Near Gateway, western Colorado, by John Fleck
The green strip in the fading sunlight is pasture, irrigated with Colorado River tributary water.
Western Colorado has some pretty
Despite drought, California farm employment rising
I sometimes think that, in trying to understand the impacts of drought, we pay too much attention to the water numbers. It’s not that it doesn’t matter how much is in the reservoir, or is being pumped from the ground, but it’s only the first link in the chain of impacts.
California economist Jeff Michael points us to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which provides a relatively reliable and quick measure of employment impacts in the agricultural sectors, which is one area we would expect to see a societal response to drought. Here’s Jeff’s latest on the data, showing continued employment growth in California farm sector in spite of four years of horrendous drought:
For a number of years, the largest growth in farm jobs has been in the winter months rather than the peak summer months. It suggests there is some restructuring going on in the seasonal patterns of the labor market, probably caused by the increasing number of permanent crops. It could also reflect a tighter labor market which makes employers (in all industries) less willing to layoff workers during slack times.
What adaptive capacity looks like.
El Niño/Colorado River Basin update
Since I wrote last month about the impact (or lack of impact) of El Niño on Colorado River flows, Paul Miller at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has done a new, more detailed analysis than the one I showed (which I had attributed to the Central Arizona Project folks, but which originally came from CBRFC):
Courtesy CBRFC
The basic message is the same: the three strongest El Niño years have been wet, but that’s such a small statistical sample, and when you expand the universe to all El Niño years (the red ones on the graph above) you can see all kinds of scatter and pretty much zero statistical significance.
This is flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, the dividing line between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin for purpose of Colorado River Compact administration. But Paul’s data got me curious. What about downstream of that point? Lee’s Ferry is the most important measurement point on the river, and the standard for this sort of thing. But flows below that point also are interesting, because the inflows downstream from Lee’s Ferry – especially the Virgin River and Little Colorado – are essentially “free water” for the Lower Basin when they are high and problem when they are low. And, in fact, El Niño years do show higher flows on this stretch of the river (warning: journalist doing his own math):
Impact of El Niño on Colorado River flow downstream of Lee’s Ferry
This makes sense. The impact of El Niño is weaker as you go north, into the main part of the basin. But in the lower basin, especially Arizona, El Niño does tend to be wetter to the tune of about 170,000 acre feet per year compared to the long term average for the period I looked at. I only calculated flows between Lee’s Ferry and Lake Mead, but river management folks say they also expect this downstream from Lake Mead, especially on the Bill Williams River. On average, this is enough to add a foot or two to Lake Mead during El Niño years. Not enough to make El Niño a drought mitigation tool, but a bit of potential good news for the Lower Basin.
(Note on data sources: El Niño comes from Klaus Wolter’s Multivariate ENSO Index, Colorado River flows from the USBR’s natural flow dataset. Period calculated: 1950-2012, because that’s the period for which the two datasets overlap.)
A promising seasonal forecast for the Colorado River Basin
The federal Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal forecast, out this morning, looks promising for the Colorado River Basin:
November-January seasonal forecast, courtesy CPC
These forecast maps can be visually deceptive. The greens mean a shift of odds toward wetter weather, not a forecast that we should expect wetter weather. Dice, loaded slightly in our favor. You can see all the precip maps here, which are showing odds tipped toward wet well into the spring across most of the basin, with especially strong odds of wetter weather in the southern part of the basin.
Just beware the risk (reality?) of warmer temperatures, which pose the risk of sapping river flows once the water hits the ground.
Cynthia Barnett’s “Rain” a National Book Award finalist
So excited for my friend Cynthia Barnett, whose book Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
Las Vegas to help out Southern California with 150,000 acre feet of Colorado River water
The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s board will take up a proposal this Thursday to ship 150,000 acre feet of Las Vegas’s unused Colorado River water to Southern California to help out during California’s epic drought.
Hoover Dam, Lake Mead bathtub ring, February 23, 2015. Elevation 1088.97
The water will help the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California make up for shortfalls in its supplies from Northern California, where drought has dramatically reduced the amount of water available for shipment through California’s State Water Project. Met is basically desperate, and Las Vegas has been so successful at water conservation that it is only using 75 percent of its Colorado River allocation these days.
If I was trying to explain this in the simplest possible terms, I would put it this way: Las Vegas is selling L.A. and San Diego 150,000 acre feet of water at a price tag of $295.83 cents per acre foot. But language here matters, so let’s be careful about the legal terminology. It would be wrong to call this a “sale” of water. More like a loan, or a banking agreement? The agreement between SNWA and MWD calls for Met to pay Vegas $44.375 million, and Vegas in turn will “store” 150,000 acre feet of water in Met’s system, that might be paid back (water and money) some day maybe sorta. But “store” really means Met can just use it to meet drought needs now.
Storage and Interstate Release Agreement
This is made possible by a “Storage and Interstate Release Agreement“, which provides the states of the Lower Colorado River Basin the flexibility to do water deals across state lines without calling them water transfers. Met and Southern Nevada have had such an agreement in place since 2004, and Southern Nevada already has 205,225 acre feet of water “stored” in Met’s system. (Nevada has another 601,041 acre feet stored in Arizona.)
Matt Jenkins in his High Country News profile of Pat Mulroy earlier this year had a great bit of business explaining the linguistic care with which these deals must be handled:
[T]ransfers, even within the Lower Basin, are … politically charged. “Don’t ever call it a transfer,” (Mulroy) scolded during a 2008 interview. “It’s a banking agreement. That thing will disappear on us tomorrow if we call it a transfer.”
So this is definitely not a transfer. If and when Las Vegas needs the water back, it’ll pay Met “a proportional amount of its costs” and grab the water from Lake Mead via an accounting swap. (It’s not like it makes sense to literally pump the water back uphill from Diamond Valley Lake to Vegas.) So maybe this is more like a “loan” of water?
Whatever we call it, it’s an important example of the sort of adaptive capacity Colorado River water managers have been developing in recent years to overcome the legal strictures that tie up water management flexibility under the cumbersome Law of the River.
A Colorado River water use I can get behind: Palisade peaches
I assume this bluff above Palisade, Colorado, explains the name:
Palisade, Colorado, peach orchard
Those are peach trees in the foreground, irrigated by water from the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, which first turned water in 1904 onto what a friend calls “as fertile a swath of God’s green earth as there is in the West.” The district’s water now comes from the Cameo diversion dam a few miles upstream, and this is one of those lovely plots of Colorado River Basin ag land that has the river itself flow right through the middle of it. Famous for peaches:
Peaches, Palisades Colorado
One of those boxes is now safely nestled in the back of our car for the drive back to Albuquerque.
Grand Junction: A view from higher up in the watershed
The question of what is included in the “Colorado River Basin” is in part a legal one. The seven-state Colorado River Compact of 1922 defined a weird legal geography:
[T]he term “Colorado River Basin” means all of the drainage area of the Colorado River System and all other territory within the United States of America to which the waters of the Colorado River System shall be beneficially applied.
The creates the weird reality that for my entire life outside of five-plus years away at college, I have lived in the legal Colorado River Basin without ever living in the actual watershed of the great river – in suburban Southern California (where we got Colorado River water via the Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River Aqueduct) and Albuquerque (where we get water via the Bureau of Reclamation’s San Juan-Chama Project).
I spent a really productive day today in Grand Junction, in western Colorado, at the Colorado River District’s annual Water Seminar. This is a working landscape, and there was much useful talk about how to help keep it so in a time of decreasing river flows and pressure from water users elsewhere. (Huge thanks to Eric Kuhn and Jim Pokrandt and the other folks at the River District for inviting me.)
Folks here are looking downstream nervously at the perilous state of Lake Mead. The title of the day’s meeting was “Will What’s Happening in California Stay in California?” Pat Mulroy, late of Brookings Institution, reiterated an argument that she’s been making for some time (an argument with which I agree) that we’ve created one giant interconnected artificial watershed that links the Sacramento Delta in California, via California’s vast plumbing, with the Colorado River system. When Southern California gets less water from the Sacramento System, it has to turn to the Colorado to try to pick up the slack. The resulting water management pressures link that, then, with pressures on water use here in places like Grand Junction.
But here, where the Colorado River skirts the southern edge of town, there’s no question that you’re really in the Colorado River Basin. No need for a legal arm-waving to make that clear:
Colorado River at Grand Junction
A pleasant (if long) detour
The pass between Silverton and Ouray was closed yesterday for roadwork, so Lissa and I (headed for Grand Junction) ended up on a long but gorgeous detour. The canyon country of the West is so beautiful:
Downstream from Naturita, western Colorado
Cohen sees signs for Salton Sea optimism
Mike Cohen, writing for National Geographic’s “Water Currents”, explains what’s at stake in the current discussions over what to do to mitigate reduced flows to the Salton Sea as ag water conservation efforts in Imperial Valley grow:
The shrinking Salton Sea will expose tens of thousands of acres of lakebed. The dry lakebed could emit as much as a hundred of tons of dust each day, posing a severe threat to public health. It would also remove one of the last remaining havens for birds and wildlife along this Sonoran Desert stretch of the Pacific Flyway. Some 90 percent of the original wetlands of the Colorado River Delta and central California have dried up or been converted into farm fields, making the Salton Sea a critical link on the Pacific Flyway.
But he’s optimistic:
Fortunately, even allowing for the IID-San Diego County water transfer, a huge volume of water – more than 700,000 acre-feet per year – will continue to flow into the lake. Properly managed, this water could create and sustain tens of thousands of acres of productive habitat, minimize dust, and create recreational and economic opportunities….
Now, after more than 50 years of studies and meetings, the future of the Salton Sea may offer some glimmers of hope.
Worth a click for the full explanation of recent promising developments.