Drought Relief?

Not to be too much of a wet blanket, but the surface area and volume of retention needed to counteract the current water use deficit and excess runoff would be of unbelievable proportions. Empty reservoirs tell the story. We'd be trying to replace a big chunk of Rocky Mountain snowfall that's no longer accumulating in Lake Mead and Lake Powell (not to mention the CA reservoirs) with better capture of precipitation in the Sierra and elsewhere in CA. Except there's not enough of that to go around either. We probably need thousands of square miles of catchments in areas that don't already have them and which also get enough precipitation to move the needle. I think most remedies of practical scale will be good for local plants and wildlife, but won't do much to solve human consumption problems.

The fundamental issue is that we've chosen to do mass agriculture in places that have lots of sun, but not much water, on the principal that it's easier to deliver water to where the sun is than the other way around. Ancient cultures did this in the Southwest and in large parts of South America. There's evidence that they did so in the Midwest as well. When conditions are less favorable, there are major societal dislocations.

It's already feeling like we're back to the old pattern of winter, that is from November to April/May about every week or week and a half a system off the Pacific Ocean would come in year's past. But the last 3-4 winters we would spend a month or two without a storm. It was great for hiking, I must admit.