why is California always in a drought crisis, but landlocked states in the Midwest are not?

Question

why is California always in a drought crisis, but landlocked states in the Midwest are not?

In: 286

Answer 1

In addition to the other answers, California’s climate is much more affected by El Nino and La Nina, so it frequently has multiple years in a row of either too much rain or not enough rain.

This is what reservoirs are supposed to be for, but California’s reservoir capacity is not sufficient to capture all the rain in the rainy years and save it for the drought years – as a result, they ping-pong between flooding and water shortages