Magpies and Poppies

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SACRAMENTO – My friend Judy Liddell*, wise in the ways of bird travel, tipped me to be on the lookout for the yellow-billed magpie while I’m in northern California. She knows whereof she speaks. I saw my first one on the roof of my motel this morning as I ventured out for breakfast. They’re everywhere.

California Poppies

California Poppies

I’m staying a short walk from where the American River enters the Sacramento, and I ventured out after breakfast to look at the water. With a big snowpack, the rivers are running high, though that is not obvious to a visitor with no idea what normal is supposed to look like. The rivers are pinned between levees here, and I walked up through Discovery Park along the riverbanks to get a better feel. A fisherman I stopped to talk to said the place he was fishing – which looked like a big river side channel to me – is normally a creek. Closer examination showed bank shrubbery poking up through water. So yeah, high water.

Beyond the yellow-billed magpie, I saw a lot of great birds – Swainson’s hawk, double-crested cormorant swooping low over the river beneath one of the bridges as I crossed, a white-throated swift, western scrub jays that looked a bit different than ours (a brownish back). And of course the turkey vulture anchoring the scene, ever mindful of our mortality. I also saw people who live here casually embracing their rivers – fishing and boating and undergoing sophisticated preparations for Saturday afternoon barbecue by the water.

And California poppies, sign of the land of my birth.

* I’m reading the proofs of Judy and Barbara Hussey’s Birding Hot Spots of Central New Mexico, which is due out this fall. If you live in New Mexico, or are planning a visit, you’ll want this book, even if you’re not a birder. If you’re a birder, you’ll want it for sure, but their discussions of NM’s natural world are also delightful.

The Nine Percent Headline

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The headline message in the first iteration of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado Basin supply-demand study is “9 percent”:

Under the Downscaled GCM Projected scenario, the mean natural flow as measured at Lees Ferry over the next 50 years is projected to decrease by approximately 9 percent, along with a projected increase in both drought frequency and duration as compared to the observed historical streamflow record. Droughts lasting 5 or more years are projected to occur 40 percent of the time over the next 50 years. Projected changes in climate and hydrologic processes include continued warming across the Basin, a trend toward drying, although precipitation patterns continue to be spatially and temporally complex, and increases in evapotranspiration and decreases in snowpack, as more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow.

But we already knew that, right? Basically the same data, with some minor tweakage, was behind the Bureau’s Climate Change Impacts in Western Basins report released in March. Its headline number was 8.5 percent for the Colorado. But don’t hang two much on the number. There’s too much uncertainty surrounding the modeling (especially the specification of an emissions scenario to drive the climate change models) to think of this as predictive.

What’s more important is the development of a range of scenarios to better understand the range of risks we face not only on the supply side (climate change, drought) but also on the demand side – as a result of population change, changed usage patterns and also changes in use in response to climate change. In the snapshot of the study released today, this work is only starting to get underway.

 

jfleck’s big water adventure

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I’m headed up to Boulder this week for the University of Colorado Natural Resources Law Center’s “Navigating the Future of the Colorado River” conference (more from John McChesney here), then off from there to Sacramento and the Bay Area (with the kind support and assistance of Stanford’s Lane Center) to learn more about California’s water problems.

The two sets of problems – the Colorado River supply-demand imbalance and the political and policy mess that is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – are closely linked because of Southern California’s dependence on imported water from both. “We’re all interconnected,” a Southern California water manager told me the other day. “A problem on the delta eventually means a problem for Vegas and Phoenix.” Or vice versa, as I noted last month with respect to Southern California’s increased use of Sacramento Delta water as its Colorado River supplies declined.

But there are huge differences in the institutional frameworks for dealing with the political and policy problems faced by the two systems. Despite the grim scenarios painted by some with respect to the Colorado River (including, frankly, me), the Law of the River has proven robust in the face of problems on the Colorado over the last decade. California was successfully forced to reduce its diversions from the Colorado – to stop depending on surpluses and live within its means. With that agreement in place, we weathered the biggest decadal-scale drought on the Colorado River since record-keeping began more than a century ago, and no one had their water supplies reduced any further than that.

Rob Davis is right that we lack a plan for what happens next, which is a big part of what I hope to get out of the Boulder conference – given the framework now in place that allowed us to weather the drought of the ’00s, what do we do next? There is no guarantee that we’ll succeed in creating the additional framework necessary to deal with greater problems in the future, but at least I can see a path forward.

As for California, I’m still scratching my head, trying to understand what the framework might be that would allow the sorting out of competing/conflicting demands on the delta.

Stay tuned here, and over at the work blog. I also hope to file several pieces for the newspaper over the next few weeks trying to explain to the Albuquerque audience why they should care.

I also hope to get out on a boat. On the water. And I’m taking my binoculars, because I hear the Delta has some great birds.

On the importance of stakeholder communication and buy-in

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A big focus of my reporting on western water right now is process. It’s clear we have supply-demand imbalances. What are the processes by which we’ll respond? What successes have we had to date in creating institutional arrangements that can reduce use in response, and where and how have we failed (are we failing) to do that?

In that regard, I’ve been casting an occasional eye toward Australia, where the folks in the Murray-Darling Basin seem years ahead of us in the scale of their problem. This story about an inquiry into the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s process for determining future flow regimes (h/t Malcolm, who smartly zeroed in on the communication issue) seems to offer a good example of what not to do:

The inquiry says the authority failed to communicate clearly with communities that its “draft to the guide” document released last year was just a working document.

That document recommended water cutbacks of between 3,000 and 4,000 megalitres in the Murray-Darling system to ensure what it said would be a sustainable river system.

The inquiry found the authority gave the mistaken impression that it had not consulted in putting the guide together.

When it did embark on the community consultation process, it falsely gave the impression that the guide was a done deal, giving producers and communities the idea that their water entitlements would be taken from them immediately without their say.

Mr Windsor says the authority’s report sent shockwaves through the community for no good reason.

“It was very obvious the authority hadn’t done a good job in terms of discussing the issues with the community,” he said.

“To have the fairly brutal cuts to entitlement as a way to solve the obvious issues within the river system – the way in which that was marketed wasn’t the correct way to go.”

I don’t know enough about the situation to know whether a more effectively managed stakeholder process could have succeeded, but the way it was handled seems to have ensured failure.

Winds of my childhood

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It’s been a weird couple of days in Albuquerque.

Last night, driving down from the foothills near sunset, I could see a thick haze building across the city, and by the time I got home I could smell smoke. Turns out it’s blowing up from a wildfire in southeastern Arizona (the Wallow, 106,000 acres at last report, a crown fire, which is the fastest hottest kind) and it’s making people edgy. It settled down today, but around sunset it moved in again. Lissa and I are sitting by an open back door, and I can smell it, feel a little sting in my eyes.

It’s a weird sensation, the power of smell memory, a hearkening to my childhood in the foothills of LA’s eastern suburban fringe when the Santa Ana winds would blow hot and dry from the desert. I was in sixth grade when this happened most memorably, when the Lytle Creek Fire fire roared in across the mountain front above my house. The college where my dad taught, out east of town, was evacuated, and they sent us home from school early. I remember walking home with my friends, watching the columns of smoke to the east. It was such a grand adventure, all false bravado and danger and drama befitting a bunch of 11-year-old boys.

That evening, Mom and Dad had packed the car with whatever fear and treasures grownups pack at a time like that, ready to evacuate, and we sat out watering the wood shingle roof and watching the fire advance across the mountains above. At some point I think the crews must have lit a backfire near the bottom of the hills behind the house and I remember that you could feel the heat from where we were, which must have been a mile and a half away.

Which is really just cheap prelude to my favorite noir. Stop me if you’ve heard this before:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Raymond Chandler, Red Wind, 1938

I confess I like the smell.

Increased flood risk in California under climate change

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USGS researcher Mike Dettinger, whose paper on “atmospheric rivers” (ARs) and climate variability in California I highlighted over the weekend, has a new paper in the June Journal of the American Water Resources Association looking at how climate change might influence the phenomenon in the future. AR’s dominate California’s precipitation (and water supply) delivering a handful of huge bursts of moisture. Overall the averages don’t change that much in the climate change scenarios he modeled, but the extremes do:

Years with many AR episodes increase, ARs with higher-than-historical water-vapor transport rates increase, and AR storm-temperatures increase. Furthermore, the peak season within which most ARs occur is commonly projected to lengthen, extending the flood-hazard season. All of these tendencies could increase opportunities for both more frequent and more severe floods in California under projected climate changes.

Mulroy: We don’t need to tear up the compact

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John McChesney has posted a great interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, about future directions for Colorado River management. She’s the most vocal proponent for mechanisms that might allow sharing of shortages among water users across the Colorado River basin, rather than a strict prior appropriation approach where junior users get cut off completely before senior users suffer any losses. She argues this can be done without abandoning or rewriting the Colorado River compact, but rather that it can be accomplished within the existing legal framework:

I think there are enough flexibilities in this that we can overcome these first-in-time, first-in-right provisions that we hang on to so dearly. I mean, for example, we are paying the state of Arizona 350 million dollars to store their unused water in their groundwater basins for our future use. We’re covering their cost. That allows us during shortages, to the extent that Phoenix, Tucson, their cities aren’t shorted, to be able to take water out of that groundwater basin. During Metropolitan’s shortage period all the water we were conserving in southern Nevada we were giving to southern California with the understanding that one day when we needed it we would get it back. It’s that kind of relationship that will start blurring and muting the negative effects of the first in time first in right doctrine.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Dry Year

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We’ve received 2.15 inches (5.46 cm) of precipitation since Oct. 1 (the “water year”) at the Heineman-Fleck house in Albuquerque. That’s 44 percent of average for the first 8 months of the water year. (My average is based on data going back to the 1999-2000 water year.)

A sidelight: 1.41 inches of that (3.58 cm) came in a single storm, overnight Dec. 16-17. Aside from that one fluke storm (and a remarkable one it was) we’ve been remarkably dry.