A legend in the making: Albuquerque Tumbleweed Snowman 2015

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Seen on my bike ride this morning, Albuquerque’s Tumbleweed Snowman in preparation in the back lot behind the flood control authority offices and workshop:

Tumbleweed Snowman under construction, November 2015

Tumbleweed Snowman under construction, November 2015

Tumbleweed Snowman history

Some years ago I got the help of retiring Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority engineer John Kelly to trace the history of the snowman, which by tradition is emplaced along Interstate 40 just east of the I25 interchange on the Monday after Thanksgiving:

Kelly was there at the start back in 1995 when a group of the agency’s executives cooked up the idea of a tumbleweed snowman out behind their main office between Menaul and the interstate.

“Some things are worth doing for fun,” Kelly explained.

Tuesday, Kelly pulled up in a pickup truck on his last day on the job, bearing a sack of burritos for the crew’s mid-morning break and eyeing the snowman’s rising three-lobed physique.

Spray-painted white, three tumbleweeds are assembled atop a steel frame that Moya and his colleagues have refined over the years. A sturdy steel hat with “AMAFCA” on the front sits atop his head as he greets drivers speeding past on the interstate.

Legend has it that Larry Trujillo, the flood control authority’s maintenance supervisor, looked at Kelly like he was crazy when the idea first surfaced 15 years ago.

Trujillo, sitting in an office Tuesday morning overlooking the yard where the snowman assembly was under way, did not dispute the legend. But he seems to have softened over the years, now that he has grandchildren: “They say, ‘Grandpa, grandpa, we see your snowman!'”

On this date in water history: Arizona governor, state senator, fisticuffs over the Colorado River

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87 years ago today in Colorado River water management history, water apparently was for fightin’ over:

Butte Montana Standard November 27, 1928, page one

 

POLICE CALLED TO STOP BATTLE IN STATE HOUSE

Affair Outcome of Argument Between Governor and Senator on River

LIVELY MELEE HAS MANY PARTICIPANTS

Gov. Hunt Declares Blow Received from Opponent Was “Purely Accidental”

PHOENIX, Ariz., Nov. 26 – Police were called to the Arizona state capital late today when Gov. W. P. Hunt was engaged in a brief fist fight by State Senator Fred Colter. The governor was struck one or two blows by Colter as the climax of an argument in the capitol lobby. Interference by J.S. Strode, secretary of the governor, ended the affair.

The affair, witnesses said, was the outcome of an argument between Hunt, Colter and several legislators on the question of the Colorado river state commission, to which Senator Colter is opposed.

Arizonans have always taken their water very seriously.

A grim forecast for Colorado River Basin ag under climate change

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Surface-water supply reductions (relative to current agricultural surface-water use) range from 20 percent to more than 75 percent across areas of the Mountain, Pacific, and Plains regions in 2080. The most severe declines occur in the middle and lower Colorado River Basin under virtually all scenarios, while other river systems with headwaters in the central Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada range are affected to varying degrees depending on the scenario. In general, surface-water supply impacts for irrigated agriculture under climate change are increasingly severe over time, with the most significant impacts occurring after 2050. These reductions are calculated based on climate conditions averaged over a 20-year window; they do not reflect the magnitude of supply reduction that could occur under multiyear drought conditions.

And a visual aid:

Marshall et al., Climate Change, Water Scarcity, and Adaptation in the U.S. Fieldcrop Sector, USDA, November 2015

Marshall et al., Climate Change, Water Scarcity, and Adaptation in the U.S. Fieldcrop Sector, USDA, November 2015

Don’t expect groundwater to save Colorado Basin ag:

Reductions in groundwater availability

Reductions in groundwater availability

That’s from Climate Change, Water Scarcity, and Adaptation in the U.S. Fieldcrop Sector, by Elizabeth Marshall, Marcel Aillery, Scott Malcolm, and Ryan Williams, USDA Economic Research Report No. (ERR-201) 119 pp, November 2015

Gila River diversion decision: “Reply hazy. Try again.”

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The Magic Eight Ball predicts Interior's Gila decision: "Signs Point to Yes". Image CC via CRASH:candy

The Magic Eight Ball predicts Interior’s Gila decision: “Signs Point to Yes”. Image CC via CRASH:candy

Brett Walton’s Circle of Blue update on the Interior Department’s upcoming Gila River diversion decision suggests we should expect a “yes” from Secretary Jewell tomorrow on a decision to proceed with a lot of inconclusive studies of the super-expensive project that will almost certainly never be built but that will be an intense environmental and water management distraction in New Mexico for years to come.

The decision simply represents a bureaucratic milestone – the approval of a “New Mexico unit” to the Central Arizona Project that could eventually be the institutional vehicle to divert water from the Gila River in southwest New Mexico. It’s a bureaucratic ratchet: “no” tomorrow would kill the diversion, but “yes” doesn’t ensure that it is built. And Walton’s Magic Eight Ball suggests that “signs point to yes”:

Statements from the Interior Department indicate that Jewell will approve the New Mexico unit and proceed with an environmental review that is required under the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act.

This could take decades a really long time:

According to the project’s authorizing statue, a final decision would be made between 2019 and 2030.

The closest thing we have to serious benefit/cost analyses of this project, done by the federal government ( the recently released Value Planning – Final Report: New Mexico Unit, see also last year’s Appraisal Level Report on the AWSA Tier-2 Proposals and Other Diversion & Storage Configurations) suggests building a diversion and storage for water taken from the Gila would be staggeringly expensive and staggeringly not cost effective, with costs from $700 million to $1.05 billion and substantially less in benefits. Since New Mexico will have to pay most of the cost (Brett’s story gives a good rundown of the limited federal money available) and my impoverished state struggles to find money for far less expensive water projects with far clearer benefits (see this NM Legislative Finance committee report – pdf – for an overview of that problem), you can see where this is headed. However the rest of the policy and politics debates play out, New Mexico is never going to have the money to build this. For now this is a discussion in isolation – Gila project, yes or no? – but as we face decisions as a state, it will inevitably be stacked up against other water infrastructure spending, and it will not stack up well.

My prediction: We’ll have a wonderful, energetic, impassioned fight for years. Come 2030, we’ll still have a Gila Diversion Project, live on the books, with little chance in reality of being built. Lawyers and consultants will prosper. But a great deal of human water management capital that could have been more productively spent dealing with our water needs and environmental problems will have been squandered.

The Magic Eight Ball toy offered up 20 different possible answers to the weighty questions my friends and I would pose as kids in the 1960s. My favorite: “Reply hazy. Try again.”

We always did.

Five pieces of good news for water in the western United States

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CPC long lead forecast

CPC long lead forecast

Amid the litany of the apocalypse, with the pictures of fallowed farm fields and dead fish and trees and cracked mud, here are five pieces of good news on western water, both on the supply side and on the demand side.

 

1. Colorado River Basin storage is up

Total storage in the Colorado River Basin’s big reservoirs ended the 2015 water year up 281,000 acre feet compared to the same time last year. The increase happened in the Upper Basin, with the biggest increases in Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Wyoming and Navajo Reservoir on the San Juan in New Mexico. This is not because it was a wet year. Total streamflow above Lake Powell was just 94 percent of average. (Source: USBR draft AOP, Table 1, pdf)

2. Colorado River Lower Basin water use is down

Total projected 2015 water use in Arizona, Nevada, and California, with a bit more than a month left in the calendar year, is on track to be at its lowest point in a decade. At a projected 1.504 million acre feet, the Central Arizona Project, which pumps Colorado River water to the Phoenix and Tucson areas, is on track for its lowest diversions since 2005. The Imperial Irrigation District (desert farming in southeastern California) is, at a projected 2.469 maf, on track for its lowest water-using year since at least 1965 (that’s as far back as my dataset on this goes). Source (pdf)

3. The forecast map is sorta greenish

The Climate Prediction Center’s long lead forecasts, out today, are projecting above-average odds of a wet winter and spring across all of the southwest, and well up into the headwaters of the Colorado River Basin. (see map above, for Jan-Mar).

4. The other forecast map is not very brownish

drought outlook

drought outlook

The seasonal drought outlook, in keeping with the CPC precip maps, calls for the removal of “drought” across the entire Four Corners/Colorado Basin region, with improvement in California:

Sorry, Montana and the rest of you up there on the top of the map. Winners and losers, always, in the Game of Drought.

5. New Mexico drought conditions the best they’ve been in five years

New Mexico drought monitor

New Mexico drought monitor

In my home state of New Mexico, the brown bits are nearly gone from the drought monitor map. That’s the best we’ve been since November 2010.

Final thoughts

The bathtub ring around Lake Mead is still bigger than it’s ever been, and the risk of a formal Lower Basin shortage declaration looms. But the context is important. The supply side is not something we can do anything about (other than reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which we probably oughta thing about?), but we’re seeing some clear progress on the demand side that is worth noting.

And the supply side makes me happy.

The Salton Sea: natural or not?

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Daniel Polk, an anthropologist now based at Stanford’s Lane Center has an interesting post looking at the question of our perceptions of the Salton Sea – natural or not?

The lake demonstrates that the “natural” is a fluid and not fixed term. Proponents of the Salton Sea often emphasize the natural qualities of the lake. If the lake is unnatural, then its decline can be more readily accepted by the public, yet if it is a natural place, then its restoration becomes a more urgent imperative, less easy to ignore for those in power.

The importance of measuring water

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From a new Public Policy Institute of California white paper on water allocation reforms:

Regions with drought-prone climates need reliable accounting of water availability and use. Authoritative water accounting is a foundation for the transparent, reliable, timely administration (and, if necessary, curtailment) of water rights, management of groundwater, and water trading. This drought spotlighted serious gaps and fragmentation in California’s water accounting system, hampering such actions.

Importantly, according to authors Brian Gray et al., California law does not now have a framework for measurement return flows, the water returned to the system (through agricultural drainage back to a river or groundwater recharge):

Understanding net water use (the amount applied minus return flow) is key to understanding water availability and also the amount of water that can be traded without harming other water users.

California also suffers from a lack of clarity of the place public health and safety, and the environment, have in the water rights priority queue:

The water board does not have a clear policy to take public health and safety or the environment into account when ordering surface water curtailments, even though an array of laws designates these public interests as priorities that may take precedence over senior water rights. So far, this omission has been especially costly for the state’s stressed riverine and wetland ecosystems.

The proposed solution:

Adopt a process for the local development of watershed-based environmental flows, combining a state mandate and local authority to flesh out details (water board and local action).

There is much more, a very rich and thoughtful package of actionable recommendations.