California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait

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CFS January, courtesy Levi Cowan

CFS January, courtesy Levi Cowan

My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn.

The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about the storm track pointed California’s way:

The large-scale atmospheric shift I’ve been referencing in nearly every blog post from the past 6 months has finally materialized, and will make itself known in California as early as this weekend….

This is the classic El Niño pattern that I have discussed in previous posts, with a powerful Pacific jet aimed either directly at or south of California.

(If you’re a water nerd and not reading Swain, bookmark him, his weather stuff is for me must read.)

Above is the precipitation anomaly map for January from NOA’s Climate Forecast System model. Green means wetter than average. Yellows are drier than average. You can see a classic El Niño pattern here – wet south, dry north.

Importantly, much of the snowmaking bits of the Colorado Basin are in that colorless limbo, neither wet nor dry. That’s why El Niño isn’t a strong predictor for the Colorado River one way or the other – it’s in the middle, spanning wet south and dry north during El Niño years.

CFS March

CFS March, courtesy Levi Cowan

The latest CFS forecast runs, however, suggest that pattern could shift as we move toward spring. Here’s March, with the wet anomalies spilling north into Colorado and Utah. The CFS points in that direction through spring and into summer, forecasting wetter than average weather over much of the Colorado River Basin into August.

And here in New Mexico? Yeah, those maps have me smiling.

The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal

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Michael McGuire reminds us that today is the 116th anniversary of one of the great milestones in the push toward clean and safe drinking water in the urbanized world – the opening of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. This allowed Chicago to dump its sewage into the Mississippi River rather than Lake Michigan, from whence Chicago’s drinking water came. This seemed like a great idea to the Chicagoans. Not so much to the folks in St. Louis, 357 miles downstream:

The total travel distance for the sewage from its generation to St. Louis intake was about 357 miles. Missouri sued Illinois to plug the connection to the Mississippi River, also called the Sanitary and Ship Canal, which they claimed was contaminating the St. Louis water supply and increasing the incidence of typhoid fever in that community.

I recommend McGuire’s piece, which traces the legal wrangling. Getting to the point where our tap water’s safety can be mostly taken for granted was a long struggle, and this is one of its important sagas.

2015 puts Sierra Nevada-Colorado Basin linkage in stark relief

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If you care about Colorado River Basin water, it behooves you to pay attention to the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada. It’s an entirely different watershed, but 2015 demonstrated how the interconnections in California’s plumbing have left the two inextricably linked.

The tl;dr version of two interrelated points below:

  • California’s drought has put pressure on the Colorado River, as Southern California turns east for more water to make up for shortfalls from the north.
  • Despite California’s problems, the overall Colorado River Basin is holding up – able in a subpar year on the Colorado to deliver the extra water to L.A. and San Diego while ending the year with total reservoir storage unchanged from last year at this time. The system is in a tenuous but encouraging balance.

California, the Colorado, and the West’s interlocking watersheds

7 -day accumulated snow, GFS model, courtesy Levi Cowan

7 -day accumulated snow shows more help on the way for California’s watersheds. GFS model, courtesy Levi Cowan

The good news in California is that, as of yesterday’s theatrical, made-for-media first measurements of the year, the Sierra snowpack is near normal for this time of year. That’s essentially twice as much snow as last year at this time. There’s lots of snow season left to push the numbers up or down, but for now it’s good news. And the current forecasts (see map to the right) call for more of the same.

Less theatrical is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s low key success in running its Colorado River Aqueduct full bore this year, ferrying extra water from Lake Mead to coastal Southern California to make up for the shortfall in 2015 Sierra-fed water supplies. In particular, in addition to Met’s flexibility in water deals within California to move ag water to meet urban demand during the drought, there is 240,333 acre feet of water moving through the aqueduct that would not otherwise be there thanks to a historic 150kaf deal to send Las Vegas water Met’s way to help during the drought, plus another 90,333 acre feet in water that Met had banked in Lake Mead in previous years.

The result is that, at 1.178 million acre feet, Met’s take on the Colorado River this year is projected to be the largest since 2002 (source: USBR water accounting reports, 2015 year-end forecast updated today).

There are two ways of looking at this.

Water use by the Imperial Irrigation District. Data: USBR, graph by John Fleck

Water use by the Imperial Irrigation District. Data: USBR, graph by John Fleck

The foresight of Southern California’s water management community created diverse sources of supply that have allowed it to weather the unprecedented California drought. One purpose of big multi-year reservoirs is to store water in wet times so that it is available in dry times. Lake Mead has fulfilled that role, dramatically, during California’s current drought. That is a good thing. What good is a reservoir full of water if you can’t tap it when you’re faced with an event as extreme as California’s current drought?

California also has been building increasingly sophisticated water-sharing/transfer deals, including between the Imperial Irrigation District (where water use in 2015 was at record low levels) and metro water agencies.

But risk in California now poses risk in the rest of the Colorado River Basin, because of the interconnections we’ve built. My water supply here in Albuquerque, beyond the eastern  boundary of the hydrologic Colorado River Basin, is now linked to snow that falls in California’s Sierra Nevada nearly 1,000 miles (600 1600 km) away.

Why 2015 nevertheless leaves me optimistic about about the Colorado

When I sat down this morning to look at 2015 Colorado River data with an eye toward a year end post, here is what struck me.

  • The last water year was a bit below average (94 percent at Lake Powell).
  • Current total system storage of 29.7 million acre feet is essentially exactly the same as last year at this time. (source)

So in a slightly sub-par year, and with California taking extra water in response to a historic drought, the Colorado River system remained, in 2015, roughly in balance. Absent California’s problems, net storage would have been up this year.

Importantly, with just 94 percent river flow, Lake Powell is up ~300,000 acre feet from a year ago, suggesting that Upper Colorado River Basin water users consumed less water than nature provided. Mead is down, Powell is up.

Of course, “absent California’s problems” invokes a useless hypothetical, because California did have problems. I could just as easily pose a hypothetical in the opposite direction: What if we hadn’t had that “miracle May” that bailed out an otherwise dismal year in the basin?

Elephant Butte Reservoir, 2015

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Elephant Butte Reservoir, the largest on the Rio Grande, will end 2015 with roughly 322,000 acre feet of water, or about 16 percent full. That’s up from 11.5 percent last year at this time:

Year-end Elephant Butte storage

Year-end Elephant Butte storage

Elephant Butte provides water, primarily for irrigation, for southern New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico. When Elephant Butte is short, as it has been most recent years, farmers shift to groundwater for their permanent crops (especially pecans) and fallow some of their field crops.

This graph shows the depth and duration of what we call “the drought of the 1950s”. You can see that it really began in the 1940s and we didn’t really pull out of it until the late 1970s. It was a badass.

A reader recently asked the potential impact of a good snowpack this year on the Butte. This graph shows how it took a series of almost entirely good years from 1974 to 1982, with only one bad year mixed in, to refill the reservoir. It’s really big.

Data courtesy USBR water ops.

update: this post was updated to correct a typo on the amount of water in Elephant Butte. 322kaf, not 232kaf

People on wells less likely to view water management as a shared problem

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This is fascinating:

A survey finds correlations between utilizing an individual water source (e.g. well or spring) and attitudes toward water management and conservation. Compared to respondents with a shared water source, those with an individual source believe they are segregated from regional water concerns. They are less willing to pay for water management or conservation measures and less supportive of any government intervention in water management. These results suggest that planners and water managers may face resistance to conservation policies or any policy based on the idea of water as a common pool resource. (emphasis added)

That’s from “Individualized water source as an indicator of attitudes about water management and conservation in humid regions” by Kristan Cockerill, Peter A. Groothuis, Tanga McDaniel Mohr, and Courtney Cooper in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. (I’ve only read the abstract, my university library doesn’t have a subscription.)

 

Sierra Madre, CA, introduces Colorado River water, winds up with “the Tucson problem”

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Water is just water, right? What happened when Sierra Madre, a suburb northeast of Los Angeles, switched from local groundwater to imported Colorado River water is a reminder that, well, no:

In 2013, Sierra Madre was forced to begin importing water from the Metropolitan Water District. That led to a new problem. The water source has a different chemistry, temperature and disinfecting agent than the groundwater supply. That started taking a toll on the city’s aging infrastructure.

Residents began to see yellow, foul-smelling water coming from their taps ? the result of iron oxide being released from the inside of old pipes.

When water pipes acclimated to water of a certain pH suddenly get water of a different pH, the chemistry of degunking the inside of the pipes can be a bit of a mess. This is what happened in in the early 1990s when Tucson made a similar switch, as Mitch Basefsky wrote some years ago in Southwest Hydrology (pdf):

Almost immediately following the initial delivery of Colorado River water, the utility began receiving complaints about water that was discolored, smelly, foultasting, or contained rust. Analyses showed that the water contained high levels of iron and other corrosion byproducts from metallic water mains and private plumbing. In essence, the aggressive water was releasing existing corrosion and scale from the pipe walls.

The GI Bill and the history of American art

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Blue Curve III, 1972, Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Blue Curve III, 1972, Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Surely some art historian has puzzled through the impact of the GI Bill on the history of American art.

Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944

Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944

I noted in the PBS Newshour’s obituary this evening that the late Ellsworth Kelly, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, went to art school on the GI Bill. My Dad was part of that generation – a young guy who wanted to make art and got a crack at the education he needed thanks to the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944”. The statute’s presumption was that guys like Kelly and Dad “whose education or training was impeded, delayed, interrupted, or interfered with by reason of his entrance into the service” deserved a chance to resume said education.

I have only anecdotes, but know of a wave of artists who got the chance at the years of study and “Masters of Fine Art” degree. My Dad never rose to the level of Kelly, whose abstractions wowed me when I first saw them as a teenager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But Dad had a crack at making a living at art that he never would have had absent the GI Bill. Surely that wave of talent, which otherwise would have gone untapped, had some influence on the trajectory of 20th century art.

One must not forget that the GI Bill was not, in the words of scholar Hilary Herbold, a “level playing field“. Black servicemen may have enjoyed the same benefits on paper as Kelly and my Dad, but in practice the U.S. system of higher education remained a system of unequal access. But for those who benefitted, it was a remarkable opportunity.

“hold others in the light”

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luminarias, Christmas 2015 - "hold others in the light"

luminarias, Christmas 2015 – “hold others in the light”

Walking after Christmas eve dinner, we came upon a rainbow of luminarias around the corner from our house. The luminaria is a tradition in the southwestern United States, a little paper sandwich bag with a bit of sand in the bottom to weigh it down and a candle to light the way for Christ’s spirit.

The rainbow bags are a recent innovation, of which I approve.

Daughter Nora came over before dinner and helped set out the candles while sister, Lisa, and wife, Lissa, finished making the gyoza. We think of gyoza as Japanese, but they made their way to Japan from China (jiaozi) and to our house by way of a Japanese restaurant in L.A.’s Little Tokyo whose name is long forgotten. The luminarias, so quintessentially Southwestern Spanish-Catholic, are said to have come too by way of China, via Spanish merchants who loved Chinese paper lanterns. It’s all a mashup.

The headline for the post comes from a holiday letter that arrived today. I am not religious, but I was touched by a bit of wisdom my friend Elizabeth Sanford shared in her annual family greeting. “We go forward,” wrote Elizabeth, who is deeply religious, “with a pledge to ‘hold others in the light,’ a Quaker term that we were introduced to this year and have become fond of.”

Elizabeth’s husband, Jim Timmermann, died this year. Jim and I were young together many years ago, with all that entails. I was then, as I am now, crisp and certain in my atheism. Jim was deeply Catholic. We worked together each day to make a newspaper, and we’d wander many days with our lunches to the leafy campus of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, a couple of blocks from the office.

Our religious differences were far from an impediment to our friendship. Quite the opposite. We were each fascinated with the others’ views. I could never quite understand his faith, and Jim could never quite understand my lack of it. So we talked.

I cannot begin to do justice to Quaker theology, but “holding others in the light” seems to carry its own weight on this quiet holiday evening.

Merry Christmas.