A drying trend forecast for the Southwest

Posted by on

Today’s long lead outlook from the Climate Prediction Center is enough to make a southwestern water manager long a second consecutive busted forecast*. With La Niña in the offing, the maps show creeping brown across the Four Corners states by August and not letting up until late spring of 2017:

Source: Climate Prediction Center

Source: Climate Prediction Center

* Last winter’s forecast, for a wet year down here, didn’t exactly come off as planned. I’m being glib here, not critical. The nature of probabilistic forecasting is that they will be “wrong” a significant portion of the time. It’d not a “prediction”.

In California environmental management, signs of hope

Posted by on

California sprang to action in its fourth year of deep drought because water management professionals and state leaders recognized that California’s water-scarce condition could be the new norm. They accepted the scientific consensus that it could get considerably worse. The way out of the trouble was to convince state residents of the need for collective action and to instill behavioral changes in homes and businesses that would diminish demand and provide a higher measure of safety.

California’s response to the drought is even more nationally and globally significant than that. What state and local leaders did to reduce the risks, and how state residents reacted, was a very public demonstration of government’s capacity to act with reason and intelligence to a short-term ecological emergency, with a long-term vision.

That’s Keith Schneider, former New York Times, now Circle of Blue, in the latest Boom. Not just water, Schneider’s arguing that we look at California to learn broad lessons of resilience:

More so than in any other state in the United States and nearly any region of the world, Californians have shown a capacity to recognize and reckon with deep drought, high heat, sea level rise, insect plagues, wildfire, and many more of our current, high-risk ecological realities. California is responding with targeted, sometimes statewide, but often smaller, local solutions to the problems facing every person on the planet. In this way, what we might call a California code is contributing to developing a new global operating system for the future.

Institutional Constraints to Water Management in New Mexico

Posted by on

Conference May 20 organized by my University of New Mexico water colleagues, especially Kerry Howe at UNM’s Center for Water and the Environment and Adrian Oglesby at the Utton Center:

The drought has eased somewhat in New Mexico but might be returning, and uncertainties regarding our future remain.  This 1-day conference will focus on federal and state institutions that manage and control our water supply, and the constraints that are imposed by physical realities and regulatory requirements.  Speakers and participants will explore alternative approaches to minimize these constraints to improve our overall water resource management.  The conference will feature opening remarks from Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham and presentations from several federal and state institutions.

Conference details here.

Optimism, problems journalism, and solutions journalism. And groundwater.

Posted by on

It is not hard to find and highlight problems. Solutions are more difficult stories to tell, because they often manifest themselves as things that just work, unnoticed by the very fact of their practical efficiency – “Problems scream, solutions whisper,” as a new friend working on “solutions journalism” recently told me.

Thus it is, for example, that we have seen journalism to the point of exhaustion regarding groundwater pumping in California’s Central Valley, but precious little about those groundwater basins in that state or elsewhere that have successfully self-regulated their groundwater pumping and stabilized their aquifers.

I frame the problem in a particular way because of my focus on water, but as Gregg Easterbrook writes in the New York Times, it generalizes:

Because optimism has lost its standing in American public opinion, past reforms — among them environmental protection, anti-discrimination initiatives, income security for seniors, auto and aviation safety, interconnected global economics, improved policing and yes, Obamacare — don’t get credit for the good they have accomplished.

Important avocado news

Posted by on

OK, not really “news”, but I made you click, and this is the Internet, so let’s proceed:

Scientists believe the avocado, with its enormous wood-like seed, evolved to be eaten by enormous animals that lived thousands of years ago. One of these animals would chow down on some avocados and either leave partially-eaten fruit (and its seed) nearby, or the seed would pass all the way through the animal and be left behind in its waste.  Since those giant beasts are no longer with us, avocados are now dependent on human intervention to spread their seeds.

The important part is that a) it was news to me, and b) it’s about avocados! The source is Why Do Strawberries Have Their Seeds On The Outside? On which you should also click because it’s about strawberries!

Selling the Colorado River deal back home: Imperial, the Salton Sea and California’s hard road

Posted by on

For those following efforts to cobble together an expanded Colorado River water conservation deal (that’s all of you, right?) there are a couple of important issues to unpack in Ian James’ excellent interview published yesterday with Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District. Imperial, the largest single water using agency on the Colorado, is farming 369,000 acres of desert land this year (source pdf) and is forecast to use 2.55 million acre feet of water in 2016 (source pdf). That is nearly four times the Colorado River water use currently forecast for metropolitan Southern California this year.

Wheat, right, and onions with a canal, Imperial Valley, March 2014

Wheat, right, and onions with a canal, Imperial Valley, March 2014

In other words, as measured by water use, Imperial is the major player here.

As currently structured (and this is very much a work in progress), an agreement among the states of Arizona, Nevada, and California would have California voluntarily reducing its take on the Colorado River if Lake Mead drops too low. But Californians are still sorting out the details of how allocations within California would be reduced. From James’ story:

IID and other water districts in California have been in talks about proposals to share in reductions in the amounts of water they receive from the Colorado River. Those negotiations among the state’s districts are taking place parallel to talks between representatives of Arizona, Nevada, California and the federal government.

These in-state talks, as I wrote last week, may be the hardest part of this deal-making. For Imperial, Kelley explained, a solution to the problems of the Salton Sea is crucial to any deal. Water conservation efforts in Imperial reduce flows to the sea, creating a host of environmental problem in the desert communities that surround it:

“There is no single agency with a greater stake in the river or one that could make a greater impact in propping up that plunging elevation (of Lake Mead) than IID,” Kelley said. “But IID’s participation can only come about if there is a going-forward road map at the Salton Sea.”

Kelley made a second incredibly important point in the James piece – the way important information about the current status of the California part of the deal was made public last month ago by folks in Arizona. There’s always been tension between Arizona and California over how to share the Colorado (there’s a chapter on this in my forthcoming book), and Kelley’s comments suggest concerns among at least some in California about the way Arizonans chose to make the deal public before Californians were ready:

The Arizona Department of Water Resources recently released a presentation describing some of the proposals, including potential cutbacks for each of the states – in California’s case, up to 8 percent of total water deliveries in one hypothetical scenario.

“These recent news reports out of Arizona have not been helpful to the process within California,” Kelley said. “They suggest that there’s a California commitment to specific volumes, and that is not the case.”

The politics within Arizona are crucial. That state’s historic resentment of California mean Arizona leaders trying to win support for the deal have to convince the domestic Arizona political audience that California will be saving water too. Arizona is going first here because that state’s legal structure requires legislative approval, and because Arizona as the junior water user has the most to lose if there is no deal. So I can see why a public rollout there has to be able to emphasize California’s contributions to the water conservation pool, as Arizona Department of Water Resources chief Tom Buschatzke wrote:

California would take reductions as well, but not before the lake has fallen to still lower levels. Current law states that California does not take reductions in deliveries until the Central Arizona Project completely dries up. Equity and fairness demand a different outcome.

The question raised by Kelley’s comments is whether Arizona, in being the one who revealed what’s going on internally within the California negotiations, has made it harder to reach a deal that is very much in Arizona’s interests.

The oldest working door in Britain. We know because tree rings!

Posted by on

The BBC reports on the oldest working door in Britain:

Archaeologists discovered the oak door in Westminster Abbey was put in place in the 1050s, during the reign of the Abbey’s founder, Edward the Confessor.

It makes it the only surviving Anglo Saxon door in Britain.

We most often think about the use of tree rings to study ancient climates (wide rings wet, narrow rings dry). But they’re also commonly used for archaeological and historical research, to date the time when structures were built based on the ages of the lumber used. I wrote a book about this.

Melons, boats, fish: the new Tusher Dam on the Green

Posted by on

Brian Maffly writes this week about the new Tusher Dam on the Green River, a little diversion structure that diverts water to a bit more than 5,000 acres that apparently grows delicious melons. The old dam was in trouble, and the new one has been crafted to expand the range of natural and societal values attached to a 21st century river:

The initial Tusher plan did not call for a boat passage and river runners quickly mobilized, lobbying for features that would enable boaters to replicate the Green River portion of the 1869 expedition led by John Wesley Powell.

Officials agreed a boat passage was warranted and the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands (FFSL) put up the $153,000 to help cover increased costs….

The new design also features screens to keep fish out of the diversion canals, as well as three fish passages — one for upstream swimmers and two for downstreamers — equipped with readers to count fish that have been injected with tiny electronic tags. This aspect of the project was funded and designed by state and federal wildlife agencies hoping to recover native humpback chub, Colorado pike minnow, razorback sucker and bonytail.

The inevitable decline of irrigated acreage in California’s central valley

Posted by on

It’s a relatively straightforward point: when there is less water to irrigate farmland, there will be less irrigated farmland. For example, OtPR last year:

As groundwater sustainability agencies have to bring irrigated acreage in line with the sustainable yield of the groundwater basin, they will be retiring irrigated lands (Dr. Burt: 1-1.5 million acres; Dr. Lund: up to 2 million acres). I say 3 million acres, because so far everything we’ve predicted for climate change has been an underestimate.)

But this will be really, really hard to do, because the people irrigating land now would prefer to continue to do so, for perfectly understandable reasons (profit, way of life). And there will be hard tradeoffs in deciding how much less water, and which bits of land. Use groundwater now at the expense of future subsidence and loss of resilience? How much of the environment to protect and enhance with water that could otherwise be used to irrigated crops? Those are questions of values, not science, much as people love to scientize them in the political debates.

But however we do it, and however big the reductions are, they are coming. Jay Lund:

  • The San Joaquin Valley will have less irrigated agricultural land. The Central Valley south of the Delta is a huge productive agricultural region that currently relies on water from the Delta imports, groundwater overdraft, and reduced outflows from the San Joaquin River. Reductions in those sources will decrease water available to this region by 2-5 million acre feet per year, requiring the fallowing of 500,000-2 million acres of this region’s 5 million irrigated acres. Some of this land will be retired due to salinization and urbanization. Continued shifts to higher value crops, especially orchards, will help maintain agricultural revenues and jobs, as they have during the drought.