CORPUS CHRISTI, Tx — If you’ve moved to the Coastal Bend in the last 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 biggest player in our water supply. When it's full, this lake has a capacity of over 250,000 acre-feet. These days, this is what Lake Corpus Christi looks like at less than 40 percent full. In October 2023, Lake Corpus Christi was half full; in 12 months, the lake has dropped to roughly 32 percent. You don’t have to be a meteorologist to know what’s changed in the last year.
“The whole of South- and south-central Texas have missed out on the rain events.” Greg Waller, Service Coordination Hydrologist with the National Weather Service says the reason behind our drought is simple, but the science is not.
He says, “the heavy rain has to fall in the upper Nueces up near Asherton, all the way over to near the border. The border itself is the Rio Grande.” That just hasn’t happened and weekly updates to the drought monitor have shown worsening conditions throughout the Nueces River watershed.
The result is sinking lake levels. Our largest reservoir, Choke Canyon, is about 18 percent full— the lowest it's been since it started impounding water three decades ago.
“We've got to see organized patterns producing, you know, organized thunderstorms to generate runoff. If we see afternoon showers, you know, sea breeze type showers, that's not a favorable environment for generating the runoff 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 phrase, you know, the trend is not our friend,” he adds. The seasonal precipitation outlook expects Texas to be drier than normal through early 2025.
Waller offers a silver lining in light of the prediction. “If there is any positive when we go into the winter: less demand from users 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 continue to be our easiest and most effective solution to make it through our dry season.
Next time, we’ll look at how the hydrology in our watershed compares across the state.