The municipal water conservation story

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Municipal water demand in the West, according to Gary Woodard of Montgomery and Associates in Tucson, has become decoupled from population growth. Here’s a teaser from a talk he’s giving next month in Tucson:

The talk, entitled “The surprising slide in domestic demand: Be careful what you wish for,” focuses on the declines in municipal water demand in the Southwest, which have occurred over the past 30 years for both indoor and outdoor uses. Because this declining trend has often exceeded population growth, utilities are now delivering less water to more people. Woodard will discuss the factors that have profoundly affected demand — higher efficiency standards for appliances and fixtures, the declining appeal of turf and pools, the growing interest in sustainability, and shifting household demographics. He will also discuss the consequences of this trend and their implications for those who were planning for growing — not declining — demands.

Bruce Finley reported in the Denver Post yesterday on that Colorado front range city’s experience with the phenomenon:

Whatever the reasons, water use in metro Denver has dipped to 40-year lows.

The total amount residents used in December decreased to 3.19 billion gallons, and in January to 3.36 billion gallons — down from previous winter highs topping 4 billion gallons, utility officials said.

The last time December use dropped this low was in 1973 when Denver had 350,000 fewer people.

 

More on the early snowmelt

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Albuquerque meteorologist Brian Guyer, who seems to be as obsessed as I am with the early snowmelt, plotted up the latest flow in the Azotea Tunnel* this year, compared with the long term median:

Azotea tunnel, courtesy of Brian Guyer

Azotea tunnel, courtesy of Brian Guyer


* Azotea delivers New Mexico’s San Juan-Chama Project water from a trio of streams in southern Colorado.

Why pumping ocean water into the Salton Sea wouldn’t work

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From yesterday’s New York Times:

The problem with using ocean water to replenish the lake is that current agricultural runoff adds three million to four million tons of salt per year, Mr. Shintaku said. The same amount of ocean water would add about 10 times as much salt. As the water evaporates, the salt would be retained and the lake would become even saltier.

The first thing we do, let’s plant a lawn

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"Las Vegas, Nevada. A worker's wife watering a newly planted lawn around one of the thousand demountable houses built adjacent to the Basic Magnesium Incorporated plant in the southern Nevada desert", Fritz Henly, December 1942, Farm Security Administration, courtesy Library of Congress

“Las Vegas, Nevada. A worker’s wife watering a newly planted lawn around one of the thousand demountable houses built adjacent to the Basic Magnesium Incorporated plant in the southern Nevada desert”, Heinle Fritz, December 1942, Farm Security Administration, courtesy Library of Congress


Basic Magnesium Inc. was a water materiel plant built in the desert south of Las Vegas in the early years of World War II. Its owner built a company town to house workers. This picture (which I love) says something powerful about the motivations and practices of turning a pre-fab desert shack into a home.

Very early runoff for the San Juan-Chama project

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Today’s high in Durango was 59F (15C), 18 degrees above the 1981-2010 average for Feb. 8. In the mountains to the east – the mountains that provide Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama drinking water – the snow has already begun to melt.

The snowpack there is lousy to begin with – 62 percent of normal for this time of year at the sites measured with automated SNOTEL gauges. But the first week of February is ridiculously early for the Azotea Tunnel, which brings SJC water under the continental divide and drops it into the Rio Grande Basin, to begin flowing.

azotea It’s not a lot of water right now, a peak of ~23 cubic feet per second this morning. But the normal for this time of year is zero, and the tunnel typically doesn’t break 20cfs until the second week in March. This is basically a month early. I went back to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation data on this, and found that only five times during the last 30 years has there been any flow at all in February.

The worry here is not early melt. We’ve had that pattern for a while, with more of the snowmelt coming in March-May, and less in June and July. The early melt water coming through the tunnel will end up in Heron Reservoir, part of usable supply for Albuquerque and the other SJC water users. The worry is that weather this warm, dry and early could start a round of early sublimation – snow evaporating into the dry air before it has a chance to melt . This has been a repeated problem in recent years, with warm dry springs eating into the snowpack, turning lousy years (with too little snow) into even worse years (with even less runoff that you’d expect given how much snow we have gotten).

Bad water on the Texas-Mexico border

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The Texas Tribune (which I will never forgive for hiring my pal Jolie McCullough away from Albuquerque) is crowdfunding what sounds like a very interest bit of water journalism:

Despite decades and billions of dollars spent trying to provide Texans living along the Mexican border with reliable access to clean drinking water, hundreds of thousands of residents there — the vast majority of them low-income Latinos — still don’t have this certainty. We need your support to find out why.

 

NM Drought: it depends on where the rain is falling

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January was wet in southern New Mexico:

Courtesy High Plains Regional Climate Center

Courtesy High Plains Regional Climate Center

But the farmers of the southern part of the state are among those with the highest drought risk this year. How could that be? Diane Alba Soular does a nice job of explaining that it’s snow in the mountains, which creates Rio Grande runoff, that matters. Rain at the farm itself only helps at the margin:

King said precipitation in Las Cruces isn’t the solution to a large-scale drought.

“Any precipitation is good, but we’re talking a much more long-term and profound drought we’re in,” he said. “One little dusting is not going to cure it.”

Faubion said while recent localized storms in Doña Ana County help in a way because they add moisture to the soil. So, when river water is released from reservoirs later this year, less of it will soak into the ground. Also, the soil moisture can help dormant crops, such as alfalfa and pecans, and some crops that are grown during the winter, he said.

That’s why the mid-range forecasts for the rest of February aren’t super helpful:

8-14 day outlook

8-14 day outlook

 

 

New life for one of the West’s zombie water projects?

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Ute Pipeline, map courtesy USBR

Ute Pipeline, map courtesy USBR

I have long assumed that the Eastern New Mexico Water Supply Project, also known as the Ute Pipeline, was one of those zombie water projects that never quite dies but will never be built, either. The idea is to build a pipeline from the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission’s Ute Lake on the Canadian River to bring water to eight eastern New Mexico communities, the largest of which is Clovis. The ISC built the reservoir for just such a purpose, but the water users lack a pipeline to get water from reservoir to lake.

Like much in western water, the idea has been that the federal taxpayers will foot the bill. Of the current estimated $523 million cost for the pipeline, $393 million is supposed to come from the feds. Until today, I thought this year’s federal spending on the project was going to be $47,000, which is a rounding error in a $500 million project, and a sign that the feds are not really serious about building this, but are unwilling for political reasons to zero it out.

But today Reclamation threw another $700,000 into the pot for work on the pipeline in the current fiscal year. It’s part of $96.9 million in bonus money Congress gave Reclamation for western drought and rural water infrastructure. Here’s Estevan López’s statement that accompanied the spending plan Reclamation released today for the new money: “Reclamation and its partners are confronting a growing gap between supply and demand in river basins throughout the West,” López said. “The funding released today will help us meet immediate needs and support long-term infrastructure and environmental needs of key water projects.”

So I guess the Ute Pipeline is a key water project, though it’s worth noting the size of the Obama administration’s Fiscal Year 2016 request for the work: $47,000. At this rate, it’s gonna take a while.

More info:

addendum: Credit for the “zombie water project” name to Peter Gleick, I think. Denise Fort and Barry Nelson several years ago wrote a useful overview (pdf) a few years back that included a lot of projects of this sort.

A lousy January in the Colorado River Basin

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January Colorado Basin precip, courtesy CBRFC

January Colorado Basin precip, courtesy CBRFC

January was dry in the water-producing parts of the Colorado River Basin.

The official Feb. 1 forecast for the Colorado River above Lake Powell (the part of the Basin where all the water comes from) calls for just 80 percent of median April-July inflow. That’s a big drop from the Jan. 1 forecast, which called for inflow of normal (and by “normal” I mean at the median).

That’s about 1.2 million acre feet less inflow forecast. That’s a lot of water to lose in a month. I realize it’s just water on paper. There still are big error bars on the forecast, inherent uncertainties because we don’t know how much it’ll snow from here on out. Seasonal forecast odds are tipped slightly toward wet, so we could get some of that back.

But yowza, 1.2 million acre feet is a lot of water.