The groundwater subsidy – what happens to it after we pump it up and use it – is frequently ignored in policy discussions. When we stop mining groundwater, I’ve often argued, we need to recognize that the share we discharge into our rivers, which becomes water supply to those downstream, goes away. But via David …
Continue reading ‘Another anthropogenic influence on sea level: groundwater pumping’ »
In the work I’m doing now on the Colorado River Basin for my book, I’m trying to get beyond simply extrapolating supply and demand curves and then running around with my hair on fire. The hair-on-fire thing is easy to do, because the current supply and demand curves, as the Bureau of Reclamation frankly noted …
Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill: According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of …
Continue reading ‘Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?’ »
A: When April 1 falls on a Monday. That’s the conclusion of a clever bit of work by Tom Pagano, former NRCS forecaster who used to do the Rio Grande forecasts before he went on to bigger and better things. “Bigger and better” has included a stint in Australia and a current world tour of …
Continue reading ‘Q: When is an April 1 snow survey not an April 1 snow survey?’ »
The authors acknowledge that the result when they looked at the effect of piñon die-off from the Four Corners drought a decade ago seems counterintuitive: Basins with the most tree die-off showed a significant decrease in streamflow over several years following die-off, and this decrease was not attributable to climate variability alone. The results are counterintuitive …
Continue reading ‘drought kills seem to be reducing streamflow in the arid southwest’ »
Humans here in the West use and therefore value water for basically three sorts of reasons: for domestic use (cooking, bathing, drinking, flushing away waste) for economic purposes (agriculture being the most obvious, but also things like computer chip manufacturing) for environmental purposes (water in the river to look at and enjoy, for recreation, or …
Continue reading ‘Should we embrace the Bellagio Fountain?’ »
Phil Isenberg, head of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, gets to the heart of the matter in the discussion of the possibility that California needs more water storage capability: The council agrees with Assemblyman Logue that water storage is a critical component of any solution to meet the state’s water supply and environmental needs. Over the …
Continue reading ‘Isenberg: you want more storage? who’s gonna pay?’ »
Ed Kandl from USBR: If you want the one-word synopsis, it’s going to suck pretty bad.
In southern California, the Metropolitan Water District is cranking up the rate meter, squeezed in the conservation v. cost vice: As more people conserve water, MWD sells less water, and that means revenues go down. But MWD’s costs of delivering that water remain essentially the same: Thus, prices go up.
I had to laugh when I looked at today’s long-lead precipitation forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center. Those little splotches of color are forecasts. All that white is what the forecasters call “equal chances”, which basically means they have no idea other than historical climatology what might happen. In other words, it could be wet, …