Colorado River Basin forecast: where’d that 1.3 million acre feet go?

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The April-July runoff forecast into Lake Powell, on the Arizona-Utah border, is just 52 percent of the long term mean, according to new numbers out today from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center.

That is roughly 1.3 million acre feet less water flowing into Lake Powell than the forecast of just a month ago, the result of a hot, dry March. That means at the end of said runoff period, Powell will be roughly 13 feet lower than it would have been otherwise, according to my half-assed amateur calculation (danger, danger, journalist doing math! – the pros at the Bureau of Reclamation will give us a more reliable number next week).

It’s important to remember what this means. Unlike in California, where farmers directly downstream from reservoirs get shorted when inflow is lousy, Powell is a giant bathtub in a super-plumbed system. While farmers using headwaters streams and rivers to irrigate could see shortages as a result of the lousy snowpack, the real impact for the Colorado River Basin system as a whole is more buffered. But in the long run, it increases the chances of seeing a formal shortage declaration in coming years, which would reduce allocations to Arizona and Nevada.

California drought: Jerry Brown doesn’t have a knob to turn

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Yesterday’s executive order from California Gov. Jerry Brown (pdf here) illustrates a crucial issue about water governance, the issue of the scale at which we manage our water.

The headline news from Brown’s announcement – “First Ever Statewide Mandatory Water Reductions.” But what does “mandatory” mean here? Here’s the explanation from Craig Miller, who’s covering California drought for KQED in San Francisco:

In other words, municipal water in California is managed at a different scale – of 400 (or maybe 3,000? see below) municipal water agencies. Here’s how Matt Weiser and David Siders, in the Sacramento Bee, described what happens next:

Brown’s executive order directs California’s more than 3,000 urban water providers to collectively cut their water use by 25 percent compared with 2013. The State Water Resources Control Board is expected to impose the new restrictions by mid-May, setting a different target for each agency depending on how much water its customers use per capita and conservation progress since last year.

What “mandatory” actually means here, as it cascades down from the Governor to the SWRCB to the individual utilities to their customers is not clear. Each of those entities is already either succeeding or failing, managing well or poorly, struggling or not, and the most Gov. Brown can do here is give them a little nudge.

This is not a criticism of Gov. Brown. As Faith Kearns put it, expecting a single solution here is wrong:

Rather, the solutions are likely to flow up from the bottom, as each group of water users deals at its local level with its local problems. But saying Gov. Brown doesn’t have a knob to turn may underestimate his extraordinary political skill. The single nob he does have to turn is the power to make dramatic statements that draw a lot of attention to the problem. That in turn may enable that bottom up push for solutions. And that is the knob he turned on Wednesday.

(Thanks to my University of New Mexico colleague Bruce Thomson, who in the New Mexico context introduced the concepts of “knobs to turn” to our water policy dialogue here.)

Where will California’s water shortfalls hit?

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Craig Miller at KQED has a useful roundup of what sort of shortfalls California water users might see this summer as a result of drought:

  • Ag: “More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.” That’s in the neighborhood of 10 percent of California’s irrigated acreage.
  • Big munis will have to cut back, but will not run out of water. Some rural systems will be stressed: “Cowin hastens to add that ‘the vast majority of our citizens will not run out of water,’ some already have, mostly in rural areas where wells have gone dry.”
  • Pressure on aquifers to make up for surface shortfalls will grow: “Groundwater resources will be stressed even more, as water-constrained farmers turn up the pumps to offset cuts in allocations from state and federal water projects.”

Corn, cotton, hay, rice all down: how California farmers are responding to drought

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California farmers by now have a pretty clear picture of what their water supply situation is going to be this year, whether it’s reservoir and irrigation system surface delivery, or groundwater pumping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture today released projected acreage for the state’s major field crops (pdf) that reflects farmers’ resulting choices:

  • corn: 430,000 acres,down 17 percent
  • cotton: 155,000 acres, down 27 percent
  • hay: 1.23 million acres, down 11 percent
  • oats: 120,000 acres, up 9 percent
  • rice: 408,000 acres, down 6 percent
  • winter wheat: 430,000 acres, down 7 percent

Keep breathing, California. You can do this.

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A year ago, I wrote a piece urging calm in the face of California’s extreme drought:

The thing to remember – and this’ll help you get through the tough year ahead – is that drought is no one big thing. It’s a series of little things – one water user, one water system at a time. That’s how you’re going to get through this. If you focus on “zero” you’re screwed. Think about who’s actually going to be short of water, and what they’re going to do about it.

It wasn’t easy, some real tough times, especially for Central Valley farmers, but Californians showed their resourcefulness and adaptability with what I think I will call Fleck’s Law: “When people have less water, they use less water.”

I’ve been meaning to write an update, but Jay Lund has done far better than I could.

This year, with another dreadful snowpack, the hair-on-fire rhetoric has amped up a notch, but Lund (way smarter, with way more standing and history in California water management than I) has done a great service with this calm explanation of what is really happening, and what needs to be done:

There is need for concern, preparation and prudence, but little cause for panic, despite some locally urgent conditions….

California will not run out of water this year, or next, if we are careful. We will respond mostly as we did last year, with some modest changes.

In rough order of importance, California will make up most of this year’s water shortage by:

Additional groundwater withdrawals of perhaps 5 million or more acre-feet

  • Reductions in urban and environmental water uses and agricultural fallowing — totaling perhaps 4 million acre-feet
  • Shifting perhaps 1 millon acre-feet of water use from lower to higher economic values through water markets
  • Depleting reservoir storage by perhaps 1-2 million acre-feet
  • Increasing wastewater reuse and other conservation efforts

If you are concerned about California’s drought, Jay’s piece is a good dose of realism in the midst of the crazy talk we’re hearing right now. You can do this, California.

San Juan-Chama forecast: looks like a second year of shortfall

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According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, warm February weather meant the earliest runoff in the 40-plus year history of the San Juan-Chama Project, which brings water from southern Colorado to the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. But “early” does not translate to “a lot of water”.

San Juan-Chama Project contractors, the largest of which is Albuquerque, got a preliminary allocation Jan. 1 of “zero”, because storage was exhausted. The next allocation milestone comes in mid April, and with just a bit over 10,000 acre feet of SJC’s typical “firm yield” of 96,200 in storage at this point and a forecast of about 50 percent of average, it looks like another skimpy year.

It’s important to note what this does not mean. It does not mean Albuquerque goes dry. Albuquerque has more than two years’ worth of previously banked SJC water sitting in Abiquiu Reservoir on the Chama, and groundwater to fall back on. The availability of such a robust backstop is a testament to community conservation efforts. Average per capita usage is just a bit over half of what it was two decades ago. But after seeing the first year in history with a less-than-full SJC delivery last year, it’s a reminder that this effort by Albuquerque and other Rio Grande Valley communities to diversify their sources of water supply and augment the Rio Grande’s flows are not a sure bet.

update: Writing from Durango, Jonathan Thompson explains what this all looks like up in the snow-bearing region from whence this water comes:

We had a December thaw; I saw a dandelion blooming in Durango on Dec. 8. We had a February thaw, during which six 60+ degree days closed the nordic center at 9,000 feet and brought golfers onto the greens at 6,600 feet. And we had a March thaw, more like a scorcher, which coaxed apricot and even apple blossoms out, surely to be killed by an April frost.

Exaggerated Impacts of Unrealistic Water Shortages

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A guest post of sorts* from a group of prominent economists here in the western United States questioning the findings in a widely quoted report (pdf here) by a group from Arizona State about the potential economic impact if the Colorado River went dry:

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A January 14th article in the Wall Street Journal reported results of a study that estimated economic losses to the seven Colorado River Basin States should the Colorado River dry, and, with it, a loss of critical water supply to the regional economies. The study tallies the annual contribution of the Colorado to the combined Gross State Product of the Basin at about one twelfth of the total U.S. GDP. The regional losses cited in the study range from $43,000 to $394,000 per acre-foot, our usual measure of water quantity. Anyone familiar with market water values in the region that typically range from $100 to $300 per acre foot will be skeptical of the loss estimates.

Values in California during its current drought have reached $2000 per acre foot. It is unrealistic to assume that the Colorado will dry up, although it is well known that recent flows have been falling and that storage in the Basin’s reservoirs is at an historic low. Further, ways of mitigating such huge losses are ignored in the study: (1) increased water use efficiency by urban and (especially) agricultural users; (2) use of groundwater in the short term; (3) desalination of plentiful brackish waters priced around $1000 per acre-foot; (4) imports from other regions. The study’s approach ignores these possibilities and assumes that historical ratios of water use to output must continue unchanged. It ignores the contribution of other inputs such as power, land, and capital.

Study statements that 65.8% of New Mexico’s annual state output would be lost are, prima facie, not credible since only 15% of New Mexico’s irrigation water comes from the Colorado and only 60% for urban uses according to the study.

Good policy needs to be based on sound economic analysis. Distorted analyses serve no interests well.

Frank Ward, Professor of Agricultural Economics, New Mexico State University; R. Garth Taylor, Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, University of Idaho; Charles W. Howe, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Colorado; George Frisvold; Professor of Agricultural Economics, University of Arizona

* Originally written as a letter to the editor to the Wall Street Journal, not published there, published here by permission of the authors

How Southern California quietly doubled its 2014 supply of Colorado River water

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Resilience is a system’s ability to absorb a shock and still retain its basic structure and function.

Here, in one complicated table, is an example of the sort of institutional plumbing valves we need to build to increase resilience in the face of drought. It’s a table accounting for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s diversions of Colorado River Water in 2014, water that provided a buffer against California’s extraordinary drought, and it shows how Met essentially doubled the amount of water it was able to take from the Colorado River in 2014 to meet the needs of coastal cities:

 


The key point to understand is that under the basic Colorado River water allocation rules, Met is entitled to 550,000 acre feet of water per year in a “normal”, non-surplus year, but last year it took more than twice that: 1.18 million acre feet. It did that by invoking a long list of policy widgets that allowed it to either pay for conservation in other places, or to conserve water in previous years that was banked in Lake Mead for later use.

  • 113,400 acre feet of water saved by lining canals in the Imperial and Coachella, the region’s two big ag water districts
  • 100,000 af saved by fallowing land in Imperial
  • 67,700 af saved by lining the All-American Canal
  • 338,500 af that had been saved through conservation efforts and banked in Lake Mead

Each one of these widgets is the result of the unglamorous work of building personal and institutional relationships among water users and agencies, many of them across the difficult ag-urban interface. They were built over time, and are now available when they’re needed. They have added resilience to the system.