“focused, not fighting”

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The Arizona Republic had a very smart editorial today about the Colorado River. The premise: what happens in California matters a great deal to Arizona. The back story is a struggle in California about how to meet the terms of a deal in the early ’00s to cut back to its 4.4 million acre foot share of the Colorado River after years of overuse. Californians are in court now fighting over the details of how to do that. It would be easy for the other Colorado River states, especially Arizona, with its long history of fighting with Californians, to watch from a smug distance, maybe even take quiet pleasure in California’s discomfort. But the Republic wisely notes this:

[A] California in turmoil, unable to manage a limited supply of water efficiently and perhaps casting about for other sources, will be a poor partner in future water planning.

And we need a lot of planning. The Colorado basin is in a decade-long drought, with predictions for a hotter, drier future. A study is under way to figure out how to supplement the river’s water supply, maybe through desalination or importing water or cloud seeding.

We need California to be focused, not fighting.

A tip of the Inkstain hat to the unmissable Aquafornia for the link.

Dipping more drinking straws into the Colorado River

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When it comes to water, we westerners seem to be a distrustful lot:

Water politics in Colorado and in western Wyoming have long been driven by this one, nagging fear: that California was getting something to which it was not entitled – and might get accustomed to it. Squatter rights, if you will, bolstered by a huge population advantage. Million still plays that card. “If the water users of Wyoming decide they don’t want to access their water, then that’s their decision – and California, Arizona and Nevada will continue to benefit,” he says.

Stacy Tellinghuisen, water and energy analyst for Western Resource Advocates, says she believes proposals for pipelines at Flaming Gorge, Lake Powell and Las Vegas are all driven by a new realization of limits. “The thinking is that if we develop this now, if there is a shortage in the future, we will still have this water,” she says.

That’s from Allen Best’s sweeping look at proposals by entrepreneur Aaron Million and others to siphon off some more water from Flaming Gorge. Beyond the narrow point I’ve selected, the piece richly rewards. If you’re interested in western water, I recommend giving it a click and a few minutes of your time.

What will it take to end New Mexico drought?

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Corey Pieper, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Texas, linked this evening to some excellent (if grim) maps showing what it would take to bring Texas, New Mexico and the rest of the southern tier of states out of drought. The first is the percent of normal precipitation required over the winter to end drought:

Percent of normal precipitation required to end drought in the next four months

Percent of normal precipitation required to end drought in the next four months

The second is the probably probability of getting that much precip:

Probability of receiving enough precipitation to end drought in the next four months

Probability of receiving enough precipitation to end drought in the next four months

Source

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Getting to know our river

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From the morning paper, a riff on getting acquainted with our river:

The question of what we know about our river, and how we care for it, has been on my mind since I finished reading Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Blue Revolution.”

Barnett, a Florida journalist, writes about the need for a water ethic. She was in town this month to speak at the annual meeting of the American Water Resources Association, and while she was here I offered to show her our river. We spent a delightful Sunday afternoon working our way up the Rio Grande from Isleta to Alameda — the ditches that spread the water over the valley, the old neighborhoods that grew up around them, and the river corridor itself, the great strip of golden fall cottonwoods and brown water down the middle of our city. But I found myself apologizing (and complaining) as we followed a tortuous path to reach the relatively few places where I could actually get her down to see the river itself.

Can we blame Westlands shortages on Colorado River management?

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California's interconnected plumbing

California's interconnected plumbing, courtesy Delta Stewardship Council

Via Doug Obegi at NRDC’s San Francisco office, more evidence today of the interconnection of water management across the western United States.

Obegi, in a post outlining the history of diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, pointed out the way water allotments to the Westlands Water District in the San Joaquin Valley decreased as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California increased use of its share of delta water in the early ’00s:

Admittedly, several decades ago, the water allocation for the 600 farmers served by Westlands was typically 100%, But back then, the 19 million people served by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California took a lot less water from the Delta. For instance, the initial 2011 allocation for Metropolitan is more than 1.146 million acre feet, and this amount is likely to increase substantially if 2011 is an average or wet year; however Metropolitan’s 1996 allocation was just over 738,000 acre feet.

And why did Met increase its diversions from the Delta? From the Bureau of Reclamation (pdf – see p. 77):

The Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA) signed in 2003 resulted in a decrease in the amount of Colorado River water available to California.

Or, as I wrote back in May by way of explaining my fascination with California water:

As the Central Arizona Project fully came on line, California had to bring its usage down to reflect that reality. One thing that happened is that the Metropolitan Water District’s use of Colorado River water went down, and its use of State Water Project water, pumped from the delta, went up.

Click on the map for a bigger view of California’s interconnected plumbing, and to see how we’re all in this together, for better or worse.

Water use in Indian Country

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In the western United States, water use and water rights questions associated with Native American communities are a major factor in the region’s future. Under federal law, these communities are entitled to substantial but often unquantified amounts of water. Planning for the future often gets tangled up in these questions.

For example:

Not all tribes in the Basin have adjudicated rights or settlements covering all of their tribal lands. In Arizona, five federally recognized tribal governments do not currently have quantified water rights: the Havasupai Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Navajo Nation and the San Juan Paiute Tribe. An additional six tribes do not have adjudicated rights or settlements for at least some of their lands: the Hopi Tribe, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, the San Carlos Apache Tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Tonto Apache Tribe, and the Yavapai-Apache Nation.

That’s from the Inter Tribal Council of Arizona’s comments (pdf here) on the US Bureau of Reclamation’s draft Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study. The ITCZ also make a salient point that never occurred to me regarding water consumption under various economic scenarios being considered:

[E]conomic hardship that depresses population growth and thus M&I water demand in the large cities may result in tribal members who were living in those cities and become unemployed moving back to their tribal homelands, increasing M&I water demand there.

SREX, slow journalism edition

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Given the time scales associated with climate change and societal response, it seems perhaps best to wait to consume the new IPCC Special Report Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) until it’s actually done. This seems especially true given its stated purpose:

The assessment concerns the interaction of climatic, environmental, and human factors that can lead to impacts and disasters, options for managing the risks posed by impacts and disasters, and the important role that non-climatic factors play in determining impacts.

Because managing those risks will likely have to be done on a local/local/regional/national scale, we need a lot more detail than that presented in the summary released Friday (pdf here) to actually make use of the thing. Its primary role now, it seems, is to fuel the usual climate wars feuds, though it seems to be profoundly useful in that regard. The echo chamber is loud this weekend.

That said, the summary does offer some interesting tidbits that will likely lead to useful reading once the full report is out:

It is likely that there has been a poleward shift in the main Northern and Southern Hemisphere extra-tropical storm tracks.

This is consistent with one of the components of drought discussions here in the southern tier of US states. But:

There is medium confidence that some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, e.g., in central North America and northwestern Australia.

So let’s talk again in February, shall we?

Not much river left

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Back in the 1950s, the Colorado River, at least a bit of it, used to regularly reach the “Southern International Boundary” – the river bed near San Luis where it stops being the US-Mexico border and travels solely in Mexico. Even during the driest bits, when Lake Mead was dropping during the late ’50s, at least a little water slipped by.

In the mid-’80s, the great floods that nearly cost us Glen Canyon Dam and filed Mead to the brim meant that “extra” waster slopping in the system cascaded down to the Colorado River Delta. By the mid-1990s, it was less common. Today? Pretty much nada:

Colorado River Flow Into Mexico

Colorado River Flow Into Mexico

From the Yuma Sun:

“The riverbed is completely dry. There’s no flow coming down into Mexico.”

Data courtesy International Boundary and Water Commission

Hand drawn maps

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I first noticed it while I was out in the mountains of northern New Mexico back in the mid-1990s with Karl Karlstrom, a University of New Mexico geologist. I had tagged along on a summer field camp mapping exercise for a feature I was doing, and spent a good part of the day shadowing Karl and some of his students as they mapped a tangled section of old basement rock.

Hand Drawn Weather Map

Hand Drawn Weather Map

This will be familiar to earth scientists, but was a revelation to me – the way Karl with his little pouch of colored pencils sketched in the rock units as he walked. He was not simply recording data. The act of drawing was part of his construction of a mental model.

I’ve seen it again many times, most notably among meteorologists. In my book*, there’s a scene with forecaster Ken Drozd sketching out the movement of a storm across his daily weather map. Charlie Liles, the retired head of the Albuquerque Weather Service office, used to make these wonderful colored drought maps by hand.

Tom Pagano, the roving river forecaster, has a thoughtful explanation today on his blog about why it’s done this way:

Even though they have access to some of the largest supercomputers in the world, somewhere right now a meteorologist is sitting down with a set of colored pencils to hand-draw air pressure levels on a blank map. This is a generational thing, for sure, younger forecasters (myself included) often preferred to automate things and spend more time, for example, actually getting to eat lunch.

However, it is a meditation on the data. They spend time with their problem, giving it attention and thinking about its parts. As they draw, they consider each individual curve and line, while also subconsciously (or even consciously) marinating in the meaning of the broader pattern of the data. They are developing and exercising their intuition.

I’ve wondered too about whether it’s a generational thing. For the meteorologists, geologists and anyone else in the audience, do you sketch out your work by hand?

* Ideal for that bright youngster on your holiday shopping list!