In California drought, when the water’s not fer fightin’ over

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What to make of this California drought story from Alex  Breitler?

Farmers within the Delta and farmers south of the Delta aren’t exactly bosom buddies.

Not when it comes to water.

But this spring, as their lawyers geared up for another year of fighting over limited supplies, farmers on both sides quietly started talking.

They hammered out a rough plan to compensate Delta farmers for voluntarily fallowing their fields, thus freeing up water that could be pumped south to their parched brethren.

The tentative arrangement was more complex than that — too complex, according to state officials, who rejected the plan late Wednesday.

But parties on both sides say the progress they’ve made could be helpful if, heaven forbid, the drought lingers for years to come.

The danger for me here is that the entire premise of my upcoming book is that collaborative arrangements to share water, rather than fighting, are the only way out of the mess we’ve made for ourselves. So obviously, in the midst of all the California hollerin’ right now, I love this story because it feeds my preconceived narrative. Most of my research right now is focused on deals like this, and how they come about – the formal legalistic (institutional) structures, but also the informal stuff. Great job Alex for this detail:

Farmers from both regions met recently on McDonald Island, toured the farms there and broke bread together (actually, they ate burritos).

Burritos! Yes! (For my book, beer seems to be the thing, though there’s an epic tale I may include involving mole at a Mexican restaurant in Salt Lake City.)

But there are two problems with the story that give me pause. The first is the obvious point that the deal didn’t go through. The state nixed it. I don’t see that as a huge problem. Part of what all these burritos, beer and mole are about is learning how to have the conversation. Alex’s story gets that:

While the plan appears to be dead this year, he didn’t rule out the possibility of another effort.

“We were trying to change the way we do this in California with more of a direct farmer-helping-farmer approach, rather than lawyer-talking lawyers,” he said.

The second problem is more fundamental. Like some of the deals I’m looking at in the Colorado River Basin, this is a small deal. Are problems are huge. Does this approach scale up?

Deconstructing media coverage of the California drought

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Brian Devine has written one of those special pieces that made me smack my forehead repeatedly and say, “Yeah, that!”:

To conflate the myriad problems of water in California into a single problem is the hallmark of a generalist reporter on deadline, as if I wrote that the Detroit auto industry’s collapse was because they made lousy cars. Did they? Probably. Certainly I could find some evidence for that. Have we planted too many almonds? Are we growing too much of China’s forage crops? Do we have too many lawns? Do we still drink bottled water unnecessarily? Yes. No doubt. But to write about one of those things and omit the others- not out of malice or ignorance, mind you, but to find an interesting story that appeals to busy readers from all walks of life- has real consequences for how the general public- the ultimate arbiter in the market and the voting booth- think about our very, very complicated problems.

I recommend clicking through to read the entire piece. It is very good.

The Upper Basin: the Colorado River shortage that has already happened

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Mike Cohen of the Pacific Institute, in some conversations last week sparked by my post about the risk of what we often call the “first ever” shortage in the Colorado River Basin, points out that shortages in fact are routine in the river’s Upper Basin.

This is a result of hydrology. The Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico – has two big storage reservoirs upstream of its water users that fill in wet years and therefore allow continued water use downstream in dry years. But if you’re in Utah or Colorado, without a big reservoir above you, you’re dependent on the snowpack in the mountains above you and the water flowing down your river. If it’s a dry year, you don’t have water to irrigate.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation attempts to calculate the shortages that result – the amount of water that would have been used but is not available simply because it’s a dry year. Here’s Mike’s graph of the results:

Courtesy Michael Cohen, Pacific Institute; data from USBR

Courtesy Michael Cohen, Pacific Institute; data from USBR

2002 is particularly interesting, and was apparently particularly galling for folks in the Upper Basin. It was a horribly dry year, with big shortages to Upper Basin water users. But the big downstream reservoirs were relatively flush, and the Bureau declared a “surplus” on the Lower Colorado, giving California a big slug of extra water.

Typically in a big river system, the people upstream have the advantage, and those downstream are left behind because of upstream use. But on the Colorado, it’s the reverse.

You should read Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Rain”

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Rain, a Natural and Cultural History, by Cynthia Barnett

Rain, a Natural and Cultural History, by Cynthia Barnett

I presume that the audience for this blog is, in significant measure, made of people who think a lot about water. Many of your are probably already familiar with Florida write Cynthia Barnett’s books, Mirage, and Blue Revolution. For you, the news that Cynthia has a new book is self-recommending.

There’s so much good to say about Cynthia’s new book, Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, that it’s hard to know where to begin. Her history of the raincoat alone, or the people who measured rain, or forecast it, is delightful and makes the book worth the price of admission. Water nerds will love this book.

But let me write from my particular point of view, the tradecraft of someone who cannot read a book like this and not be at least a little distracted by the “how did she do that” part. (Cynthia’s Mirage, the story of Florida water, has been a model for me in my own work, explaining a place and its water, and she has been a kind and generous mentor as I negotiate the process of book-writing myself.)

Her seventh chapter, “Rain Follows the Plow”, tells the story of those who resolutely moved west across the Great Plains of North American in the 19th century, confident that rain would follow them into this arid landscape as they busted the sod:

Once the dutiful settlers broke up land with their plows…, rainfall could seep down, then return to the atmosphere overhead. The more soil cultivated, the ore moisture captured. More moisture, more evaporation. More evaporation, more rain.

“Rain follows the plow.”

The theory stuck like wet grass.

It was, of course, wrong.

It’s a story water nerds will find familiar, but Cynthia brings it a remarkable new life drawing on the letters of pioneer Uriah Oblinger, his wife Mattie, and family. For a time, their 160 acres of Nebraska soil did them well, but Mattie died in the birth of their fourth child. Until her death, it was a happy time, and a wet one, but it did not last:

In reality, dry was normal. But Mattie would never know it in the seven years she worked to build a life on the plains with Uriah and their three little girls. She died in childbirth in February 1880, along with their infant son. Uriah was left with nine-year old Ella, Stella, five, and Maggie, two.

That spring was dry; day-and-night different from the year Mattie had arrived on the plains. Uriah’s crops failed. He blamed himself as much as the lack of rain. “I hard know how to manage,” he wrote to Mattie’s parents in the fall, asking that they take one of the children. “I feel that it is not possible or right for me to go through another season as I have this one, for I cannot do justice to myself or family this way.”

The tradecraft is in a) finding a story as compelling as Uriah and Mattie’s, told through their old letters, and b) weaving the story so gracefully through the broader narrative of rain and drought on the plains. It’s full of narrative like this, stitching together a wonderful picture of the water falling from the sky that water nerds will love, but also the rest of us, people for whom water is just that unquestioningly beloved part of our lives.

I highly recommend this book.

Decades of dry on the Rio Grande

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Seventeen of the last 20 years have had below-average runoff at Otowi (north-central New Mexico) on the Rio Grande:

Courtesy USBR

Courtesy USBR

That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Annual Operating Plan presentation, done in Albuquerque last week. “Average” is the 1895-2014 mean.

Southwest monsoon!

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Sorry, that was a clickbait headline. Let me walk it back: Odds shifted slightly toward a wetter Southwest monsoon this summer!

Summer seasonal outlook

Summer seasonal outlook

 
The usual forecast explainer: this shifts the odds from the climatological one-in-three-years-is-wet statistical binning to a 33-40 percent chance of wet in the light green area, upwards of 40 percent in the dark green area.

That translates to a seasonal forecast of continued drought, but some improvement, across the Colorado River Basin:

Seasonal drought outlook

Seasonal drought outlook

What do we mean by drought?

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Darren Ficklin at Indiana University has a new paper exploring trends in drought in the United States which notes that the trends are not universal:

[F]our regions of increasing (upper Midwest, Louisiana, southeastern United States (US), and western US) and decreasing (New England, Pacific Northwest, upper Great Plains, and Ohio River Valley) drought trends….

By one measure, increasing drought in the west. From A climatic deconstruction of recent drought trends in the United States,Darren L Ficklin et al 2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 044009 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/4/044009

By one measure, increasing drought in the west. From A climatic deconstruction of recent drought trends in the United States,Darren L Ficklin et al 2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 044009
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/10/4/044009

But we need a more fine-grained analysis, Ficklin and colleagues acknowledge, in order to be careful in what we mean by “drought”:

While the general definition of drought—a deficit of precipitation—is well known, quantifying drought is more difficult. The challenges result from the diversity of questions one can ask about drought leading to differences in the classification of drought over varying timespans, and the influence of drought on a variety of socioeconomic factors.

Jim Dalrymple has a terrific piece in BuzzFeed today that takes this insight and runs with it:

You may have heard that the current drought is California’s worst in 1,200 years. That oft-cited figure comes from a paper by Daniel Griffin, of the University of Minnesota, and Kevin Anchukaitis, of the Woods Hole Oceanic Institution.

In conversations with BuzzFeed News, both researchers explained that they came to that conclusion after studying tree ring samples, as well as using what’s known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index, or PDSI. Basically the PDSI measures soil moisture as it compares to what is “normal” for a particular place.

What Anchukaitis and Griffin ultimately found is that the soil moisture in central and southern California has fallen to it’s lowest level for any three year period on record. Other droughts may have been longer or drier, but they were punctuated by rainy years.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Griffin and Anchukaitis were looking only at one type of data, and both said there are other ways to evaluate the drought.

“There’s no one definition of drought,” Anchukaitis explained.

Both Ficklin and Darlymple are worth your clicks.

And an additional recommendation: if you’re on the Twitter, I suggest you follow Kevin Anchukaitis, the Woods Hole climate scientist who is quoted in Dalrymple’s story, and whose tweets brought both of these to my attention.

Medjool dates

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Date orchard, Bard, Calif., by John Fleck

Date orchard, Bard, Calif., by John Fleck

I know, I know, beware the romanticism of desert agriculture, but these trees are such a nostalgic throwback to my childhood.

I grew up on the fringe of the Los Angeles suburbs. Trips to the desert were part of my childhood. And date palms along the highway were an iconic image of those jaunts.

The story I heard on my trip last week was that these six trees in the foreground are the original Medjool date trees that came to this area (Bard, in California’s far southeast corner) in the 1940s, and that the trees around them are all direct descendants therefrom. Dates are one of those high-labor, high-value crops that take advantage of desert sun and abundant Colorado River irrigation water.

I’ve been able to trace Imperial County date acreage back to the late 1970s (still haven’t found any older data than that) and see a steady increase in land devoted to these beautiful trees. According to USDA, the California farmers gross about $5,000 per acre growing dates, which puts ’em in the higher end of value per acre and unit water used. But they’re also incredibly labor intensive. This is one of those crops that early farmers in the region thought would make them rich, but it remains a very small portion of the irrigated land down there.

Mostly this was just an excuse to post some pictures that I love. Here’s another:

Canal carrying water to date orchards in Bard, California. By John Fleck

Canal carrying water to date orchards in Bard, California. By John Fleck

Lake Powell takes a big hit in latest Bureau forecast

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More than a million acre feet of water disappeared from Lake Powell in the latest U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operational forecast for the 2015 water year, translating to a 13 foot drop in the big Colorado River reservoir’s projected end-of-September elevation in this month’s forecast compared to just a month ago.

Colorado River storage, graph by John Fleck, data courtesy USBR

Colorado River storage, graph by John Fleck, data courtesy USBR

The change in this month’s USBR “24-Month Study” (pdf) is the latest fallout from a dismal March, with hot temperatures and little snow across the Colorado River Basin.

For now, the forecast will have little impact downstream at Lake Mead, the reservoir that supplies Arizona, Nevada, and California. Mead is at historically low levels (where by “historically” I mean “lowest since it was filled”) and is teetering on the brink of a shortage declaration, so the numbers here matter, but the latest forecast suggests the odds remain against a 2016 formal shortage declaration (gory details of what “shortage” means here). But the forecast contains a caveat that, if the crappy weather continues, released from upstream Powell to downstream Mead could be throttled back later this year, which would Mead closer to the shortage line by the end of the year.

Karl Flessa on the Colorado River pulse flow, one year on

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The University of Arizona's Karl Flessa getting a first hand look at the pulse flow as it arrives at San Luis. March 2014, by John Fleck

The University of Arizona’s Karl Flessa getting a first hand look at the pulse flow as it arrives at San Luis. March 2014, by John Fleck

Vanessa Barchfield:

University of Arizona geoscientist Karl Flessa said Tuesday that the eight-week flooding helped to germinate and establish cottonwoods and willows that will live for up to 50 years, demonstrating that even a small amount of water can have long-lasting effects on an ecosystem.

But, Flessa said, the impact of the water varied.

“In some places the pulse flow did enormous amount of good work in establishing vegetation and sustaining that vegetation. In other parts of the river it didn’t really make that much of a difference,” he said.