A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Chris Bowman.
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Persistent drought in the West over the last two decades has
limited the amount of electricity that hydropower dams can
generate, costing the industry and the region billions of
dollars in revenue. The sector lost about 300 million megawatt
hours of power generation between 2003 and 2020 due to drought
and low water compared with the long-term average, researchers
from the University of Alabama found. That equals about $28
billion in lost revenue. Half of the drop in power generation
was due to drought in Oregon, Washington and California, which
produce half the hydropower generated in the U.S. The
researchers published their findings July 23 in the journal
Environmental Research Letters.
… The World Wildlife Fund sees farms in the mid-Mississippi
delta as ripe with opportunity to become a new mecca for
commercial-scale American produce. California currently grows
nearly three-quarters of the nation’s fruits and nuts and more
than a third of its vegetables. But as climate change
compounds the threats of water scarcity, extreme weather and
wildfires on California’s resources, WWF’s Markets Institute is
exploring what it would take for farmers in West Tennessee,
Mississippi and Arkansas to embrace — and equitably profit from
— specialty crop production like strawberries, lettuce or
walnuts.
Access to clean water is a human right — one that half of the
world may not have. Out of the roughly 8 billion people on
Earth, more than 4.4 billion lack access to safely managed
drinking water, researchers report August 15 in Science. The
estimate, based on computer simulations of data from low- and
middle-income countries, is more than double the figure
calculated by the World Health Organization (SN: 8/16/18).
… The new estimate may not replace the official count,
which is based on country-provided data rather than surveys and
simulations, says water solutions researcher Gregory Pierce of
the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s pretty
unlikely that those who are producing the official estimates
are going to be okay with just using these methods, because
there’s a lot more projection involved in them.”
One of the main challenges of irrigating crops is that
available water sources contain salt. Over time, repeated
waterings from these sources lead to salt accumulation,
damaging soil fertility. This issue is especially acute in the
arid and semi-arid regions found in much of the western United
States. To address the issue, researchers are beginning to
apply the techniques of digital and precision agriculture to
help growers provide their crops with the water they need
without harming them, or the soil, in the process. Their
efforts combine a variety of strategies and tools. Todd Skaggs,
research leader at ARS’s Agricultural Water Efficiency and
Salinity (AWES) Research Unit, in Riverside, CA, described
several ideas that his team is exploring. One approach is to
develop crops with a higher salt tolerance, including working
to understand that trait at a genetic level.
There is widespread concern about the effect of introduced
species on native species. The San Francisco Estuary (SFE) is a
highly invaded system (Cohen and Carlton 1995), with a mix of
native and introduced species that didn’t evolve
together. Humans introduced non-native species in a
variety of ways, ranging from recreation to ship ballast water
to aquarium and pond releases (Hanak et al. 2013). … However,
not all non-native species disrupt an ecosystem. Many
introduced fishes do not have clear negative impacts on
populations of native species, and some may provide benefits to
humanity in the form of recreation opportunities, ecosystem
services, or as indicator species (Moyle et al. 1986, Bork
2018, Grossman 2016). In this blog, we’ll review the complex
roles of non-native fishes within our novel estuary and propose
a systematic framework evaluating the “invasiveness” of these
introduced species.
After temporarily prohibiting large-mesh drift gillnet fishing
to protect migrating threatened loggerhead sea turtles in
waters off the coast of Southern California in May, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries
announced that they will reopen the area for commercial fishing
in August. The agency says in an announcement set to be
released on Thursday that the sea surface temperatures off the
West Coast — in an area stretching from Point Conception in
Santa Barbara County to the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego
County called the Southern California Bight — has returned to
normal or below normal, and El Niño conditions are no longer
present.
At the weekly meeting of the Rotary Club of Tehachapi on Aug.
15, the club welcomed Tom Neisler, general manager of the
Tehachapi-Cummings County Water District. Neisler has been with
the water district since 2013, stepping into the position of
general manager in 2016. He studied civil engineering at San
Diego State University, and has an extensive background in
civil engineering and construction, working many years in both
the public and private sector. He is active in the Association
of California Water Agencies, serving on the board of directors
at both the regional and state level. At the Tehachapi-Cummings
County Water District, Neisler says that their motto of “Our
Water, Our Future,” is a very true statement, because water
resources are essential to life. Water will continue to be
important in the future, as the water in California is
decreasing, in addition to being insufficient to meet current
and future needs.
Arizona, Nevada and Mexico will continue to live with less
water next year from the Colorado River after the U.S.
government on Thursday announced water cuts that preserve the
status quo. … The Interior Department announces water
availability for the coming year months in advance so that
cities, farmers and others can plan. Officials do so based on
water levels at Lake Mead, one of the river’s two main
reservoirs that act as barometers of its health. Based on those
levels, Arizona will again lose 18% of its total Colorado River
allocation, while Mexico’s goes down 5%. The reduction for
Nevada — which receives far less water than Arizona, California
or Mexico — will stay at 7%. … Heavier rains
and other water-saving efforts by Arizona, California and
Nevada somewhat improved the short-term outlook for Lake
Mead and Lake Powell, which is upstream of Mead on the
Utah-Arizona border. Officials on Thursday said the two
reservoirs were at 37% capacity.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) announced a new
partnership opportunity to support the state’s ability to
measure stream and river flows through the California Stream
Gage Improvement Program (CalSIP) as climate extremes continue
to impact the state’s water supply. As part of the
approximately $7 million program, DWR is seeking to partner
with public agencies to install, upgrade and/or reactivate
existing stream gage stations. This effort will expand
California’s ability to access critical data that can inform
important water management decisions during both flood and
drought conditions.
As La Niña gathers strength in the tropical Pacific,
forecasters are warning that the climate pattern could plunge
California back into drought conditions in the months ahead. La
Niña is the drier component of the El Niño Southern Oscillation
system, or ENSO, which is a main driver of climate and weather
patterns across the globe. Its warm, moist counterpart, El
Niño, was last in place from July 2023 until this spring, and
was linked to record-warm global temperatures and California’s
extraordinarily wet winter. Though ENSO conditions are neutral
at the moment, La Niña’s arrival appears increasingly imminent.
Persistent drought in the West over the last two decades has
limited the amount of electricity that hydropower dams can
generate, costing the industry and the region billions of
dollars in revenue. The sector lost about 300 million megawatt
hours of power generation between 2003 and 2020 due to drought
and low water compared with the long-term average, researchers
from the University of Alabama found. That equals about $28
billion in lost revenue. Half of the drop in power generation
was due to drought in Oregon, Washington and California, which
produce half the hydropower generated in the U.S. The
researchers published their findings July 23 in the journal
Environmental Research Letters.
The mpox virus has been detected in San Francisco’s wastewater,
after the disease was declared a “public health emergency of
international concern” by the World Health Organization
(WHO). The WastewaterSCAN Dashboard, a public health tool
used to monitor infectious diseases within communities, shows
that mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, was detected in
southeast San Francisco on July 26, August 11 and August 12. It
is important to note that it is not clear whether these
detections come from human sources. … San Francisco’s
database on the virus, Mpox data and reports, does not show any
data for August yet, but does show one case recorded in July.
Eighty years ago, the United States and Mexico worked out an
arrangement to share water from the two major rivers that run
through both countries: the Rio Grande and the Colorado. The
treaty was created when water wasn’t as scarce as it is now.
Water from Mexico flows to Texas’ half-billion-dollar citrus
industry and dozens of cities near the border. On the Mexican
side, some border states like Baja California and Chihuahua are
heavily reliant on the water that comes from the American side
of the Colorado River. Now, those water-sharing systems are
facing one of the biggest tests in their history. Mexico is
some 265 billion gallons of water behind on its deliveries to
the United States.
The Pacific Institute, a US-based global water think tank,
today released new research revealing the significant potential
for stormwater capture on public school campuses in Los Angeles
(LA) County, California. … While focused on LA County, the
report’s recommendations are broadly applicable to urban school
campuses nationwide, offering a blueprint for creating greener,
more resilient school environments. The study, “Advancing
Stormwater Capture for Greener Schools in Los Angeles,”
estimates that the total stormwater runoff generated from LA
County public school campuses is approximately 3.15 billion
gallons (9,510 acre-feet) per year. Of this amount, about 2.04
billion gallons (6,190 acre-feet) per year could potentially be
captured to augment water supplies and green school
campuses.
For decades, San Diegans have been trying to hold the federal
government responsible for sewage spilling into the United
States from Tijuana via the International Boundary and Water
Commission or IBWC, the binational federal agency that cleans
some of the sewage as it crosses the border. … And every step
of the way the federal government has said: It’s not our fault.
The most recent example was this week when the IBWC rejected
the notion it could be held accountable for smells emanating
from the Tijuana River, which gets contaminated by raw sewage
and trash as it snakes its way through its namesake metropolis
in Mexico. The San Diego Air Pollution Control District
declared the IBWC’s equipment was to blame for over 150 odor
complaints in nearby communities. The IBWC said, you’ve got the
wrong guy. In the meantime, 54 million gallons of
polluted water flowed down the river channel and into the
United States at a time of year when the riverbed should be
naturally dry.
A one million dollar grant promises to help with groundwater
recharge and flood diversion in the Merced County, the
Westlands Water District says. The grant was awarded to the
district by the California Department of Water Resources as
part of the Flood Diversion Recharge (FDRE) Initiative.
… According to the water district, the grant will be
used to support the removal of 450 acres of orchards near the
San Luis Canal in Merced County. The removal of the trees will
reduce demand for groundwater near critical infrastructure and
will improve the availability of both surface and groundwater.
The Colorado River’s biggest single user – farmers in Imperial
Valley – made another agreement with the federal government to
cut their take of the overused, threatened river for the next
two years, with help from San Diego. The Imperial Irrigation
District’s board announced this week it’d pay farmers to skip
some harvests in the coming two years in order to keep around
700,000 acre feet of water (an acre-foot is two California
households’ annual water use) in the river’s biggest reservoir,
Lake Mead. San Diego is in discussions with Imperial Valley to
help farmers reach that goal by selling back some of the water
it purchases from the valley.
In 2017, after more than a century of legal struggles by the
Māori people of the Whanganui River (Te Āti
Haunui-a-Pāpārangi), the 292-kilometer Whanganui River — also
known as Te Awa Tupua — became the first river in the world to
be recognized as a legal entity, granting it the same rights
and powers as a legal person. The passage of the Te Awa Tupua
Act has been a milestone for Aotearoa New Zealand — a name that
reflects the country’s Māori identity and colonial history. It
has also been read as an encouraging example for the granting
of legal personhood to ecosystems in other parts of the world.
… Māori Iwi of the Whanganui region have long had to advocate
against an often conservative and Western-minded government
structure. Their relentless advocacy efforts have shaped the
narrative of Te Awa Tupua, a story rooted in the deep
connection between culture, land, and water.
The City of Ukiah is taking action over impacts to
the Upper Russian River, including environmental and economic
harm to the region, caused by PG&E dramatically reducing
flows to the Russian River from the Potter Valley Project. In a
formal “Request for Rehearing” filed July 29th,
the City again underscored how the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) approval for PG&E’s
reduction in water flows was made without fairly or adequately
considering the harmful impacts to the Upper Russian River.
A bi-state effort to reduce pollution and restore Lake Tahoe’s
world-famous water clarity kept significant amounts of
stormwater and fine-grained sediment out of the lake in 2023,
despite challenges from a winter of record snowfall and runoff,
according to an annual lake performance report released on
Wednesday. While a prolonged snowmelt period in spring 2023
swept sediment into the lake and reduced clarity, partners in
the Lake Tahoe Total Maximum Daily Load Program helped keep the
lake’s annual average clarity at around 68 feet, which is in
line with what has been observed over the past two decades, the
bi-state report shows. This was achieved despite continuous
periods of heavy snowfall and cold temperatures in 2023, which
hindered street sweeping and stormwater infiltration efforts
for long stretches.
