As California’s rainy season comes to a close and the state heads into the spring and summer of the fourth year of its historic drought, a senior NASA researcher is warning that the state may have only a single year worth of water left at present usage rates.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti warned in an LA Times editorial that “right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

The NASA researcher recommended the immediate adoption of rationing across all sectors of the state, including domestic, municipal, agricultural and industrial sectors. Famiglietti, also a professor at University of California at Irvine, also recommended the immediate creation of a task force to create long-term strategies for monitoring the state’s diminishing water supply.

Famiglietti also urged a speed up in the implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014.

“The law requires the formation of numerous, regional groundwater sustainability agencies by 2017. Then each agency must adopt a plan by 2022 and “achieve sustainability” 20 years after that. At that pace, it will be nearly 30 years before we even know what is working. By then, there may be no groundwater left to sustain,” he wrote.

According to the authors of a study published in February, in the inaugural edition of the journal Science Advances, Famigletti is correct. According to the research, the chances of the Southwest and central Great Plains facing a “megadrought” of 35 years or longer is currently 80 percent.

Warnings of long-lansting, possibly even permanent, drought have been making headlines in California and the Southwest since at least 2007. A study published in that year, the seventh year of another recent California drought, warned of permanent drought by 2050.

“The driest periods of the last century — the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the droughts of the 1950s — may become the norm in the Southwest United States within decades because of global warming, according to a study released Thursday. The research suggests that the transformation may already be underway. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the study’s analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period,” said the LA Times at the time.

Famiglietti’s concerns are based on NASA data which shows that water reservoirs in California have been in steady decline since 2002.

A poll released in February showed that 94 percent of Californians see the drought as “serious” and 68 percent “extremely serious”. However, only 34 percent of respondents favored rationing, with 61 percent favoring voluntary reductions instead.

Last year California Governor Jerry Brown asked for a voluntary 20 percent reduction in water use. That goal was not met.

“If Californians can’t conserve enough, water managers will either have to create new sources, often in the form of recycling, or pray that Mother Nature delivers sooner rather than later,” said Aaron Orlowski of the Orange County Register in February.

The state does have one other option, albeit an expensive one. Starting in 2016, the world’s largest desalinization plant will provide 50 million gallons of drinking water per day to residents of San Diego.

The cost of that plant, for construction alone, is an estimated $1 billion and it would take several such plants to meet the needs of everyone in Southern California, to say nothing of the needs of the agricultural and industrial sectors. However, it is an option not shared by states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico that do not have access to the ocean.