Water in the Desert: Moving Flash Floods

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We had a nice line of thundershowers move across Albuquerque this afternoon. After dinner, Lissa and I headed to the north end of town to view the results.

Albuquerque North Diversion Channel following a storm, July 2010

The metro area’s North Diversion Channel drains roughly 100 square miles of city, and flood control engineers tell me it’s a relatively unusual terrain for a major urban flood control district, with an unusually large drop from the foothills to the Rio Grande. A series of concrete collector channels gather water from the heights and deliver it to the north Diversion Channel, which starts near my house and goes 8 or 9 miles north until it hits the Rio Grande.

The pictures show the point where it’s nearly reached the river. It’s nasty at this point, having picked up urban detritus large and small. It flares out into a broad shallow holding basin, the purpose of which is to allow the nastiest bits to settle out before the water flows on to the river.

Tramway Wetlands, Albuquerque, July 2010

The area in the picture to the right we call the “Tramway Wetlands.” It’s one of those odd bits of accidental urban nature. It’s one of the few broad shallow mud flats along this stretch of the river, and it’s often home to shore birds as a result. (The Rio Grande, with its incised channel, doesn’t offer much in the way of natural “shoreline” any more.) It’s a favorite of local birdwatchers.

At the peak of the flood flow this afternoon, it reached 3,000 cubic feet per second, which for a brief period matches a good spring runoff in the entire Rio Grande.

Here’s a map showing where the pictures were taken:

View Tramway Wetland in a larger map

Phoenix and water – what’s plan B?

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James Lawrence Powell concludes his otherwise excellent western water history Dead Pool with an apocalyptic vision of the abandonment of Phoenix, “a Grapes of Wrath-like exodus in reverse” as drought saps the Arizona city of its last reserves of water. It’s a vision I don’t buy (hence my “otherwise excellent” tag), because we won’t abandon Phoenix – or Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver etc., the arid climate cities built in the 20th century based on the notion that we could bring rivers to them. The question is not will it happen, but how we will avoid it, and how painful the process will be.

It’s not hard to think up solutions that make hydrologic sense – reallocation of water from current to future uses, conservation measures, extreme growth controls, price-based economic solutions. But it’s also easy to make the case for why those solutions aren’t politically viable.

So what’s our Plan B?

Arizona Population Growth, via Google Public Data

I was thinking about Powell’s end point as I read a terrific piece this week by journalist Jon Talton, late of Phoenix, now settled in considerably wetter Seattle. It’s a fire-in-the-belly response to the way Phoenix is blindly stumbling forward into its arid future:

In general, Arizona’s water issues are stark and simple: The state can’t sustain double-digit percentage population increases every decade, particularly in subdivisions apart from historic urban footprints.

And this:

Here’s what I know: The Colorado River is oversubscribed. It can’t support the population that depends on it now, much less added growth. The paralyzed federal government would not build a second CAP canal (“pork”), as some dream, even if the water was there. The Upper Basin states (and Mexico) will never allow themselves to get fleeced again by California, Arizona and (now) Las Vegas.

And on he goes. His analysis of the problem, honed by his work as a journalist in Phoenix and what he describes as a childhood as son of one of the people who help build the Central Arizona Project, Phoenix’s river uphill from the Colorado, is razor sharp. Go read it.

But his solution is not.

1) Stop all exurban development; 2) Stop all development outside the real urban footprints of cities and towns — that means no more Pinal or Buckeye sprawl; 3) Shrink the state’s population through taxes, “anti-business” regulations and whatever other creative solution someone can reach (the heat may do this anyway); 4) Price water extremely high outside the SRP footprint and a few other quasi-sustainable areas; 5) Start to return much of metro Phoenix’s fringes to natural desert — yes, tear down the crap; 6) Get a real handle on the state’s water resources, based on science, not the venal appetite of the Growth Machine; 7) Fill in the old SRP footprint with high-quality dense development that includes plenty of shade tree and grass oases but also building based on Spanish and Moorish models rather than American tract houses with large expanses out front; also, with much less pavement 8) Tax the fringe areas to encourage migration either out of state or into the dense SRP footprint or other such areas. 9) Shut down any golf course built after 1970; 10) Have statewide, airtight water regulations. Not the least impediment to realizing these solutions would be building an economy based on more than sprawl. So…no chance.

Lake Mead's Bathtub Ring, April 2010

It’s probably not fair to criticize Talton here, because he acknowledges the point I’m trying to make with his “no chance” closer. He recognizes that we’re not going to get Jon Talton as czar of Arizona, with the power to implement all this stuff.

So really, Jon Talton’s solutions to Arizona’s water problems are not going to happen. What’s Plan B?

I believe (and this is at the heart of where I’m heading with my book) that the solution does not lie in specifying a workable hydrologic or legal solution – taking X acres out of ag, reducing per capita household consumption to Y, rewriting the Colorado River Compact, revising the doctrine of prior appropriation, raising prices to Z.

The solution instead lies in creating the institutional framework in which a useful conversation can be held and politically viable solutions can be crafted. The math, how many acre feet of water we need to save here to use there, has to wait.

“So how are you going to do that, John?”

Yeah. I realize that at this point I’m about as useless here as Talton’s politically impossible solution set. I’ll get back to you when I’ve figured out the next step.

But I will suggest a couple of case studies that interest me, where collective action on seemingly intractable common pool water resource problems has happened.

On is Elinor Ostrom’s case study of greater Los Angeles groundwater basin management. (Some previous Inkstain discussion here and here.) The other, which I’m immersed in now, is the 2007 Colorado River shortage sharing agreement.

Other examples come to mind?

River Beat: Western Precip Update

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The question of how much it rained or snowed is an important one in water management, but answering it is not trivial. The answer depends on a mix of remote sensing data, radar and rain gages (often data collected by volunteers).

I got a helpful note yesterday from Jeff Lukas about a western precipitation map I used in a post last weekend. Turns out the map, which I pulled from this NOAA web site, may be underestimating high mountain precipitation in the Colorado Basin because of the methodology used to turn the disparate data into a map. (Jeff does climate product assessment at the Western Water Assessment.) The map’s basic message – dry in the Colorado River Basin as compared with points east – is basically the same, but Jeff points out that the actual situation is not as dire as the map I posted suggested.

Here, thanks to Jeff, are a couple of better ones. First, from COOP rainfall reports, a network of volunteer weather observers, with map via the Western Regional Climate Center (image below taken 7/23, updated daily here):

The second is from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center:

California’s Early Snowmelt

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Sierra Nevada

California's snow-covered Sierra Nevada, as seen from space. Courtesy NASA

One of the less appreciated effects of warming temperatures on water supply is the shift in the timing of runoff. Warming springs mean earlier melt. This is as much an infrastructure problem as it is an overall water volume problem, because the dams and ditches built to manage water during the 20th century were based on climate normals of the 20th century. Some water is stored behind dams, and some us presumed to be stored in the snowpack itself.

That’s the message of a new BAMS paper by Sarah Kapnick and Alex Hall, which found (not surprisingly) a shift to earlier runoff from California’s Sierra Nevada in the spring:

Given future scenarios of warming in California, one can expect acceleration in the trend toward earlier peak timing; this will reduce the warm season storage capacity of the California snowpack.

Given our apparent inability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this is a pattern California’s water managers will likely need to learn to cope with.

Is desal one lesson of Australia’s “big dry”?

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At April’s “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium, Brad Udall talked about the importance of the Australian example for the western United States. From 2000 to 2010, Udall said, parts of Australia experienced 40 to 50 percent reductions in river flow, which said has profoundly changed societal discussions about water. Australia’s “big dry” may be the template for thinking about the Colorado River Basin’s future, Udall argued.

One lesson worth following may be the example Australia is setting with desalination of seawater to meet urban water needs. A recent article by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times illustrates the struggles now going on down under regarding this technological solution – enormous cost, some significant environmental opposition, but a certain air of inevitability about desal:

“We consider ourselves the canary in the coal mine for climate change-induced changes to water supply systems,” said Ross Young, executive director of the Water Services Association of Australia, an umbrella group of the country’s urban water utilities. He described the $13.2 billion as “the cost of adapting to climate change.”

But desalination is also drawing fierce criticism and civic protests. Many homeowners, angry about rising water bills, and environmentalists, wary of the plants’ effect on the climate, call the projects energy-hungry white elephants. Stricter conservation measures, like mandating more efficient washing machines, would easily wring more water from existing supplies, critics say.

Wes Strickland linked this morning to a recent San Francisco Chronical story illustrating how that is playing out here. The example may not be exactly on point, but the Monterey Peninsula in California is heading the desal route:

In the wake of a November “cease and desist” order by state regulators requiring Monterey County’s main water purveyor to slash its diversions from the Carmel River 70 percent by 2016, an ambitious regional desalination project has emerged as the best – and arguably only – way to slake the thirst of about 100,000 customers on the peninsula.

River Beat: Some Good News

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Update: I’ve added a post with a better seasonal precip map than the one below:

*****

As we close in on the end of the current water year, the US Bureau of Reclamation has reported what passes for good news these days on the Colorado River.

This month’s forecast for year-end storage levels in Lake Powell is up 340,000 acre feet from those made a month ago. At a projected 15.41 million acre feet of water in storage Sept. 30, that’s still below last year (15.46 maf), but it’s looking considerably better than it was as recently as April, when the Bureau was forecasting a big drop. Small drop better than big drop. As I said, this is what passes for good news.

Precip Oct. 1 to July 16

Percent of Average Precip, Oct. 1 to July 16, courtesy CBRFC

The reason Powell is dropping (and Mead downstream, though explanations there are more complicated) is clear in this map from the Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, which is pretty self-explanatory. (Yellows, oranges and reds are dry, click on the image to embiggen.) It’s as if the wet line rolled east off the continental divide, with all the precip to the east, on the plains, and pretty much the entire Colorado River Basin dry.

I like the blobs of green on the Lower Colorado. Wet year in Yuma! But that portion of the basin contributes so little to the river’s flow that it’s a percentage increase on almost nothing to begin with. Double Yuma’s usual annual precip of near zero is still near zero. Most of that came in the big January storms.

Drought Outlook

Drought Outlook

This comes as the folks at the Climate Prediction Center have issued a seasonal drought outlook for dry weather across the southwest. The reason is a lackluster monsoon and a looming La Nina, according to CPC head Wayne Higgins:

“If the monsoon remains erratic during the next few weeks, then the drought development area may be expanded on the updated outlook scheduled for August 5,” said Wayne Higgins, director of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.

Factors leading to the forecast of enhanced chances for drier-than-normal conditions in the Southwest during the above periods include coupled ocean-atmosphere global climate forecasts and historical conditions during the late summer when transitioning from El Niño to La Niña.

“Beyond this time period, expected dryness associated with established La Niña conditions may bring further expansion of drought conditions in the Southwest during the 2010-11 winter season,” Higgins said. La Niña may also provide wetter-than-normal conditions in the Pacific Northwest during fall 2010 and winter 2010-2011.

At this point I’m not prepared (in terms of the journalism I’ve done or my understanding of the

DJF Forecast

Courtesy Climate Prediction Center

science) to make a huge deal about the La Niña forecast in terms of the Colorado River. The folks at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center publish correlations for all their rivers between ENSO (La Niña and El Niño) and river flow. For you climate data nerds, the R^2 value of the correlation between flow into Lake Powell and the ENSO 3.4 SST is 0.0022. For non-nerds, that roughly translates as “La Niña doesn’t help us a whole lot in making a forecast.” The reason is that the area where La Niña is linked to drought lies south of the Colorado River headwaters region. See, for example, this long lead forecast map for Nov-Dec-Jan 2010-11 to the right.

For those who have been following the (to me at least) fascinating question of whether all of this dry will lead to record low levels on Lake Mead this year, the answer seems to be “no”. The current USBR forecast calls for Mead to end the year with a surface level of 1084.97 feet above sea level. That will be the lowest Sept. 30 level since 1936, when the reservoir was first filled. But it is still above the previous trough of April 1956 (1083.81). It looks like we could flirt with that record level by November of this year, though.

As a journalist, for storytelling purposes, that historic 1083.81 matters to me a lot.

Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate

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David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for him in covering climate change any more.

I think he’s wrong. I’ve come to largely the same conclusions he has about the state of the science and the state of public discourse surrounding the science. But as I mentioned in his comments, and I’ll repeat here, there’s plenty left for me to do journalistically.

Given our apparent inability to reduce greenhouse gases, societal impacts and adaptation reporting – in my case, water supply issues in the Southwestern US – becomes, I think, more important, and an area where journalism can play a useful role.

It’s interesting to me that I find essentially no climate skeptics in the western water management community. They are very anxious to find ways to use climate projections (and to usefully incorporate genuine uncertainties) into their planning and management processes.

River Beat: Death on the Colorado

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To track my favorite topic, I have a Google news alert set on “Colorado River”. I’m trying to track water policy issues, but every year beginning in spring that news is accompanied by a macabre uptick in stories about people falling into the river, flipping their boats, going missing, and frequently drowning.

Crews search for teen reported missing in Colorado River

EAGLE COUNTY – Rescuers called off the search for a missing 15-year-old on Tuesday night after just a few hours.

This is unsurprising. It’s a very long river, and is generally the only water around, so come spring folks head out to play. But it kinda creeps me out.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lead Wheel Weights

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The issue of lead wheel weights has become a touchstone for me in thinking about risk perception and how we respond to various sort of environmental contamination.

I did a story in 2001 about research by a clever scientist named Bob Root who had quantified the lead wheel weights falling off of our cars’ wheels. The amount was staggering – four tons per year in a city the size of Albuquerque, being ground up into toxic dust.

I wrote a front page story. No on called me. No one called Bob. There was no outrage, no calls for regulation. Nada.

It’s easy to imagine what the level of outrage would have been if the contamination was coming for a corporate polluter. Or, this being New Mexico, one of our nuclear weapons research centers. But perception of risk and outrage over its causes seems to be strongly linked to our beliefs about who is responsible. With no evil actor behind the lead wheel weights, no one seemed to care.

It’s nearly a decade later, and they let me write columns for the newspaper, so I revisited the topic today (sub/ad req):

Imagine what might happen if we discovered some company was clandestinely dumping 4 tons a year of toxic waste on the streets of Albuquerque.

Let’s call it DefenseCo Inc., and let’s say its workers were dribbling out their toxic waste a tiny bit at a time as they drove around the city’s streets, year after year after year, spreading it all over town hoping no one would notice.

Just to juice it up, imagine it was a type of toxic waste that was especially harmful to children, and that this was happening all over the country, not just in Albuquerque.

Imagine the outrage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, no one called this time either.

P.S. Sorry for the silence, I did in fact make it safely home from my European adventure, but I’ve exhausted for a week. My travel adventures really took it out of me. Back to water blogging soon.