More than an inch and a half of rain fell on San Antonio Thursday and Friday, the most precipitation the area has seen in more than seven months.
The deluge brought the city’s 2023 rainfall total to more than 4 inches, and while that’s about twice as much rain as the Alamo City had seen by this time last year, it’s still two inches below a normal year, National Weather Service meteorologist Nick Hampshire told the San Antonio Report on Monday.
Last week’s wet weather dumped 1.63 inches of rainfall over two days, Hampshire said.
It was the area’s biggest rain event it has seen in 220 days, SAWS Vice President of Water Conservation Karen Guz told the city’s council’s Municipal Utilities Committee on Friday.
But Central Texas is going to need a lot more rain to pull it out of drought, weather and water conservation experts say.
“It’s for sure going to take more rain than what we’ve had to make a significant impact,” Hampshire said. “We’re still way behind.”
The ongoing drought, which began last spring, has been especially brutal for San Antonio, which saw both its hottest summer on record last year, and its second driest year to date.
So far, 2023 has been fairly warm and dry, Guz told council members Friday. A lot of the area’s rainfall has also been “more to the east and south than we would have liked in terms of benefiting the [Edwards] Aquifer,” leaving San Antonio “still in a rain deficit.”
The vast limestone aquifer that holds the largest source of drinking water in the San Antonio region is regulated by the Edwards Aquifer Authority (EAA), whose jurisdiction spans the eight counties that encompass the aquifer.
The EAA’s Critical Period Management plan dictates how much permit holders like SAWS can pump out of the aquifer, depending on the aquifer’s water level.
As of midday Monday, the water level of the J-17 Index Well, which is used as a barometer, was 637.63 feet. The weekend’s rainfall brought the well up by about 4 feet, Paul Bertetti, director of aquifer science with the EAA, told the San Antonio Report Monday.
The well’s 10-day average is currently clocking in at about 636 feet, Bertetti said. That’s the lowest it’s been since 2014, he said, and just 6 feet away from triggering Stage 4 restrictions, which would require permit holders to reduce their pumping by 40%.
“We’re still in Stage 3 restrictions,” he said, which means those who have permits to pump Edwards water, including SAWS, have reduced pumping by 35%.
Late last summer, the 10-day average dropped below 630 feet, triggering Stage 4 water restrictions, which remained in place for six days. Bertetti said the last time the EAA had to declare Stage 4 was in 2014, where it remained for 90 days.
Texas’ driest year on record was 2011, the beginning of another multiyear drought that stretched through 2015. Between those years, San Antonio spent 48 out of 60 months in Stage 2 water restrictions.
Given the ongoing drought, the EAA may have to institute Stage 4 restrictions again by the end of August, Bertetti estimated.
The City of San Antonio has been under SAWS’ Stage 2 restrictions since April 13, 2022. where it’s been able to stay due to the water utility’s diversified water sources.
Hampshire said relief may be on the way, if an El Niño weather pattern develops by the end of the year, as expected. As of now, the climate in the Southern U.S. is considered neutral, as experts have declared La Niña officially over.
La Niña pushes the Pacific jet stream north, typically bringing warmer temperatures but less rain to the southern United States while making the northern U.S. and Canada wetter and colder. El Niño typically brings wetter, colder conditions to southern states.
“With El Niño moving in, we won’t see much of a difference probably in the summer but we should hopefully be seeing a wetter fall,” Hampshire said.
