Deadpool diaries: Bonkers snowpack, open thread

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From today’s bike ride, the wall art version of the “open thread”

Snowpack, runoff, reservoirs

In the comments, Nick from Australia is on “team Powell 3600”. Last month Reclamation was on “team Powell 3569.93“, meaning the projected elevation of Lake Powell above sea level at the end of the water year, and the CBRFC’s forecast for runoff into Powell is up two million acre feet since those numbers were run, so who knows? Given the need to refill Upper Basin storage, I’m not as optimistic as Nick, but whatever. Go Nick!

We don’t have official word yet, but it sure looks from the Lees Ferry gage* that Reclamation is bumping up this year’s Glen Canyon Dam release to 9 million-plus acre feet. But the CBRFC’s most forward-looking runoff forecast (ESP+QPF) has already dropped a million acre feet from April 1. It’s a finicky system.

That, combined with big runoff on the tributaries between Lake Powell and Lake Mead could bump Mead’s elevation by a lot – maybe 20 feet? More? Join Nick in the comments with your predictions!

Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement

The Interior Department will be sharing with us next week its Draft Environmental Impact Statement for management of Mead and Powell for the next few years. Recall that the driver, when Interior launched the process last year, was the need for adjusted rules (and related environmental review coverage) for releases out of Powell of less than 7 million acre feet per year – call it “team Powell less than 3500 would be really bad“. That’s obviously off the table for 2023, but one hopes Interior doesn’t just say “never mind” and recognizes the need for the fire drill – the lack of rules and accompany operating certainty at these really low levels. Even with a good bump, Mead will still be at perilously low levels, we still have the problem of overuse of 1.5 million acre feet per year.

We still need those new rules that a decade of rhetoric about effective collaborative governance promised you’d be able to develop. Those of us who believed the promises intend to hold you to your commitments.

The best publicly available data, from Reclamation’s regularly updated Lower Basin forecast as of Friday, April 7, shows California finally dipping below its 4.4 million acre feet allocation, but just barely. Perhaps behind the scenes there are plans afoot to leave more water in Mead? If “yes”, please share!

Full allocation 2023 percentage
California 4.4 4.36 99.1%
Arizona 2.8 2.35 83.9%
Nevada 0.3 0.22 73.3%
Total 7.5 6.93 92.4%

 

One hopes the basin states and federal government can see their way to a more durable solution that those numbers would indicate.

Nota bene

In the old days of blogging as the centerpiece of online communities, there was a tradition of the “open thread,” to create a conversation space.

There’s gonna be a blizzard of Colorado River news in the coming week. I’ve been pretty successful in fencing myself off from the chaos, that I might focus on the Rio Grande and the new book. I give myself bonus points for bailing out on Twitter, which has pretty much taken the notion of the “open thread” to some sort of dystopian hellscape extreme.

“Open thread” below, discuss among yourselves. I’ll try to join in as I have time.

“ribbon of green”

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leafless tree, silhouetted, against rocky backdrop

Ribbon, not yeet green. Colorado River outside Moab, March 2022. Photo by John Fleck

I’ve been obsessed with John van Dyke’s “ribbons of green” image for a long time. Rummaging through some old computer files last night, I found the following, circa 2009, in a folder of notes and sketches for what would become my book “Water is for Fighting Over.”

Notes from Moab

There’s a moment when you’re driving across the deserts of the southwest as the road tops a rise and you get your first view of the ribbon of green along a river.

That’s where the towns are, and that’s where the cool is, a break in both temperature and color – from hot to a bit cooler, from the reds, browns and yellows of desert rock and earth to the riparian greens of cottonwoods and, now, salt cedar, dipping their roots in the groundwater that leaves as much or more river underground as you see above. The striking thing is always how sharp the boundary is between dry and wet. Add a town, and you often have irrigation, a few fields tacked along the bottonlands on either side of the river. And, often, a place to buy ice cream. I learned this as a kid, on epic ’60s family car trips through The West, before the days of air conditioning, and I’ve loved the moment ever since.

Lissa and I shared the experience numerous times over the last week on a road trip up through Four Corners country – in Bloomfield on the San Juan, at Hite where the Colorado meets the Dirty Devil in the canyon country of southern Utah, as the interstate meets the Green. And one of my favorites, the site where this picture was taken, on the Colorado River just upstream from where the highway drops down from the north, past the entrance to Arches National Park.

I had occasion on this trip to pick up a copy of John Van Dyke’s “The Desert”, an essay written a century ago about Van Dyke’s strange and wonderful wanderings of the lower Colorado. He saw it too:

The desert terraces on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand-dunes) come down to meet these “bottom” lands, and the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife. Seen from the distant mountain tops the river moves between two long ribbons of green, and the borders and the gray and gold mesas of the desert.

Deadpool Diaries: In March, the Rio Grande/Colorado River snowpack went bonkers

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Irrigation canal with cement plant in the background.

An urban river. Arenal Canal in Albuquerque’s South Valley

The ditches were flowing across Albuquerque’s valley floor yesterday as I criss-crossed them on a long, aimless bike ride, the first day it really felt like spring. The cycling challenge at this winter<->spring pivot point is clothing – layers for a morning start hovering just above freezing, with a pannier stuffed with the layers by the time I was down to shirtsleeves for my taco brunch.

Graph of flow at Embudo Creek on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, showing day-night oscillations and rising runoff as snow melts

Embudo Creek

My favorite gage at this time of year is Embudo Creek, just above its confluence with the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. You can see the diurnal cycle of day-night melting, and the rising as the temperature warms. With the big snowpack, flows right now are well above the median. (Prof. Fleck note: The skewed nature of the data, with flows a lot higher on the high side than the lows on the low side, makes the mean – typically what we mean by “average” – less meaningful for a data like this. Hence median.)

The West Gulf River Forecast Center is forecasting Embudo Creek runoff at more than double the median this year.

The Embudo is just one little creek, but people live on it and built their lives around it. Of such creeks is the entire West built. Good to pay attention to one.

Colorado River at the start of April

The whole deadpool/wrecked speedboats emerging from the Lake Mead mud thing seems a bit of a quaint echo from a stranded past, as the Colorado River discourse shifts from how to protect the infrastructure from a dark cascade toward deadpool to “Which reservoirs should we refill, and by how much?”

The official CBRFC April 1 forecast hasn’t dropped yet, but the preliminary modeled numbers are up 3.6 million acre feet from March 1.

3.6 million acre feet.

Wrecked speedboat emerging from Lake Mead mud.

Never forget.

That seems like a lot, but it is worth remembering that we’ve been overusing the river by about 1.5 million acre feet per year since the turn of the century.

This likely means a release from Glen Canyon Dam to the Lower Basin of 9 million acre feet (or more?) in 2023, which might be enough to re-submerge some of the wrecked speedboats. That would be nice, but I hope we don’t forget the visceral message they’ve been sending us.

Interior’s draft modeling results should emerge next week (perhaps April 10-11-12?), but the specific near term crisis they were meant to help us through – the possibility of a Glen Canyon Dam release of less than 7 million acre feet this year – is gone.

Yay.

Instead, the Basin community is wrestling with a “what shall we do with the extra water” question: refilling Flaming Gorge and the other Upper Basin reservoirs drawn down by DROA, erasing “operational neutrality” by solving the confusing mess of the relationship between how much water was held back in Powell to keep the dam from breaking, and how that affects Lower Basin shortage tier accounting. (Don’t ask me hard questions, it’s super confusing.)

In a really important way, the discussion has shifted from short term crisis management to long term, umm, I guess “crisis management” remains the right description? Raise your hand if you disagree.

Rio Grande at the start of April

The Rio Grande, which is getting my most focused thinking right now on account of the new book (see bike ride picture above), is in good shape. Usually at this time of year I shift from watching the snowpack to worrying about dry wind events, but this year there’s so gosh-darned much snow up there that I’m, like, “Meh, whatever, bring it on, spring!”

Graph showing high runoff in the Rio Grande at Otowi

Otowi runoff via WGRFC – a very good year on the Rio Grande

I lot depends on spring winds now, and the rate of warming and meltoff. But that will just be the difference between a big year and a very big year.

My great hope is for overbank flows in the Middle Rio Grande, like we had in 2019. Those were super fun.

As always, a big thanks to Inkstain’s supporters for helping support this work.

To use or refill? (a good mid-March Colorado River Basin forecast raises the question)

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With more wet in the forecast, the latest numbers from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center look very good right now:

The active weather pattern that began around mid-February continued through mid-March across the region. Precipitation was above to well above normal across most of the region during the first half of March. March 1-16 precipitation in the UCRB ranged from 80% of normal in the Colorado Headwaters above Kremmling to 275% of normal in the Duchesne River Basin. In the LCRB, March 1-16 precipitation ranged from 110% of normal in the Upper Gila River Basin to 285% of normal in the Virgin River Basin. Precipitation generally exceeded 200% of normal during the first half of March in the GB.

Graph from Colorado Basin River Forecast Center showing unregulated inflow to Lake Powell at nearly 5 million acre feet above average.

A good runoff forecast

This poses a really interesting question for water managers: Do we keep our water conservation foot firmly on the throttle (or brake? a metaphorical muddle?) and use this year’s bonus water to refill the reservoirs? Or do we back off the throttle (brake?) and let some of bonus water flow to users?

As always, a huge thanks to Inkstain’s supporters for making this possible

“partición de bienes” – Albuquerque’s Long Lots

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A “long lot” in Albuquerque’s Duranes neighorhood

Sunday’s bike ride book research took us up along the old Duranes ditch, through Albuquerque’s near north valley. The landscape is still wearing its winter coat, but it’s clearly dusting off its leaf-growing apparatus and getting ready for spring.

We stopped to get a look at one of my favorite old farm fields, on Los Luceros Road. If you don’t count parks, it’s likely the largest irrigated parcel left in Duranes, about an acre in size. But look at the picture. Look at its weird shape – 600 feet long, maybe 75 feet wide

Long lots and “partible inheritance”

A guiding theme of our new book is the notion that institutions shape landscapes. By “institutions” here, we mean rules. The government agencies, the more common thing we talk about when we talk about “institutions”, are relegated to an important but secondary role – they are the tools we build to carry out the rules. So you’ve got to start with the rules.

The rule that drives the shape of this long narrow lot on Los Luceros is “partible inheritance”, a practice rooted in Spanish law of dividing land up equally among heirs to a piece of property. You can’t write Johnny out of the will because he joined the circus to pursue his dream of becoming a clown. Johnny still gets his share of the land when Mom and Dad are gone. And, importantly, because its value is connected to his ability to irrigated, Johnny and his siblings each get a narrow piece of land, connected on one end to the ditch.

Partible inheritance – “partición de bienes” – inevitably led to a bunch of “long lots” in the midst of urban Albuquerque.

Long lots and Albuquerque’s urban form

The urban development of Albuquerque was passed through the institutional funnel of partible inheritance.

Long lots of Duranes. Source: MRGCD 1927 Property Maps

You can see it in the map to the right (click to blow it up), showing the land ownership structure of the old village of Los Duranes circa 1927.

Long lots helped to establish a distinct agricultural landscape, as small family-owned subsistence farms gave way to work in the wage economy after the arrival of the railroad in 1880.

The long lots and the ditches influenced the layout of roads and paths, and which mostly (as in Duranes) run parallel to the ditches, sharing the high ground path the ditch builders chose for the first and most crucial piece of Albuquerque’s urban infrastructure.

Partible inheritance also resulted in fragmented land ownership, which shaped the urban growth and development patterns of Albuquerque.

The primary large parcels available to the early 20th century city-builders were the ones not subject to the “long lot” phenomenon. (Reader warning, I’m getting arm wavy here, but this is the hypothesis.) These big chunks of non-long lot land were mostly swamps and riverside woods, and that’s where you find the wave of suburban home building in the middle third of the 20th century. I think.

 

“the valley breathing in”

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The Duranes, in Albuquerque’s North Valley, awaits first water. February 2023

The Middle Rio Grand Conservancy District began diverting water this morning (March 16, 2023) around 4 a.m. from the Angostura Diversion Dam north of town into the Albuquerque Main. The big concrete-lined channel carries water down the east side of the river some 15 miles to Albuquerque’s North Valley.

It irrigates land along the way in Santa Ana and Sandia Pueblos, two Native American communities that have lived and farmed their lands for what we call “time immemorial”, a poetic term rooted in English common law that the English jurist William Blackstone in the 1700s described as “a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.”

By next week, the water will be flowing down through the city, through a hybrid landscape that is sorta “peri-urban”, a term that’s usually used to describe the transition zone between urban and rural areas. But Albuquerque’s peri-urban landscape is weird, or at least we think it’s weird (a central theme in our new book).

Peri-urban landscapes are often characterized by the tension of a city sweeping away the rural, an expanding series of concentric circles as the urban area pushes outward. But in Albuquerque the ditches of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District instead became a peri-urban anchor that preserved a belt of quasi-rural green run straight through the city’s urban core.

The economics wonks have a conceptual framework to think about what has happened here in the notion of “non-market values”. We normally think of irrigation ditches as conveying economic benefit via crops that farmers sell. Here, the value is non-market:

  • a preservation of a perceived cultural and historical significance, maybe growing a bit of hay or some fruit trees (I say “perceived” – maybe not quite the right word? – because our narrative of the history of agriculture in the valley doesn’t seem to match up well with the actual history, but the non-market value comes from the perception, eh?)
  • ecosystem services – the richly understudied biodiversity of the ditch network is endlessly fascinating, a novel ecosystem that’s been around for hundreds of years
  • recreational opportunities – walking, biking, fishing. Yeah, really, people fish the ditches!
  • community cohesion – social capital is built around the shared experiences of a neighborhood ditch
  • aesthetic values – have y’all seen that giant cottonwood along the Griegos Lateral?

My book’s co-author, Bob Berrens, and I are playing with an intriguing hypothetical: What would it take to add something like this to a city after the fact? Like, take a modern western city that’s kinda dry and boring and add a network of public flowing water through its midst, with trees and walking trails in the cool summer shade?

You couldn’t do it.

Years ago I was out on a newspaper story around this time of year with the late Joey Trujillo, the MRGCD guy in charge of helping usher the water down the Albuquerque Main into the city. I can’t find the old quote, so I’m doing this from memory, which is risky, but what I remember Joey saying is this:

I love this time of year. You can feel the valley breathing in.

Deadpool Diaries: Colorado River report card

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An old wrecked speedboat emerging from a declining Lake Mead.

The structural deficit

With the March 24-month study out, a status report on the Colorado River Basin’s critical numbers. I’ve added the “minimum probable” forecast this time to help better understand the risk profile.

In brief, water users continue to take more water out of Lake Mead than is flowing in.

Most Probable
Lake Mead million acre feet
Start of WY2023 7.328
End of WY2023 6.589
Change in storage (0.739)
Year-end elevation 1,034.27
Miminum Probable
Lake Mead million acre feet
Start of WY2023 7.328
End of WY2023 5.883
Change in storage (1.445)
Year-end elevation 1,023.46

 

Projected water use by Lower Basin states

State Projected use in maf Percent of full allocation
California 4.423 100.52%
Arizona 2.358 84.21%
Nevada 0.227 75.67%

 

Sources: Projected reservoir levels, March 24-month studies, retrieved March 15, 2023; Forecast Lower Basin use, USBR Forecast, March 13, 2023, retrieved March 15, 2023

As always, a huge thanks to Inkstain’s supporters for helping make this possible.

Does 2023’s “cabin crusher” of a snowpack herald a return of California’s Tulare Lake?

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Map showing the Tulare Lake Basin in Central California, USA.

Map showing the Tulare Lake Basin in Central California, USA. Shaded relief data from USGS. Solid blue: Perennial streams Dashed blue: Seasonal streams Dashed light blue: Man-made aqueducts Beige: Dry lake beds. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

It is easy to forget that California’s Tulare Lake, in the southern San Joaquin Valley, once competed with Lake Cahuilla (the “Salton Sea”) for the title of “largest lake west of the Mississippi”.

We drained it. We farm it. But as Erica Gies happily reminds us at every opportunity, water is a formidable adversary if we aren’t willing to make peace with it.

Here’s Jeff Mount:

It is easy to forget that the Tulare Basin once held a very large lake, covering more than 1,000 square miles. The lake was very productive, with vast tule marshes teeming with fish and waterbirds that supported numerous Native American tribes. In very wet periods, it got deep enough (more than 40’ deep) to spill over into the San Joaquin River. In surface area, it was the largest water body west of the Mississippi, surpassing even the Great Salt Lake.

But in the 1900s, inflow to the basin was tamed by a combination of levees, dams, and canals, allowing farming throughout the region. Despite this, every few decades, nature recaptures a portion of the old lakebed when flows from the four rivers that drain into the basin—the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern—overwhelm the ability of landowners to move water around to avoid flooding their fields.

The last big cabin-crusher of a snowpack happened in 1983. That year, a young John Fleck got “trapped” in Chico, California, by the bodacious runoff (the scare quotes a reference to the fact that 23-year-old me being stuck in a party town with a delightful traveling companion and no particular need to be anywhere else was not a bad thing). In 1983, according to Mount’s PPIC post, 100,000 acres of Tulare’s former lakebed, now turned lucrative farmland, ended up under water.

There’s a good chance of something along those lines happening again this year – the water has to go somewhere! But Mount notes a fascinating “wrinkle”:

For the past decade, extensive groundwater withdrawal has lowered portions of the Tulare Basin, including areas both in and around the historic lake. This is likely to have two impacts. First, flooding may affect a potentially wider area that’s now lower and within reach of flood waters. Second, even though infrastructure that’s used to move water around in the Tulare Basin is critical to managing floodwaters, subsidence has altered the slope of many irrigation canals, reducing their capacity to move water. It’s not yet clear how this will impact flood management, but it could pose a challenge.

Jeff’s post is useful throughout.

Deadpool Diaries: A report card on our response to inconvenient science

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A Colorado River report card

Lake Mead Water Year 2023, based on the most recent Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study

Lake Mead million acre feet percent full
Start of WY2023 7.328 28.08%
End of WY2023 6.508 24.93%
gain(loss) (0.820) -3.14%

 

Current forecast U.S. Lower Basin water use

state projected use in maf percent of full allocation
California 4.427 100.61%
Arizona 2.36 84.29%
Nevada 0.227 75.67%

 

Sources: Projected reservoir levels, February 24-month study, retrieved March 13, 20-23; Forecast Lower Basin use, USBR Forecast, March 10,2023, retrieved March 13, 2023

 

Some “inconvenient science”

An Assessment of Potential Severed Droughts in the Colorado River Basin

Salehabadi, Homa, et al. “An Assessment of Potential Severe Droughts in the Colorado River Basin.” JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association (2022). (from the terrifically helpful Utah State Colorado River team and collaborators)

We summarize our updated understanding of plausible future drought conditions by considering historical flows, tree-ring reconstructions, and climate change…. We produced three drought scenarios, each comprising 100 streamflow sequences to be used as input to systems operation and management models. We used analysis of the duration-severity and cumulative deficit relative to the mean natural flow to evaluate droughts and drought simulations and show that the current millennium drought that started in 2000 has an average flow far less than the historical record. However, the flows reconstructed from tree rings or future flows projected from climate models indicate that even more severe droughts are possible. When used as input to the Colorado River Simulation System the drought scenarios developed indicate considerable periods when Lake Powell falls below its hydropower penstocks, indicating a need to rethink management and operation of these reservoirs during these critical conditions. (emphasis added)

Let the rethinking begin.