A dry summer and fall means less water in the Colorado River in the coming year

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a lousy monsoon

soil moisture heading into the 2020 runoff, courtesy CBRFC

Despite an above-average snowpack in significant parts of the Colorado River Basin, the initial 2020 forecast is for below-average runoff thanks to a dry summer and fall.

According to the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center’s Cody Moser, speaking in today’s first-of-2020 forecast briefings, the monsoon over the Colorado River Basin was the 9th driest and 3rd hottest in a record that goes back to 1895. That means very dry soil moisture heading into the snow season. And that dry soil must then soak up the first pulse of melt before water can get to the rivers.

With three months of snow season to go, the error bars are still huge, with a forecast mean flow into Lake Powell of 82 percent. Pictures here courtesy CBRFC, click for more forecast maps and information than you could every think of asking for.

 

 

The problems of a rising Lake Mead

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The folks running Lake Mead’s marina – often a story line for folks like me writing about a declining western water supply as marina managers chase a shrinking reservoir’s shoreline – are running the opposite direction this year:

In 2003, they had to relocate the marina to the south 12 miles because the water was going down so quickly.

“We had to take the dock apart in pieces and put it back together and we had to put utilities and everything here, which we paid for too,” said Kaiser.

But now they have to deal with the higher waters, a new increasing out of the pocket expense.

“We’ve ordered in another section of walkway so hopefully we can just add walkway,” said Kaiser.

 

How big was Lake Mead’s “structural deficit” in 2019?

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With Lake Mead ending 2019 at elevation 1090.49 feet above sea level – up 9 feet for the year – it’s worth visiting the Bureau of Reclamation’s classic “structural deficit” slide and seeing how it compares to 2019’s real world data. First, a reminder of where the oft-quoted “1.2 million acre foot structural deficit” comes from:

the structural deficit

Now, let’s compare that to 2019 data, and to a “what if” scenario:

Structural deficit slide20192019 with an 8.23 release
Inflow9.010.19.3
Outflow-9.6-9-9
Evaporation-0.6-0.5-0.5
Balance-1.20.6-0.2

Look, no structural deficit this year!

Well, sorta. In order for Lake Mead to rise that much (the biggest one-year rise since the monster runoff of 2011), we needed

  • reduced lower basin use (it’s the lowest it’s been since 1986, and in the case of California since 1950) and
  • the release of 9 million acre feet from Lake Powell – above the Law of the River-mandated 8.23 million acre feet and
  • a good year on the Colorado’s tributaries between Lake Powell and Lake Mead (they added ~1.1 million acre feet, above the recent average of ~800,000 acre feet)

Absent all that bonus water, the Lower Basin, despite its lowest use since 1986, would still have a deficit to deal with.

A good year on the Rio Grande

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We ended up with 1.2 million acre feet of water flowing down the Rio Grande past Albuquerque this year, according to my quick and dirty calculations based on the USGS Central Avenue gauge. That would be the biggest flow through town since 1995.

graph showing high 2019 flow through Albuquerque on the Rio Grande

Rio Grande total flow

That’s 42 percent above the long term mean (this gauge’s data goes back to 1966, the first full year at the site) and nearly double the 21st century mean. Here’s the hydrograph of a good year on the Rio Grande.

Elephant Butte reservoir, the biggest storage on the Rio Grande, ended 2019 with ~557,000 acre feet, the most at years’ end since 2008, but still hovering around “drought of the ’50s” levels (which as you can see really stretched from the 1940s into the 1970s).

Elephant Butte storage, data via USBR

Not sure where we ended up in terms of meeting our Rio Grande Compact delivery obligation to folks downstream, but I’m speaking in a week at the annual New Mexico Water Dialogue, I’ll track down the answer and report back here.

And finally one of my favorite water measures, the aquifer beneath my house was up more than 3 feet in 2019. This is one of the metrics that, as I watched it over time, finally began to persuade me that not all was doom and gloom:

The aquifer rising beneath John Fleck’s house

California’s 2019 use of Colorado River water lowest since 1950

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graph showing California's decling use of Colorado River water

Data: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; USBR. Munging together of datasets by John Fleck, University of New Mexico Water Resources Program

While Colorado River water management eyes were focused elsewhere this year – on the big snowpack up north, or the chaos success of the Drought Contingency Plan – California has quietly achieved a remarkable milestone.

Its use of Colorado River water in 2019 will be 3.858 million acre feet. The last time it was below 4 million acre feet was 1950, as the state’s big diversions – the All-American Canal and the Colorado River Aqueduct – were ramping up.

In our new book Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, Eric Kuhn and I make the obvious plea that decision-making going forward must take seriously the hydrologic science: that the Colorado River never had the water the planners schemed for in the 1920s, and that climate change makes that reality worse. But we also include a plea for taking demand-side science seriously:

There also is an empirical reality on the water demand side that has been insufficiently taken into account, but which provides a significant opportunity to help solve the river basin’s problems once we are willing to take it seriously. The widespread presumption that population growth means growing water demand drives much of the politics of water planning in the Colorado River Basin. But it is wrong. Simply put, we are consistently using less water. In almost all the municipal areas served with Colorado River water, water use is going down, not up, despite population growth. Water use in the basin’s major agricultural regions also is going down, even as agricultural productivity continues to rise. This is not limited to the Colorado River Basin. Such “decoupling” among water use, population, and economies is common across the United States.

In the 2019 California data, I see four things going on, three on the municipal water use side and one on the agricultural.

Southern California municipal water management success

On the municipal side (which means the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and its best pal the San Diego County Water Authority):

  • A good snowpack in the Sierra Nevada meant Met got a 75 percent allocation from the California State Water Project, which moves Northern California Water to “the Southland”, as we used to call the state’s populous Southern California coastal plain. That’s not a great allocation, but it is a good one.
  • Bangup water conservation success in Met’s service area – publicly available California data suggests total municipal water use across Southern California is essentially where it was back in the 1980s. It’s not clear where the floor is here, but California’s experience during their Big Drought of the teens suggests there is still room reduce water use even more.
  • Aggressive efforts to maximize local supplies – desalination, wastewater reuse, groundwater contamination cleanup, stormwater capture. Expect these numbers to continue to go up.

The result of all that is that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides all the water to the coastal cities, will end the year at 536,726 acre feet of use, its lowest use of Colorado River water since 1958.

Southern California ag reducing its water use too

Meanwhile on the agricultural side, California’s big desert irrigation districts also are using less water. Total use this year by the “big three” – Imperial, Coachella, and Palo Verde – is 81 percent of the 2002 peak. A big part of that is the web of agreements among ag and municipal users that allowed California to step back in the early 2000s from its excessive past use of Colorado River water use. The deals are frequently characterized as ag-to-urban transfers, but the more accurate way of seeing them is finding ways to compensate ag communities for absorbing the cuts as California scaled back from 5-plus million acre feet a year of Colorado River water use to its legal entitlement of 4.4maf.

Not just California

California’s low use is the headline grabbiest, but Arizona and Nevada are also using less than their full allocation. As I write every damn chance I get, when people have less water, they use less water. This is the critical point in the bit I quoted above from our new book.

My lovely All-City bicycle atop Hoover Dam, with a bathtub ring in the background illustrating Lake Mead’s great emptiness.

This should in no way be read as a suggestion that all is fine. The obligatory pictures of Lake Mead’s bathtub ring I take every December while on my way to the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting show, well, a bathtub ring, seen from many angles. No way around that.

1,090.44

Mead is ending the year at elevation ~1,090 feet and a couple of inches above sea level (1,090.44 as of 6 p.m. Mountain time as I write this), which means the provisions of section III.E.6 of Exhibit 1 to the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan Agreement kick in:

In the event Lake Mead’s January 1 elevation in a given Year is higher than that projected in the preceding August 24-Month Study, any DCP ICS creation that would not have occurred in such Year if the DCP Contribution had been determined based on Lake Mead’s actual January 1 elevation rather than a projection will instead remain available as the type of ICS originally created to the extent such volumes are the result of conservation actions consistent with ICS Exhibits to the 2007 Lower Colorado River Basin Intentionally Created Surplus Agreement (2007 ICS Agreement).

I’ve read that paragraph now ~17 times and I’m getting a headache and that’s no way to spend New Year’s Eve, but it basically seems to be saying that all the August hoopla about the first mandatory DCP cuts is basically “meh” and we end up with more dusty regular old “intentionally created surplus” banked in Mead in the coming year, not the shiny new “DCP ICS” we’ve all been so excited about. But I am not a lawyer, and would be delighted if any of you who have passed the bar can help clarify my thinking.

An interesting exercise for the reader would be to look at the final pumping numbers to see if anyone backed off of their pumping in December to try to nudge the final number above 1,090. Arizona, for example, seems to have diverted ~100k acre feet from the river in December 2019, which is less than half of what it took in each of the previous five Decembers. An extra 100kaf would have been enough to keep Mead above the 1,090 threshold, but I haven’t looked closely at who within Arizona was taking what, nor thought through who might stand to benefit from section III.E.6. As I said, an interesting exercise for the reader.

Colorado River Basin storage – slightly more than half full

Total Colorado River system storage is ending 2019 at 52 percent of capacity. So slightly more than half full, or just a bit less than half empty, depending on your desired framing. My preferred framing is that we figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time with this stuff – recognizing enormous success without losing sight of how large are the looming problems that remain.

 

#geographybybike

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John Fleck’s 2019 Albuquerque bike rides

With a couple of days left in 2019 I’m at 4,303 miles bicycled for the year, so I made a map. My claimed mileage is almost certainly not accurate to that fourth significant digit, but since I GPS all my rides it’s probably close. There are a few hotel fitness center miles in there, and a few rides when I took my bicycle with me when I traveled (to Colorado, Arizona, and California). But the vast majority of the miles were ridden on the roads of my home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

lunch at El Mezquite

My friend Maria Lane (an actual geographer!) dubbed this #geographybybike, a sort of aimless wandering around looking at all the things. A lot of aimless wandering around. A version of the map sans arty black background would show Albuquerque’s river corridor, tracing the trails on either bank. Add a time element and you’d see more and more rides on the valley floor riding ditch banks. A Sunday-specific geography would chronicle a growing relationship with cheap tacos.

I’ve lived in Albuquerque nearly 30 years, and been riding my bike here for 20. I used to be all zoomy and fitnessy, but as I approach senescence I’ve increasingly been about looking around.

It’s given me a fresh sense of my city. There are no bad days on a bike.

 

great blue heron

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great blue heron, Rio Grande Bosque, Albuquerque, New Mexico, December 2019

The first bird I formally identified, as in “sat down with the book and then wrote down the result” was a great blue heron.

The entry in the old family Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, red ball point pen:

11/86 Sat on tiny island in Colorado River all morning, picking at its feathers

The book dates to the 1960s. Per the inscription in the front, it was a Christmas 1968 gift from my father to my mother. When Lissa and I were married it was passed down to us.

I cannot remember the November 1986 Colorado River blue heron campground with precision. It was on the Lower Colorado, the Blythe stretch I think (North of Blythe? South?) on the Arizona side, I think. There were a few tent spaces, but it was mostly RV’s. We were poor, and tent campers, and went often in the winter months from our home in South Pasadena to the deserts of the Lower Colorado.

When I was young and imagined being a writer (which is almost certainly what I was imagining on that trip in November of 1986 as I sat looking out at that river), I had a character in mind who lived in the desert – out near Joshua Tree, in a mobile home – and learned the names of birds. The naming of things has always seemed important to me:

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

The heron, if you believe in such things, has always been a spirit animal for me, following me on my travels. One swooped up into a cottonwood this morning as my friend Scot and I were riding our bikes up through the woods along the Rio Grande, kindly posing, that I might take their picture and remember their name.

How we got into our Colorado River mess (and how we get out of it?)

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Bret Jaspers at public radio station KJZZ in Phoenix did a two-part piece starting with a nice overview of our new book, followed by a good dive, from the Arizona perspective, into the options we have for extricating ourselves from the Colorado River’s overallocation problems.

Arizona’s “great forgetting”

I returned to a message I’ve been hammering on regarding what’s going on in Arizona right now:

“In 1968 when the Central Arizona Project was approved, Arizona knew that there was not sufficient water to keep that canal full year in and year out,” Fleck said.

He points to testimony from then-Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy, who told a House of Representatives subcommittee that “sooner or later, and mostly sooner, the natural flows of the Colorado River will not be sufficient to meet water demands, either in the lower basin or the upper basin, if these great regions of the Nation are to maintain their established economies and realize their growth potential.”

Fleck said Arizona knew that without augmentation, the water available for CAP canal customers would fluctuate.

“And somehow that was forgotten, and Arizona grew to depend on a full CAP canal every year,” Fleck said.

As John Berggren pointed out when I pushed on the same point last summer at a conference in Boulder, banging on this point may not be helpful at this point. Arizona did what it did over the last half century, and is where it is now, mistake or not.

It’s hard to disagree with him on this, but I still keep saying it.