One suggested short term tool to deal with the shrinking Salton Sea is to continue putting in more water. New research suggests that, for fish and birds, it won’t help. “Mitigation water” is jargon for extra water currently diverted to the Salton Sea to make up for reduced agricultural runoff as efficiency improvements. (It’s hairy …
Continue reading ‘Salton Sea fish, birds, in jeopardy even with more mitigation water’ »
A sometimes poorly understood piece of the water story is the question of scale – the truly enormous quantities of water required to do human stuff like be a city or grow our food. This is the shortcoming of well-meaning suggestions like building a pipeline to the Missouri River or a string of desalination plants …
There’s something that really jumps out in the Bureau of Reclamation’s final accounting of 2016 Lower Colorado River Basin water use. In May, the Bureau releases the official accounting, which is a meticulous, tedious, closely watched and monitored and argued over report on who used how much water on the Lower Colorado. Much to digest in the …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Irrigation District is saving a lot of water’ »
Matt Weiser (Water Deeply) has a nice interview with Mike Cohen (Pacific Institute) about one of the most interesting policy conundrums in Colorado River Basin water governance – the question of the Salton Sea. Here’s the sequence. California needs to figure out how to use less Colorado River water. Since the biggest chunk of the …
Continue reading ‘When a water supply problem becomes an air quality problem’ »
At the end of April, Lake Mead sat at 1,085 feet above sea level, more than eight feet higher than it was a year ago. That is in part thanks to a big winter upstream, which has ensured continued above-average releases from Lake Powell upstream. But equally important is the fact that folks in the …
Continue reading ‘Using less water on the Lower Colorado River’ »
Amid the Colorado River water management attention last week rightly focused on the fact that a wet winter in the Upper Basin means a big release this year from Lake Powell to help refill Lake Mead, I missed another bit of business that may be even more important. The Bureau of Reclamation’s planning model is …
Continue reading ‘declining Lower Colorado River Basin water use’ »
Reconciliation ecology, the field’s founders say, “says we still have time to save most of the world’s species. But to do it, we must stop trying to put an end to civilization and human enterprise. Instead, we need to work on the overwhelming bulk of the land — the places we humans use. We need …
Continue reading ‘“reconciliation ecology” in the rice fields of California’ »
We’ll be analyzing lessons from California’s drought for a while yet. But what I view as the most important lesson is already clear. The L.A. Times’ Bettina Boxall, one of the state’s most experienced and respected water reporters, summed it up thus: [O]n the whole, this intricately plumbed state proved to be surprisingly resilient in …
Continue reading ‘California’s remarkable resilience in the face of drought’ »
Ian James on new work by USGS researcher Michelle Sneed on the aquifer beneath the Coachella Valley, west of California’s Salton Sea: Since 2010, she said, groundwater levels have either stabilized or risen in many parts of the valley, in large part due to replenishment of the aquifer at percolation ponds. “Every well I’ve looked …
Continue reading ‘In California, another aquifer turns the corner’ »
This Bee aerial video of the work on the Feather River to try to cope with the problems at Oroville Dam is an amazing illustration of the scale of human intervention in rivers: Click through for the full video, no one screen grab can do it justice. They’ve completely shut down the spillway so they …
Continue reading ‘To fix Oroville, they shut down a river. Then built a road.’ »