The San Joaquin River, which helps
drain California’s Central Valley, has been negatively impacted
by construction of dams, inadequate streamflows and poor water
quality. Efforts are now underway to restore the river and
continue providing agricultural lands with vital irrigation,
among other water demands.
After an 18-year lawsuit to restore water flows to a 60-mile dry
stretch of river and to boost the dwindling salmon populations,
the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement is underway.
Water releases are now used to restore the San Joaquin River and
to provide habitat for naturally-reproducing populations of
self-sustaining Chinook salmon and other fish in the San Joaquin
River. Long-term efforts also include measures to reduce or avoid
adverse water supply impacts from the restoration flows.
As the summer grinds on, farms, towns and a critical native
salmon restoration program that all rely on water from
Millerton Lake near Fresno continue to hope their water won’t
be needed to fulfill irrigation contracts further up the San
Joaquin Valley. But in this parched year, nothing is
certain. If water is required out of Millerton, which
happened in drought years 2014 and 2015, that could be
especially detrimental for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, which is already taking unprecedented steps to nurture
its endangered spring run Chinook salmon population.
As water resources managers work hard this summer to deliver
limited water supplies to cities, rural communities, farms,
refuges and fisheries–while also providing essential
hydropower for the state’s energy grid–there is increasing
attention to prepare for the next water year. … As we think
about water management opportunities for next year, there is an
increasing focus on groundwater recharge …
Join us as we guide you on a virtual journey through California’s Central Valley, known as the nation’s breadbasket thanks to an imported supply of surface water and local groundwater. Covering about 20,000 square miles through the heart of the state, the valley provides 25 percent of the nation’s food, including 40 percent of all fruits, nuts and vegetables consumed throughout the country.
Whether the Kern River truly has spare water and, if so, how
much, has been left up in the air for more than a decade. Now,
11 years after the State Water Resources Control Board ruled
the Kern River was not fully appropriated, it will finally
start the process of getting at those two key questions: Is
water available? How much? A status conference hearing has been
scheduled by the board’s Administrative Hearing Office for Aug.
17 at 9 a.m., the board announced on Monday.
California’s 2021 water outlook became grimmer this spring as
the state did not get fabulous February or miracle March
precipitation. Unsurprisingly, spring streamflow forecasts from
snowfed basins in the Sierra were far below average. For
example, early April forecasts from California DWR called for
April-July runoff to be between 59-70% of normal. Bad, but not
terrible. Then came April, bringing little additional
precipitation. To compound matters, April brought very warm
temperatures for much of the state that led to rapid ablation
(evaporation) of the Sierra snowpack.
Alex Padilla made his first official visit to the Central
Valley as U.S. Senator, holding several discussions about
water. Padilla, along with other elected officials, held a
media availability at his only public event of the day — a tour
of the Dos Palos water treatment plant. There, he spoke about
the need to upgrade infrastructure for drinking water, as well
as water for farmers. Padilla says the infrastructure bill
being debated in the Senate will help with water, especially in
underserved areas.
Science is about more than data and research, it’s about
teamwork. Collaboration is key, and the State Water Contractors
are committed to working together with our partners in
academia, government, non-profit and the private sectors to
invest in California’s water future. The SWC and
Member Agencies participated in multiple interagency and
stakeholder working groups tasked with determining how to
implement permit requirements, including the Spring-Run Chinook
Salmon Juvenile Production Estimate Core Team and Delta
Coordination Group for summer-fall habitat actions for Delta
Smelt.
Mountain snow is like a bank account for water across the
western United States. Snow that falls on the Sierra Nevada,
the Rocky Mountains, and other ranges becomes a natural
reservoir that slowly melts each spring and summer and flows
down into the river valleys. The resource managers of western
states count on this allowance from nature to fill reservoirs
with sufficient water for the typically dry months of summer
and autumn. In 2021, those meltwater accounts have been turning
up “insufficient funds.”
Southern San Joaquin Valley Rivers are running at near historic
lows — again. In fact, the Bakersfield City Council passed a
resolution Wednesday officially declaring the Kern River as
running at only 17% of normal, it’s second driest year since
record keeping began in 1893. The driest year on record was
2015, the worst year of the 2012-2016 drought. The resolution
notes the river is so low this year, the city won’t have any
“excess” water to sell to local agricultural irrigation
districts. This is the first time the City Water Resources
Department has made such a resolution.
Climate change is exacerbating droughts and accelerating the
transformation and decline of California’s native forest and
aquatic ecosystems. As a state, we are poorly organized to
manage these effects, which need extensive focused
preparation. We need to adapt (and we will make mistakes
in doing so). Our human, economic and environmental losses
will be much greater, however, if we manage poorly because of
delay, complacency or panic. -Written by Jay Lund, professor of civil and
environmental engineering at the University of California at
Davis.
Farmers are facing a water shortage right as we head into peak
growing season…. Solano County farmer Spencer Bei shows us
one of the wells his family uses to farm 15,000 acres. He says
he is losing pressure now as he is pumping because he is
pulling more from the aquifer due to a lack of surface water
and no rain in sight. He is one of many farmers feeling
the heat after the State Water Resources Board sent out letters
to 4,300 water-right holders saying there was no longer enough
water for them and that the remaining 2,300 with pre-1914
riparian rights could see even more restrictions soon.
[A] developer hopes to submit [an application] by
the end of the year [to] utilize excess solar and wind energy
to power their pumped storage technology … By using
renewable energy to transfer water back and forth between two
reservoirs, the project would be a non-consumptive means of
using water to generate power. In the case of the Mokelumne
Pumped Storage Water Battery Project, the Salt Springs
Reservoir has been identified as the lower reservoir, as it
already has a small hydro-facility on it that generates about
44 megawatts of energy.
[S]ome 95% of the Central Valley’s riparian woodlands, along
with the conditions they evolved in, have already been
sacrificed, mainly to make the Central Valley an agricultural
powerhouse. The scattered remnants face multiple threats,
including droughts and floods intensified by climate change;
manipulated streamflows that favor human over ecological
needs; and shrinking aquifers left critically overdrawn by
decades of unregulated groundwater pumping.
Hot temperatures have many headed straight to local waterways
to cool off, but experts say high heat and a bad drought this
year can be ideal conditions for harmful algae. It’s an issue
that’s not always top of mind. … According to state
data, popular waterways in the immediate Sacramento area are
safe. People headed to the American River or Folsom Lake for
the Fourth of July are in the clear. But the state labels
part of Discovery Bay near San Francisco as a danger area, with
a warning not to swim or touch the scum on the water.
Our leaders must take bold action to adapt to our new reality
and create a system that can support healthy rivers and
wildlife, communities with access to safe drinking water and a
thriving agricultural economy. Unfortunately, that’s not what
we’re seeing today. The state’s water regulators are draining
our reservoirs and depleting our rivers to deliver vast volumes
of water to a small number of powerful agricultural interests
during a historically dry year. Protecting fish and
wildlife and water quality for Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta communities does not mean eliminating agriculture in the
Central Valley. -Written by Rachel Zwillinger, water policy advisor
for Defenders of Wildlife in Sacramento.
In America’s fruit and nut basket, water is now the most
precious crop of all. It explains why, amid a historic
drought parching much of the American West, a grower of premium
sushi rice has concluded that it makes better business sense to
sell the water he would have used to grow rice than to actually
grow rice. Or why a melon farmer has left a third of his fields
fallow. Or why a large landholder farther south is thinking of
planting a solar array on his fields rather than the thirsty
almonds that delivered steady profit for years.
I was pleased to hear that Governor Newsom has nominated
Nichole Morgan to fill the civil engineering seat on the State
Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board). Ms.
Morgan, a Cal State Sacramento graduate, is currently Assistant
Deputy Director of Financial Assistance at the State Water
Board and previously worked at the Central Valley Regional
Board. The State Water Board is the primary regulatory agency
that is supposed to manage water resources in
California.
As much as 100,000 acre-feet of water — enough to meet the
annual demand of more than 40,000 Tuolumne County residents for
at least five years — that’s currently stored in New Melones
Reservoir could soon be sent south to aid drought-stricken
farmers under an agreement between the Oakdale and South San
Joaquin irrigation districts.
What if we could predict changes to ecosystems in the same way
we can predict the weather? An emerging field of science
is working towards making that a reality. In areas such as
fisheries, wildlife, algal blooms, wildfire, and human disease,
we often need to know how ecosystems and the services they
provide might change in the future and how human activities can
affect those trajectories.
