River Beat: Alligators
Posted on | July 29, 2010 | No Comments
I report without comment reports of alligators in the Colorado River (Palisade is in western Colorado, just upstream from Grand Junction):
Wednesday, a group of kids playing near the water at Riverbend Park raised the alarm when they say they spotted an alligator on the bank. They say their parents didn’t believe them, but a bystander did.
“Everybody thought we were crazy. These ladies said we must be blind or seeing things. But this guy saw it too and he saw it go into the water. And he was trying to tell everyone we weren’t being crazy. We really did see it,” says Josie Brumfield.
Water Quote
Posted on | July 28, 2010 | No Comments
“Water is the classic common property resource. No one really owns the problem. Therefore, no one really owns the solution.” - Ban Ki-moon, quoted in Grafton et al.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Water and Institutional Structures
Posted on | July 27, 2010 | 7 Comments
Saturday’s post about Phoenix and the need for proper institutional structures to sort out the West’s water problems was really a bit of shadowboxing with a piece I was working on for today’s paper about New Mexico (sub. ad req.) It’s about an ongoing argument here about a proposed water rights agreement between our Interstate Stream Commission and Intel. The agreement was an attempt by the ISC to do something very much outside the normal water management box, and it’s run into a shitstorm of criticism.
I argue that one of its problems is that we lack the institutional framework under which to consider a deal like this:
But it is also clear that, if López and his team are right about the deal’s legality and merits — and there is reason to think they might be — we do not have the political and institutional framework in this state to have a proper discussion of the issues being raised.
There is no institutional forum for the discussion of an idea like this, a place where the major players with skin in the state water game — the big municipal utilities, irrigators, the pueblos, the state regulators and legislators — regularly sit down to discuss our water future.
The Intel deal is just one small item on the long list of possible solutions to our water problems — increased water conservation, desalination of brackish groundwater, sale of water from agriculture to urban use, improved management of dams to reduce evaporation, long-distance transfers from places that have water to those that don’t, changes in endangered species protections.
All involve, to a greater or lesser extent, old law and engineering versus new realities. But without a sufficiently broad statewide forum in which to have the conversation, the best solutions are likely to founder on the same shoals on which the Intel deal has run aground.
Comments welcome – in fact, encouraged.
Water in the Desert: Moving Flash Floods
Posted on | July 26, 2010 | 4 Comments
We had a nice line of thundershowers move across Albuquerque this afternoon. After dinner, Lissa and I headed to the north end of town to view the results.
Albuquerque North Diversion Channel following a storm, July 2010
The metro area’s North Diversion Channel drains roughly 100 square miles of city, and flood control engineers tell me it’s a relatively unusual terrain for a major urban flood control district, with an unusually large drop from the foothills to the Rio Grande. A series of concrete collector channels gather water from the heights and deliver it to the north Diversion Channel, which starts near my house and goes 8 or 9 miles north until it hits the Rio Grande.
The pictures show the point where it’s nearly reached the river. It’s nasty at this point, having picked up urban detritus large and small. It flares out into a broad shallow holding basin, the purpose of which is to allow the nastiest bits to settle out before the water flows on to the river.
Tramway Wetlands, Albuquerque, July 2010
The area in the picture to the right we call the “Tramway Wetlands.” It’s one of those odd bits of accidental urban nature. It’s one of the few broad shallow mud flats along this stretch of the river, and it’s often home to shore birds as a result. (The Rio Grande, with its incised channel, doesn’t offer much in the way of natural “shoreline” any more.) It’s a favorite of local birdwatchers.
At the peak of the flood flow this afternoon, it reached 3,000 cubic feet per second, which for a brief period matches a good spring runoff in the entire Rio Grande.
Here’s a map showing where the pictures were taken:
View Tramway Wetland in a larger map
Phoenix and water – what’s plan B?
Posted on | July 24, 2010 | 9 Comments
James Lawrence Powell concludes his otherwise excellent western water history Dead Pool
It’s not hard to think up solutions that make hydrologic sense – reallocation of water from current to future uses, conservation measures, extreme growth controls, price-based economic solutions. But it’s also easy to make the case for why those solutions aren’t politically viable.
So what’s our Plan B?
Arizona Population Growth, via Google Public Data
I was thinking about Powell’s end point as I read a terrific piece this week by journalist Jon Talton, late of Phoenix, now settled in considerably wetter Seattle. It’s a fire-in-the-belly response to the way Phoenix is blindly stumbling forward into its arid future:
In general, Arizona’s water issues are stark and simple: The state can’t sustain double-digit percentage population increases every decade, particularly in subdivisions apart from historic urban footprints.
And this:
Here’s what I know: The Colorado River is oversubscribed. It can’t support the population that depends on it now, much less added growth. The paralyzed federal government would not build a second CAP canal (“pork”), as some dream, even if the water was there. The Upper Basin states (and Mexico) will never allow themselves to get fleeced again by California, Arizona and (now) Las Vegas.
And on he goes. His analysis of the problem, honed by his work as a journalist in Phoenix and what he describes as a childhood as son of one of the people who help build the Central Arizona Project, Phoenix’s river uphill from the Colorado, is razor sharp. Go read it.
But his solution is not.
1) Stop all exurban development; 2) Stop all development outside the real urban footprints of cities and towns — that means no more Pinal or Buckeye sprawl; 3) Shrink the state’s population through taxes, “anti-business” regulations and whatever other creative solution someone can reach (the heat may do this anyway); 4) Price water extremely high outside the SRP footprint and a few other quasi-sustainable areas; 5) Start to return much of metro Phoenix’s fringes to natural desert — yes, tear down the crap; 6) Get a real handle on the state’s water resources, based on science, not the venal appetite of the Growth Machine; 7) Fill in the old SRP footprint with high-quality dense development that includes plenty of shade tree and grass oases but also building based on Spanish and Moorish models rather than American tract houses with large expanses out front; also, with much less pavement
Tax the fringe areas to encourage migration either out of state or into the dense SRP footprint or other such areas. 9) Shut down any golf course built after 1970; 10) Have statewide, airtight water regulations. Not the least impediment to realizing these solutions would be building an economy based on more than sprawl. So…no chance.
Lake Mead's Bathtub Ring, April 2010
It’s probably not fair to criticize Talton here, because he acknowledges the point I’m trying to make with his “no chance” closer. He recognizes that we’re not going to get Jon Talton as czar of Arizona, with the power to implement all this stuff.
So really, Jon Talton’s solutions to Arizona’s water problems are not going to happen. What’s Plan B?
I believe (and this is at the heart of where I’m heading with my book) that the solution does not lie in specifying a workable hydrologic or legal solution – taking X acres out of ag, reducing per capita household consumption to Y, rewriting the Colorado River Compact, revising the doctrine of prior appropriation, raising prices to Z.
The solution instead lies in creating the institutional framework in which a useful conversation can be held and politically viable solutions can be crafted. The math, how many acre feet of water we need to save here to use there, has to wait.
“So how are you going to do that, John?”
Yeah. I realize that at this point I’m about as useless here as Talton’s politically impossible solution set. I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured out the next step.
But I will suggest a couple of case studies that interest me, where collective action on seemingly intractable common pool water resource problems has happened.
On is Elinor Ostrom’s case study of greater Los Angeles groundwater basin management. (Some previous Inkstain discussion here and here.) The other, which I’m immersed in now, is the 2007 Colorado River shortage sharing agreement.
Other examples come to mind?
River Beat: Western Precip Update
Posted on | July 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
The question of how much it rained or snowed is an important one in water management, but answering it is not trivial. The answer depends on a mix of remote sensing data, radar and rain gages (often data collected by volunteers).
I got a helpful note yesterday from Jeff Lukas about a western precipitation map I used in a post last weekend. Turns out the map, which I pulled from this NOAA web site, may be underestimating high mountain precipitation in the Colorado Basin because of the methodology used to turn the disparate data into a map. (Jeff does climate product assessment at the Western Water Assessment.) The map’s basic message – dry in the Colorado River Basin as compared with points east – is basically the same, but Jeff points out that the actual situation is not as dire as the map I posted suggested.
Here, thanks to Jeff, are a couple of better ones. First, from COOP rainfall reports, a network of volunteer weather observers, with map via the Western Regional Climate Center (image below taken 7/23, updated daily here):
The second is from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center:
California’s Early Snowmelt
Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 1 Comment
California's snow-covered Sierra Nevada, as seen from space. Courtesy NASA
One of the less appreciated effects of warming temperatures on water supply is the shift in the timing of runoff. Warming springs mean earlier melt. This is as much an infrastructure problem as it is an overall water volume problem, because the dams and ditches built to manage water during the 20th century were based on climate normals of the 20th century. Some water is stored behind dams, and some us presumed to be stored in the snowpack itself.
That’s the message of a new BAMS paper by Sarah Kapnick and Alex Hall, which found (not surprisingly) a shift to earlier runoff from California’s Sierra Nevada in the spring:
Given future scenarios of warming in California, one can expect acceleration in the trend toward earlier peak timing; this will reduce the warm season storage capacity of the California snowpack.
Given our apparent inability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this is a pattern California’s water managers will likely need to learn to cope with.
Is desal one lesson of Australia’s “big dry”?
Posted on | July 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
At April’s “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium, Brad Udall talked about the importance of the Australian example for the western United States. From 2000 to 2010, Udall said, parts of Australia experienced 40 to 50 percent reductions in river flow, which said has profoundly changed societal discussions about water. Australia’s “big dry” may be the template for thinking about the Colorado River Basin’s future, Udall argued.
One lesson worth following may be the example Australia is setting with desalination of seawater to meet urban water needs. A recent article by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times illustrates the struggles now going on down under regarding this technological solution – enormous cost, some significant environmental opposition, but a certain air of inevitability about desal:
“We consider ourselves the canary in the coal mine for climate change-induced changes to water supply systems,” said Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, an umbrella group of the country’s urban water utilities. He described the $13.2 billion as “the cost of adapting to climate change.”
But desalination is also drawing fierce criticism and civic protests. Many homeowners, angry about rising water bills, and environmentalists, wary of the plants’ effect on the climate, call the projects energy-hungry white elephants. Stricter conservation measures, like mandating more efficient washing machines, would easily wring more water from existing supplies, critics say.
Wes Strickland linked this morning to a recent San Francisco Chronical story illustrating how that is playing out here. The example may not be exactly on point, but the Monterey Peninsula in California is heading the desal route:
In the wake of a November “cease and desist” order by state regulators requiring Monterey County’s main water purveyor to slash its diversions from the Carmel River 70 percent by 2016, an ambitious regional desalination project has emerged as the best – and arguably only – way to slake the thirst of about 100,000 customers on the peninsula.
River Beat: Some Good News
Posted on | July 17, 2010 | 4 Comments
Update: I’ve added a post with a better seasonal precip map than the one below:
*****
As we close in on the end of the current water year, the US Bureau of Reclamation has reported what passes for good news these days on the Colorado River.
This month’s forecast for year-end storage levels in Lake Powell is up 340,000 acre feet from those made a month ago. At a projected 15.41 million acre feet of water in storage Sept. 30, that’s still below last year (15.46 maf), but it’s looking considerably better than it was as recently as April, when the Bureau was forecasting a big drop. Small drop better than big drop. As I said, this is what passes for good news.
Percent of Average Precip, Oct. 1 to July 16, courtesy CBRFC
The reason Powell is dropping (and Mead downstream, though explanations there are more complicated) is clear in this map from the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, which is pretty self-explanatory. (Yellows, oranges and reds are dry, click on the image to embiggen.) It’s as if the wet line rolled east off the continental divide, with all the precip to the east, on the plains, and pretty much the entire Colorado River Basin dry.
I like the blobs of green on the Lower Colorado. Wet year in Yuma! But that portion of the basin contributes so little to the river’s flow that it’s a percentage increase on almost nothing to begin with. Double Yuma’s usual annual precip of near zero is still near zero. Most of that came in the big January storms.
Drought Outlook
This comes as the folks at the Climate Prediction Center have issued a seasonal drought outlook for dry weather across the southwest. The reason is a lackluster monsoon and a looming La Nina, according to CPC head Wayne Higgins:
“If the monsoon remains erratic during the next few weeks, then the drought development area may be expanded on the updated outlook scheduled for August 5,” said Wayne Higgins, director of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.
Factors leading to the forecast of enhanced chances for drier-than-normal conditions in the Southwest during the above periods include coupled ocean-atmosphere global climate forecasts and historical conditions during the late summer when transitioning from El Niño to La Niña.
“Beyond this time period, expected dryness associated with established La Niña conditions may bring further expansion of drought conditions in the Southwest during the 2010-11 winter season,” Higgins said. La Niña may also provide wetter-than-normal conditions in the Pacific Northwest during fall 2010 and winter 2010-2011.
At this point I’m not prepared (in terms of the journalism I’ve done or my understanding of the
Courtesy Climate Prediction Center
science) to make a huge deal about the La Niña forecast in terms of the Colorado River. The folks at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center publish correlations for all their rivers between ENSO (La Niña and El Niño) and river flow. For you climate data nerds, the R^2 value of the correlation between flow into Lake Powell and the ENSO 3.4 SST is 0.0022. For non-nerds, that roughly translates as “La Niña doesn’t help us a whole lot in making a forecast.” The reason is that the area where La Niña is linked to drought lies south of the Colorado River headwaters region. See, for example, this long lead forecast map for Nov-Dec-Jan 2010-11 to the right.
For those who have been following the (to me at least) fascinating question of whether all of this dry will lead to record low levels on Lake Mead this year, the answer seems to be “no”. The current USBR forecast calls for Mead to end the year with a surface level of 1084.97 feet above sea level. That will be the lowest Sept. 30 level since 1936, when the reservoir was first filled. But it is still above the previous trough of April 1956 (1083.81). It looks like we could flirt with that record level by November of this year, though.
As a journalist, for storytelling purposes, that historic 1083.81 matters to me a lot.
Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate
Posted on | July 17, 2010 | 4 Comments
David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for him in covering climate change any more.
I think he’s wrong. I’ve come to largely the same conclusions he has about the state of the science and the state of public discourse surrounding the science. But as I mentioned in his comments, and I’ll repeat here, there’s plenty left for me to do journalistically.
Given our apparent inability to reduce greenhouse gases, societal impacts and adaptation reporting – in my case, water supply issues in the Southwestern US – becomes, I think, more important, and an area where journalism can play a useful role.
It’s interesting to me that I find essentially no climate skeptics in the western water management community. They are very anxious to find ways to use climate projections (and to usefully incorporate genuine uncertainties) into their planning and management processes.
keep looking »