What will it take to end New Mexico drought?

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Corey Pieper, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Texas, linked this evening to some excellent (if grim) maps showing what it would take to bring Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the southern tier of states out of drought. The first is the percent of normal precipitation required over the winter to end drought:

Percent of normal precipitation required to end drought in the next four months

Percent of normal precipitation required to end drought in the next four months

The second is the probably probability of getting that much precip:

Probability of receiving enough precipitation to end drought in the next four months

Probability of receiving enough precipitation to end drought in the next four months

Source

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Getting to know our river

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From the morning paper, a riff on getting acquainted with our river:

The question of what we know about our river, and how we care for it, has been on my mind since I finished reading Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Blue Revolution.”

Barnett, a Florida journalist, writes about the need for a water ethic. She was in town this month to speak at the annual meeting of the American Water Resources Association, and while she was here I offered to show her our river. We spent a delightful Sunday afternoon working our way up the Rio Grande from Isleta to Alameda — the ditches that spread the water over the valley, the old neighborhoods that grew up around them, and the river corridor itself, the great strip of golden fall cottonwoods and brown water down the middle of our city. But I found myself apologizing (and complaining) as we followed a tortuous path to reach the relatively few places where I could actually get her down to see the river itself.

Can we blame Westlands shortages on Colorado River management?

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California's interconnected plumbing

California's interconnected plumbing, courtesy Delta Stewardship Council

Via Doug Obegi at NRDC’s San Francisco office, more evidence today of the interconnection of water management across the western United States.

Obegi, in a post outlining the history of diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, pointed out the way water allotments to the Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley decreased as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California increased use of its share of delta water in the early ’00s:

Admittedly, several decades ago, the water allocation for the 600 farmers served by Westlands was typically 100%, But back then, the 19 million people served by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California took a lot less water from the Delta. For instance, the initial 2011 allocation for Metropolitan is more than 1.146 million acre feet, and this amount is likely to increase substantially if 2011 is an average or wet year; however Metropolitan’s 1996 allocation was just over 738,000 acre feet.

And why did Met increase its diversions from the Delta? From the Bureau of Reclamation (pdf – see p. 77):

The Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) signed in 2003 resulted in a decrease in the amount of Colorado River water available to California.

Or, as I wrote back in May by way of explaining my fascination with California water:

As the Central Arizona Project fully came on line, California had to bring its usage down to reflect that reality. One thing that happened is that the Metropolitan Water District’s use of Colorado River water went down, and its use of State Water Project water, pumped from the delta, went up.

Click on the map for a bigger view of California’s interconnected plumbing, and to see how we’re all in this together, for better or worse.

Water use in Indian Country

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In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions.

For example:

Not all tribes in the Basin have adjudicated rights or settlements covering all of their tribal lands. In Arizona, five federally recognized tribal governments do not currently have quantified water rights: the Havasupai Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Navajo Nation and the San Juan Paiute Tribe. An additional six tribes do not have adjudicated rights or settlements for at least some of their lands: the Hopi Tribe, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Tonto Apache Tribe, and the Yavapai-Apache Nation.

That’s from the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona’s comments (pdf here) on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s draft Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study. The ITCZ also make a salient point that never occurred to me regarding water consumption under various economic scenarios being considered:

[E]conomic hardship that depresses population growth and thus M&I water demand in the large cities may result in tribal members who were living in those cities and become unemployed moving back to their tribal homelands, increasing M&I water demand there.

SREX, slow journalism edition

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Given the time scales associated with climate change and societal response, it seems perhaps best to wait to consume the new IPCC Special Report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) until it’s actually done. This seems especially true given its stated purpose:

The assessment concerns the interaction of climatic, environmental, and human factors that can lead to impacts and disasters, options for managing the risks posed by impacts and disasters, and the important role that non-climatic factors play in determining impacts.

Because managing those risks will likely have to be done on a local/local/regional/national scale, we need a lot more detail than that presented in the summary released Friday (pdf here) to actually make use of the thing. Its primary role now, it seems, is to fuel the usual climate wars feuds, though it seems to be profoundly useful in that regard. The echo chamber is loud this weekend.

That said, the summary does offer some interesting tidbits that will likely lead to useful reading once the full report is out:

It is likely that there has been a poleward shift in the main Northern and Southern Hemisphere extra-tropical storm tracks.

This is consistent with one of the components of drought discussions here in the southern tier of US states. But:

There is medium confidence that some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, e.g., in central North America and northwestern Australia.

So let’s talk again in February, shall we?

Not much river left

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Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at least a little water slipped by.

In the mid-’80s, the great floods that nearly cost us Glen Canyon Dam and filed Mead to the brim meant that “extra” waster slopping in the system cascaded down to the Colorado River Delta. By the mid-1990s, it was less common. Today? Pretty much nada:

Colorado River Flow Into Mexico

Colorado River Flow Into Mexico

From the Yuma Sun:

“The riverbed is completely dry. There’s no flow coming down into Mexico.”

Data courtesy International Boundary and Water Commission

Hand drawn maps

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I first noticed it while I was out in the mountains of northern New Mexico back in the mid-1990s with Karl Karlstrom, a University of New Mexico geologist. I had tagged along on a summer field camp mapping exercise for a feature I was doing, and spent a good part of the day shadowing Karl and some of his students as they mapped a tangled section of old basement rock.

Hand Drawn Weather Map

Hand Drawn Weather Map

This will be familiar to earth scientists, but was a revelation to me – the way Karl with his little pouch of colored pencils sketched in the rock units as he walked. He was not simply recording data. The act of drawing was part of his construction of a mental model.

I’ve seen it again many times, most notably among meteorologists. In my book*, there’s a scene with forecaster Ken Drozd sketching out the movement of a storm across his daily weather map. Charlie Liles, the retired head of the Albuquerque Weather Service office, used to make these wonderful colored drought maps by hand.

Tom Pagano, the roving river forecaster, has a thoughtful explanation today on his blog about why it’s done this way:

Even though they have access to some of the largest supercomputers in the world, somewhere right now a meteorologist is sitting down with a set of colored pencils to hand-draw air pressure levels on a blank map. This is a generational thing, for sure, younger forecasters (myself included) often preferred to automate things and spend more time, for example, actually getting to eat lunch.

However, it is a meditation on the data. They spend time with their problem, giving it attention and thinking about its parts. As they draw, they consider each individual curve and line, while also subconsciously (or even consciously) marinating in the meaning of the broader pattern of the data. They are developing and exercising their intuition.

I’ve wondered too about whether it’s a generational thing. For the meteorologists, geologists and anyone else in the audience, do you sketch out your work by hand?

* Ideal for that bright youngster on your holiday shopping list!

The economic origins of wildlife refuges

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In his richly detailed The Fall and Rise of the Wetlands of California’s Great Central Valley, Philip Garone explains a bit about the origin of wildlife refuges that I never knew:

During the early decades of the twentieth century, much of the Sacramento Valley was converted to profitable rice production. However, because the valley’s natural wetlands had been reclaimed, crop depredations that followed led to a crescendo of calls by the same farmers who had benefited from the valley’s reclamation to create wetland refuges in the valley. Some of the earliest motivations behind the creation of these refuges in the Sacramento Valley stemmed, therefore, more from economic interests  than from an ecological awareness of the importance of wetlands….

The sound of bark beetles

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A Great Aridness

A Great Aridness

I’m thinkin’ you’ll want to head out to your favorite local bookstore and buy Bill deBuys’ A Great Aridness. It’s full of stuff like this, on the dry winter of 2001-02, when a bear came out of hibernation early because it was so warm and ransacked deBuys’ yard in search of something to eat:

That winter was a bad one for the bear, but a good one for the bark beetles, and once spring came, bringing weather so hot and dry the pastures never greened, you could walk among the piñons and hear a faint mechanical drone, as of a thousand tiny chisels rhythmically chipping away. It was hordes of beetles, tunneling and feeding.

I admit I was skeptical, but when I related deBuys’ account to a couple of northern New Mexico denizens, one an actual tree scientist, they said it’s true. When it’s scary warm and dry like that, they both told me, if you’re really quiet in the woods, you can hear ’em.

Creepy.