It’s not a big drop, but in the face of drought and modest population growth, Albuquerque’s water use dropped in 2011. From the morning paper:
The drop was tiny — less than 1 percent.
But with Albuquerque weathering one of its driest years in history in 2011, the consumption drop is significant, said Katherine Yuhas, head of the conservation program at the Water Utility.
“What we’re telling our customers is, ‘Wow, amazing job,’” Yuhas said Wednesday.
The Lamont-Doherty group that has done so much to help our understanding of the factors that drive multi-decadal droughts has added a nice piece to our understanding of the issues.
In a paper in review (for which they’ve done a nice accessible writeup), Ben Cook and colleagues looked at a number of drivers for long-duration drought: sea surface temperature, warming caused when grasses die off and leave bare soil, and then the added role of increased aerosols from dust kicked up in the ensuing mess.
The addition of active dust sources led to dust emissions and significant aerosol loading that further decreased precipitation relative to the case with SST and bare soil forcing alone. Active dust emission from the dunes also increased the persistence of the megadroughts making them more in agreement with tree ring evidence of the character of the megadroughts. In the model dust aerosols suspended in the atmosphere reflect solar radiation reducing energy available at the surface increasing atmospheric stability and reducing upward motion and convection. This suppresses precipitation.
In communities that fully reuse their wastewater (Albuquerque and Las Vegas do this now, for example, by returning sewage treatment effluent to the water’s source), it’s outdoor water use that dominates the water supply equation. And here in the arid southwest, sooner or later everyone will fully reuse their wastewater. This is not an argument against indoor conservation – it still has enormous value, in reducing the amount of water that must be pumped, treated and then returned. But outdoor conservation is where the big water supply action’s at.
Which is why this quote in Teresa Rochester’s Ventura County Star story about rising water rates and drying yards in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is so hilarious:
“It’s not like we’re fat, selfish cats sucking up water, man. It’s the landscaping,” he said. “The city fathers are proud to show people this neighborhood.”
Public understanding is hard. Comes slowly.
I’m a fan of NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Here’s an example of why.
In working on my book, I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin – how much precipitation falls, and where, and when. The CBRFC has great data and great tools to help. Last week I was puzzling over the Green River. One of the most useful CBRFC tools for watching a snow season play out is their “snow groups“, which collect all the real time snow measurement gauges in a watershed into a single graph. I wrote the Center asking which snow group was best for monitoring the Green River as a whole. Turns out that, as of last week, they didn’t have none that really captured the Green as a whole.
But since I asked, they made a new one.
The bad news is that, as of today, the Green watershed is at 60 percent of average:
Green River watershed, Jan. 9, 2012
Mark Lubbell at UC Davis makes the case for abandoning the Mark Twain “whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’ over” quote, and not just because Twain didn’t say it:
Unfortunately, perpetuating water wars and the language of conflict will never solve California’s water problems. Water wars are equivalent to the “tragedy” aspect of managing common-pool resources. What is instead needed is for all the various water stakeholders to find some type of agreement or cooperation to sustainably manage water over time (more to come at later time).
It echoes a point I made in my Lane Center piece about the search for cooperation on the Colorado:
The quote lives on in descriptions of water politics in the arid Southwest, invariably with Twain’s name attached, because of the power of the idea behind it: that the allocation of scarce water is an enduring source of conflict.
But the history of Colorado River management is a more complex story. It is easy to focus on the fighting, and the battles make for some great yarns. But there also is a remarkable history of not fighting – of negotiated agreements – that suggests there is more than one path for dealing with the West’s water problems. Westerners have done their share of fighting, but they also have a remarkable record of cooperation. “History has shown that collaboration is a necessary ingredient for action in the Colorado River basin,” Jennifer Gimbel of the Colorado River Water Conservation Board told members of Congress in a 2010 hearing .
John Bass has been pushing an excellent question about the direction of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan:
Why isn’t the “fortress Delta” solution the most cost effective way of pursuing the co-equal goals question.
John’s come to this line of thinking based on a cost-benefit argument: Couldn’t armoring the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees achieve the goals of reliability of water supply and environment protection at a fraction of the cost of building a peripheral canal/tunnel thingie?
Timm Herdt had a piece in the Ventura County Star yesterday that comes at this from a different direction: will the folks down south be willing to foot the bill for a multi-billion dollar conveyance to carry water around the delta?
Before the process advances, some are arguing that it’s time for a cost-based reality check.
“They’re devising a project without first determining what the customers can afford to pay,” said Dennis Cushman, assistant general manager of the San Diego County Water Authority.
“The real Achilles heel is the financing,” said Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, of the planning for a new conveyance system that would be part of a comprehensive delta fix.
January 2012 Colorado Basin Forecast, courtesy CBRFC
Well that was fun while it lasted, eh? Looks like it’s back to draining reservoirs on the Colorado!
2011, a big sloppy wet kiss of a water year, pumped up total storage in the reservoirs behind Glen Canyon and Hoover dams by some 5 million acre feet. But the first forecast of the year suggests a turn back in the opposite direction.
The largest single water user on the Colorado River, the Imperial Irrigation District in southeast California, diverted 2.9 million acre feet from the river at Imperial Dam in 2011. Arizona’s entire consumptive use was 2.7 million acre feet.* Scale matters here, and I use those numbers to give some sense of the meaning of a 2.6 million acre drop in forecast Colorado River flows in 2012.
That 2.6 million acre foot drop is the headline number that came out of this week’s release of the first forecasts from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The forecast calls for flows into Lake Powell, which captures the bulk of the Colorado’s supply, of 71 percent of the mean during the key April-July time period, which is when most of the snowmelt arrives. We’re talking here about paper water, estimates codified in the monthly planning documents prepared by the US Bureau of Reclamation for the management of the water under its stewardship. But on paper, when the next Bureau monthly report comes out next week, the anticipated balance sheet for the year will be down 2.6 maf from what the December report showed. The 2.6 maf represents the difference between a projection made back in October, when we had essentially zero information to go on, and the first preliminary forecast based on actual snow falling (or not falling) on actual mountains.
We’ll have some clearer numbers next week when the Bureau takes the new CBRFC numbers and plugs them into its water management model, but during a conference call Friday to discuss the forecast, one of the Bureau officials on the line uttered the 2.6 maf number, which is the difference in Lake Powell inflows this year under the new forecast as compared to the October projections.
* Source: USBR provisional water use report, 2011 (pdf)
When I was writing this, the working title was “optimism”.
Central Arizona Project, photo by John Fleck
It’s a piece for Stanford’s Lane Center, based on work I’ve been doing on Colorado River Water management. It was spawned by a conversation last summer with Jon Christensen, the Lane Center’s executive director. I was talking about my optimism about our problem-solving ability, and he asked me if I’d ever written a piece about it. I had to acknowledge that I hadn’t. I’ve done bits and pieces of this argument, especially on the blog. But my optimism is so out of step with so much of the literature on the Colorado Basin that I’ve been timid in advancing the argument.
It’s easy to write gloom about the situation in the Colorado River Basin. The supply and demand curves have crossed, and not in a good way. Population and therefore water demand continues to grow. Climate change seems to already be eating into water supply, but if the eating into hasn’t started yet, it appears likely that it will. Communities dependent on the river, most of them anyway, seem oblivious to the problem.
It is easy to extend out the supply and demand curves and conclude we’re doomed as a result. But I’m increasingly prepared to argue that, when the balloon goes up, we have demonstrated an ability to comprise and constrain our water use. Consider 2003, when California’s Colorado River allotment was rolled back:
The ax fell Jan. 1, 2003, with an edict from the Secretary of the Interior: California would get 4.4 million acre feet that year, and no more.
The Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s primary water wholesaler, had been running its Colorado River Aqueduct full bore since it was built, moving 1.2 million acre feet of water per year. That number was cut to 500,000 acre feet, literally overnight.
Remarkably, the deal stuck.
At the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting last month in Las Vegas, I ran into one of the people who was in the room for the negotiations. This person still smiled in amazement recalling the events of nine years ago, because no one thought that politically powerful California would see its allocation cut.
California’s experience – in shifting to more locally developed supplies, in conservation, in better managing its storage – shows how much slack there is in our profligate water usage, and how much room there is in our approach to water management to use less and still have the sorts of communities and productive economies we seem to want. It would be perhaps better if it could be done proactively. I’m not optimistic about that. Change takes crisis. But I’m optimistic that, when crisis comes, we’ll be successful in adapting to our changing situation rather than abandoning this region that we love.
Special thanks to Jon and John McChesney at the Lane Center for their support of this effort.
It would be easy to look at this Arizona Republic story as another example of the profligate water wastefulness that will ultimately doom Phoenix:
Valley homeowners’ excess citrus fruit, often picked by volunteer gleaners, can’t be shipped across state lines this year after a fungal disease known as sweet orange scab was found in some citrus orchards in Arizona and other states.
You mean they have so much extra water that they can grow citrus and just throw it away?
I have a more optimistic view. When faced with abandoning a lifestyle of lawns and wasted citrus or abandoning Phoenix, I’m thinking the lawns and citrus trees will go. This is evidence that they have a long way to go in the direction of water efficiency before folks have to pack up and move to Cleveland.
In water policy terms, this is one of the most important stories I’ve done in a while:
The steady dripping into Carl Axness’ cistern is the sound of next spring’s water supply.
The snow melting from his Rio Rancho roof is the bounty of December’s storms. For the better part of four years, that roof runoff has provided the entire source of supply for Axness and his family.
It’s not that I expect everyone to follow Carl’s path. His situation is unique in a couple of ways. The first is the way his Rio Rancho lot was bypassed by water infrastructure. The second is Carl himself – an energetic tinkerer, willing to fiddle to make his off-the-water-grid life possible. It’s obviously not for everyone. But I think of him as a sort of bounding scenario for what is possible when we’re faced with apocalyptic visions of life in the Southwest with dwindling water supply and growing population. Carl’s a living demonstration that it is possible to live with far less developed water than we use today. Given a choice between apocalyptic abandonment of Phoenix or Las Vegas or Albuquerque as water supplies run low or the widespread adoption of some part of the suite of things Carl’s doing (especially for outdoor watering, which is far less finicky), it seems clear to me what we’ll see.