In California, the worst drought in a really long time

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Defining drought is a tricky business, but I think Daniel Griffin and Kevin Anchukaitis have come up with a reasonable one – three years of persistent low soil moisture. By that measure, the drought in Central and Southern California is…. Well, I’ll let them tell it (pdf):

We demonstrate that while 3-year periods of persistent below-average soil moisture are not uncommon, the current event is the most severe drought in the last 1200 years, with single year (2014) and accumulated moisture deficits worse than any previous continuous span of dry years.

That’s from “How unusual is the 2012-2014 California drought?” They used tree rings. Published today in GRL.

update: The irony of having this paper go public on a day when it’s raining like hell in California was not lost on Dan and Kevin. Dan offered this:

 

The Tumbleweed Snowman: An Immigrant Tale

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Tumbleweed Snowman, December 2014

Tumbleweed Snowman, December 2014

A riff in the morning paper on Albquerque’s beloved Tumbleweed Snowman, after spending the morning watching the flood control authority crew do his final assembly:

Tumbleweed origin stories differ, but only slightly. German-Russian Mennonite farmers are believed to have inadvertently brought the seeds of our modern tumbleweed, also known as Russian thistle, mixed in with flax or wheat seed packets they brought when fleeing the Russian czar in the 1870s.

The wheat, a hard red winter wheat, turned out to be well adapted to the harsher climates of the western Great Plains and changed farming there forever, according to journalist Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl and Midwestern farming. The tumbleweed, meanwhile, tagged along for the ride, moving easily with the humans as they remade the continent.

Its most common means of spreading was to hitch rides on the expanding railway system, Lowrey said, and it made itself at home in the arid West, especially in areas that are heavily grazed. “They like the aridity and they like disturbance,” he said. “The overgrazing in the West has been perfect for them to spread.”

As an aside, I love my job.

Sacramento, gettin’ serious about water

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Sacramento holds by far the largest body of unmetered water connections in California – about 62,000. These customers are allowed to consume all the water they want and pay only a flat monthly rate of about $41 for an average home. With a few exceptions, all other California communities are entirely served by water meters that measure how much customers consume and bill them accordingly.

But Sacramento hopes to beat a state deadline of 2025 to get its customers metered!

“the robbery of Arizona’s birthright”

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The people of Arizona have come to look upon the officials of California, and particularly those of the Imperial Irrigation District and the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles as diabolical schemers who are dedicated to the robbery of Arizona’s birthright.

That’s sometime Arizona political scientist Dean Mann, talking about the 20th century California-Arizona tussle over the Colorado River’s water, in his 1963 book Politics of Water in Arizona. At the time, just before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Arizona v. California, Arizona was pretty clearly losing said tussle.

My question to the Arizonans in the audience – are y’all still pissed? Does Mann ring true today?

Colorado River Research Group

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Jack Schmidt, one of the members of the new Colorado River Research Group, at the normally dry San Luis bridge in the Colorado River Delta, March 28, 2014

Jack Schmidt, one of the members of the new Colorado River Research Group, at the normally dry San Luis bridge in the Colorado River Delta, March 28, 2014

A new collaboration among some of the serious names in Colorado River Basin water science and policy today launched a new project, the Colorado River Research Group. If you follow Colorado River issues and western water science policy, it’s a list of names (pdf) you’ll be familiar with and, more importantly, that you’ll want to listen to: Robert Adler, Bonnie Colby, Jonathan Overpeck, Karl Flessa, Doug Kenney, Dennis Lettenmaier, Larry MacDonnell, Jack Schmidt, Brad Udall and Reagan Waskom. Importantly, this is not just physical scientists, but also social scientists. (I love y’all, physical scientists, but I’m convinced that the real action right now is on the law and policy side.)

Here’s how they describe themselves:

The Colorado River Research Group (CRRG) is a self-directed team of veteran Colorado River scholars assembled to provide a non-partisan, academic voice on matters pertaining to science, law and policy on the Colorado River, helping all those with a stake in the river identify, justify and implement actions consistent with long-term sustainable management. The CRRG provides an independent and knowledgeable voice that is insulated from political constraints, sectoral alliances, and other pressures that might impede the full consideration of relevant ideas and viewpoints.

Their initial white paper (actually, kinda khaki? – here’s the pdf, color descriptions welcome) outlines some key policy principles:

  • “The solutions that are most cost-effective, reliable, equitable, and quickly implemented are those focused on conservation, reallocation, and voluntary shortage sharing.” Augmentation? Not so much.
  • Solutions for shifting water use patterns have to be supported by incentives, something we really have’t done to date. They make this interesting point: “The historic failure to manage water with respect to sound economic principles is not merely a problem to lament, but is an opportunity to exploit moving forward. Innovative mechanisms for trading water, money and shortage risk can protect regional economies and can help remove the historic view of water as a zero-sum game.”
  • Solutions have to be “flexible and iterative”. Adaptive management and resilience and stuff.
  • “Everyone who has received benefits from the river has a responsibility to support solutions through conservation, funding and other suitable mechanisms. No water user should expect a ‘free pass’ in implementing management reforms.” (If I had a dollar for every basin water manager who pointed to the great stuff his or her agency has already been doing by way of the ‘free pass’ thing for future management decisions, I’d have some dollars.)
  • And a bottom line: “Without a significant infusion of new funding, lasting and sustainable solutions will not be achieved. To date, the amount of money invested to protect and restore the river is woefully inadequate, and is dwarfed by the resources spent to facilitate overconsumption.” Amen.

updated to include Jonathan Overpeck in list of participants

IID to state of California on Salton Sea restoration: “But you guys promised!”

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The Imperial Irrigation District earlier this month threw down a significant marker in the ongoing struggle to deal back overuse of Colorado River water with a petition to the California State Water Resources Control Board demanding action on restoration of the Salton Sea.

The sea’s decline is one of the knock-on effects of efforts to untangle an over-allocation of the river’s water, and it is arguably the most difficult to solve. Everyone’s easy answer to bringing consumption and supply into balance (“easy” being a relative term here) is to move water out from southeastern California ag (primarily Imperial) to the urbanized L.A.-San Diego strip. But the Salton Sea, an accident of history that now lives on ag runoff, will inevitably suffer as a result.

There are two big concerns – air pollution from the drying playa, and loss of critical habitat, especially for birds.

Imperial’s argument in its SWRCB petition (pdf here, and worth reading if you have the time and want to understand the arcane details of the problem) is that when California water leaders approved a sweeping agreement in the early 2000s (the “Quantification Settlement Agreement,” known as QSA) to reduce the state’s Colorado River water by moving ag water to cities, dealing with the Salton Sea was part of the deal. IID argues that it’s been holding up its end of the deal, developing the institutional tools to move ag water to the coast, but that the state has not lived up to its obligation in return to come up with a plan for the Salton Sea. The canned press statement from IID board president Jim Hanks says it all:

“The mitigation water delivered to the sea under the original state board order ends in 2017,” said IID board President Jim Hanks, “and the state is no closer to implementing a restoration plan today than it was in 2003. IID and its urban partners have met all their water transfer milestones and stand ready to continue doing so in the future, but the state’s failure to act, along with an already-receding shoreline and the looming deadline of 2017 pose a direct threat to not only the residents of the Imperial and Coachella valleys but to the long-term viability of the QSA.” (emphasis added)

IID is asking the SWRCB to force the state to get serious, suggesting some very clear process steps for near-term action. And that last little bit, which I highlighted, suggests the threat. Here’s the language from the petition, with emphasis from the original:

[I]f the QSA is to continue – as IID believes it should – it must continue in its entirety, including through the State’s commitment to restore the Salton Sea.

The QSA is critical to California living within its 4.4 million acre foot per year Colorado River allocation.

Ian James’s Desert Sun story makes clear what is at stake here:

IID officials said the petition is aimed at keeping the water transfer deal in force. They said that while the water transfer is clearly needed during the drought, it’s also crucial to avoid a public health crisis as the lake recedes.

“This is being interpreted by some as a provocative act, and I want to be very clear that our intention at IID is to uphold the QSA, not to upend it,” Kelley said. “We’re very mindful of the deepening drought in California and the continuing drought on the Colorado River, so this situation at the Salton Sea, if it isn’t addressed, it doesn’t just threaten the residents of the Imperial and Coachella valleys. It has a bearing on the viability of these water transfers that are so important to the state.”

Water buffalos – embracing the pejorative?

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I tend to hear the term “water buffalo” as pejorative – the old, lumbering water managers of a bygone era of dam-building and overconsumption. Not so, say the folks at the Central Arizona Project:

Just what is a water buffalo? In Arizona, they are those iconic figures who had the foresight to plan ahead to meet the water needs of a growing desert community. Without them, we might not have the Central Arizona Project and the state’s water situation might be bleak.

 I stand corrected, I guess.

 

Annals of adaptation: Cally Carswell on desert cattle

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In High Country News, Cally Carswell has a story about the criollo (“a name that is endlessly fun to recite. These are criollo cows. (Try it: cree-oh-yo.)”:

There’s anecdotal evidence that criollo will eat more of the shrubs and tougher grasses on degraded grasslands, but no hard data yet on whether that amounts to a statistically different use of the landscape.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why don’t we go back to buffalo?’ ” Gonzalez muses, bracing himself against the fence. “Well, in dry lands, why don’t we go back to criollo?”

Worth a read.