Original Walt Disney World Monorail Mark IV, starting bid $160k
Brian Devine gets how awesome this could be:
@jfleck If you could mount it on buoyant outriggers it would make the sweetest Lake Havasu party boat EVER
— Brian Devine (@bedevine25) March 19, 2015
Today’s long lead forecast from the Climate Prediction Center is pretty sweet:
May-July forecast, courtesy CPC
That’s May-July, and here’s a reminder about what the color blobs mean, because that swatch of green across New Mexico, where I live, can be a bit misleading. The CPC divides climatological history into three bins – 1/3 dry, 1/3 the middle, and 1/3 wet. An absence of color means odds are evenly spread across the three categories. – “EC” means “equal chances”. It doesn’t mean a forecast that those area’s are likely to have average precip, but rather just even chances of wet, middle or dry.
The light green across the Upper Colorado River Basin means the odds of wet increase from one in three to a 33-40 percent chance. The “A” and darker green across New Mexico and the mountains of southern Colorado means a greater than 40 percent chance of this year falling in that upper tercile, a “wet” year. So it’s a shift in the odds away from dry and toward wet, not a guarantee of wet.
Keep in mind that drought conditions here are deep, so layering a wet forecast on a dry landscape still leaves the map looking a bit droughty for the Four Corners and some of the key watersheds:
Drought outlook
Also interesting is the monsoon forecast:
July-September outlook, courtesy CPC
Boom!
Ensconced in my office in Albuquerque, I’ve been popping in and out of the webcast of today’s California State Water Resources Control Board workshop on the future of the Salton Sea, and I’ve noticed a very interesting subtext to the discussion that I think is important. It’s about the importance of Salton Sea environmental management to the broader goals of integrated water management in California and the western United States.
If we’re going to get this right elsewhere, we’ve got to get the Salton Sea question right now.
As a broad matter of policy, folks around the West are trying to figure out how to negotiate the process of ag-to-urban water transfers while managing what economists call “externalities” – the third party impacts that we’re going to have to manage as we adjust the system to changing hydrologic and societal realities.
Kevin Kelley of the Imperial Irrigation District told the board’s members this morning that more some 50,000 acres of Imperial farmland was fallowed last year as part of a program by which the metro area of coastal Southern California pays for water conserved. In the midst of a horrific California drought, that water has become critical, making up 60 percent of the municipal supplies shipped down the Colorado River Aqueduct last year, according to Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District. That’s huge. We talk about the importance of conservation. This is agricultural water conservation on an enormous scale.
courtesy Kevin Kelley, Imperial Irrigation District
But when agricultural activity in Imperial decreases, that means less ag runoff to feed the Salton Sea, and the sea shrinks. Kelly showed the slide to the right and told the board, “This area was covered in water ten years ago.”
The problem, as the Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen documented in a report last year, is that drying up the sea comes with enormous costs, as a result of the hazardous dust clouds left behind. Health impacts are likely to be subsantial. Importantly, as several people testified today, that risk falls disproportionately on the poor. Imperial is a very poor place.
That’s bad as a general matter of equity and justice. It’s a moral issue. But it also could be a huge water management problem. The concern, as expressed repeatedly during today’s board meeting, is that as part of the Byzantine water transfer deal that kept Met’s aqueduct full last year with transferred ag water, the state of California promised to deal with “restoration” efforts to mitigate the worst of the sort of consequences Cohen described in his report. That largely has not happened. So LA got its water, Imperial ag got the money in exchange for the transferred water, and the externality remains unaddressed.
Failure here would be a serious setback to other innovated water management efforts, Cohen and his colleagues said in written testimony to the board (pdf):
The State’s failure to provide assurance that it will meet its mitigation obligations – either through a clear, transparent funding plan or through leadership on the development of a vision for Salton Sea restoration/mitigation – will have a chilling effect on future water transfer agreements that require state involvement. In effect, the State’s inaction not only jeopardizes the current QSA, but also diminishes the likelihood that other large-scale water transfers will occur to improve the State’s overall water reliability.
Faith Kearns has a smart look at an under-covered piece of the problem of drought – the psychology of waiting:
[W]hile waiting for uncertain news, people often focus on preparing—emotionally and logistically—for any possible outcome. People tend to shift between optimism and pessimism, and both states can help increase readiness. Optimism engenders people to take preparative, proactive actions, and pessimism helps people to prepare by protecting themselves psychologically from worst-case scenarios.
Click through for some useful ideas about how to wait well.
Emily Green has written a great primer for Southern Californians on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the distant geography from which a big chunk of their water emerges:
[W]hat makes the Delta the Delta is water. After winter rain and snow, roughly half of California’s fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place. Twenty five million Californians depend to some degree or another on freshwater from the Delta. Roughly a third of Southern California’s supplies originate here.
Emily is sneaky good. This is great geography and hydrology, but as she notes in the introduction, this is at heart about sharing water.
[W]e see a total lack of vision or action to address the REAL drivers of scarcity — retail prices too low to notice, permissive overuse of groundwater, failing water-as-charity policies, and the blinders of a historic pretension that water rights are properly allocated (nope) in the correct volumes (NOPE).
Taken together, the excess of demand over supply and failure to address that fact means that California is heading the way of Sao Paolo, with twice the population at risk.
Jeff Michael at the University of the Pacific’s Center for Business and Policy Research summarizes data on economic recovery in California suggesting that the impact of the drought has not, at least to date, been as significant as some might suggest:
Focusing just on the Central Valley, there is a geographical pattern from north to south. The worst recovering areas are in the Sacramento Valley, while the strongest growth has been in the drought-stricken areas of the south Valley.
UC Davis’s Jay Lund responding to the flurry of news coverage surrounding Jay Famiglietti’s Los Angeles Times op ed:
While the drought is serious, a UC Davis scientist is casting doubt on Famiglietti’s dire prediction.
“It’s not the right impression that one more year of this and we’re toast,” UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences Director Jay Lund said.
Lund studies the short and long term impacts of the drought on California’s water supply. He said Famiglietti’s forecast is the wrong one.
“There’s quite a bit more left in groundwater,” Lund said. “A little bit less every year because we’re pumping, trying to make up for the drought.”
L.A. Times headline
Here’s a reader quiz. Which headline would be more like to draw your click?
The first is the headline the Los Angeles Times put atop a Jay Famiglietti op-ed last Friday. It was a scary as hell, a click-generating machine. OMG, California’s gonna run out of water! Why aren’t we talking more about this?
Kinda feel like this whole "California only has one year of water left" thing was a tad underreported today: http://t.co/KHGle2diLu
— Matt Ford (@fordm) March 14, 2015
Sunday evening, Jay seems to have grasped the misunderstanding the headline had caused. The body of the piece has a bit more nuance, noting that it’s talking about surface storage, and that this as a result placing growing pressure on groundwater, and Jay’s rightly concerned that overpumping of groundwater is a thing we ought to worry about:
Thx 4 supporting my @LATimesOpinion op-ed. Be careful: it's 'about 1 yr of reservoir storage' and then we must rely even more on groundwater
— Jay Famiglietti (@JayFamiglietti) March 16, 2015
That’s an OMG too, but the first version – “OMG, California’s about to run out!” is the one that has run amok, clickbait style, and it’s terribly misleading.
Not blaming Jay here. Many’s the time I’ve been bitten by a headline written by someone else atop my work. But it’s a reminder that communicating about water policy is hard.
Colorado River, south of Hoover Dam from Arizona side, February 2015