Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
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Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
Mark your calendars! Registration will be opening soon for two
exciting Water Education Foundation events this fall.
Water Summit | Oct. 29
Join us for our premier event of
the year, bringing together leading policymakers and experts from
all sectors to discuss the most pressing water issues facing
California and the West.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado
River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated
between the seven states that depend on the river. Those
guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding
negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against
the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend
on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two
federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of
unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15
percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities
scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for
shortages.
For more than a century, Western states have fought to keep the
federal government out of their business when it comes to
water. Now, the Trump administration is about to seize control
of the Colorado River, the region’s most important waterway.
But it’s not the narrative you might think. Interior Secretary
Doug Burgum — himself a former Western governor — has said
repeatedly that he preferred to have the states work out the
shrinking river’s problems. Far from a brash commandeering of
the system, the plan his department is set to finalize
as soon as Monday is effectively a kick-the-can
exercise for managing the drought-riddled river that supplies
water for 1 in 10 Americans. … The river plan, which is set
to be unveiled in the form of a final environmental impact
statement, is less of an actual plan than it is a framework for
future decisions, according to public statements by Interior
officials and the states. It is expected to cover a
10-year period in which the federal government would issue
short-term operating regimes every other year,
potentially with the sign-off of the states.
El Niño is back, and it might be bigger than ever. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in June that
the threshold for an El Niño had been met in the eastern
Pacific Ocean, and that it was likely to strengthen
significantly through the end of the year. … For
the Central Valley and Sierra, the question is also not just
how much precipitation falls, but the form it takes. Thanks to
warmer ocean waters, El Niño storms tend to be warmer, allowing
them to physically hold more moisture. That pushes the
rain-snow line higher up the mountains, meaningthat
some precipitation that should be piling up as snowpack
instead runs off as rain. … A strong El Niño
could deliver even more precipitation this coming winter.
However, if the storms are warm, theSierra snowpack may fail to recover even in a wet
year.
When Denver Water looked back at the historically abysmal
snowpack, and ahead to a historically scorching summer, the
crucial agency for 1.5 million Coloradans set a target of 20%
water use cuts to help solve challenges from the ongoing
drought. It’s not working. At roughly the midpoint
of the high season for lawn watering, which accounts for about
half of Denver Water home use, customers have cut only
about 2% of the five-year system average. Officials
fear that after a weekend of 100-degree temps forecast for the
Front Range, they’ll see even worse results as customers reel
from a searing streak of daily highs and defend their lawns
with amped irrigation.
California’s Central Valley is one of the country’s richest
farming regions, blessed with fertile soils, sunny days and a
massive man-made system of irrigation canals and reservoirs.
But as climate change intensifies, droughts deepen, and water
restrictions kick in, growers in much of the valley are
getting less water for their fields.They also face new
limits on how much they can pump from underground, forcing them
to leave hundreds of thousands of acres dry in the coming
years. Some are turning to an answer they never thought
they’d embrace: solar. … Farmers’ desperation
coincides with California’s solar dreams. The state is legally
mandated to reach 100% clean electricity by 2045. That will
require an additional 10 gigawatts of clean energy a year and
between 0.5 and 1.3 million acres of in-state solar
development.
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought — an extended period of
limited or no precipitation — is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
No portion of the West has been immune to drought during the last
century and it occurs with much greater frequency in the West
than in any other region of the country.
