calls for Texas to be drier than normal through early 2025.

Waller offers a silver lining in light of the prediction. “If there is one positive as we go into winter: less user demand and less evaporation, so that will slow the decline.”

Spring tends to bring more rain to the watershed. Until then, Waller says water conservation will remain our easiest and most effective solution to get through the dry season.
Next time we’ll look at how the hydrology in our watershed compares across the state.