Taming the Lower Basin Structural Deficit
The federally funded water use reductions approved last month by the Imperial Irrigation District and the federal government have made their way into the Bureau of Reclamation’s annual forecast model (updated Sept. 6 as I’m writing this), and the numbers are remarkable.
Imperial’s projected 2.2 million acre foot take on the Colorado River in 2024 is on track to be the lowest on record, with data going back to 1941.
California’s total projected main stem withdrawals are again under 4 million acre feet, the lowest they’ve been since the 1950s. Arizona’s main stem withdrawals remain under 2 million of their nominal 2.8 maf allocation for the second year in a row, basically the lowest they’ve been since the Central Arizona Project was built. Nevada is once again hovering around 200,000 acre feet of its 300,000 acre foot allocation.
Taken together, water use by the three lower basin states is currently on track to be the lowest since detailed record keeping began in 1964.
A note on the data
The Bureau of Reclamation has complete reported data back to 1964, when the modern accounting system was established as a result of the Supreme Court’s Arizona v. California decree. I have stitched that data together with a separate dataset that pushes California records back into the 1940s, assembled some years ago by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and kindly shared with me. For my current version of the dataset, I extend a huge thanks to Sami Guetz, who spent time QA’ing it as part of her masters project at UC San Diego.
Under these new scenarios, will the two big reservoirs gain or loose water?
Patrick – My colleague Jack Schmidt is looking at the numbers now, we should have something later this week.
Patrick –
P.S. Right now, as of yesterday, they’re up year over year, by about 300,000 acre feet.
This is great, but it’s only because we taxpayers are paying farmers in Arizona and California more to not use their water rights than they could make by using the water to farm. I do not want to be paying farmers not to farm, forever. Farmers in the Imperial Valley got their water rights for free, they get their water for free courtesy of the federal government, and now we’re paying them not to use their free water. Heck of a deal.
I have been telling my upper basin water friends about the real reduction in water use that has been happening with IID (and evidently CAP as well).
When any state rep wants to re-do the compact, the first question that should be asked is, “what has been your reduction in use?”
We’re all in this together!