Desalination

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This is a fascinating harbinger of things to come on the Colorado River, as the dry side of the natural range of variability collides with rapidly growing water demands:

A plant built to remove salt from highly saline irrigation runoff has sat idle in this southwestern Arizona community for more than 14 years after only a nine-month run.

But worries over a potential water shortage in the Colorado River stemming from continued drought and surging regional growth have prompted officials to restart the plant, and federal officials are now putting it through a 90-day trial run. The intent: to have the plant ready if it’s needed to help provide water that could be used by Arizonans or others who rely on the river.

If the plant is put into use, it could provide about 82,000 acre-feet of water annually that could be included in a 1.5 million acre-feet allotment the U.S. is obligated to deliver to Mexico under a treaty between the two countries.

The forecast flow into Lake Powell on the Colorado this year is 59 percent of average. Lake Powell is currently at 63 percent of average.

No Palms

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Australia’s drought means no palms for Palm Sunday in New South Wales:

Up to 300 NSW churches could have no palms for Palm Sunday with suppliers blaming the drought and logging for the shortage.

Instead, churches will be supplied with paper replicas for the religious day, observed on April 1 this year as precursor to Easter Sunday.

A Problem With “Average Temperature”

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A new paper by David Lobell and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore illustrates one of the problems with the whole “average temperature” notion ensconced in our discussions of climate change. The researchers compared outputs from 12 climate models, looking at the differences between daytime highs and overnight lows. The lows went up a little bit more than the highs but they were similar. The difference shows up in the variability. Clouds, as we know, are one area of uncertainty in climate models, and clouds play a big role in the summer daytime high. But they do not play as much of a role in overnight lows. As a result, the modelers found much greater variability in the daytime highs than in the overnight lows:

These results highlight the importance of considering separately projections for Tmax and Tmin when assessing climate change impacts, even in cases where average projected changes are similar. In addition, impacts that are most sensitive to summertime Tmin or wintertime Tmax may be more predictable than suggested by analyses using only projections of daily average temperatures.

Water in the Desert

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Rio Grande at Alameda

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

We’ve had a burst of warm weather over the last two weeks, and you can see it in the river. Up at Alameda, it’s running at about 1,700 cubic feet per second (cfs) well above the average of 1,100 for this time of year. I realize for people who live with real rivers this might not seem like much water (the Mississippi is currently flowing at 271,000 cfs past St. Louis), but you live in the desert with the river you’ve got, not the river you might want or wish to have at a later time.

This picture is taken from the Alameda Bridge, and I’ve picked a spot I can find and return to ever time I’m up there, lining up the camera on the bridge railing so I can capture the change over time. You can see the cottonwoods – the large trees on the bank to the right – aren’t close to leafing out yet. What looks like the left bank in this picture is actually a sandbar island in the middle of the stream. Before the river was hemmed in by levees and controlled by Cochiti Dam upstream, islands like this did not exist. Rather than one central channel like we have now, the river was braided and meandering – far more shallow, far wider, with patches of cottonwoods, marshy wetlands, and bare sandbars scraped clean by the spring flood every year.

With no high spring flood, the sandbar islands have become “armored” with plants, mostly willows. Up at the head of this island, though, the Interstate Stream Commission has been doing some terraforming, scraping off the brush and scraping down the sandbar a bit so the island can be easily overtopped with water. That creates habitat for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow, which used to spawn in the slow-moving meandering braids. From the bridge, it looks like the overtopping is already happening at 1,700 cfs, which is exciting to see. There were geese today flopping around in the shallows created by the ISC project.

Meanwhile, Closer to Home

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western US drought map

Folks in Tucson are gearing up for drought restrictions:

A plan that would force homeowners and businesses to conserve water if southern Arizona’s drought worsens is expected to go into effect Tuesday.
The City Council approved the plan in November, but the panel is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the code change that puts the new rules into effect. The rules would become effective immediately if passed.

Drought News

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A bunch of interesting drought news:

  • From Australia, camels mad with thirst: “They helped to build the Australian nation and had a cross-continental railway named after their handlers. But now the camel population here is wreaking havoc in the desert and remote communities because of a desperate lack of water.”
  • Things are so bad in the Black Hills of South Dakota that junior water rights holders are being cut off: “Drought conditions in western South Dakota have forced the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to issue shutoff orders today to 46 junior water right holders along the Cheyenne River and tributaries upstream of Angostura Reservoir.”
  • water restrictions in South Florida: “Water managers voted today to impose three-day-a-week limits for sprinklers from Palm Beach County to the Keys, saying it’s time for residents and businesses throughout the region to share the pain of a drought that shows no signs of ending.”

Pi(e) Day

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pies

I don’t eat much sugar, so dessert is a bit of a problem. But the Village Inn, god bless its strangely anarchic cultural heart, has sugar free apple pie most nights. As a result, pie is a common family outing. Lissa’s not terribly fond of the Village Inn, but Nora, The Boy and I are regulars. The night crew sees me and immediately begins checking to see if they have any of my pie. I don’t even have to ask any more. The pies are not all that great, but they’re not bad, and the staff is delightful, and the strange slices of humanity that hang out there late evenings even more so.

We didn’t have any cameras with us, so you’ll have to settle for the above stock shot as a stand-in for our Pi(e) Day desserts.

Sleep-painting

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From the Times of New York:

The Australian drug agency said it had uncovered a variety of unusual activities by consumers using the product, including sleep-driving, sleep-eating, and, in one case, a woman who painted the front door of her home while asleep.