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 drought occurs with much greater frequency in the
West than in other regions of the country.
Most of the West experiences what is classified as severe to
extreme drought more than 10 percent of the time, and a
significant portion of the region experiences severe to extreme
drought more than 15 percent of the time, according to the
National Drought Mitigation Center.
Experts who have studied recent droughts say a drought occurs
about once every 10 years somewhere in the United States.
Droughts are believed to be the most costly of all natural
disasters because of their widespread effects on agriculture and
related industries, as well as on urbanized areas. One of those
decennial droughts could cost as much as $38 billion, according
to one estimate.
Because droughts cannot be prevented, experts are looking for
better ways to forecast them and new approaches to managing
droughts when they occur.
The seven states that depend on the Colorado River have missed
a Jan. 31 federal deadline for reaching a regionwide consensus
on how to sharply reduce water use, raising the likelihood of
more friction as the West grapples with how to take less
supplies from the shrinking river. In a bid to sway the process
after contentious negotiations reached an impasse, six of the
seven states gave the federal government a last-minute proposal
outlining possible water cuts to help prevent reservoirs from
falling to dangerously low levels, presenting a unified front
while leaving out California, which uses the single largest
share of the river. The six states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada,
New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — called their proposal a
“consensus-based modeling alternative” that could serve as a
framework for negotiating a solution.
Water managers in the Colorado River basin are gaining a better
understanding that what happens in the weeks after peak
snowpack — not just how much snow accumulated over the winter —
can have an outsize influence on the year’s water supply. Water
year 2021 was historically bad, with an upper basin snowpack
that peaked around 90% of average but translated to only 36% of
average runoff into Lake Powell, according to the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation. It was the second-worst runoff on record after
2002. One of the culprits was exceptionally thirsty soils from
2020’s hot and dry summer and fall, which soaked up snowmelt
before runoff made it to streams. … But according
to the paper, in 2021, “rates of snowmelt throughout April were
alarming and quickly worsened summer runoff outlooks which
underscores that 1 April may no longer be a reliable benchmark
for western water supply.”
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is considering altering its
monthly Colorado River forecasting methods in the face of
criticism from experts inside and outside the agency that
predictions have been too optimistic. Changing forecast methods
could have major ramifications in how the bureau manages the
river, water experts say. Larger cutbacks in water deliveries
to Arizona, Nevada and California could possibly be triggered,
for example. The agency will consider starting to base its
forecasts on the past 20 years of flows into Lake Powell,
compared to the 30 years it uses now, a bureau official told
the Arizona Daily Star.
With the federal government poised to force Western states to
change how they manage the alarming shortfall in Colorado River
water, there is one constituency with a growing interest in the
river’s fate that’s little known to some: Wall Street
investors. Private investment firms are showing a growing
interest in an increasingly scarce natural resource in the
American West: water in the Colorado River, a joint
investigation by CBS News and The Weather Channel has found.
For some of the farmers and cities that depend on the river as
a lifeline, that interest is concerning. … Bernal’s
family came to the Grand Valley nearly 100 years ago, and he
has lived there his whole life. But now, he has a new
neighbor: a New York-based investment firm called Water Asset
Management, which he says bought a farm in the valley around
2017 that Bernal now rents and helps operate.
The 23-year drought that’s parching the
Southwest is forcing Arizona to make a bitter choice. Unless
developers can find new sources of water, the state’s largest
master-planned housing development is going to remain a desert.
It’s not just an Arizona problem. Across the American West,
demand for housing is increasingly running into water
shortages. Surface waters like the Colorado River are drying
up, forcing cities and farmers to turn to groundwater.
Unfortunately, most groundwater is finite, and once depleted
it’s difficult or impossible to replenish. Written by Bloomberg opinion writer Adam Minter.
We just returned from a drive up and down the San Joaquin
Valley. Being reared on a California almond and water ranch, I
have a long-standing interest in water and California
agriculture. Consequently, I always view our trip as an
opportunity to read the pulse of California’s water situation.
This year the landscape was fresh and green from recent and
abundant rains. … One notable and repeated image during
this ride was the number of almond orchards being ripped out,
amid vast areas of new plantings. The other notable image was
the number of signs complaining about water running out to the
ocean instead of being transferred to the Valley’s
ranchers. -Written by UC Berkeley Blog.
Competing priorities, outsized demands and the federal
government’s retreat from a threatened deadline stymied a deal
last summer on how to drastically reduce water use from the
parched Colorado River, emails obtained by The Associated Press
show. … Reclamation wanted the seven U.S. states that rely on
the river to decide how to cut 2 million to 4 million acre-feet
of water — or up to roughly one-third — on top of already
anticipated reductions. … California says it’s a partner
willing to sacrifice, but other states see it as a reluctant
participant clinging to a water priority system where it ranks
near the top. Arizona and Nevada have long felt they’re
unfairly forced to bear the brunt of cuts because of a water
rights system developed long ago, a simmering frustration that
reared its head during talks.
A flurry of storms unloaded historic amounts of rain and snow
across California over the past month. The deluges, fueled by a
parade of atmospheric rivers, filled reservoirs and have
improved drought conditions across large swaths of the state.
The Sierra snowpack has ballooned to more than double its usual
size for this time of year. The snow will continue to replenish
California’s water supplies as it melts during the warmer
months. …Picturesque locales where Californians ski and enjoy
other snow activities are burning in wildfires more often,
undergoing long-lasting changes that make snowpack melt
earlier. Snow can even melt in the middle of winter, before
reservoir managers are ready to shift from flood control to
water storage.
Golf courses. Ponds. Acres of grass. Cascading waterfalls.
Displays of water extravagance zip past each day when Sendy
Hernández Orellana Barrows drives to work. She said these views
seem like landscapes that have undergone “plastic surgery,”
transforming large parts of the Coachella Valley’s desert into
scenes of unnatural lushness. From La Quinta to Palm Springs,
the area’s gated communities, resorts and golf courses have
long been promoted with palm-studded images of green grass,
swimming pools and artificial lakes. The entrepreneurs and
boosters who decades ago built the Coachella Valley’s
reputation as a playground destination saw the appeal of
developments awash in water, made possible by wells drawing on
the aquifer and a steady stream of Colorado River water.
Plans for ensuring the long-term viability of four major
groundwater basins in the North Bay were approved Thursday by
state water regulators. The State Department of Water
Resources announced that it gave the okay to plans developed
for the Napa Valley Subbasin in Napa County and the Santa Rosa
Plain Subbasin, the Petaluma Valley Basin and Sonoma Valley
Subbasin in Sonoma County. The plans were developed by
four different local groundwater sustainability agencies under
the requirements of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act.
The new year started off with a parade of storms, leading to
San Francisco and the wider Bay Area seeing one of its rainiest
time frames since the Gold Rush era. This onslaught of storms
seemed a bit out of place with the trend of La Niña, an outlook
that traditionally brings warm, dry conditions to most of
California. Instead, the first half of the 2022-23 winter
season was marked by atmospheric river-enhanced storms and
notable reductions in drought conditions across the state.
… For meteorologists in both the Bay Area and across the
Western U.S., this January’s shift toward wet and stormy
conditions brings with it questions over what
other factors might be stomping out the typical La
Niña outlook.
The dry and empty landscape [around Kingman, AZ] has since
morphed into something much more green that supports pistachio
and almond orchards, as well as garlic and potato fields, in a
climate similar to California’s Central Valley. The crops are
fed by groundwater that also serves the city of
Kingman. The Arizona Department of Water Resources has put
a limit on the amount of land that can be watered, designating
the Hualapai Valley as an irrigation non-expansion area. That
means anyone who hasn’t farmed more than 2 acres there during
the past five years can’t. It’s the first such designation
in Arizona in four decades — highlighting struggles around the
U.S. as water supplies dwindle and tensions grow between
farmers and cities.
A day after state water leaders announced they plan to increase
water allocations to farmers and cities, some now hope the
federal government will follow the lead and allocate more water
from their reservoirs. The decision by state leaders follows a
series of atmospheric rivers that filled reservoirs and
increased the Sierra snowpack. But federal leaders have
yet to make a similar decision. In San Benito County,
agriculture leaders hope they do because a large source of
water for them comes from the San Luis reservoir, a federal
water project, and water levels there have increased
drastically in the last month. As of Jan. 27 water
capacity was at 57 percent, up from just 24 percent, before a
series of storms slammed into the Central Coast.
Even while power outages, flooding, and downed trees plagued
Mendocino County during the first weeks of 2023, we could take
comfort in the fact that on California’s drought-ridden soil,
rain is good news. Lake Mendocino hit its highest amount of
water storage in more than a decade, and our past month of
precipitation is on track with or better than “normal”
conditions over the past 30 years. … A high water
table and a near-full reservoir can no longer be taken at face
value: water managers, well users, and those who watched
Governor Gavin Newsom deliver a speech on water rights from the
bed of Lake Mendocino in 2021 know better than to expect a
couple weeks of rain to reverse decades of water
insecurity. According to a table from the California
WaterBlog, drought can be considered “over” in only one area of
impact this month: soil moisture.
States dependent on the drought-stricken Colorado River are
increasingly looking toward desalination as a way to fix the
river’s deficit and boost water supplies across the western
U.S. The search for alternative ways to source water comes as
federal officials continue to impose mandatory water
cuts for states that draw from the Colorado River, which
supplies water and power for more than 40 million people.
Desalination (or desalinization) is a complicated process that
involves filtering out salt and bacteria content from ocean
water to produce safe drinking water to the tap. While there
are more than a dozen desalination plants in the U.S., mostly
in California, existing plants don’t have the capacity to
replace the amount of water the Colorado River is losing.
The rain in December and January is still paying off for
200,000 South Bay residents. The Sweetwater Authority, which
provides water to customers in Western Chula Vista, Bonita, and
National City, just opened a massive valve in the Loveland Dam
Thursday to send water to the Sweetwater Reservoir for the
second time in two months. “We might be able to capture
approximately 1.1 billion gallons of water,” explained Erick
Del Bosque, Sweetwater Authority’s Director of Engineering and
Operations. Del Bosque said that much water will save customers
roughly $5 million. The Loveland Reservoir is only filled with
rainwater and water runoff. Sweetwater Authority opened the
valve in Loveland Dam in November for more than two weeks to
send water to the Sweetwater Reservoir because it was running
dangerously low, at only 14% capacity.
In a major sign that California’s drought conditions are easing
after a series of huge storms earlier this month, state water
officials on Thursday increased the amount of water that cities
and farms will receive this summer from the State Water
Project, a series of dams, canals and pumps that provides water
to 27 million people from the Bay Area to San Diego. The
increased water deliveries — six times the amount promised
on Dec. 1 — are made possible by rapidly filling reservoirs and
a huge Sierra Nevada snowpack and likely will mean that many
communities will ease or lift summer water restrictions if the
wet weather continues through the spring.
The seven states that rely on water from the shrinking Colorado
River are unlikely to agree to voluntarily make deep reductions
in their water use, negotiators say, which would force the
federal government to impose cuts for the first time in the
water supply for 40 million Americans. The Interior Department
had asked the states to voluntarily come up with a plan by Jan.
31 to collectively cut the amount of water they draw from the
Colorado. … Negotiators say the odds of a voluntary agreement
appear slim. It would be the second time in six months that the
Colorado River states, which also include Colorado, New Mexico,
Utah and Wyoming, have missed a deadline for consensus on cuts
sought by the Biden administration to avoid a catastrophic
failure of the river system.
Just north of the California-Mexico border, the All-American
Canal cuts across 80 miles of barren, dune-swept desert. Up to
200 feet wide and 20 feet deep, the canal delivers the single
largest share of Colorado River water to the fertile farmlands
of the Imperial Valley. It’s more water than what Los Angeles,
Phoenix and Las Vegas get combined, and it’s used to grow
lettuce, broccoli, carrots and spinach, as well as hay to
supply beef and dairy operations, wheat, melons, lemons and
other crops. … But as the Colorado’s largest reservoir
declines closer to “dead pool” levels, politicians and water
managers in other states are calling on the IID to make cuts
beyond the 250,000 acre-feet, or about 9%, that the agency has
pledged to make starting this year. They say that the dire
state of Lake Mead warrants larger cuts …
California’s string of heavy rainstorms in January continue to
provide temporary relief to the state’s chronically dry land.
Drought conditions across the golden state have either improved
or remained the same compared to one week ago. The U.S. Drought
Monitor, in a weekly update published Thursday, reports the
state remains free of both “extreme” or “exceptional” drought
for the second week in a row. California’s Central Coast, which
was devastated by the severe storms, has exited moderate
drought conditions and is now “abnormally dry.” In the
northwest corner of the state, the majority of Del Norte County
is drought free for at least the second the week in a row.
After weeks of near-constant rain and flooding, California
is finally drying out—but hopefully not getting too dry,
because the state needs all the rain it can get to pull itself
out of a historic drought. This is California at its most
frenetic and contradictory: Climate change is making both dry
spells and rainstorms more intense, ping-ponging the state’s
water systems between critical shortages and canal-topping
deluges. A simultaneous solution to both extremes
is right beneath Californians’ feet: aquifers, which are
made up of underground layers of porous rock or sediments, like
gravel and sand, that fill with rainwater soaking through the
soil above. … In paleo valleys, those coarser sediments
are topped with perhaps just a few feet of soil, so they
readily channel water into the aquifer system—this is where
you’d want to refill.
The saga over connecting Exeter and Tooleville’s water systems
entered its most important phase to date on Jan. 24., in which
an agreement will now be sent to the state for
review. City manager Adam Ennis said that the approval of
the consolidation agreement between Exeter and Tooleville will
be one of the last steps before they can execute the project.
The agreement outlines the responsibilities of Tooleville
Mutual Non-Profit Water Association (TMNPWA) and Exeter for
making the water connection a reality. Exeter is now awaiting
approval of this agreement from the State Water Board, and if
it is approved, they will finally be allowed to break ground on
the project. This was a long time coming, as the city has spent
years working on a solution to Tooleville’s water woes.
In the warmth of Arizona’s winter sun, 50 residents gathered in
front of neighborhood activist Cody Reim’s house last weekend,
eager to discuss a solution to their problem. Despite living a
few miles from a river, their community has no water supply
services. … In Rio Verde Foothills, an unincorporated
community with no municipal government, near Scottsdale, the
fashionable, wealthy desert city adjoining the state capital of
Phoenix, none of the homes are connected to a local water
district. There is only one paved road, no street lights, storm
gutters, or pipes in the ground. Instead residents have wells –
or water tanks outside their homes, which they used to fill at
a local pipe serviced by Scottsdale.
Over the course of the next seven years, an average 35,000
housing units will be built each year in Colorado. If past
trends persist, around 70% of those housing units will be
single-family homes. From Fort Collins to Colorado Springs,
it’s likely that Coloradans will see more single-family
suburban developments popping up — and with them, lawns.
Conventional grass lawns ornament the vast majority of American
homes, covering three times as much surface area as irrigated
cornfields in the United States. Although lawns are often
purely aesthetic, sometimes they are chosen for their
durability; lawns hold up against cleats, dogs and kids. …
But there are far too many cropped, green lawns that are
neglected until a weed sprouts up or it’s time to mow. Too many
lawns exist just for the sake of being maintained. -Written by Sammy Herdman, a campaign associate
for Environment Colorado.
The past weeks following our recent large storms have been
awash in misinformation and hypocrisy about operating and
permitting water infrastructure in California. Even those who
closely follow the news about California water are likely
unaware that the data shows that more than half of the runoff
from the storms in early January was captured and stored in the
Central Valley. Or that the loudest voices criticizing
environmental protections for our rivers and fisheries during
the storms – which are requirements of the Trump
Administration’s 2019 biological opinions – are the very same
voices demanding that legislators and the courts keep those
biological opinions in place.
California farmers are encouraged by the series of atmospheric
river storms that brought near-record rain and snow, filling
depleted reservoirs and bolstering the snowpack. Frost
Pauli, vineyard manager for Pauli Ranch in Potter Valley in
Mendocino County, said he feels optimistic after three intense
years of drought. He said the winter storms “have been
excellent for our water supply.” Farmers with water rights
along the Russian River in Mendocino and Sonoma counties have
been subject to water diversion curtailments since 2021, after
the California State Water Resources Control Board adopted
actions spurred by a drought emergency declaration by Gov.
Gavin Newsom. Other water supply cuts were mandated for
watersheds including the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and
the Scott River and Shasta River watershed.
Over the last several years, managers of water agencies have
reached deals to take less water from the river. But those
reductions haven’t been nearly enough to halt the river’s
spiral toward potential collapse. As Lake Mead, the nation’s
largest reservoir, continues to decline toward “dead pool”
levels, the need to rein in water demands is growing urgent.
Efforts to adapt will require difficult decisions about how to
deal with the reductions and limit the damage to communities,
the economy and the river’s already degraded ecosystems.
Adapting may also drive a fundamental rethinking of how the
river is managed and used, redrawing a system that is out of
balance. This reckoning with the reality of the river’s limits
is about to transform the landscape of the Southwest.
As of Friday morning, more than 600 colonias were without
running water in Tijuana and Rosarito, where residents say
service has been spotty since last year. Facing the possibility
of running out of water, Tijuana’s State Commission for Public
Services, CESPT, turned to the San Diego County Water Authority
for help. Agreements in place between Mexico and the United
States allow for water deliveries in times of emergency or
severe drought. So last week, the San Diego-based agency began
sending water to Tijuana. Compounding the problem is the
deterioration of Tijuana’s main aqueduct that delivers water
from the Colorado River, the city’s main source of water. So
far, repairs are taking longer than expected.
Water is already a scarce commodity in the West, but if
Colorado keeps growing we are going to need even more. One
source could be treating reused drinking water. It’s a scenario
water providers and the state are already planning for.
… It’s not something that will likely happen soon.
Direct potable reuse water will need to be treated with
state-of-the-art technologies to make it safe to drink and that
process is expensive, but providers and the state want to be
prepared. That’s why just this month [Colorado Department
of Public Health and Environment] implemented new rules to
regulate direct potable reuse water. So that way if water
providers are going to practice direct potable reuse, they are
doing it safely.
La Niña brings cooler than normal and wetter than normal winter
weather for the Pacific Northwest…usually. Cold storms with
high amounts of rain and mountain snow, along with a few more
rounds of lowland snow, keep the precipitation above average
and temperatures below. Cooler and wetter than the average for
the Pacific Northwest, La Niña also creates drier than average
winters over the southwest United States; most often, a drought
builds. Not this year! Our rare, third-consecutive La Niña
winter has been filled with variability.
A Maricopa County judge in Arizona denied residents emergency
relief over their Scottsdale water source that has been cut off
since Jan. 1 because of drought conditions and despite repeated
city warnings to find an alternative water source. The action
for an emergency stay was brought by some residents of the
nearby unincorporated community of Rio Verde Foothills who saw
their deliveries of water run dry at the beginning of the year
due to action by the city of Scottsdale, whose leaders said
they repeatedly warned the community that continued deliveries
were unsustainable due to drought.
[S]evere drought, which affected 90% of the state by the end of
2022, led to historic water restrictions in Southern
California — impacting millions of people. The Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power says L.A.-based golf
courses use about 1.6 billion gallons of drinking water each
year, about 1% of the total potable water used in the city.
Meanwhile, courses use only about one billion gallons of
recycled water. Those restrictions are also pushing golf
courses across the region to incorporate new technology to
become more efficient with their water usage.
This is the first in a series of videos we’re calling “Rooted
in the Valley.” We hope to highlight family farmers in the San
Joaquin Valley, how they came to this area from all over the
world and what the future holds as water becomes a key factor
in their ability to survive.
Bakersfield and the Kern River Valley made the list of Cal
Water’s top water-saving districts for December 2022.
California Water Service, Cal Water, said customers surpassed
the state’s conservation target of 15% in December 2022, saving
16.5% company-wide over December 2020. In a release it said,
“This is the eighth month in a row Cal Water customers reduced
their water use, with 11 districts saving more than 15%.” The
11 Cal Water districts that surpassed 15% in water-use
reductions are …
California’s water supply has hit a new milestone for the year
in the wake of three weeks of wet weather. Water levels at two
of the state’s largest reservoirs are now at their highest
point in 2.5 years, Chief Meteorologist Mark Finan said.
… Lake Shasta and Oroville have both added more than 1
million acre-feet of water in the past month and the levels
continue to rise. Inflow rates into those reservoirs have
decreased considerably, which is to be expected during periods
of dry weather. As of Tuesday, Lake Shasta is at 55% of
its total capacity and Lake Oroville is at 62% of capacity.
Last summer, Lake Shasta peaked at about 40% of its total
capacity.
Hefty snowfalls from a series of atmospheric rivers have
brought a slightly rosier outlook for the beleaguered Colorado
River. While not enough to fend off the falling water levels
entirely, the snow that has dropped in recent weeks across the
mountains that feed the river is expected to slow the decline
at Lake Mead, according to the latest federal projections
released last week. Forecasters now expect Lake Mead to finish
this year around 1,027 feet elevation, about 19 feet lower than
its current level. That’s about 7 feet higher than the 2023
end-of-year elevation in the bureau’s forecast from last month.
As for Lake Powell, the reservoir located on the Utah-Arizona
border is now expected to finish 2023 at 3,543 feet, or 16 feet
higher than last month’s forecast and about 19 feet higher than
its current level.
Madera County is keeping its recently approved current
structure for penalizing farmers who blow past their water
allocation, forgoing an option to implement a tiered penalty
structure. The decision came during Tuesday’s Madera
County Board of Supervisors meeting and maintains the status
quo for the Chowchilla, Delta-Mendota and Madera
Subbasins. The backstory: Last September, the Board
adopted a new penalty structure for water overdrafts, setting
the 2023 fine at $100 per acre-foot in excess of the allotted
amount. The penalty would increase by $100 per year and cap out
at $500 in 2027 and beyond.
Arizona needs tens of thousands of new housing units to meet
demand, but first, developers will need to find enough water.
The state’s water woes have been on full display this month as
it lost 21% of its Colorado River supply to cuts, homes outside
Scottsdale, Arizona, had their water cut off by the city, and a
recently released model found planned housing units for more
than 800,000 people west of Phoenix will have to find new water
sources. Arizona is one of the fastest-growing states and short
100,000 housing units, a state Department of Housing report
released last year found, but depending on where they’re
located, some homes will be more easily built than others.
The Sites Project Authority released findings from a new
analysis that projected Sites Reservoir could have diverted and
captured 120,000 acre-feet of water in just two weeks if the
reservoir had been operational from Jan. 3 through Jan. 15 and
would continue to capture water over the next few weeks as
flows continue to run high. … The project, which has
been in the works for more than 60 years, hopes to turn the
Sites Valley, located 10 miles west of Maxwell where Colusa and
Glenn counties meet, into a state-of-the-art off-stream water
storage facility that captures and stores stormwater flows in
the Sacramento River – after all other water rights and
regulatory requirements are met – for release in dry and
critical years for environmental use and for communities, farms
and businesses statewide to utilize when needed.
Organizers behind a proposed water district in the Alexander
Valley put forward Monday their vision for a new entity that
would seek to safeguard legal standing of agricultural
landowners in the famed grape-growing region. They made their
presentation at the Healdsburg City Council’s regular meeting
where they called for the formation of the Alexander Valley
Water District. It would give valley property owners, many of
them grape growers, a stronger legal foothold to protect their
rights to draw on Russian River flows and connected
groundwater. … The move comes in response to a host of
factors, such as the multi-year drought that has spurred state
regulators in recent years to curtail water rights for
thousands of water rights holders along the upper Russian
River, forcing some to cut back on irrigation with surface
water flows or turn to groundwater.
Good news: roses can be a part of your
water-efficient landscape. Lorence Oki, UC Cooperative
Extension environmental horticulture specialist in the UC Davis
Department of Plant Sciences, identified rose cultivars that
remain aesthetically pleasing with little water.
Oki is the principal investigator of the Climate-Ready
Landscape Plants project, which may be the largest irrigation
trial in the western U.S., and the UC Plant Landscape
Irrigation Trials (UCLPIT), the California component of
that project. These projects evaluate landscape plants under
varying irrigation levels to determine their optimal
performance in regions requiring supplemental summer water.
The long reign of La Niña may soon be over. According to the
latest outlook released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, there’s an 82%
chance that by springtime – sometime between March and May
– La Niña will have faded away. In the spring, La Niña is
most likely to be replaced by conditions meteorologists refer
to as “ENSO neutral,” which is when neither La Niña nor El Niño
is present. Looking further down the forecast into late summer
and early fall and there are signs of something we haven’t seen
in years: the return of El Niño. By the August through
October timeframe, there’s about a 50% chance El Niño will take
hold. Of course, that means there’s also about a 50% chance it
won’t.
Do trees suck? You bet they do, and it’s time we do something
about it, according to a group of conservative Utah lawmakers.
Claiming “overgrown” forests are guzzling Utah’s water
resources dry, rural members are now calling for a major
logging initiative as the best hope for saving the shrinking
Great Salt Lake and Lake Powell, despite a lack of scientific
evidence that tree removal would make a big difference. Water
conservation and efficiency are fine, but such measures are not
enough to replenish Utah’s drought-depleted reservoirs and
avert the ecological disaster unfolding at the Great Salt Lake,
according to presentations Thursday before the Legislature’s
“Yellow Cake Caucus,” a group of conservative lawmakers
organized by Rep. Phil Lyman, R-Blanding.
The drenching storms that hit California in recent weeks
represented a long-sought opportunity for Helen Dahlke, a
groundwater hydrologist at the University of California, Davis.
Dahlke has been studying ways to recharge the state’s severely
depleted groundwater by diverting swollen rivers into orchards
and fields and letting the water seep deep into aquifers. But
carrying out such plans requires heavy precipitation—which had
been scarce. This week, however, water managers began to turn
theory into practice. In the Tulare Irrigation District, which
supplies water to more than 200 farms south of Fresno,
officials started diverting water from the San Joaquin River
into 70 fields as well as specially constructed ponds.
We’re getting a peek at the future of our economy. The Las
Vegas Chamber hosted Preview Las Vegas Monday. Key Colorado
River state leaders address Southern Nevada’s water issues. One
of the main focuses of Preview Las Vegas this year was the
water supply for Southern Nevada. The biggest take away?
Colorado river states are working together as one to combat the
water crisis. … At Monday’s panel discussion, talk
turned to the importance of a partnership with California’s
regional recycling system. The agency is evaluating a
restoration process that one day could send water back to
Colorado River using states. But for now, the project’s
targeted start date isn’t until 2030.
Though the recent barrage of winter storms has certainly
improved California’s drought conditions, state water leaders
are making moves to prepare for the inevitable dry season soon
to come. On Friday, the California Department of Water
Resources kickstarted a partnership between state agencies,
local governments, scientists and community members in a new
task force, called the Drought Resilience Interagency and
Partners Collaborative. The DRIP group was created in part by
the 2021 Senate Bill 552, which requires state agencies to take
a proactive stance on drought preparedness, especially for
smaller rural communities most vulnerable to droughts.
Towering refineries and rusty pumpjacks greet visitors driving
along the highways of Kern county, California. Oil wells sit in
the middle of fields of grapevines and almond trees. The air is
heavy with dust and the scent of petroleum. The
energy fields here are some of the most productive in the US,
generating billions of barrels of oil annually and more than
two-thirds of the state’s natural gas. And in a
drought-stricken state, they’re also some of the thirstiest,
consuming vast quantities of fresh water to extract stubborn
oil. But in the industry’s shadow, nearby communities
can’t drink from the tap. One of those communities is Fuller
Acres, a largely Latino town in Kern county where residents
must drive to the nearest town to buy safe water.
Utah’s Washington County is one of the fastest growing areas in
the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, made possible
by the Virgin River which supplies the region and its
multiplying suburbs with water. But drought and population
growth have long plagued the river, and the mayor of Ivins, a
small, bedroom community of nearby St. George, did not mince
words when addressing constituents this month. … Hart’s
message came in the wake of an upscale community near
Scottsdale, Arizona, having its water shut off on New Year’s
Day. Similar to the St. George area, the fast-growing
Scottsdale community received its drinking water from Arizona’s
allotment of the Colorado River, and the shutoffs were in
part due to shortages in the river’s basin, according to
a memo sent to residents of the Rio Verde Foothills
neighborhood.
Concerns over the Colorado River have led the everyday Arizonan
to think about water in ways they haven’t before. As a result,
much has been made as of late about growing “thirsty crops” in
Arizona’s desert climate. It doesn’t take long to find an
opinion or editorial about how farming alfalfa is the
embodiment of everything that is wrong with the water system in
Arizona. This rhetoric needs to stop. Here’s why. When you hear
that agriculture uses nearly three-fourths of Arizona’s water,
it is easy to draw the conclusion that the best way to save
water for growing urban populations is to take it from the
largest user. In reality, though, that water is already being
consumed by that urban population each and every time they sit
down for a meal. -Written by Chelsea McGuire, the Arizona Farm
Bureau Government Relations Director.
The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which has
continued to increase throughout January as a result of storms
battering much of the state since the New Year, might help
California combat its ongoing drought. As of January 20, the
Sierra snowpack state-wide was at 240 percent of the average
for this time of year. The South Sierra stations, located
between the San Joaquin and Mono counties through to Kern
county, reported snowpacks at 283 percent of the January 20
average. The Sierra Nevada snowpack usually peaks around April
1. Currently, state-wide, the snowpack is at 126 percent of the
average for April 1, with the South Sierras in particular at
149 percent.
Underground storage may be a key for Western states navigating
water shortages and extreme weather. Aquifers under the ground
have served as a reliable source of water for years. During
rainy years, the aquifers would fill up naturally, helping
areas get by in the dry years. … But growing demand for
water coupled with climate change has resulted in shortages as
states pump out water from aquifers faster than they can be
replenished…. Municipalities and researchers across the
country are working on ways to more efficiently replenish
emptied-out aquifers… In California — where 85
percent of the population relies on groundwater for some
portion of their supply — more than 340 recharge projects have
already been proposed.
The sun was shining again recently when Fidencio Velasquez
visited what used to be 90 acres of prime Ventura County
strawberry fields. He pointed to a 40-foot storage container
that Santa Clara River floodwaters had swept off a neighboring
farm and deposited before him. Overturned tractors and
fertilizer bins were strewn about like toys, while the deep
channels between crop rows were filled with mud. A harvesting
machine was damaged beyond repair. Metal pipes, hoses and trash
littered the farm’s outskirts. … Velasquez, a supervisor
at Santa Clara Farms in Ventura, estimates that the expense of
cleaning up and replacing damaged crops, machinery and
equipment could run upward of $900,000.
While California’s drought outlook is improving, the State is
continuing to proactively prepare for a return to dry
conditions amid climate-driven extremes in weather. Today,
Department of Water Resources (DWR) is officially launching a
standing Drought Resilience Interagency and Partners (DRIP)
Collaborative, which will include members of the public.
Community members and water users are encouraged to apply.
Initiated by Senate Bill 552, the DRIP Collaborative will
foster partnerships between local governments, experts,
community representatives and state agencies to address drought
planning, emergency response, and ongoing management. Members
will help ensure support for community needs and anticipate and
mitigate drought impacts, especially for small water supplier
and rural communities who are often more vulnerable to
droughts.
[A] new project aims to shield the flows from the heat and sun
and help the state meet its renewable energy goals by covering
canals with solar panels. California ships
water across more than 700 miles. Most of the state’s
water comes from the northern half, but most of it is
used in the southern half. So those UC Merced researchers have
been studying the idea of putting solar panels atop those
canals. “If we put solar panels over all 4,000 miles of
California’s open canals, we estimated we could save 65 billion
gallons of water annually,” said Brandi McKuin, lead author of
a report on the research. “That’s enough for the residential
water needs of 2 million people, enough to irrigate 50,000
acres of farmland.”
Early January was an unusually wild ride of atmospheric rivers.
Nine sizable systems produced a train of storms beginning about
New Years and lasting for several weeks across almost all of
California. After three years of drought, the storms reminded
us that California has flood problems similar in magnitude to
its drought problems, and that floods and droughts can occur in
synchrony. As the dust begins to settle, let’s look at the
impacts of these early January floods and examine if the recent
three-year drought and its longer-term drought impacts might be
ending.
Here in Fig Garden, a suburb that creeps up to the edge of the
San Joaquin River, on land my neighbors prefer not to think of
as a floodplain, the rain started falling in late December and
didn’t stop for two weeks. My lawn turned into pond. Geese were
honking like they haven’t honked in years. As the last big
storm was nearing, I got a call from my aunt and uncle,
California natives who high-tailed it to Cleveland a half
century ago. “You guys all right?” they asked. The pond had yet
to reach my front door. “I think we’re going to be OK,” I said.
I reminded them that there are seven dams on the San Joaquin. I
don’t know of any other river in America that has been more
corralled by man. Over 90 percent of its flow is shunted via
canals and ditches to farmland that produces almonds,
pistachios, table grapes and mandarins. -Written by Mark Arax, author of “The Dreamt Land: Chasing
Water and Dust Across California.”
Standing under a shady tree drooping with pomegranates late
last year, Brad Simmons, a retired metal fabricator who has
lived in Healdsburg, California, for 57 years, showed off his
backyard orchard. … Of course, the small grove requires
plenty of water — an increasingly scarce resource in a state
that continues grappling with a historic drought despite recent
torrential rains. Yet Simmons, like many of his fellow 12,000
residents, has managed to keep much of this wine country
community north of San Francisco looking verdant while slashing
the city’s water use in half since 2020. Healdsburg benefits
from an invaluable resource that keeps gardens, trees, and
vineyards irrigated: free, non-potable water produced by its
wastewater-reclamation facility.
The recent onslaught of storms and the backdrop of relentless
drought might make Los Angeles residents wish we had an
old-school water czar to tap distant rivers. But the days of
having William Mulholland single-mindedly create a system to
quench Los Angeles’ perpetual thirst are long gone. … Still,
as Los Angeles residents watched the winter storms drench the
region with billions of gallons of water — most of which
rushed, unused, to the Pacific — it’s natural to wonder why our
water systems don’t capture that water to use when we need it.
… Adopted by voters in 2018 as Los Angeles
County Measure W, the program is building a network
of small, local rainwater- and runoff-retention projects,
anchored by several larger catch basins that together will
increase by at least a third the amount of water that seeps
into groundwater basins.
This winter, the West has been slammed by wet weather. An
“atmospheric river” has pummeled California with
weeks of heavy rain, and the Rocky Mountains are getting buried
with snow. That’s good news for the Colorado River, where all
that moisture hints at a possible springtime boost for massive
reservoirs that have been crippled by drought. Climate
scientists, though, say the 40 million people who use the
river’s water should take the good news with a grain of
salt. The flakes that pile up high in the Rockies are
crucial for the Colorado River — a water lifeline for people
from Wyoming to Mexico in an area commonly referred to as the
Colorado River basin. Before water flows through rivers,
pipelines and canals to cities and farms across the region, it
starts as high-altitude snow.
Environmental rules designed to protect imperiled fish in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have ignited anger among a
group of bipartisan lawmakers, who say too much of California’s
stormwater is being washed out to sea instead of being pumped
to reservoirs and aqueducts. In a series of strongly
worded letters, nearly a dozen legislators — many from
drought-starved agriculture regions of the Central Valley —have
implored state and federal officials to relax environmental
pumping restrictions that are limiting the amount of water
captured from the delta. … Since the beginning of
January, a series of atmospheric rivers has disgorged trillions
of gallons of much-needed moisture across drought-stricken
California, but only a small fraction of that water has so far
made it into storage.
For the first time in nearly two years, the entire state of
California is not experiencing “abnormally dry” conditions —
though most of it is. The U.S. Drought Monitor, in a weekly
update published Thursday, reports 99.36% of the state in at
least an “abnormally dry” status, as of Jan. 17, down from 100%
a week ago. Better news: None of the state is in “extreme” or
“exceptional” drought. In the northwest corner of the state,
the majority of Del Norte County is drought free. A move in the
needle, however slight, means the string of heavy rainstorms
have temporally improved drought conditions. It does not mean
the drought is over.
At their Jan. 17 meeting, Grand County commissioners heard a
presentation from Lily Bosworth, staff engineer for the
Colorado River Authority of Utah, on a water conservation pilot
program. The Colorado River Authority of Utah was established
by the Utah State Legislature in 2021. Ongoing drought and
growing evidence that the river cannot support the demand being
placed on it by users have strained water infrastructure,
policies and agreements across the Southwest; the stated
mission of the Colorado River Authority is to “protect,
preserve, conserve, and develop Utah’s Colorado River system
interests.” The Authority is overseen by a six-member board as
well as the governor.
Nearly every square mile of California was in a severe drought
four months ago. … Now we’re worrying about whether we have
too much water in some places. California, always a state of
extremes, rarely faces one quite like this. After three years
of drought, the state’s snowpack is suddenly the deepest it’s
been on record for mid-January. Most spots in the Sierra
already have far more snow today than is usually measured on
April 1, the date the snowpack typically peaks. In the central
Sierra. The snowpack is 255% of normal for Jan. 17.
… The [flooding] concern might increase in April, when
the snowpack typically begins to melt, sending water flowing
from the mountains and into rivers, streams and reservoirs.
Lake Oroville is at just 58% of total capacity, but already has
more water than it had in either 2021 or 2022.
Joe McCue thought he had found a desert paradise when he bought
one of the new stucco houses sprouting in the granite foothills
of Rio Verde, Arizona. There were good schools, mountain views
and cactus-spangled hiking trails out the back door. Then the
water got cut off. Earlier this month, the community’s longtime
water supplier, the neighboring city of Scottsdale, turned off
the tap for Rio Verde Foothills, blaming a grinding drought
that is threatening the future of the West. Scottsdale said it
had to focus on conserving water for its own residents, and
could no longer sell water to roughly 500 to 700 homes — or
around 1,000 people.
The Trump administration failed to consider the strain of
climate change and drought on the Colorado River and
tributaries when it agreed to give Utah 52,000 acre-feet of
water from a reservoir annually, environmental groups argued
Thursday and asked a 10th Circuit panel to order an
environmental impact statement for the plan. Forty million
Americans depend on the Colorado River for water, along with
5.5 million acres of land, 22 Native American tribes and nearly
two-dozen national parks and preserves. One of the Colorado
River’s tributaries is the Green River, which winds through
Utah and sustains ecosystems in the Browns Park National
Wildlife Refuge, Dinosaur National Monument, Ouray National
Wildlife Refuge and Canyonlands National Park.
Officials involved in the talks over how to cut Colorado River
water use amid a historic drought say they’re optimistic a
consensus will be reached by states before a Feb. 1 deadline
even though the negotiations are in a delicate place. If the
seven Western states don’t reach consensus, the Interior
Department’s Bureau of Reclamation will consider mandating
water cuts—a move the states are working feverishly to avoid.
More than likely, “we’re going to end up with some kind of
hybrid outcome in which we have agreement in part, and some
mandatory imposed outcomes from the federal government,” said
Tom Buschatzke …
As California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly
atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the
recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic
rains the state has experienced throughout its history and not
the result of global warming. Although scientists are still
studying the size and severity of storms that killed 19 people
and caused up to $1 billion in damage, initial assessments
suggest the destruction had more to do with California’s
historic drought-to-deluge cycles, mountainous topography and
aging flood infrastructure than it did with climate-altering
greenhouse gasses. Although the media and some officials were
quick to link a series of powerful storms to climate change,
researchers interviewed by The Times said they had yet to see
evidence of that connection.
Rainfall from the recent storms in California have been an
encouraging sign for rice farmers in the north state. Lake
Oroville, which feeds water to farmers along the Feather River,
has surpassed its historical average capacity for this time of
year with its elevation measured at about 779 feet on
Sunday, a rise of more than 100 feet since Dec. 1. The lake is
at 56% of its total capacity and carries more water now than
last year’s highest recorded capacity of 55% in May
2022… Colleen Cecil, executive director of Butte County
Farm Bureau, said conversations about how much water will be
allocated to farmers are happening now, but that the area will
likely have enough water to produce as much or more than last
year.
A chorus of Republicans and moderate Democrats in the San
Joaquin Valley has called for the Newsom administration to ease
pumping restrictions and export more water to drought-stricken
regions of the state. For two weeks a surge of floodwater
flowed nearly unimpeded through the Sacramento–San Joaquin
Delta and into the bay. It was another missed opportunity to
seize on a wet year to export and store more water, argued the
lawmakers. Climate extremes and a lack of preparation underline
the challenge. But the fault lies with an inflexible process
for updating the pumping permits rather than on water managers,
according to a group of irrigation districts and water agencies
with contracts for the exports. This week the same regulatory
inertia put up another obstacle in the way of Delta pumping.
When Kitty Bolte looked at her yard at the start of
California’s powerful winter storms, she saw more than half a
foot of standing water behind her house. At first Bolte, a
horticulturalist by trade, contemplated pumping it out onto the
street. But with the historic rains coming in the midst of a
historic drought, that seemed oddly wasteful. So instead, she
and her boyfriend decided to save it. They found a neighbor
selling IBC totes – large 330-gallon plastic containers
surrounded by wire – on Craigslist, and filled them up using an
inexpensive Home Depot pump. They also dragged some spare
garbage cans outside to sit under the downpour, gathering 800
gallons in all. … One inch of rain on a 1,000 sq ft roof
can result in 600 gallons of water – enough to water
a 4 by 8 ft food garden for 30 weeks. In her cisterns,
Dougherty collects much more – 2,000 gallons at a time that are
stored in large plastic vessels that can be closed off.
California voters approved a ballyhooed $7.5-billion bond issue
eight-plus years ago thinking the state would build dams and
other vital water facilities. But it hasn’t built zilch. True
or false? That’s the rap: The voters were taken. The state
can’t get its act together. Republicans and agriculture
interests in particular make that charge, but the complaint
also is widespread throughout the state. There’s some
truth in the allegation. But it’s basically a bum rap. No dams
have been built, that’s true. But one will be and two will be
expanded. And hundreds of other smaller projects have been
completed. -Written by LA Times columnist George Skelton.
As drought persists and future impacts of climate change
threaten, salmonids across the state will increasingly seek out
refuge from warming waters. Cold-water streams like Big
Mill Creek, a tributary to the East Fork of the Scott River,
offer important refuge for these fish including the federal and
state threatened coho salmon. In the next few years, CalTrout,
with the support of The Wildlands Conservancy and our project
partners, will prepare to implement a project to restore fish
access to upstream habitat in Big Mill Creek creating impacts
that could ripple throughout the whole watershed. … Much
of the river is warm, but there are cold-water pockets where
thousands of coho salmon can be found.
California may be flooding, but the multiyear drought is far
from over. It only makes sense that the city of Bakersfield has
its eye on reducing water use over the long term on city-owned
properties and streetscaping along Bakersfield’s busy avenues
and major traffic arteries. It’s why the city has begun taking
advantage of incentives offered by California Water Service Co.
that have the potential to return hundreds of thousands of
dollars to city coffers, while saving millions of gallons of
water annually. CalWater has established a program for
customers, both big and small, that incentivizes turf
replacement with drought-tolerant landscaping, sometimes called
xeriscape. The program reimburses CalWater’s account holders up
to $3 for each square foot of turf removed.
“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years,
and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the
dry years. It was always that way.” Sadly, nothing much has
changed in California and the Salinas Valley since 1952, when
John Steinbeck wrote those words for the opening chapters of
his novel, “East of Eden.” As a result, the atmospheric rivers
drenching the state have been a decidedly mixed blessing. The
rainfall means for the first time in more than two years, the
majority of California is no longer in a severe drought. The
Sierra snowpack is at 226% of average for this time of year,
the largest we’ve seen in more than two decades. Reservoirs are
filling at a rapid rate. … Then there’s the bad news,
starting of course with the deaths of 17 Californians …
Across the sun-cooked flatlands of the Imperial Valley, water
flows with uncanny abundance. The valley, which straddles the
U.S.-Mexico border, is naturally a desert. Yet canals here are
filled with water, lush alfalfa grows from sodden soil and rows
of vegetables stretch for miles. … But now, as a
record-breaking megadrought and endless withdrawals wring the
Colorado River dry, Imperial Valley growers will have to cut
back on the water they import. The federal government has told
seven states to come up with a plan by Jan. 31 to reduce their
water supply by 30%, or 4 million acre feet. The Imperial
Valley is by far the largest user of water in the Colorado
River’s lower basin — consuming more water than all of Arizona
and Nevada combined in 2022 — so growers there will have to
find ways to sacrifice the most.
Without a doubt, weeks of rain and snow since late December are
absolutely helping with California’s water supply. But how much
help exactly is a question many have been asking. KCRA 3 Chief
Meteorologist Mark Finan goes over where water reservoirs in
Northern California stand. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot of good
news. … Shasta is the state’s biggest reservoir, able to
hold 4 1/2 million acre-feet of water. As of Jan. 17, it stands
at 52% capacity compared to 34% a year ago. … As of Jan.
17, [Folsom] is at 54% capacity compared to 56% a year
ago. The thing to understand about Folsom’s capacity right now
is that it is already in flood control mode, meaning that water
is already being released to balance out the reservoir because
there is still plenty of the year to go. And then there’s the
snowpack to consider when it melts.
A massive amount of water is moving through the Sacramento–San
Joaquin Delta in the wake of recent storms, and calls have
risen from all quarters to capture more of this bounty while
it’s here. We spoke with PPIC Water Policy Center adjunct
fellow Greg Gartrell to understand what’s preventing that—and
to dispel the myth of “water wasted to the sea.”
… People complain that we’re wasting water to the ocean.
While it’s true that there are pumping restrictions right now
to protect fish, the maximum the projects could be pumping is
about 14,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), not quite double what
they’re currently pumping (8,000 cfs on Jan 12). With current
outflows at about 150,000 cfs, we’d still see 144,000 cfs
flowing to the ocean if they were pumping without restrictions.
Last week, days after a bomb cyclone (coupled with a series of
atmospheric rivers, some of the Pineapple Express variety) took
devastating aim at California, a downtown conference center
here was inundated by the forces responsible — not for the
pounding rain and wind but for the forecast. Scores of the
world’s most authoritative meteorologists and weather
scientists gathered to share the latest research at the 103rd
meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The subject
line of an email to participants on the first day projected
optimism — “Daily Forecast: A Flood of Scientific Knowledge.”
But there were troubling undercurrents. Scientists are in
consensus on the increasing frequency of extreme weather events
— the blizzard in Buffalo, flooding in Montecito, Calif.,
prolonged drought in East Africa — and their worrisome impacts.
At the Denver meeting, however, there was another growing
worry: how people talk about the weather.
As flood flows and dam releases follow a series of atmospheric
rivers in California, a sea of bureaucracy complicates the
ability of water contractors to make use of runoff. This month,
the Bureau of Reclamation began releasing water from Friant Dam
into the San Joaquin River. But unlike in 2017, when
Californians also experienced a wet year, the Bureau of
Reclamation and State Water Resources Control Board made excess
water available to growers. Even though the water passes
through water infrastructure owned and operated by the federal
government, permits to deliver that water are still granted by
State Water Resources Control Board. Since 2017, the Control
Board changed rules that flows from Friant Dam into Mendota
Pool could only be delivered to Friant Division contractors.
Some might think that the recent rain would be good for
Southern California’s farms. But, water has inundated fields,
destroying crops and putting some farmworkers out of work. Some
workers were out in the muddy fields Monday trying to pick
fruits and vegetables as quickly as possible to get them out to
market. Berta Leon works in a strawberry field and says the
fruit can get damaged when the fields get too much water. It’s
a complete loss for the owner of the field, as well as the
workers because they lose out on work. Some workers said while
the rain is welcome, some can’t be out in the fields because
it’s too dangerous.
Developers planning to build homes in the desert west of
Phoenix don’t have enough groundwater supplies to move forward
with their plans, a state modeling report found. Plans to
construct homes west of the White Tank Mountains will require
alternative sources of water to proceed as the state grapples
with a historic megadrought and water shortages, according to
the report. Water sources are dwindling across the Western
United States and mounting restrictions on the Colorado River
are affecting all sectors of the economy, including
homebuilding. But amid a nationwide housing shortage,
developers are bombarding Arizona with plans to build homes
even as water shortages worsen.
Emergency water deliveries started last week after a
coordinated effort between the Water Authority, Otay Water
District, and Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California (MWD). The typical multi-month approval process was
compressed into a few days to avoid additional water supply
shortages in Tijuana. … Cross-border emergency deliveries
started more than 50 years ago and are governed by an agreement
between the United States and Mexico to provide Tijuana with a
portion of Mexico’s Colorado River supply. The Water Authority
provides emergency water deliveries to Mexico through a
cross-border connection in Otay Mesa.
The most drenching storms in the past five years have soaked
Northern California, sending billions of gallons of water
pouring across the state after three years of severe drought.
But 94% of the water that has flowed since New Year’s Eve
through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a linchpin of
California’s water system, has continued straight to the
Pacific Ocean instead of being captured and stored in the
state’s reservoirs. Environmental regulations aimed at
protecting a two-inch-long fish, the endangered Delta smelt,
have required the massive state and federal pumps near Tracy to
reduce pumping rates by nearly half of their full limit,
sharply curbing the amount of water that can be saved for farms
and cities to the south.
Coming into this winter, California was mired in a three-year
drought, with forecasts offering little hope of relief anytime
soon. Fast forward to today, and the state is waterlogged with
as much as 10 to 20 inches of rain and up to 200 inches of snow
that have fallen in some locations in the past three weeks….
The [Climate Prediction Center's] initial outlook for this
winter, issued on Oct. 20, favored below-normal precipitation
in Southern California and did not lean toward either drier- or
wetter-than-normal conditions in Northern California.
… The stark contrast between the staggering amount of
precipitation in recent weeks and the CPC’s seasonal
precipitation outlook issued before the winter, which leaned
toward below-normal precipitation for at least half of
California, has water managers lamenting the unreliability of
seasonal forecasts.
Growing up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Andrew
Schwartz never missed an opportunity to play in – or study
– a Colorado snowstorm. During major blizzards, he would
traipse out into the icy wind and heavy drifts of snow
pretending to be a scientist researching in
Antarctica. Decades later, still armed with an
obsession for extreme weather, Schwartz has landed in one of
the snowiest places in the West, leading a research lab whose
mission is to give California water managers instant
information on the depth and quality of snow draping the slopes
of the Sierra Nevada.
In 2014, during the throes of last decade’s drought, California
voters approved billions of dollars for infrastructure that
would catch and store much-needed water from winter storms. The
hope was to amass water in wet times and save it for dry times.
Nearly 10 years later, none of the major storage projects,
which include new and expanded reservoirs, has gotten off the
ground. California reservoir levels: Charts show water supply
across the state As the state experiences a historic bout of
rain and snow this winter, amid another severe water shortage,
critics are lamenting the missed opportunity to capture more of
the extraordinary runoff that has been swelling rivers,
flooding towns and pouring into the sea.
It seems like such a no brainer: Grab the floodwater inundating
California right now and shove it into our dried up aquifers
for later use. But water plus California never equals simple.
Yes, farmers and water districts can, legally, grab water from
the state’s overflowing rivers, park it on their land and it
will recharge the groundwater. But if those farmers and
districts want to claim any kind of ownership over that water
later, they can’t. Not without a permit. And permits are
costly, time consuming and overly complicated, according to
critics. Farmers and districts in some areas are taking flood
water independently in order to relieve problems for people
downstream. But there just isn’t a large-scale,
systematic way for water agencies and farmers to absorb the
current deluge and store it for future use, mostly because of
regulatory hurdles, critics say.
The survival — or at least the basic sustenance — of hundreds
in a desert community amid the horse ranches and golf courses
outside Phoenix now rests on a 54-year-old man with a plastic
bucket of quarters. John Hornewer picked up a quarter and put
it in the slot. The lone water hose at a remote public filling
station sputtered to life and splashed 73 gallons into the
steel tank of … Some living here amid the cactus
and creosote bushes see themselves as the first domino to fall
as the Colorado River tips further into crisis. On
Jan. 1, the city of Scottsdale, which gets the majority of its
water from the Colorado River, cut off Rio Verde Foothills from
the municipal water supply that it has relied on for
decades. … [T]he federal government is now pressing
seven states to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet more, up to 30
percent of the river’s annual average flow.
As Wallace Stegner, “the dean of Western writers,” once
observed, California is like the rest of America, only more so.
It’s a reference to the state’s character, but it could just as
easily apply to its weather. Extreme wildfires. Prolonged
drought. And now, massive rain and flooding. In a surprise
pummeling, along with the new year has come an unusually large
number of powerful, back-to-back atmospheric rivers: narrow
bands through the atmosphere that carry water vapor. They have
flowed the length of the state – and blown destruction eastward
across the United States. In the Golden State, they’re dumping
rainfall that’s 400% to 600% above average in some places,
forcing mass evacuations, closing highways, shutting down
power, and killing 19 people.
The current wet spell, made up of a parade of atmospheric
rivers, is a welcome change from the last three years of record
dry and warm conditions. For very good reasons, the focus
during these big, early winter storms is first and foremost on
flood management and public safety. There is of course also
great interest in the potential of these storms to relieve
water shortages for communities and farms. What is not always
appreciated is the role of these early winter storms in
supporting the health of freshwater ecosystems. For millennia,
California’s biodiversity evolved strategies to take advantage
of these infrequent, but critical high flow events. Benefits
from recent storms are now being realized throughout the state,
from temperate rainforests of the North Coast to semi-arid and
arid rivers in the south.
The Governor’s January Budget forecasts General Fund revenues
will be $29.5 billion lower than at the 2022 Budget Act
projections, and California now faces an estimated budget gap
of $22.5 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023-24. … Some
highlights from the Governor’s January Budget include: The
Budget maintains $8.6 billion (98 percent) of previously
committed funding to minimize the immediate economic and
environmental damage from the current drought and support
hundreds of local water projects to prepare for and be more
resilient to future droughts. Delta Levees—$40.6 million
General Fund for ongoing Delta projects that reduce risk of
levee failure and flooding, provide habitat benefits, and
reduce the risk of saltwater intrusion contaminating water
supplies.
Even as a storms shower California with rain and snow, state
water regulators announced this week that they’re revisiting
their effort to protect Mono Lake from the ravages of drought,
agreeing to review how much water the city of Los Angeles is
taking from the basin and whether it’s too much. The
announcement, which has already begun drawing backlash from
Southern California, comes as the giant salt lake and
ecological curiosity on the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada
has becoming increasingly dry in recent years. The freshly
exposed lakebed has been sending toxic dust into skies and
creating a land bridge to islands where hungry coyotes threaten
to prey on nesting birds.
At the end of last year, the seven states in the Colorado River
Basin committed to once again work together and negotiate a
consensus framework for making significant cuts to water use,
an attempt to stabilize the nation’s two largest reservoirs and
avoid an even deeper shortage crisis. The states recommitted to
considering a consensus deal, by Jan. 31, after several
deadlines passed in 2022 — with seemingly irreconcilable
differences over how to make painful cuts in a watershed relied
upon by 40 million people who use the river for drinking water
and agriculture. …… Of note was the comment letter from
Nevada, which outlined a possible framework to achieve
consensus. It was the only state-led letter that suggested a
comprehensive framework. In fact, two other letters
specifically refer to the Nevada plan as a starting point for
the state discussions….
No, California’s drought is not over, not by a long shot. But
weeks of near-constant rainfall have improved the situation
considerably, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s weekly
report released Thursday. The map updated Thursday shows most
of the state in moderate or severe drought after about seven
atmospheric river storms swept through the state since
Christmas Day. Only a small portion in the extreme northeastern
portion of the state remains in extreme drought, while the
northwestern corner of the state and much of Imperial County
dropped to the lowest level of drought, termed abnormally dry.
The Sacramento and Central valleys, which were in extreme and
extraordinary drought just three months ago, have seen
conditions improve to severe.
Even in the middle of a cool and wet winter in the Coachella
Valley and California in general, officials of the Coachella
Valley Water District have a blunt message for the desert’s
golf course industry: Take the ongoing drought seriously,
because changes could be coming to water availability sooner
rather than later. … Golf course superintendents and
general managers from throughout the desert listened to
presentations on advances in drought-tolerant grasses and
technological advances that can help save water on the desert’s
120 courses. But Cheng and Pete Nelson, a director of the CVWD,
made the more important presentation on the state of the
Colorado basin and how water from the Colorado River can no
longer be counted on as a long-term solution to irrigation
needs for golf courses or agriculture in the desert.
A group of Assembly Republican lawmakers gathered on a levee on
the American River in Sacramento to call out the state’s
Democratic leadership for failing to invest in water
infrastructure to aid with flooding and water
storage. Around 22 trillion gallons of rain will fall in
California according to estimates. However, state Assembly
Republicans blame the lack of infrastructure as the root cause
for why most of the water will go uncaptured. … In 2014,
voters supported a water bond that authorized billions of
dollars to go toward state water supply infrastructure and
water storage projects. Since then, no new reservoir or other
water project has been built.
A New Mexico town that is intimately aware of the water supply
risks from a drying climate could receive up to $140 million to
rebuild its water system after the largest wildfire in state
history tore through its watershed last year. Besides being a
lifeline, the funds also illustrate the financial and
ecological vulnerability of small, high-poverty communities in
the face of extreme weather. In the fiscal year 2023 budget
that President Joe Biden signed just before the new year,
Congress set aside $1.45 billion for post-fire recovery in New
Mexico. That’s in addition to $2.5 billion that lawmakers had
already directed to the state, bringing the total amount of
federal aid after the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire to nearly
$4 billion.
Faced with ongoing drought, farmers in California have
sought ways to find a precious natural resource: water. In the
San Joaquin Valley, an area in central California known as the
breadbasket of the world, people have long bolstered the water
supply by pumping from underground basins. But experts say
people have been overdrafting groundwater for years.
Agriculture is a booming industry in California, employing
around 420,000 people across the state and supplying more than
400 different types of crops to consumers around the world. But
with limited access to water, and with rain and snow hard to
come by, reservoir levels are at record lows. Rivers have even
dried up.
A series of atmospheric river storms since Christmas has
significantly reduced California’s drought, the federal
government concluded Thursday. For the first time in more than
two years — since Dec. 1, 2020 — the majority of the state is
no longer in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, a weekly report put out by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Overall, 46% of
California’s land area remains in severe drought, the report
found, a dramatic improvement over the past month, when it was
85% on Dec. 6.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Jan. 10 unveiled his proposed budget for
the next fiscal year … [T]he governor has proposed
timely new funding for flood risk reduction and protection, as
well as several other important water management issues.
Specifically, the governor’s proposed budget calls for funding
in the following categories. Urban Flood Risk Reduction —
$135.5 million over two years to support local agencies working
to reduce urban flood risk. Delta Levee — $40.6 million
for ongoing Delta projects that reduce risk of levee failure
and flooding, provide habitat benefits, and reduce the risk of
saltwater intrusion contaminating water supplies. Central
Valley Flood Protection — $25 million to support projects that
will reduce the risk of flooding for Central Valley communities
while contributing to ecosystem restoration and agricultural
sustainability.
Water from the Colorado River covers more than a third of
Arizona’s total water usage, but the state is increasingly
losing access to that supply. The state is no longer in what
Terry Goddard, the president of the Central Arizona Water
Conservation District Board of Directors, called “a fool’s
paradise.” Arizona had maintained a surplus of water since the
mid-1980s, but that’s not the case today. Now, it’s losing
water, and it’s losing it fast. That loss, and potential future
loss, was the focal point of Arizona’s state legislature
Tuesday, starting with a presentation from the Central Arizona
Project on the status of the state’s water supply in which
legislators heard about the tensions between Arizona and other
Colorado River Basin states over access to groundwater.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which
requires local agencies to form Groundwater Sustainability
Agencies (GSAs) to adopt Groundwater Sustainability Plans
(GSPs) to ensure sustainable groundwater management in all
high- and medium-priority groundwater basins, is well into its
implementation phase. The deadlines for GSAs to submit GSPs for
all high- and medium-priority basins have passed, and the
Department of Water Resources continues to issue determinations
on submitted GSPs. As GSPs are approved, GSAs have begun to
pursue projects to implement their GSPs, primarily comprising
groundwater recharge projects. These projects are generally
subject to the requirements of the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA), which mandates environmental review of
discretionary public agency actions.
As Lake Mead continues to decline toward dead pool, federal
officials are requesting the Colorado River states to
offer major cuts in water usage. Nevada has responded with a
detailed and innovative plan set forth in a December 20,
2022 letter to the Bureau of Reclamation, calling for
basic reform of water management throughout the entire Colorado
River system. … Arizona and California have not responded in
public. They remain on the sidelines, unable to
summon the political will to either agree or to propose an
alternative. The reason Arizona and California are
internally deadlocked can be summed up in one word:
agriculture. Irrigated agriculture uses more than 70 percent
of the water allocated to the two states from Lake
Mead. -Written by Bruce Babbitt, an attorney and politician
from the state of Arizona, and President Bill Clinton’s
secretary of the Interior from 1993 to 2001.
Facing heated pushback from growers, Madera County officials
decided to maintain current groundwater pumping allotments for
the next two years rather than reduce allocations over that
time. At its Jan. 10 meeting, Board of Supervisors also
considered increasing penalties for growers who exceed pumping
allocations in the Madera, Chowchilla, and Delta-Mendota
subbasins as part of an effort to raise money for projects
geared toward bringing more water into the critically over
drafted region. Madera County has been the site of an
escalating battle over how to reduce groundwater pumping and
who should pay for new water projects.
A comprehensive overhaul of water policy affecting the San
Joaquin Valley is back on the table, courtesy of Rep. David
Valadao (R–Hanford). Valadao initially introduced the Working
to Advance Tangible and Effective Reforms (WATER) for
California Act last September and is bringing it back, this
time with a Republican-controlled House. The entire California
Republican delegation joined Valadao as co-sponsors on the
bill. … What’s in it: If it passes, the act will
require the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water
Project (SWP) to be operated consistent with the 2019 Trump-era
biological opinions, which have been under fire by the Biden
administration.
As Californians struggled to deal with a grueling drought that
has led to water rationing and other extreme water-conservation
measures, Mother Nature has this week intervened with an
atmospheric river that has led to massive rainfalls and
flooding — especially up in our end of the state. This cycle of
drought and flooding is nothing new. … Unfortunately,
California has left itself dependent on the weather (or
climate, if you prefer) because it hasn’t built significant
water infrastructure since the time that essay was published —
when the state had roughly 18 million fewer residents. Some
environmentalists argue against building water storage when
there’s little rain, but they only are correct if it doesn’t
rain again. History suggests the rains will always come —
at least eventually, and this week’s ongoing series of storms
is a whopper of an example.
Erik Porse joined the University of California Agriculture and
Natural Resources (UC ANR) on Jan. 11 as director of the
California Institute for Water Resources (CIWR). Porse has
built an outstanding career in water as a research engineer
with the Office of Water Programs at California State
University, Sacramento and an assistant adjunct professor with
UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. His
research focuses on urban and water resources management. He
specializes in bringing together interdisciplinary teams to
investigate complex environmental management questions.
Vendors at the Ocean Beach farmers market are singing rain’s
praises after a series of storms that have passed through San
Diego. … While farmers say the rain makes their
fruits and vegetables pop, they say it also helps them
save money and the environment. … Pasqual said the
farm he works for could save a couple grand from being able to
turn off the irrigation system. … As California
has suffered through a devastating multi-year drought,
giving irrigation systems a vacation after the rain is a
critical part of much-needed conservation, according to the San
Diego County Water Authority.
California is the most populous state in the nation and the
nation’s biggest agricultural producer. That combination can
occasionally lead to misunderstandings between consumers in
cities and suburbs and growers in farming communities. That
extends to public perceptions about decisions farmers make to
grow crops such as alfalfa. The crop is an important part of
our food chain that most of us depend on every day. But very
few people understand that. … We see it all the time when
water supplies are scarce. Critics emerge, confident that they
know how the state should manage water resources and what crops
farmers should and shouldn’t be growing. -Written by Mike Wade, executive director of the
California Farm Water Coalition.
The chairmen of the Ute Mountain Ute and the Southern Ute
tribes spoke in a joint address to the state legislature on
Wednesday. It was the first time, under a new state law, that
the tribal leaders were invited to address state lawmakers.
Over the course of about 30 minutes, the two leaders shared the
history of their communities and asked for lawmakers’ help on
specific issues. Here are a few. Manuel Heart, chairman of
the Ute Mountain Ute, said the tribe needs help to access the
water for which it already holds rights. … Heart said
the state should partner with the tribe to work on a pipeline
from Lake Nighthorse to Montezuma County. The tribes also
deserve a greater role in water planning among the Colorado
River basin states, he said.
As California wrangles with a projected $22 billion budget
deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed cutting most heavily
from programs designed to help the state confront the worsening
effects of climate change. Newsom’s proposed budget, which he
released Tuesday, would cut a net $6 billion from the state’s
climate efforts. Among the cuts: subsidies for electric
vehicles; funding for clean energy programs, such as battery
storage and solar panels; and money for programs to help
low-income people deal with extreme heat waves. Climate
activists and some progressive legislators said they were wary
of the move, particularly as another atmospheric river drenched
much of the state and brought flooding to communities from
Santa Cruz to San Diego….Among the other proposed cuts to
climate programs and projects in Newsom’s budget: … $194
million for drought preparation and response
It’s been a wild couple of weeks of weather in Northern
California. But there is a rather bright silver lining to this
train of storms: our surface water supply is getting a big
boost. Here’s a look at some of the highlights. On
Oct. 1, 2022, the start of the new water year for California,
reservoir levels were woefully low throughout the state. But
after an active December and now a very busy January, water
levels are rising quickly. Folsom was the fastest reservoir to
fill up to the seasonal benchmark. There’s no surprise there,
given that it’s one of the smallest in the region.
… Reservoirs are steadily filling up with runoff from
rainfall and later this season, there will be plenty of
snowmelt to look forward to. As of Tuesday, the statewide
snowpack is at 214% of average for the date.
Adán Ortega, Jr. took the helm today of Metropolitan Water
District’s Board of Directors as the 20th chair and first
Latino to lead the board in the district’s 95-year
history. In addition to his installation, Ortega welcomed
three new directors who took their seats to represent the
Calleguas, Central Basin and Eastern municipal water districts
on the 38-member board. Ortega, who has represented the city of
San Fernando on the board since March 2021, took his oath of
office in a boardroom filled with family, elected officials,
community leaders, mentors and friends.
It wasn’t so long ago that California prayed for rain.
Something to quench the climate-change-fueled drought — the
worst in at least 1,200 years — that has caused farm fields to
wither and wells to run dry…. Now, the water that
Californians so desperately wanted is pummeling them like a
curse….The recent onslaught of atmospheric rivers has
underscored the perils of California’s climate paradox: Rising
global temperatures are making the region drier, hotter and
more fire-prone, but they also increase the likelihood of
sudden, severe rainfall. Experts say the state is not prepared
for periods of too much water, even as it struggles to make do
without enough.
Record drought in the American West contributes to a growing
number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across
the country, and the quickening pace of large-scale events
makes recovery slower and pricier, according to a new report
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Drought covered 63% of the contiguous United States on Oct. 25,
the largest such footprint since the severe drought of 2012,
according to the report, released Tuesday at Denver’s national
convention for the American Meteorological Society. Forty
percent or more of the lower 48 states has been in drought for
the past 119 weeks, a record in more than 20 years of the U.S.
Drought Monitor reports. That’s approaching double the previous
record of 68 weeks begun in 2012’s drought.
The Wyoming State Legislature begins its lawmaking session this
week. One bill, called the “Colorado River Authority of Wyoming
Act,” would create a board and commissioner to manage Wyoming’s
water in the Colorado River Basin. The system drains about 17
percent of the Cowboy State’s land area and is critical for
agriculture, energy development and residential use in cities.
The entire Colorado River Basin is currently under stress due
to drought conditions and human development in the Southwest.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Albert Sommers (R-Pinedale) and
Sen. Larry Hicks (R-Baggs) is similar to those previously
passed in several other states that depend on the Colorado
River.
The recent atmospheric river that brought record rainfall and
snow to parts of the west coast also boosted Colorado’s
mountain snowfall totals. Several rounds of heavy snowfall like
the mountains have recently seen is the dream of every skier
and snowboarder, and it’s also a big help to the state’s
drought conditions. This boost helped Steamboat Springs
become the first resort of the season to surpass the benchmark.
It now has 225 inches so far this season. Ski areas like
Silverton and Winter Park aren’t too far from hitting 200 with
about 167 inches so far. Places like Wolf Cree, Breckenridge,
and Keystone have also seen some impressive totals for this
point in the season.
While many areas of California are coping with the destructive
impact of relentless rainfall, the news is nothing but good
when it comes to the state’s snowpack. As of Monday,
California’s snow water equivalent was 199% of normal for the
date (January 9), according to the California Department of
Water Resources. … Water experts are reluctant to signal too
much optimism since last winter California also saw snow
accumulate to above-average levels through December, only to
see January, February and March become the driest on record.
Lake Mead will need more than just rainfall to replenish
itself, an expert has told Newsweek. Spread between Nevada and
Arizona—Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the
U.S.—is best known for its rapidly declining water levels due
to the ongoing megadrought gripping the western states. The
lake is integral to surrounding communities, as it is also
formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River—which generates
electricity for thousands of people. If the water levels
continue to decline, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Water levels at the lake have risen slightly thanks to heavy
rainfall sweeping across the region.
California has gone from extreme drought to extreme flooding in
a matter of days. On Monday, 90% of the state’s population was
under a flood watch as another round of storms rolled through.
Yet it was just last week when several counties in the state
were experiencing the exact opposite – exceptional drought,
which the US Drought Monitor considers the most severe
category. … But the abrupt shift from drought warnings to
flood warnings highlights the dilemma California faces: How do
you manage an overwhelming amount of rain in a water-scarce
state? And is it possible to harness that water so it’s
available in the dry summer months? Part of the solution,
climate scientists told CNN, is drawing levees back to allow
rivers more room to flood safely into surrounding land.
With the arrival of a series of atmospheric rivers in recent
weeks, drought-weary Californians are now confronting the
weather whiplash that is a hallmark of our state’s climate.
Flooding, power outages, and downed trees are now dominating
the news. It’s a remarkable shift from the past few years,
which saw the driest three-year period in the state’s recorded
history. And while it’s tempting to think the drought is now
over, it’s not—and if anything, the recent shift in conditions
highlights just how much Californians need to prepare for
wetter wets and drier dries. The past year was very important
for California water. Water managers found ways to innovate and
adapt.
California could get 22 trillion gallons of rain in the coming
days. But what does that mean for the state’s drought? In a
perennial problem that even when California does get rain, much
of it runs off into the ocean or is otherwise uncollected. But
there’s new storm water technology that could help change that,
scientists say, as the decades-old discipline shifts to help
water managers collect rainwater, purify it and store it for
times of drought. Much of the new technology is often
referred to as “green infrastructure,” … To learn
more, The Washington Post talked with Andrew Fisher, a
professor of hydrogeology at the University of California in
Santa Cruz, and David Feldman, the director of the University
of California Irvine’s water institute.
Colorado Springs will be making decisions this week that will
impact its growth and development for decades to come. The
following issues will be discussed by local leaders this week.
Check back here for updates on how they voted. Water supply The
city is considering an ordinance that would impact how and
where Colorado Springs extends its water service. The city
wants to make sure there’s enough water as it continues to
grow. Currently, Colorado Springs Utilities is required to
maintain a surplus water supply. But there’s no definition of
how much extra that actually is. So what they want to do is
define it as a 30 percent buffer between supply and demand,
calculated on a five-year rolling average. … Half the
city’s water comes from the Colorado River Basin, which is
threatened by drought and overuse.
A team of scientists that pioneered methods to observe changes
in global groundwater stores over the past two decades using a
specialized NASA satellite mission has made a surprising
discovery about the aquifers that supply California’s Central
Valley region. Despite the Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act adopted in 2014 to prevent overpumping and stabilize the
aquifers, the groundwater depletion rate has accelerated to a
point where groundwater could disappear over the next several
decades. The act gives the state’s local groundwater management
districts until 2042 to reach sustainability
goals. Renowned water scientist Jay Famiglietti is the
lead researcher of a scientific team that published a
paper in Nature Communications in December 2022 that
details their analysis.
Tucson Assistant City Manager Tim Thomure joined a unanimous
vote last month by a state water board that will allow for
state-run discussions with an Israeli firm over its proposal
for a $5.5 billion desalination plant in Puerto Peñasco on the
Gulf of California. The Water Infrastructure Authority of
Arizona voted 9-0 on Dec. 20, following a fierce,
afternoon-long debate, to authorize its staff to prepare an
analysis of the project. If the analysis finds the proposal
meets state requirements, the board chairman can negotiate an
agreement with the company to deliver desalted water to Arizona
at agreed upon terms including costs.
Higher-than-normal rainfall during the past month has
dramatically changed Lake Shasta, with the water level of
California’s largest reservoir rising 60 feet since the end of
December. Gone are vast areas of shoreline that became parking
lots and campgrounds as the lake dried up and the water level
dropped during the past several years of low rainfall in the
North State. By Monday, the lake was 56% full, an improvement
over the 34% recorded Jan. 3. The California Department of
Water Resources said the lake was 87% of normal as of Monday,
compared to the 57% of normal at the beginning of January.
Growing up in the shadow of the
Rocky Mountains, Andrew Schwartz never missed an opportunity to
play in – or study – a Colorado snowstorm. During major
blizzards, he would traipse out into the icy wind and heavy
drifts of snow pretending to be a scientist researching in
Antarctica.
Decades later, still armed with an obsession for extreme weather,
Schwartz has landed in one of the snowiest places in the West,
leading a research lab whose mission is to give California water
managers instant information on the depth and quality of snow
draping the slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
As rain has deluged our parched state since New Year’s Eve,
many Californians have found themselves asking a familiar
question: Is this somehow because of El Niño? In the California
imagination, the climate pattern known as El Niño has an almost
mythological status as a harbinger of prolonged wet spells,
while its counterpart, La Niña, is associated with drought. The
past three years have been La Niña years. The continuing
procession of storms this winter has drawn comparisons to the
famed wet winter of 1997-98, when rain driven by El Niño
drenched the Golden State. Californians are bracing for one of
the season’s most intense storms to date on Monday and Tuesday.
But Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that El Niño hasn’t taken over —
yet.
A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power,
downing trees, dumping massive amounts of water. Now, that last
one, massive amounts of water – it’s interesting because all
that rain is hitting in a state that has been stricken with
drought. Some California residents are watching this precious
resource wash away and wondering, why can’t we save the water
for later, for times when we desperately need it? Well, Andrew
Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor at UC Santa Cruz,
attempted to answer that question in an op-ed for The LA Times.
And we have brought him here to try to answer it for us.
Professor Fisher, welcome.
The torrential rainfall across much of central and northern
California may have helped to pull a tiny piece of the state
out of drought. Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor shows that
while 97.93 percent of California is experiencing some degree
of drought, the remaining 2.07 percent is only classified as
“abnormally dry.” … However, a lot more rain would be
needed to drag California out of its
decades-long megadrought, as short-term fluctuations in
how dry an area is at a given time is drastically different to
the long-term trend of dryness across the state.
The Colorado River can no longer withstand the thirst of the
arid West. Water drawn from the river flows to more than 40
million people in cities from Denver to Los Angeles and
irrigates more than 4 million acres of farmland. For
decades, the river has been entirely used up, leaving dusty
stretches of desert where it once flowed to the sea in Mexico.
Now, chronic overuse and the effects of climate change are
pushing the river system toward potential collapse as
reservoirs drop to dangerously low levels. … Colorado River
in Crisis is a series of stories, videos and podcasts in which
Los Angeles Times journalists travel throughout the river’s
watershed, from the headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the
river’s dry delta in Mexico.
Usually, bouts of rain are a good thing for drought-stricken
farmers. But in California, where a downpour has
triggered widespread flooding, much of the water will end up in
the sea rather than helping crops, like the state’s famed
almond groves. The recent deluge highlights a decades-long
dilemma: A lack of infrastructure to store and shuttle water to
growers who produce three-quarters of US fruits and
nuts and more than one-third of its
vegetables. … While the rain and snow are
desperately needed after the driest three-year
stretch on record and billions of dollars in crop losses, much
of the precipitation will likely end up as runoff.
The Sites Reservoir project has received additional funding
support from the Bureau of Reclamation. Last week, the project
received $80 million through the Water Infrastructure
Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN Act). The announcement
comes after an additional award of $30 million was provided to
the project through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
… The reservoir project will increase water storage capacity
in the state by 1.5 million acre-feet by capturing excess
stormwater from the Sacramento River. Sites Project Authority
has also been invited to apply for a $2.2 billion low-interest
loan through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Water
Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act. The entire project
is estimated to cost about $5.2 billion.
Elected officials in Marina have joined forces with three water
agencies in a lawsuit against the California Coastal Commission
over its tentative permitting in November of California
American Water Co.’s desalination project. The lawsuit, filed
in Monterey County Superior Court, cites plaintiffs as the city
of Marina, the Marina Coast Water District, the Monterey
Peninsula Water Management District and the Marina Coast Water
District Groundwater Sustainability Agency. The complaint
alleges the desal project is a “sprawling, expensive and
unnecessary” project that the Coastal Commission erroneously
and conditionally permitted that would have far-reaching
negative impacts on Marina and surrounding ecosystems.
The Bureau of Reclamation on Jan. 5 announced a $7 million
investment from President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
in 82 small-scale water efficiency projects across 14 western
states. In California, grant recipients included 17 ACWA member
agencies that will be able to apply the federal funding toward
total project costs. The grants will support local community
projects, including measuring water flow, automating water
delivery, or lining canals.
One hundred years ago — little more than a lifetime — nature
and the Colorado River conspired almost every spring to ravage
soil, rocks, vegetation and anything else in the river’s path
on its rapacious way to the Pacific Ocean. The river overran
its banks to flood California’s Imperial Valley plus other
low-lying ground in Arizona, Mexico and California. It filled
those valleys with fertile mountain soil. A few
forward-thinking humans dreamed of taming the mighty Colorado
River with a dam near Boulder Canyon. At the time, it was the
most ambitious and most expensive public works project ever
conceived – more ambitious and more expensive, relatively, than
rocket trips to the moon half a century later. -Written by Don Gale, long-time Utah
journalist.
The string of wet storms streaming over California since the
end of 2022 have brought the San Joaquin Valley both relief and
frustration, depending on location. In the Fresno area, flows
out of Millerton Lake into the San Joaquin River have nearly
tripled from 600 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 1,600
cfs. In the coming days the Bureau of Reclamation, which
operates Millerton’s Friant Dam, expects releases to exceed
4,500 cfs. That’s great for agricultural water districts
that take Millerton water on the northern end of the Friant
system. And it’s great for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, which aims to bring back native spring Chinook salmon
runs. … Meanwhile, water managers on the southern end of
the Friant system are watching those flows with more than a
little frustration.
In October 2022, water agencies in Southern California with
Colorado River water rights announced plans to reduce water
diversions. The agencies offered voluntary conservation of
400,000 acre-feet per year through 2026. This annual total is
nearly 10% of the state’s total annual usage rights for the
Colorado River. The cutbacks help prepare for long-term
implications of climate change for the river’s management,
which are starting to be acknowledged. In urban Southern
California, an important aspect of this need is reducing
imported water reliance through investments in local water
resources. … What would happen if Southern California
lost access to Colorado River water for an extended period?
In a special message about California weather, the National
Weather Service said that another atmospheric river would
arrive in Northern California Friday night and bring the
“threat of heavy rain (and) flooding on Saturday, along with
1-2 feet of snow and “dangerous” mountain travel conditions.
But that’s just a warm-up: A “stronger” atmospheric river is
expected to arrive Monday and persist into Tuesday, bring more
precipitation and gusty winds.
California drought conditions have improved significantly in
the past week, after a series of storms drenched the state. The
state has received 119% of the precipitation it normally gets
by this point in the water year, which begins on Oct. 1. The
statewide snowpack is also 179% of average for this time of the
year…. According to the map released Thursday morning by
the U.S. Drought Monitor, no part of California currently
falls under the category of exceptional drought, something that
hasn’t been the case since the map released on May 10, 2022.
And that update doesn’t include the impact of heavy storms that
swept through the Bay Area on Wednesday, downing trees and
flooding roadways.
The Rocky Mountains snow season is off to a well-above-average
start thanks to a recent surge of stormy weather across the
West. But whether it will be enough to buoy levels at Lake Mead
and along the Colorado River remains to be seen. The Upper
Colorado River Basin snowpack currently sits at 140 percent of
the median over the last 30 years, according to data from the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That’s in large part due to a
recent series of atmospheric river storm systems that swept
across much of the West right after Christmas, dumping ample
amounts of snow and rain.
The Los Angeles River roared to life this week as a series of
powerful storms moved through the Southland. In Long Beach, 3
feet of water shut down the 710 Freeway in both directions,
while flooding in the San Fernando Valley forced the closure of
the Sepulveda Basin. It was by all accounts a washout, but
despite heaps of water pouring into the area, drought-weary Los
Angeles won’t be able to save even half of it. The region’s
system of engineered waterways is designed to whisk L.A.’s
stormwater out to sea — a strategy intended to reduce flooding
that nonetheless sacrifices countless precious gallons.
President Joe Biden has approved three bills that will improve
access to water for three tribes in Arizona amid an unrelenting
drought. One of the measures that Biden signed Thursday
settles longstanding water rights claims for the Hualapai
Tribe, whose reservation borders a 100-mile (161-kilometer)
stretch of the Colorado River as it runs through the Grand
Canyon. Hualapai will have the right to divert up to 3,414
acre-feet of water per year, along with the ability to lease it
within Arizona.
Saline lakes are rapidly losing water to climate change and
agricultural and urban uses, becoming some of the West’s most
threatened ecosystems. Now, new legislation is offering some
support. On Dec. 27, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan
Saline Lake Ecosystems in the Great Basin States Program Act,
which allocates $25 million in funding for research and
monitoring at saline lakes across the Great Basin. While this
funding is an important step, it cannot give the lakes what
they really need: more water.
We don’t always treat water like the life-sustaining resource
it is. Instead, we take it for granted: With the turn of a tap,
it’s at our fingertips to drink, grow our food and keep our
communities clean. But according to the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, it’s time for changes if we want that to continue.
Their recently released American River Basin study highlights
the growing imbalance between water supply and consumer demand.
With the stresses of population growth, regulatory updates, and
the effects of climate change, this disparity will only get
worse without new strategies and approaches to keep water
flowing.
Arizona’s newly inaugurated Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has
no time to waste as she faces the daunting challenge of
addressing the state’s use of water from the overallocated
Colorado River. Arizona is one of three states in the
river’s Lower Basin, along with California and Nevada….last
year, the river’s waters dropped to a level that triggers
automatic allocation cuts from the federal Bureau of
Reclamation…. One of the “first and most important
thing[s]” directly under Hobbs’s control is something she’s
already done, according to Dave White, director of Arizona
State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and
Innovation. Ahead of her inauguration, Hobbs confirmed she’d
retain Tom Buschatzke as director of the state Department of
Water Resources.
California is in an impressive wet period. According to
the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, four
powerful atmospheric rivers have hit California since
Christmas. And their modeling suggests that at least three more
significant storms are on their way. It looks like January is
going to be a very wet month…. These atmospheric rivers—with
their intense low-pressure systems and warm, subtropical
moisture—are California’s version of hurricanes. The
combination of high rainfall rates and winds causes urban and
river flooding, as well as landslides and debris flows
(especially in areas that have recently burned), and routinely
knocks out power to thousands. But these storms also create an
awful lot of benefit for Californians.
A powerful winter storm unleashed heavy rain and
strong winds across Northern California on Wednesday,
triggering evacuations and power outages, and heightening fears
of widespread flooding and debris flows. … Wednesday’s
storm is the third atmospheric river that’s hit California in
the last two weeks. The successive storms have brought a deluge
of water to the drought-stricken state, prompting Gov. Newsom
to declare a state of emergency to “support response and
recovery efforts.” … The series of atmospheric rivers that
started toward the end of December was somewhat surprising
after one of California’s driest years on record, which left
reservoirs drained and soils parched.
As California battles a second week of lashing rain and snow
that have flooded communities, broken levees and toppled power
lines, the state is facing questions about whether its approach
to handling crippling storms is suited to 21st-century climate
threats. For decades, federal and state planners built dams and
levees in California to store water and keep it at bay. But as
climate change increases the risk of stronger and more
destructive storms — like the one that was battering Northern
California on Wednesday — experts and some policymakers are
urging another approach: giving rivers room to overflow.
For the past three years, California has been suffering under
the worst drought in state history. Key reservoirs have
bottomed out, farmers have left their fields unplanted, and
cities have forced residents to let their lawns go brown. Now
the state’s weather has taken a violent swing in the other
direction. A series of powerful “atmospheric river” storms …
have brought record-breaking precipitation to the Golden State
over the last two weeks…. Even if 2023 does end up a wet
year, it won’t prevent an ongoing water crisis, because surface
precipitation is only one pillar supporting the state’s water
needs. … And the other two pillars ensuring regular water
availability in the Golden State — groundwater and the Colorado
River — are facing crises that even a wet year won’t fix.
After two years of construction, Morro Bay’s Water Reclamation
Facility is ahead of schedule. According to Greg Kwolek,
director of Public Works, the expected completion date for the
facility was March 23, 2023, but the city already hit that
deadline set by the Regional Water Quality Control
Board…. The new facility … includes two new lift
stations as well as 3.5 miles of pipelines and wells that
inject purified water into the groundwater aquifer, which can
be reused through the city’s existing infrastructure.
Engineers and water experts knew for decades that growth in the
Colorado River Basin would eventually hit a tipping point. That
is, unless the states depending on the river found a new source
of water. One way to do that, civil engineer Royce J.
Tipton wrote in 1965, would be to pipe water in from somewhere
else, also referred to as “importing” water. One scheme
considered in the 50s and 60s (but never developed), the North
American Water and Power Alliance, proposed to pipe water from
rivers in Alaska and Canada south into the Colorado River’s
headwaters, among other places. … These canals and pipelines
are expensive to build, though, and take years.
Officials said Wednesday that the Sites Reservoir project,
which could provide 1.5 million acre-feet of additional water
storage capacity, was awarded $80 million in federal funding
from the Bureau of Reclamation via the Water Infrastructure
Improvements for the Nation Act. This federal initiative
provides grants for water supply infrastructure that promotes
drought resilience for rural communities and agriculture, urban
areas, public health and the environment.
With $5 million in funding from NOAA’s Climate Adaptation
Partners (CAP) initiative, the California Nevada Adaptation
Program (CNAP), a collaborative initiative between UC San
Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the DRI in
Reno, Nevada will work to expand climate research and focus on
building adaptation strategies. The program will last five
years and aim to empower local communities to use this
knowledge to make informed decisions in the face of long-term
drought, unprecedented wildfires, and extreme heat impacting
public health.
After three years of drought, California is beginning 2023 with
more snow on the ground than at any start to a year in a
decade. State water officials trekked into the Sierra Nevada to
conduct the first snow survey of the winter season on Tuesday,
reporting 174% of average statewide snowpack for the
date. The reams of powder come amid a series of
storms that is blasting Northern California and has piled
snow onto banks up to 16 feet high at major highway passes
through the mountains. Some ski resorts count 18 feet of snow
on the slopes. Although responsible for significant flooding,
mudslides and even fatalities, the wet weather in recent weeks
has been good for drought relief.
A successive series of powerful atmospheric river storms poses
a growing threat to California as the ground becomes more
saturated, river levels rise and heavy winds threaten the power
infrastructure. This week’s storms are expected to dump intense
levels of rain in a fairly short period of time. The greatest
potential for disaster is in Northern California, which has
already been battered by several destructive storms — including
one this weekend that caused a deadly levee breach. But each
new storm, including one set to arrive Wednesday, adds new
pressure.
Snowpack levels crucial to water supplies in the Colorado River
basin have been rising over the past week as storms hit the
Rocky Mountains. Dec. 27 measurements of 102% snowpack in the
region — just above normal — had risen to 142% as of today
(Jan. 3) in the Upper Colorado River Basin. That week-to-week
change is good news but demonstrates the volatility of snowpack
levels. Just as rainfall makes little to no impact on the level
of Lake Mead, snowpack levels in early January shouldn’t be
seen as a sign that a few snowstorms will erase years of
drought, experts say. Kyle Roerink, executive director of
the conservation group Great Basin Water Network, said
long-term forecasts showed river flows expected to be about 87%
between now and April.
It’s not hard to find groundwater. “It’s everywhere,” said Kip
Solomon, a geology and geophysics professor at the University
of Utah. “There’s no place on earth where you can’t drill a
well and hit groundwater.” Groundwater makes up a little more
than 30% of the freshwater on earth, while nearly 70% is locked
up in glaciers and icecaps. Only a tiny percentage of the
planet’s freshwater supply is made up of freely flowing,
surface level water. What can be difficult, Solomon said, is
finding “water that is of good quality, that’s not too salty.
And it’s harder to find water where you can pump out large
quantities.” That makes understanding this critical
resource all the more important — especially in the
drought-stricken West where many communities, from Moab to
Cedar City to the Coachella Valley, California, rely on
underground aquifers.
Water watcher Scott Williams put out his Kern River Snow and
Water Report on Monday and, based on national, statewide
and local data, things have gone from “eh…” to fairly
promising. Precipitation in the upper Kern basin, which feeds
the North Fork of the Kern river was 134% of average for the
water year to date. And on the South Fork of the Kern River,
precipitation was 116% of average. “Observed water year to date
Kern River basin flow is 60% of average,” the report states.
Storage in Lake Isabella, however, is still very low. The lake,
which can hold a maximum 570,000 acre feet, only had 51,685
acre feet, or 9% of its capacity, according to Williams’
report.
One Valley community is adjusting to a new reality now that
they are without access to a familiar water source. “Really
concerned and worried. In fact, I’m happy I have a pool because
every time it rains at least I can siphon that,” says Dee
Thomas, Rio Verde Foothills resident. Just days into the new
year, residents in the Rio Verde Foothills community are
getting creative with how they conserve and use water. “We use
it mostly for showering. For, you know, washing clothes, the
bathroom,” says Thomas. On January 1st, the City of Scottsdale
stopped providing the ability for water to be purchased and
hauled outside city limits as part of their drought management
plan. In a memo, Scottsdale says they have been generous and
accommodating for years, but the city cannot be responsible for
the water needs of a separate community, especially given its
unlimited and unregulated growth.
The storm door is open — at least for now. An atmospheric river
battered Northern California this past weekend. The North Bay
was largely spared, but torrential rain across much of the
region lifted streams over their banks, trapped cars as
roadways became routes for kayaks and canoes, and flooded homes
and businesses from San Francisco to Sacramento. The National
Weather Service says another “truly … brutal system” will slam
Northern California on Wednesday. This time, Sonoma County
appears to be in the path. That could mean fierce wind gusts,
intense rain, flooded roads, mudslides and power outages. By
Friday, the Russian River is expected to reach flood stage in
Guerneville.
Propelled by a bomb cyclone, the storm expected to barrel into
the California coast Wednesday is expected to drop several
inches of rain on top of already saturated soil and will
probably cause another round of widespread flooding across the
northern part of the state. But this storm is projected to
bring even more powerful, tree-toppling winds — 50 mph gusts —
than seen during the New Year’s Eve deluge…. “To put it
simply, this will likely be one of the most impactful systems
on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a
long while,” according to a National Weather Service forecast.
… “This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at
and needs to be taken seriously.”
As the new year begins, California’s Sierra is closing in on
the second-largest snowpack we’ve seen at this time of year in
the last two decades, with more snow expected to pummel the
mountain range in the coming days. But here’s why it’s far too
soon to declare an end to the drought: Last year, we started
2022 with a similar bounty — and then ended the snow season
way, way, way below normal. … On Tuesday, state water
officials plan to tromp through the snow at Echo Summit, south
of Lake Tahoe, for the winter’s first snowpack survey, a
monthly ritual that is now mostly for show thanks to more than
100 sensors throughout the Sierra that measure accumulation
every day. It’s of vital importance in the drought-stricken
Golden State because officials use the measurements to help
manage California’s water supply, which relies heavily on
melting snow.
Water supplies are shrinking throughout the Southwest, from the
Rocky Mountains to California, with the flow of the Colorado
River declining and groundwater levels dropping in many areas.
The mounting strains on the region’s water supplies are
bringing new questions about the unrestrained growth of
sprawling suburbs.[Kathleen] Ferris, a researcher at Arizona
State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy, is convinced
that growth is surpassing the water limits in parts of Arizona,
and she worries that the development boom is on a collision
course with the aridification of the Southwest and the finite
supply of groundwater that can be pumped from desert aquifers.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood at a podium placed on the
sandy bottom of Lake Mendocino, a basin built to hold more than
20 billion gallons of water. It was spring, which meant that
the reservoir should have held water from the winter rains that
in past decades provided water to millions of Californians.
Instead, on this afternoon in 2021, the ground was dry and
cracked. Newsom was there to declare a drought
emergency. … Now, the watershed and the reservoir
where this drought began have become the proving ground for an
innovative water agreement that aims to make more of scarce
supplies. Creators say the program could become a prototype for
accords elsewhere in the state and in the West, a beacon of
collaboration in a place where water can be contentious.
Water, or the lack of it, was a major topic in California over
2022 — the third year of exceptional drought throughout
the Western United States. In the San Joaquin Valley, drought
dried up individual wells and entire towns. But the water news
didn’t stop there. Farms and cities were also coming to terms
with a new groundwater law that will change the economics and
future growth for the entire valley. As if that wasn’t enough,
water managers, farmers and others were busy fixing canals,
trying to get a new dam approved, fighting over pipelines and
more. It was quite a year in water.
When it comes to the view of desalination as a tool to
drought-proof local water systems in California, 2022 [was] a
roller-coaster year. In May, the California Coastal
Commission… rejected on environmental grounds a $1.4 billion
desalination facility proposed for Huntington Beach…. Six
months later, the commission turned around and approved two
desalination facilities, one in Orange County and another along
Monterey Bay in Monterey County. Then … the Santa Cruz
City Council on Nov. 29 approved a water-supply strategy
that listed desalination as one of four water-supply
projects on the table to secure the city’s water system in
an increasingly uncertain climate future…. 2023 will see
the Santa Cruz City Council begin the process of vetting the
water-supply options in front of the city.
Nevada water managers have submitted a plan for cutting
diversions by 500,000 acre-feet in a last-ditch effort to shore
up flows on the Colorado River before low water levels cause
critical problems at Glen Canyon and Hoover dams. But the
Silver State’s plan targets cuts in Utah and the river’s other
Upper Basin states, not in Nevada, whose leaders contend it
already is doing what it can to reduce reliance on the depleted
river system that provides water to 40 million in the West.
California made historic investments in climate measures this
year, as state leaders warned of current and escalating climate
risks. … California is experiencing the driest 22
years in more than a millennium, fueled by warmer, drier
conditions that have exposed critical weaknesses in the way the
state stores and manages water. … Meanwhile, close
to 1,500 wells ran dry this year. And though
California became the first state in the nation to recognize
the “human right” to water a decade ago, roughly 1 million
people, mostly in isolated rural communities, lack access
to reliable supplies of safe drinking
water. Legislators passed a bill in September to
help low-income Californians pay their water bill, but [Gov.]
Newsom vetoed it, citing a lack of sustainable,
ongoing funding.
Two things on California’s wish list — more water and more
power — may come soon with a first-in-the-nation plan to cover
irrigation canals with solar panels. The project, which aims to
save water by reducing evaporation from canals while generating
renewable energy, is small, encompassing nearly two miles of
waterways in the Central Valley. The hope, though, is to
showcase the simple but largely untested concept so that it
catches on with agricultural and urban water suppliers across
the state, and beyond.
Scientists will get $25 million to study salt lake ecosystems
in the drought-stricken U.S. West, as President Joe Biden
signed legislation Tuesday allocating the funds in the face of
unprecedented existential threats caused by the lack of water.
The funding allows the United States Geological Survey to study
the hydrology of the ecosystems in and around Utah’s Great Salt
Lake, California’s Mono Lake, Oregon’s Lake Albert and other
saline lakes. Amid a decades long drought, less snowmelt has
flowed through the rivers that feed into the lakes, causing
shorelines to recede and lake levels to plummet.
This simple statistic may shock you: Each time a farmer plows
his or her field, the soil loses three-quarters of an inch of
moisture. The solutions? They’re more complicated and part of
new and expanding soil health programs that seek to help
farmers explore how to retain water, improve fertility, and
create greater resilience to buffer weather extremes. Now, with
the aid of $25 million in new federal funding, the Colorado
Department of Agriculture plans to expand a program called STAR
— an acronym for Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources —
from 124 producers, including both farmers and ranchers, to
450. … State officials say that fostering techniques to
improve soils, making them more sponge-like, can help Colorado
improve water quality and use existing water more efficiently.
Agriculture continues to account for more than 80% of
Colorado’s water use.
As water managers throughout the San Joaquin Valley scramble to
reign in groundwater pumping, they’re running into a serious
roadblock: angry farmers. Across the valley, farmers have
decried fees and other measures meant to reduce pumping,
threatening not to pay, taking agencies to court and protesting
groundwater rules. In some cases, it’s working. In
the Kaweah subbasin in Kings and western Tulare counties,
farmers forced a groundwater agency to cut pumping fees by
half. In the Chowchilla subbasin farmers voted down groundwater
fees and are pursuing creation of their own groundwater
agency. … The rebellion is a reaction to the
state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which
aims to bring critically overdrafted water subbasins into
balance by 2040.
In celebration of National Energy Conservation Day, the City of
San Luis Obispo recently highlighted projects that are reducing
electrical demands at the city’s water treatment plant and
helping the city reach its climate action goals. The city’s
water-energy efficiency project and tesla battery project both
help to reduce electrical energy used during peak times and
increase the water treatment plant’s resiliency to potential
disruptions in electricity. Energy-efficient projects like
these align with two major city priorities: fiscal
sustainability and climate action.
The Department of Water Resources is accepting applications for
approximately $300 million for turf replacement, conservation
for urban suppliers and community drought relief projects. The
funding is being offered through the 2022 Urban Community
Drought Relief Grant. Eligible grant applicants include public
agencies, public utilities, special district, mutual water
companies, regional water management groups, colleges and
universities, non-profit organizations and more. Applications
must be submitted by Jan. 31, 2023 and awards will be announced
from December 2022 through March 2023.
As salmon and Delta fish populations continue to
plummet, a coalition of California Indian tribes and
environmental justice groups filed a Title VI civil rights
complaint against the State Water Board on Dec. 16,
as well as a petition for rulemaking with the US Environmental
Protection Agency. The complaint and petition seek
relief for regional tribal nations and disadvantaged Delta
communities. This coalition includes the Shingle Springs
Band of Miwok Indians, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, Little Manila
Rising, Restore the Delta and Save California Salmon. The
alliance is being represented in court by the Stanford
Environmental Law Clinic.
It’s a construction project that may have caused you traffic
headaches near 32nd Street and Shea in north Phoenix.
Eventually the Drought Pipeline Project will be able to provide
water to more than 400,000 people in the event of shortages of
Colorado River water. It will be able to carry water the city
of Phoenix has rights to from the Salt and Verde
rivers. On Wednesday morning, a number of Phoenix city
officials celebrated the installation of the final section of
pipe for the Drought Pipeline Project. Construction began in
May 2021, and Arizona’s Family did a special report over
the summer.
Multiple conservation groups are suing the City of Bakersfield
for diverting the Kern River. The Center for Biological
Diversity, Bring Back the Kern, the Kern River Parkway
Foundation, Kern-Kaweah Chapter Sierra Club, Kern Audubon
Society, and Water Audit California filed the lawsuit in late
November. In a press release, it says the lawsuit is
challenging the city’s diversion of water to agricultural
fields. The coalition says the city’s choice have damaged the
river’s wildlife and surrounding communities.
Continued droughts and climate change have elevated consumer
and government concerns about water consumption, particularly
for food production. While nuts might be the thirstiest crop,
fruits and vegetables also need a lot of watering. The
epicenter of the “water wars” is California, pitting rural
against urban, golf courses against grapes and lawns against
lettuce. Innovators have sought solutions including
micro-irrigation technology, gene-edited crops with lower water
footprints and recycling, but none have attracted investor
attention like vertical farming. Between 2019 and 2026, indoor
farming is predicted to grow to $22 billion. Raises this year
include greenhouse Gotham Greens ($310 million) and indoor
vertical farm Plenty ($400 million).
I came to this place because the Colorado River system is in a
state of collapse. It is a collapse hastened by climate change
but also a crisis of management. In 1922, the seven states in
the river basin signed a compact splitting the Colorado equally
between its upper and lower halves; later, they promised
additional water to Mexico, too. Near the middle, they put Lake
Powell, a reserve for the northern states, and Lake Mead, a
storage node for the south. Over time, as an overheating
environment has collided with overuse, the lower half —
primarily Arizona and California — has taken its water as if
everything were normal, straining both the logic and the legal
interpretations of the compact.
Washington State University plant pathologist Gary Chastagner
has been trotting the globe in an effort to safeguard an
important Pacific Northwest crop — the iconic winter
evergreen. Dubbed “Dr. Christmas Tree” by his colleagues for
a 44-year career studying the decorative conifers,
Chastagner traveled to Turkey in 2020 to find mother trees of
Turkish and Trojan firs, which are adaptable to
the Northwest’s climate and resistant to disease.
… In one effort, a multi-state team led by Patrick J.
Brown has been awarded nearly $3.8 million over the next four
years for a project to improve pistachio production as the
industry faces warmer winters and scarcer water.
The outskirts of Kingman, Arizona … has since morphed into
something much more green that supports pistachio and almond
orchards, and garlic and potato fields in a climate similar to
California’s Central Valley. The crops are fed by groundwater
that also serves the city of Kingman. The Arizona Department of
Water Resources this week put a limit on the amount of land
that can be watered, designating the Hualapai Valley as an
irrigation non-expansion area. That means anyone who hasn’t
farmed more than 2 acres there during the past five years
can’t. It’s the first such designation in Arizona in four
decades — highlighting struggles around the U.S. as water
supplies dwindle and tensions grow between farmers and
cities.
The researchers are investigating a phenomenon known as
sublimation, which is the transition of snow directly from a
solid state into water vapor, skipping the liquid stage.
… Currently the largest source of uncertainty in snow
modeling, sublimation has the potential to be an important
insight for water resources management, especially estimating
future water reserves. … In recent years, there have
also been unexplainable decreases in the river’s flow, which
people in seven states depend upon for drinking water. In 2021,
the Colorado River snowpack was estimated at 80% of average,
but streamflows ended up being only 30% of average. The
researchers speculate that the discrepancy may in part be
explained by sublimation.
The Water Education Foundation’s seventh edition of
the Layperson’s
Guide to Water Conservation is hot off the
press and available for purchase. With California and the West
in the grip of persistent drought, the guide provides an
excellent overview of the forces driving conservation and the
measures water users are taking to more efficiently use our
most vital natural resource. The 20-page guide covers such
topics as how drought and climate change are affecting
California and the Colorado River Basin, how some Southwestern
cities are stretching supplies, the impact of landscape choices
on water use, how farms are changing to more efficient
irrigation practices, and what homeowners can to do save water.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority has a plan for how the
seven states that rely on the Colorado River can protect Lake
Mead and Lake Powell. But whether the other six states
have any interest in backing that plan remains to be
seen. The water authority on Tuesday outlined how it
thinks the Colorado River basin states and the federal
government can drastically cut back on water use along the
dwindling Colorado next year in order to keep water levels at
its two major reservoirs from crashing further and threatening
putting their ability to deliver water downstream and generate
hydropower. The plan, submitted to the Department of Interior,
calls for significant alterations to the current drought
guidelines for the river’s two main storage reservoirs and cuts
across the basin of more than 2 million acre feet in water use
starting next year.
According to a draft proposal released by Reclamation on Dec.
9, the Klamath Basin remains in “severe to extreme drought
status” and dry weather is expected to continue for a fourth
consecutive year. In response, the federal water management
agency proposed reducing flows by up to 40% until April. Water
is released from Upper Klamath Lake past a series of dams on
its way to the Pacific Ocean. The Klamath River will soon be
the site of the nation’s largest dam removal and river
restoration project. One of its key pillars involves restoring
habitat for endangered coho salmon. News of proposed reductions
to the river’s flow was met with frustration by members of the
Yurok Tribe, who just hours earlier had been joined by U.S.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and the governors of
Oregon and California at a celebration about the dam removal
project.
A large part of the world’s liquid freshwater supply comes from
groundwater. These underground reservoirs of water—which are
stored in soil and aquifers—feed streams, sustain agricultural
lands, and provide drinking water to hundreds of millions of
people. For that reason, researchers are keen to understand how
quickly surface water replenishes, or “recharges,” groundwater
stores. But measuring a vast, fluid, underground resource is
easier said than done. In a new study, Berghuijs et al. found
that recharge rates might double previous estimates. The
research team produced an updated model of groundwater recharge
using a recent global synthesis of regional groundwater
measurements. They found that a single factor, climate aridity,
accurately estimated how much precipitation trickled into
groundwater across the globe: Arid locations had lower recharge
rates than humid ones.
A state water board unanimously agreed Tuesday to start
discussions with a giant Israeli company over its proposal to
build a $5.5 billion seawater desalination plant on the Sonoran
coast and sell desalted water to Arizona users. If such a plant
were ultimately approved and built, a final signoff by this
board, which is a ways off, would commit the state to providing
financial backup toward repaying the construction cost if the
plant can’t sell enough water to customers in Arizona and
Sonora to cover all those costs. Brushing aside complaints from
some citizens that it’s moving too fast, the Water
Infrastructure Finance Authority’s governing board voted 9-0 to
take the first step toward clearing the way for construction of
such a plant, while acknowledging that many issues about its
cost and potential environmental impacts need further
discussion and negotiation.
Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) announced that he
secured over $54 million in federal funding for 24 projects
across the Inland Empire in the bipartisan FY 2023
appropriations package. The bill now heads to both chambers of
Congress for final passage and then on to the President to be
signed into law. “I am proud to have secured funding for
projects in the Inland Empire to provide clean drinking water,
upgrade roads, and make the region more resilient to flooding
and drought,” Senator Padilla said. “This funding will support
local governments and community organizations that work to
directly benefit our neighborhoods. Federal dollars will create
jobs and invest in upgraded infrastructure, community safety,
and the removal of harmful chemicals from water supplies to
improve the quality of life throughout the Inland Empire.”
The U.S. Senate has advanced three bills that would improve
access to water for some tribes in Arizona amid an unrelenting
drought. One measure approved on Dec. 19 would give the
Colorado River Indian Tribes in northwestern Arizona the
ability to lease water from the Colorado River. The tribe based
in Parker has one of the largest allocations of the Colorado
River anywhere, and it’s among the most secure. Another bill
would settle the Hualapai Tribe’s claim to water from the
Colorado River and give the tribe $180 million for the
infrastructure to deliver it to the tribe’s main tourist center
at Grand Canyon West and to residents.
As California is preparing for their fourth year of drought,
the Bureau of Reclamation warns Central Valley Project water
contractors of lessened water allocations. Two months
after the start of the new water year on Oct. 1, the Shasta
Reservoir, the state’s largest reservoir and cornerstone of the
Central Valley Project (CVP), is currently at 31% capacity.
With the reservoir being so low, the Bureau of Reclamation is
asking its contractors who are receiving water from the CVP for
municipal and industrial use to begin planning for “potentially
extremely limited water supply conditions” after the start of
the new year.
Water bills in San Diego are about to go up, and that increase
is due in part to planned upgrades at the Carlsbad Desalination
Plant. Those upgrades are estimated to cost $274 million. The
San Diego County Water Authority approved the upgrades to the
plant’s seawater intakes at a board meeting on Thursday. “This
action by the board moves the Carlsbad Desalination Plant one
step closer to meeting state marine life mandates,” said Water
Authority Board Chair Mel Katz. “Staff has worked diligently to
ensure that the costs are as low as possible while continuing
to provide our region with a drought-proof source of water. We
are thankful to have this resource when so much of the West is
suffering from extreme drought, and we expect it will be
increasingly valuable as climate change further disrupts
California’s hydrology.”