An example of why groundwater regulation is hard

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OtPR today offers a list of generally poor rural communities that have seen domestic wells go dry as relatively affluent almond farms pump down regional aquifers to keep their orchards alive during the drought. It’s not hard to see why this is wrong:

This economic model, in which powerful outsiders come in, displace the natives and destroy local natural resources (the aquifers) to provide cheap unprocessed goods to a foreign country is pure colonial extraction. I don’t see how it is different from slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon to provide cheap beef or cutting hardwoods like teak out of tropical forests. Mostly I am just stunned that my state is on the receiving end; I thought we were first world. I guess anywhere can be exploited if they aren’t willing to protect their poor or their natural resource.

But regulating groundwater to prevent this has always posed a dilemma. Preventing pumping that might impair a neighbor’s well seems like a reasonable approach to regulating in a situation like this. But one of the results of such an approach is that the shallowest well defines the extent of aquifer use that will be allowed. The implication could be that usable water remains out of reach because it lies below the level of that shallowest well.

Joseph Dellapenna explains the Nebraska Supreme Court’s 1978 answer to this problem:

The court went on to hold that when an overlying owner using groundwater for domestic purposes is compelled to deepen a well to another level because of heavy pumping from the aquifer by another overlying owner, the owner making the deepening of the well necessary would have to compensate the owner whose well needed deepening.

Makes sense.

Warm in the West, but not as dry as you might have thought

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update: Jeff Lukas, in the comments, notes that I missed something important, which is the distinction between statewide averages and the east-west precip divide. As he correctly points out, that statewide blob of wet-looking Colorado hides the fact that it’s been extremely wet to the east, and relatively dry west of the continental divide. Here’s a more fine-grained map, by climate division, that shows what he’s talking about:

precip by climate division

precip by climate division

 

previously: The May 1 snowmelt runoff forecast for the Colorado River Basin is down from a month ago – 6.4 million acre feet for the Oct.-Sept. “water year”. (pdf) That is two thirds of average, and 11 percent below last month’s forecast of 7.2 maf. (See here for my wild speculation about the reservoir management implications and the risk of a Lower Basin shortage declaration.)

Surprisingly, though, it hasn’t been all that dry in the Colorado Basin, according to the latest monthly report from the National Climatic Data Center:

Precipitation rankings

Precipitation rankings

 

But it has been extraordinarily warm, which is the second big variable that drives the runoff forecast:

Temperature rankings

Temperature rankings

Full NCDC report.

Water from the sky

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One of my happy new discoveries among people writing about water in this time of drought is a guy named Dan Macon, who raises grass-fed lambs in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Mason’s one of those people who depend on water from the sky rather than irrigation water from a canal or groundwater pump, or household water from a tap. It’s a useful perspective:

[W]e have been planting almonds and other permanent crops on rangelands that were not previously irrigated.  Technological and cultural advancements have made it possible to grow (and irrigate) crops on land that could only grow grass in years past.  As Michele suggests, these decisions are largely economic – an unirrigated acre of grass provides a net return of $1.02 to a rancher, while an acre of irrigated almonds provides a net return of $195.  However, these economic figures don’t answer questions about where the irrigation water comes from, or what happens during times of drought.  An acre of grass during drought can still be grazed; an acre of almonds must be irrigated to survive – and this irrigation water is often groundwater.

Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi

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March – July snowmelt runoff on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande, which provides the bulk of the river’s water, is forecast to be 44 percent of the 1981-2010 average, according to a federal forecast out this morning. The measurement point for that number is the Otowi Bridge, which is on the road from Santa Fe to Los Alamos. It is down from a 55 percent forecast on April 1.

At San Marcial, the final measurement point before the river enters Elephant Butte Reservoir, the forecast is for 25 percent, with most of that runoff having already occurred.

Both measurements have a range of error, depending on the weather from here until the end of the runoff season:

  • Otowi: a one in ten chance of as much as 55 percent, a one in ten min of 35 percent
  • San Marcial: Max 53 percent (min yields a weird modeling error that makes it look negative, but you know that’s not possible, right?)

Why water markets are hard – what economists call “transaction costs”

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Nathanael Johnson at Grist continues his excellent work digging past the noise to try to help us understand what’s really going on with California’s drought. Today it’s a deep dive into water markets, which includes this great explanation of why they’re so hard in practice:

It’s tricky to show that the water you’re selling is legally yours, and tricky to get it to your buyer. These problems stem from the physical properties of the stuff. The amount of water you need to irrigate a field is big and heavy; it’s slippery — to hold it we need special containers (like reservoirs); it’s always moving, and mixing, and splitting into pieces, so it’s hard to tell whose is whose; it unpredictably falls out of the sky, and has no respect for property lines; if you drop it, it disappears into the ground. Because water is liquid in the physical sense, it is not at all liquid in the financial sense.

Johnson takes us through a hypothetical water deal to illustrate what economists call “transaction costs”. Well worth a click.

The Code of the Pirates and the Law of the River

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Arizona lawyer Grady Gammage, a member of that state’s water establishment, opened a conference I attended last week with an explanation of why he became so engrossed in trying to understand “the Law of the River,” that bundle of laws and customs that govern the management and distribution of the waters of the Colorado River. When he first ran for the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation as a self-described water novice, he kept confronting this: “Every time something came up, someone would say, ‘You can’t do that under the Law of the River,'” Gammage told the audience. “The ‘Law of the River’ is essentially the ‘Code of the Pirates.'”

To an audience of mostly water lawyers, it was a laugh line.

A “Code of the Pirates”, formalized among the seemingly rule-less buccaneers of the 17th and 18th century, adopted by each group, is a reminder that we all need rules.

Consider this, from the code adopted by those who sailed under the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan:

Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity (not an uncommon thing among them) makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.

We did that with the Colorado River, adopted a code to govern its operation. The Law of the River is ill-defined, in part a collection of contracts, statutes, and court decisions (the most important of them gathered here), in part a set of informal norms often difficult even for participants to articulate. It also is what I have come to call “the network” – the group of people, many of who were gathered in a windowless conference room at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas last week listening to Gammage give voice to something I puzzle over: “Why is water different? Why is water special? Why is water so complicated?”

Rocks that haven't been above water since 1937. Boulder Harbor, May 1 2015, by John Fleck

Rocks that haven’t been above water since 1937. Boulder Harbor, May 1 2015, by John Fleck

It was an opportune time for the Pirates to convene. Five days before the conference Lake Mead – the great reservoir just down the road from Planet Hollywood that is a harbinger of the Colorado River’s fate – dropped to a record low level, less water than at any time since it was filled in the 1930s. Then on Wednesday, the Bureau of Reclamation told a gathering of the Pirates that odds of passing another critical threshold, one that would trigger shortages (especially in Arizona), was rising with the dwindling winter snowpack.

The last 16 years, Bureau of Reclamation Lower Colorado River manager Terry Fulp told his shipmates, has been among the driest stretches of this length in the Colorado River Basin in the last 1,200 years. “That should give us all pause,” Fulp said.

In fact, as Fulp pointed out, the massive storage in the system, dams that were filled when the drought began in the late 1990s, has served water users well. It was their purpose – to store water in wet periods for use in dry – and as a result water users downstream can still shower and grow alfalfa in the desert sun.

But the time of reckoning has arrived, to borrow from Morgan’s Pirate’s Code: “a scarcity … makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.”

The Southern Nevada Water Authority’s Colby Pellegrino put up a slide showing the latest work by her staff that shows that Lake Mead is likely to stay at low levels for a while, levels at which there is not quite enough water to meet all the current downstream demands. “Shortage,” she said, “is the new normal on the river.”

The “retrenchment” is possible, a new management regime in which the basic structure and function of communities downstream can share in this new normal, each in their way using less water while retaining that which they value most. But the Pirates need to get on it.

Almond growers – the alfalfa farmer’s new best friend

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Tina Shields, the Colorado River Resources Manager for California’s big Imperial Irrigation District, joked Friday about the newfound celebrity of the California almond. Used to be, alfalfa was the alleged water waster that got all the attention. “The best thing for alfalfa growers is almonds,” Shields quipped at one point during a Las Vegas Colorado River water law and policy conference last week. “It takes the pressure away.”

The latest data out last week from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (pdf) estimates that California almond farmers planted nearly 20,000 new acres, with Fresno, Kern, and Madera counties leading the way. Total nut-bearing acreage (trees mature enough to bear fruit) is estimated this year at 890,000 acres.

Total California acreage planted in hay (which includes alfalfa) is estimated to be down 145,000 acres to 1.23 million in 2015.

“You can almost see its feet.”

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Hoover Dam, May 1, 2015, elevation 1078.93

Hoover Dam, May 1, 2015, elevation 1078.93

I sent Lissa a picture from the Arizona side overlook of Hoover Dam this evening. Her response: “You can almost see its feet.”

I drove out from Las Vegas to see Lake Mead and Hoover Dam this evening after a two-day Colorado River law and policy conference in a windowless hotel meeting room. Speaker after speaker – mostly water managers – laid out the difficulties they face in managing the system in the unprecedented drought we now face. But they were mostly encouraging in answering the basic questions that animate my work on water: Who will actually come up short? Who will run out?

The answers – and I believe them – are that things are getting tighter, but that there’s enough flexibility in the water management system currently to keep the cities and farm communities that depend on the river intact. These people have some really hard work ahead of them to keep it that way, but you can see a path that keeps it possible.

But it’s hard to disentangle that from the visceral shock of seeing Lake Mead lower every time I return.

I went out to Boulder Harbor, which is the closest public boat ramp to Henderson and has in the past been popular with the locals. I expected it to be closed, but the National Park Service has extended the boat ramp and done some dredging, and there’s a narrow channel out to the lake. It was nearly 6 p.m. on a hot Friday evening, and the place was jumpin’. Life goes on, I guess:

Boulder Harbor, May 1, 2015, elevation 1078.93

Boulder Harbor, May 1, 2015, elevation 1078.93

 

Why Lake Mead could drop an extra 15 feet next year, and shortage could be more likely than we expect

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While we’ve all been obsessing over the elevation of Lake Mead, there’s a second looming lake elevation problem that could really complicate Colorado River management and increases the risk of a 2016 Arizona shortage declaration beyond the current estimates. Depending on how things play out over the next couple of months, this second problem could leave Lake Mead 15 feet or more lower by the end of next year than the current forecasts would suggest.

All eyes right now are on the 1,075 feet Lake Mead elevation level that is the magic threshold.  Here’s the second number to think about: 3,575 elevation at Lake Powell. If Powell crosses that threshold at the wrong time, it would trigger a big cut in deliveries to Lake Mead later this year and leave the reservoir outside Las Vegas (where I’m currently sitting typing this) a lot emptier than current estimates suggest.

The official numbers, reported yesterday by Tony Davis, put the probability of Lake Mead hitting the shortage criteria, a surface elevation of 1,075 feet above sea level, by Jan. 1, at a one in three chance. Here’s the slide from one of the presentations done earlier this week on the latest model runs:

Lower Colorado River Basin shortage risk

Lower Colorado River Basin shortage risk

But the risk has gone up since that calculation was made.

The reason is buried in the complex Colorado River operating rules, a time bomb that could detonate and send Lake Mead to substantially lower levels in the next year. It’s this language from the 2007 operating guidelines (pdf):

In Water Years when the projected January 1 Lake Powell elevation is below 3,575 feet and at or above 3,525 feet, the Secretary shall release 7.48 maf from Lake Powell in the Water Year if the projected January 1 elevation of Lake Mead is at or above 1,025 feet.

That’s why 3,575 matters.

The 33 percent figure above is based on the April 1 runoff forecast. But things have gotten worse since then. Based on the April 1 forecast, Powell would be just a hair above the magic 3,575 next Jan. 1. With less runoff now expected to come into the Upper Basin’s big storage reservoir, the risk of that 3,575 trigger is bigger than it was when the above table was generated. That hard to read gobbledygook paragraph quoted above, translated, means that if come August, the forecast calls for Lake Powell to be below that threshold, releases into Lake Mead from upstream would be reduced beginning Oct. 1. That, in turn, pushes Mead far closer to a 1,075 shortage declaration.

A 7.48 million acre feet release from Powell to Mead in the next year, instead of the usual 8.23 maf or an even more optimistic 9 maf in the Bureau of Reclamation’s most recent 24-month study (pdf) means a difference of 10 to 15 feet in elevation in Lake Mead. And the cut in deliveries to Lake Mead would start Oct. 1, meaning Mead would start dropping this year.