As extreme weather events become more intense and more common,
states already face an estimated backlog of nearly $1 trillion
for deferred maintenance and needed upgrades to public
infrastructure. To finance long-overdue repairs and ensure that
America’s roads, bridges, and water systems can withstand
future climate impacts, states are turning to new strategies
and adapting existing approaches to address the substantial
work needed to boost the resilience of these vital systems.
… California residents recently passed a $10 billion
bond proposal, which would cover similar water
infrastructure improvements and projects to protect these
systems from the effects of extreme heat.
A storm of heavy rain, snow, and strong winds brought dangerous
conditions to the Pacific Northwest this week. By Friday, up to
16 inches of rain could inundate Northern California. The storm
is what’s known as an atmospheric river, a long narrow strip
heavy with moisture that slam into the mountains of the West
Coast and dumps out prodigious amounts of rain. While
scientists haven’t concluded whether atmospheric rivers are
increasing because of climate change, a warmer atmosphere,
driven by the burning of fossil fuels, can hold more moisture,
which can lead to increased extreme rain events. That increase
in extreme rain events has likely caused more landslides,
according to experts. … Fast-moving landslides
called debris flows, which are mud and rock-laden
torrents, are more common on land that has recently, and
severely, burned, like wildfire-scarred regions. … After
Hurricane Helene, more than 2,000 landslides were
triggered by the storm and at least half of those
landslides caused damage to rivers, roads and
structures like homes and businesses.
A Kern County agricultural water district is putting some of
its recharge basins to double duty: Sinking water and producing
solar power. North Kern Water Storage District partnered with
Fresno-based White Pine Renewables to build solar panels
directly in more than 57 acres of its existing recharge basins
along Zerker Road north of 7th Standard Road. The 14,444
panels can produce 10 megawatts a year, enough to supply 2,000
homes. But this power will go to North Kern, not the general
grid. The project, which recently went live, is expected to cut
North Kern’s electric bill by more than half.
After 13 years of planning and building, the Hester Marsh
Restoration Project had its unofficial “ribbon-cutting” moment
over the weekend of Nov. 15-17. Project researchers, managers
and volunteers gathered at the marsh on the edge of Elkhorn
Slough to observe how the newly completed marsh interacted with
water seeping in with the King Tides. The key question: Were
the final plans for the marsh designed at the correct
elevation? If the marsh was built to plan, observers should see
the water at high tide cover the marsh’s surface – only
slightly. And at 9:35am on Friday, Nov. 15, that is exactly
what they observe.
The climate is changing, and Californians are feeling the
effects. In our recent Priorities for California’s Water
report, we outline what’s been happening and forecast the
changes that lie ahead. But walking through the effects of a
changing climate on California’s water can quickly become a
slog—a litany of depressing facts with no end in sight. … We
asked four water experts to conduct a thought experiment: we
offered them a series of positive water headlines from the year
2050 and asked them to tell us how we got there.
A historically strong storm system with the strength of a
hurricane whipped damaging winds through the Pacific Northwest
overnight leading to power outages across the region. It was
creating large ocean waves and ushering in a drenching
atmospheric river that is expected to continue soaking Northern
California. … In the winter outlook from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction
Center, forecasters warned that the season’s storm paths would
favor abundant rainfall across the Northwest, a pattern often
associated with La Niña … As of now, the Pacific Ocean is
still in a neutral phase and not quite meeting La Niña
criteria. During a neutral phase, less predictable weather
patterns can dominate, something Dr. Johnson called “weather
wild cards.”
…. California will be managing its water under changing
conditions for the indefinite future. The state has taken
important steps to adapt to climate change’s effects on water,
but as Public Policy Institute of California researchers argued
in a new report, it’s not yet on the right trajectory to
manage some of the changes underway — or the greater challenges
ahead. The good news is that California can make
significant progress when it pays attention to a problem. Urban
water use has remained flat since 1990, despite millions of new
residents, which is a testament to the power of California’s
famed innovation and creative thinking. The state is also
undertaking difficult but necessary work to improve management
of its vitally important groundwater resources, as well as
the headwater forests that supply some two-thirds of the
state’s water. —Written by Letitia Grenier, director of the Public
Policy Institute of California Water Policy Center
Reservoirs, a major component of California’s water storage
system, are a significant source of climate-warming emissions,
releasing more greenhouse gases across the state than 300,000
gas-powered cars in a year, according to a report published
today by the Center for Biological Diversity. Beneath the
Surface outlines the environmental threats of big water
infrastructure projects and exposes why reservoirs’ water
storage benefits will only diminish as climate change
intensifies. The report comes as California plans three massive
reservoirs and dam expansion projects, including Sites
Reservoir, that will cost a total of $7 billion. These and
similar projects across the western U.S. would divert large
quantities of water from nearby rivers and cause irreparable
harm to imperiled fish and other wildlife.
The California Water Institute at Fresno State is positioning
its current projects to help inform work related to
California’s Proposition 4, a $10 billion climate resiliency
bond that overwhelmingly passed on the November ballot.
The historic measure is the largest single climate bond in
state history and includes $3.8 billion for state water
projects that address drought, flood and water supply issues.
The California Water Institute targets some of those key areas
with two grant-funded programs already underway; the Unified
Water Plan and Climate Resiliency through Regional Water
Recharge in the San Joaquin Valley. … Under
the Unified Water Plan, the California Water
Institute partnered with Water Blueprint for the San
Joaquin Valley for a two-year, $1 million project awarded
by the Bureau of Reclamation to track various water projects
happening across the Valley. It’s an effort to compile the
information into a single, unified water plan that could
inform future investments.
Other Proposition 4 and election-related articles:
State leaders on the Eastern Seaboard are scrambling to deal
with something California officials know all too well — drought
and fire. While the unusual dry spell fueling wildfires in New
York and New Jersey is only expected to get worse, some
California officials hope the moment can bring attention to
issues long considered niche to the West. … Californians,
long accustomed to periods of climate-driven megadrought, see
an opportunity to help other states respond. On the one hand,
expanding drought fuels tensions over water, as evidenced most
obviously in the fierce competition between the seven Colorado
River states that remain at an impasse over how to share the
shrinking river.
Water is vital to California. Access to water and
ecosystem information helps communities plan for the increasing
demands caused by climate change, population growth, and other
factors. This data assists in identifying areas and populations
most at risk from drought, flooding, and water quality issues.
To effectively manage California’s water resources amid
significant changes, everyone – from the public to Tribes to
local, state, and federal representatives – needs to have
shared access to reliable, timely, and credible water and
ecosystem data. So in 2016, the California Legislature passed
the Open and Transparent Water Data Act, authored by Senator
Dodd, which required state agencies to make water and ecosystem
data available for widespread use. The California Water
Data Consortium (Consortium), established in 2019, is dedicated
to supporting the implementation of the Act by state agencies.
President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that Gov. Doug
Burgum of North Dakota, his pick to run the Interior
Department, will also serve as the administration’s point
person to coordinate energy policy across the federal
government. In that role, Mr. Burgum will be charged with
executing Mr. Trump’s vision of a government that drives up
fossil fuel production while it demolishes environmental
regulations. Mr. Burgum will be “chairman of the newly formed,
and very important, National Energy Council,” Mr. Trump wrote
in a statement, “which will consist of all departments and
agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation,
distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of
American energy.”
Two Northern California counties are expecting up to 15 inches
of additional snow through Friday as a winter storm batters the
region. The National Weather Service (NWS) for the Sacramento
forecast region issued a winter weather advisory in the early
morning hours on Thursday for Plumas and Lassen counties. Snow
started falling in the Sacramento region on Wednesday and is
related to the atmospheric river affecting the Pacific
Northwest. Up to 6 inches of snow had already fallen as of
Thursday morning in parts of the Sacramento forecast region,
NWS meteorologist Katrina Hand told Newsweek, which could rise
another 15 inches over the next 36 hours.
King tides are bringing extreme high and low tides to the
Central Coast this weekend, impacting local wetlands and
providing a glimpse into the effects of rising sea
levels. … According to the United States Geological
Survey, the Monterey Bay area sees sea levels rising at about 2
millimeters a year. Over the past few hundred years, California
has lost more than 90% of its wetlands, with the Elkhorn Slough
losing 50% of its wetland habitat.
Sand, gravel, silt, clay…these humble sediments are the
building blocks of our world. Now, some are saying sediment
management could play an outsized role in helping California
adapt to a changing climate. We asked Julie Beagle,
Environmental Services Branch Chief with the US Army Corps of
Engineers San Francisco District, to tell us more.
On Thursday, the California Coastal Commission will vote on the
approval of a $175 million climate-related project that would
transform the southern portion of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.
… Created by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
and other agencies, the plan includes a 3,200-foot-long buried
seawall designed to protect a sewage tunnel and wastewater
treatment plant located along the coast south of Sloat
Boulevard. The 14-foot diameter Lake Merced Tunnel is used to
store combined stormwater and wastewater during big storms when
the plant is at capacity. It’s particularly vulnerable because
that part of the beach is projected to erode by more than 100
feet between now and 2100 because of sea level rise and larger
storms that come with climate change, according to a recent
study by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The odds of La Niña have decreased again, according to a
monthly update by the Climate Prediction Center on Thursday.
The agency reports a 57% chance that La Niña develops during
the period from October to December. That’s a decrease from an
update last month, when forecasters announced a 71%
probability that La Niña would be present during that same
three-month period. For now, the climate pattern is expected to
be in place through January-March 2025 and still has the
potential to influence California weather this winter.
Historically dry conditions and drought in the mid-Atlantic and
Northeastern part of the United States are a key factor in the
string of wildfires the region has faced in the past weeks,
with officials issuing red flag warnings across the Northeast.
On the West Coast, California is battling multiple wildfires,
where dry conditions and wind have caused explosive fires that
have burned more than 200 homes and businesses. It’s not
possible to say that climate change caused the fires, but the
extreme conditions fueling the fires have strong connections to
the effects of climate change, according to David Robinson, the
New Jersey state climatologist at Rutgers University.
Other drought, climate change and wildfire articles:
Los Angeles will soon begin building a $740-million project to
transform wastewater into purified drinking water in the San
Fernando Valley, expanding the city’s local water supply in an
effort to prepare for worsening droughts compounded by climate
change. … When completed, the facilities will purify treated
wastewater and produce 20 million gallons of drinking water per
day, enough to supply about 250,000 people. The drinking water
that the plant produces will be piped 10 miles northeast to
L.A. County’s Hansen Spreading Grounds, where it will flow into
basins and percolate into the groundwater aquifer for storage.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will later pump
the water from wells, and after additional testing and
treatment, the water will enter pipes and be delivered to taps.
As urgency grows to develop climate solutions, a new UCLA
report confirms that the wastewater recycling plans for the
nation’s second-largest city would make Los Angeles more
resilient and self-reliant during droughts or disasters that
cut off outside water supplies. Using a new methodology to
evaluate hundreds of thousands of scenarios, the UCLA research
team, led by the Luskin Center for Innovation (LCI), found that
the Los Angeles city plan would significantly boost local water
resilience, minimize risks of aging infrastructure and
uncertain water imports, and dramatically reduce drought- and
earthquake-driven water shortages.
A projected increase in the kind of “atmospheric river” type
storms California experienced in the historic 2023 water year
could be disastrous for the San Joaquin Valley – or its
salvation. The difference depends on whether locals can adapt
to the coming changes by absorbing the intermittent deluges and
storing that water for later dry times. Right now, systems in
the San Joaquin and Sacramento River watersheds were built to
collect and move precipitation that first lands as snow in the
Sierra Nevada mountains and then slowly melts through
springtime. A warmer climate, though, will mean more rain than
snow, filling rivers and reservoirs more quickly, said Daniel
Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment
and Sustainability at UCLA, during a webinar hosted by the
Sustainable Conservation.
…. Today, the effects of climate change on Arizona have
become almost as evident as the smoke hanging over the canyon:
dwindling snowpack and extreme drought are stretching
Colorado River supplies thin, summer temperatures
are getting hotter and increasing heat-related deaths,
and more destructive wildfires are scorching
landscapes and lives. Temperatures in Maricopa County alone
have risen by nearly 2 degrees Celsius since record-keeping
began in 1895. But Arizona is not the leader it was
15 years ago when the state led the West on regional haze and
then climate policy. Cities have largely taken the lead on
climate policies. In recent years, the governor and the
Legislature have taken no cohesive action, enacting laws
that prohibit mitigation efforts at a local
level. One state law even prevents state agencies from
monitoring greenhouse gases.
Wildfire season appears to be closing fast in Northern
California, where rain drenched the San Francisco Bay Area,
snow sent cars spinning across slippery Sierra mountain roads
and foothill communities braced for flooding. The risk of fire
has dramatically dropped for much of the state north of
Monterey, following the hottest summer on record and a
destructive wildfire season. Yet the threat of fire remains
high in Southern California. Dozens of homes still smoldered in
Ventura County after Santa Ana winds drove the Mountain Fire
through Camarillo. And there’s no rain in the near-term
forecast for the southern third of the state, said climate
scientist Daniel Swain.
… Trump is certain to clash with California leaders over
water. He has said the resource is “horribly mismanaged” in
California and has promised to turn on a massive “faucet” for
farmers and cities — partly by weakening environmental
protections for such species as the Delta smelt. But such
efforts, while popular among Trump supporters in rural farming
communities, could encounter substantial obstacles.
… According to Dr. Josh Fisher, a climate scientist at
Chapman University, many factors came together to result in the
wildfire moving quickly as it tore up hillsides, moving upwards
as it burned through Ventura County neighborhoods. “That fire
will spread faster up just because fire moves upwards,” Fisher
said. “So, we’ve got these conditions of the topography, the
wind and the plants — and also close to roads and human
property — all just kind of coming together to make this a lot
worse than it could’ve been if the winds were calm, the
vegetation was wet.” Friday, wind gusts will relax
more.
Related climate change, drought and weather articles:
SYRCL, in partnership with the Tahoe National Forest, completed
the second year of project implementation on 229 acres of
meadow, fen, and meadow edge habitat within five high priority
meadows in the North Yuba Watershed: Haskell Headwaters Fen,
Chapman Saddle Meadow, West Church Meadow, Freeman Meadow, and
Bear Trap Meadow. Meadows are important ecosystems for
sequestering carbon, they serve as habitat for threatened
native species, and act as a “water bank” by holding snow water
as it melts then slowly releasing it through the summer.
As temperatures rise and precipitation shifts from snow
dominant to rain dominant, the resiliency of these meadow
ecosystems is increasingly threatened. While existing habitat
degradation in these meadows was initially caused by a variety
of historic human impacts, this degradation is expected to
worsen in response to the impacts of climate change without
intervention.
The City of Ventura asked its residents to limit their water
use as crews tried to extinguish the Mountain Fire Wednesday
night. The rapidly-spreading wildfire quickly burned through
more than 10,400 acres after sparking near Moorpark in Ventura
County. Firefighters attributed the explosion in size to the
Santa Ana winds that prompted a Red Flag warning. In this
particular instance, they issued a “Particularly Dangerous
Situation” alert because of the threat posed by “an
ongoing or imminent fire weather pattern.” Meteorologists
tracked some gusts of wind that reached more than 60 miles per
hour as the fire burned. The strong winds grounded firefighting
fixed-wing aircraft, adding another hurdle toward full
containment, according to Ventura County Fire Department.
President-elect Donald Trump will return to the White House in
January with an agenda to slash government regulations, expand
fossil fuel production and fire his critics in the federal
government. Following Trump’s decisive win Tuesday and with
Republicans clinching control of at least one chamber of
Congress, the president-elect and his team are poised to make
drastic overhauls to energy and environmental policies.
California voters approved a bond measure Tuesday that will let
the state borrow $10 billion to fund wildfire, flood protection
and other climate resiliency projects. Proposition 4 easily
passed in a state where devastating wildfires, heat waves and
other natural disasters linked to climate change are occurring
more frequently. Pollsters say those events — which have driven
a homeowners insurance crisis — have led to growing support for
climate action across regions and demographic groups. The
measure represents California’s latest effort to spend big on
climate resiliency and environmental health projects, with
billions allocated to prepare for droughts and floods. While
the largest portion of the money will go to water
infrastructure, Prop 4 also finances new projects to address
wildfire protection and sea-level rise. Forty percent of the
money is designated to projects in disadvantaged communities.
If the 2024 ballot poses the question of whether voters care
more about leaky schools or wildfires, the answer appears
clear: Climate change trumps education in the California
consciousness. … Proposition 4, which would spend the
same amount on wildfire, flooding and other climate
resiliency programs, is at a comfortable 60 percent,
according to polling released last week. Much of the difference
is due to climate being the fresh face on the block, pollsters
and backers of both bonds said. While school funding has been
on the ballot six times since 1998, most recently in 2020, this
is the first time climate-specific spending has gone before
voters, said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public
Policy Institute of California, which conducted last week’s
poll.
The National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory
for a small portion of the Lake Tahoe shoreline Tuesday
morning, warning of lake-effect snow. Up to 3 inches of snow
was expected near Emerald Bay in El Dorado County, with the
advisory in effect until 11 a.m. The weather service reported
“sections of Highway 89 between Meeks Bay and the junction with
Highway 50 are slick and hazardous.” Weather service
meteorologist Amanda Young said lake-effect snow around Lake
Tahoe is infrequent and only occurs when there is a significant
temperature difference between the lake water and the air
above. Lake-effect snow is most common in fall, when the lake
is still warm, or in midwinter when air temperatures fall to
the teens or single digits.
Fast-growing fires were responsible for nearly 90% of
fire-related damages despite being relatively rare in the
United States between 2001-2020, according to a new study.
“Fast fires,” which thrust embers into the air ahead of rapidly
advancing flames, can ignite homes before emergency responders
can intervene. The study, published recently in Science, shows
these fires are getting faster in the Western U.S., increasing
the risk for millions of people. “In California, we’ve been
transfixed by so-called megafires because of their massive
size, but it turns out that the most destructive fires are ones
that grow so fast they can’t be stopped,” said Professor
Crystal Kolden, director of the UC Merced Fire Resilience
Center and a co-author of the study. “Fast fires are the ones
that destroy homes and lives.”
… In 2024, Northern Nevada was under a blizzard warning in
the spring and Southern Nevada shattered heat records in the
summer. By fall, most of the state was in some level of drought
— despite the 2024 water year wrapping up Sept. 30 with mostly
normal numbers. Now, water scientists and wildfire experts are
looking for signs of what 2025 might hold for the state but
it’s largely still up in the air — according to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate
Prediction Center, the region has an equal chance of having
above, near or below-normal precipitation in 2025.
In the push to stop burning fossil fuels, California may find
itself becoming less of a national power player after November.
That’s if Donald Trump or the Supreme Court dismantles one of
the state’s key weapons against carbon emissions, a
half-century old Environmental Protection Agency waiver program
that allows California to set regulations that are stronger
than federal rules. … Among other programs, [Pres. Joe]
Biden’s landmark climate law is expected to support the state’s
transition to clean energy with funding for renewables, to
modernize the electric grid and expand EV charging
infrastructure. The state climate bond, Prop 4, will also fund
a wide variety of programs from clean drinking
water to habitat restoration across the state.
… The region has been battered by extreme weather whiplash in
recent years, with sweltering summer heatwaves and long
stretches of drought alternating with furious winter storms and
spring floods. Fires that roar across the hillsides, consuming
homes and the treasured land around them, have terrorized the
town and others that dot the California mountainsides time and
time again. Residents who have paid a heavy toll to recover
from and prepare for these extreme elements are increasingly
worried that, along with fire dangers, a boost in tourists will
drain their waning water supply, overwhelm
infrastructure and put additional strain on the delicate
ecosystems.
… ABC10 meteorologist Rob Carlmark took a trip to Southern
California’s largest natural lake, Lake Elsinore. This lake is
facing the same scenario, but the leaders of the community
surrounding the lake are taking the next step. They put forth
real action and are getting results. … It’s the largest
natural freshwater lake in Southern California. It is fairly
shallow but six miles long and the surface area is nearly 3,000
acres. … When the lake turned green with toxic
cyanobacteria algae in 2022, the town was heavily impacted.
They’ve had numerous periods of the water turning green, but
the outbreak prompted a six-month closure. Residents demanded
Lake Elsinore’s mayor and city council address the issue.
… In the western United States, extensive fires are now
commonplace. … The area of land burnt each year increases
exponentially with aridity. And climate change is making the
fire season in the western United States both warmer and drier.
… In the past six years, just three fast-moving
wildfires — in Paradise, California, in 2018; the 2021 Marshall
fire in Colorado; and the 2023 fire in Lahaina, Hawaii —
destroyed thousands of homes and together took more than 150
lives. As well as spreading flames and choking smoke, fires
increase the likelihoods of water pollution, flooding and
mudslides by, for example, killing vegetation that would
otherwise regulate water run-off and stabilize soils.
Other wildfire research and climate change articles:
A team of climate specialists from the NSF National Center for
Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics Lab, Texas
A&M University, and Pennsylvania State University has found
evidence for a rise in ocean levels during future atmospheric
rivers (ARs) that form in the Pacific Ocean and make their way
to the North American coast. In their
paper published in the journal Communications
Earth & Environment, the group describes their study of
previous ARs and how they applied what they learned to ARs of
the future, when taking into account global warming. Over the
next century, dramatic changes to the
world’s climate are expected, from warming
temperatures to more rain in some places and less in others.
Another aspect of climate change that has not received as much
press is the ongoing changes to the world’s oceans. In addition
to warmer air over the oceans, the water
temperature is also growing warmer.
Sonoma Water has announced plans to update its climate change
models for the Russian River watershed using the latest
available data. Sonoma Valley and the City of Sonoma both
are contractors with the agency, and receive water from the
Russian River. The agency will partner with Flint HydroScience,
LLC to incorporate new climate projections into its Basin
Characterization Model, which is used to estimate stream flows
and analyze potential impacts to water supplies. … The
$86,000 project will utilize new climate data from the Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 that are included in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report.
This represents the most current scientific projections of
future climate conditions.
As California prepares for future cycles of water scarcity, the
Legislature continues to prioritize enhancing regulations to
address critical water supply needs, secure the rights of
diverse water holders, and protect essential environmental
resources. On September 22, 2024, Governor Newsom signed AB 460
into law, a bill that significantly increases fines for
unauthorized water diversions and other violations of state
orders related to water use. AB 460 was introduced in response
to limitations in existing California Water Code provisions
that capped the maximum fines for violations of appropriative
water diversions and uses to $500 per day.
As temperatures rise, particularly in alpine
regions, lakes are feeling the
heat. Research published in the
journal Science, led by researchers at the
Carnegie Institution for Science, indicates that
climate change impacts critical winter
processes including lake ice conditions.
Changes in lake ice conditions impact the
function of ecosystems and the communities that live nearby.
With climate affecting this critical winter process one can
ask, what other critical changes to freshwaters might occur
from changing winters whether at Lake Tahoe, or the
small lakes and streams in the mountains of
California and Nevada? … There are many ways climate
change can and will impact western alpine lakes. Changing
snowpack and winter conditions can extend plant growing seasons
for lakes in the summer, increasing the
opportunities for invasive species to take hold within
a lake or expand their range.
Clear Lake is the largest freshwater lake that lies wholly in
California. It’s also the oldest warm water lake in North
America, having formed over half a million years ago, but those
ancient waters and surrounding shores hide a dangerous element
that could suffocate this treasure. Warming temperatures and a
changing climate are giving algae and bacteria the upper hand.
The community isn’t willing to give up, though. Long-time
resident Debbie Clarke sees the potential in the lake sitting
just 100 miles north of Sacramento and San Francisco.
She recalls summer days from her childhood when the lake would
go from 1,000 people to 15,000 people starting Memorial Day
weekend. Even though the population of permanent residents has
grown, Debbie says it still feels like a close-knit community.
One neighbor is even working on revitalizing an old boat slip
with hopes of making it a place to swim and fish, if he can
find a way to keep out a dangerous bacteria growth called
cyanobacteria.
With autumn well underway, Californians are eager to know
whether it’ll be a wet or dry winter in the Golden State. After
two winters marked by robust snowpacks in the Sierra Nevada,
could more snow-dumping storms be on the way in coming
months? Meteorologists said they don’t have a crystal ball
that can forecast the weather several months out. A variety of
factors could impact the upcoming winter’s outcome, from
the development of a La Niña weather pattern to an
area of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, and nobody can predict
how much influence each will have if it does develop.
Flood Preparedness Week will have all but come and gone before
Solano County is expected to see any more rainfall. The
National Weather Service in Sacramento is reporting a new storm
system coming in over the weekend, with a chance of rain into
next week. Flood Preparedness Week runs Oct. 19-26. However,
the state Department of Water Resources said now is the time to
get prepared for the possibility of flooding, and that starts
with knowing your risk. … The warning comes after two
straight years with major flood events across the state.
It also comes with what forecasters are saying will be a La
Niña winter, which likely means a drier winter in Southern
California, and a lot of uncertainty in the northern part of
the state – including the Bay Area. Right now, the Climate
Prediction Center reports there is an equal chance that
rainfall will be above normal this winter or below normal this
winter. The historic trend is for slightly above average rain
during La Niña years in Northern California.
A combination of warmer climate and water mismanagement has led
to the draining of Eagle Lake near Susanville. While
changes could still be made to preserve what’s left, the Bureau
of Land Management says getting the lake levels to where they
were a century ago would take decades of rain without
evaporation — and that’s a scenario that just won’t play out.
Evaporation and winds drop lake levels at Eagle Lake several
feet every year. “You get 3-5 feet of loss every year so
you have to balance that with recharge, and if you don’t, then
the lake just gets smaller and smaller,” said Stan Bales with
the Bureau of Land Management.
The California Water Association (CWA) [Oct. 21] announced it
has
been selected as the beneficiary of a
prestigious $50 million grant award, to reach $100 million
with matching funds, from the Grid Resilience and Innovation
Partnerships (GRIP) program under the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) to accelerate electric grid resilient projects. The grant
program will be implemented across CWA members’ local utility
service areas in partnership with Generac Power
Systems. The aim of the grant is to advance clean energy
solutions across water utility infrastructure to enhance grid
reliability, conserve resources, and protect air quality for
communities throughout California. In collaboration with
Generac, diverse union contractors, local community-based
organizations (CBO,) and workforce development partners, CWA
member water utilities will install clean battery storage
systems at water treatment sites across the state. These
microgrids will allow water utilities to utilize
reliable, clean energy solutions to deliver
uninterrupted water service, even during extreme heat and other
stressors to the state electric grid.
New research released today by the Pacific Institute and the
Center for Water Security and Cooperation (CWSC) reveals
existing laws and policies fail to protect water and sanitation
systems from climate change impacts in frontline communities
across the United States. The report, “Law and Policies that
Address Equitable, Climate-Resilient Water and Sanitation,”
examines federal, Tribal, state, and local laws and policies
governing centralized drinking water and wastewater systems, as
well as decentralized onsite drinking water and sanitation
systems. The research demonstrates that most existing US water
laws and policies were developed assuming historical climate
trends that determine water availability would be constant and
that communities’ vulnerability to climate events would be the
same over time. The research specifically outlines how laws and
policies often do not anticipate or help to proactively manage
the impacts of climate change on water and wastewater systems
in frontline communities.
A weak La Niña is forecast to appear this winter and affect
weather patterns across the country, likely bringing
drier-than-average conditions in much of the Southwest and
wetter-than-average conditions in the Pacific Northwest,
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. The outlook is uncertain, however, for
much of California, where NOAA experts predict there
are equal chances of below-average, average or above-average
winter precipitation. “For California, there was quite a bit of
uncertainty,” said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Operational
Prediction Branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. “Drought
is not favored to develop in California at the current time,
but it’s something we will be watching very closely as we go
into the winter, because La Niña events do sometimes have a dry
signal, especially in Southern California.”
At the state and local level, ballot measures give voters an
opportunity to influence policy and spending decisions. Several
of those measures relate to water. There are fewer big-dollar
measures in 2024 compared to past years. But many smaller
considerations dot ballots from New Mexico and Minnesota to
Colorado and California. Water infrastructure
spending is a typical ballot question, and one that voters
generally endorse. Three states and a handful of towns and
counties will ask voters to approve funding measures for land
conservation, water quality protection, and climate resilience.
The biggest outlay would be in California, which has a $10
billion water and climate bond on the ballot.
Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the
first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster
that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives,
according to a landmark new report. Decades of destructive land
use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused
climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global
water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global
Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international
leaders and experts. … Disruptions to the water cycle are
already causing suffering. Nearly 3 billion people face water
scarcity. Crops are shriveling and cities are sinking as the
groundwater beneath them dries out.
Like many states, California is facing a growing number of
climate-related extremes: The annual acreage scorched by
wildfires in the state increased fivefold between 1972 and
2018, and burns are also growing more intense. In addition,
excessive rain is increasing flooding, landslides, and erosion,
which can devastate terrain already reeling from fire damage.
Large amounts of soil are prone to eroding after a wildfire,
especially if heavy rainfall occurs within a year of the
burn. Dow et al. studied 196 fires that occurred
between 1984 and 2021 and found that postfire sediment erosion
increased statewide during this period. They used a combination
of postfire hillslope erosion modeling and measurements of
debris flow volume from both real and modeled events.
An ongoing outbreak of botulism, a bacterial illness that
causes muscle paralysis, has killed more than 94,000 birds at
Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, the
worst such outbreak at the lake ever recorded, according to
federal scientists. Affected birds often cannot control their
muscles and often suffocate in the water, said biologist and
ornithologist Teresa Wicks, with Bird Alliance of Oregon, who
works in the area. “It’s a very traumatic thing to see,” Wicks
said. Though local in scale, the outbreak and catastrophic
die-off are tied to global problems including declining
wetlands, increasing demand for limited water resources,
hydrological diversions, and a warming climate. These
kinds of outbreaks can happen around the world and the
phenomenon seems to be on the rise, according to Andrew
Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who
studies bird migration.
California has endured three severe droughts over the past 15
years. Its five largest wildfires in recorded history have all
occurred since 2018. Heat waves with temperatures above 110
degrees are breaking records summer after summer. With that
backdrop, along with a state budget that lawmakers have
struggled to balance over the past year, California voters will
decide the fate of Proposition 4, a bond measure on the
November ballot that would authorize $10 billion in spending to
address climate change and its impacts. The money would
fund a range of programs, from increasing forest thinning to
planting more trees in cities to reduce temperatures during
heat waves. It also would pay for programs to expand water
conservation and recycling, enlarge state parks and create
coastal wetlands to buttress rising sea levels.
… To clarify the connection between the snowpack and
streamflow—and project how climate change is altering the
relationship—the scientists used computer simulations and
hydrological modeling in a 2017 paper in Geophysical Research
Letters to estimate snow’s significance for runoff across the
West. Here’s what they found: 53% of total runoff in the West
originated as snowmelt, even though only 37% of the
precipitation fell as snow. … A quarter of the West’s land
area, primarily in the high country, produced 90% of total
runoff on average. Climate change will reduce the snowpack’s
contribution to runoff, according to the study, as warmer
temperatures make it more likely that precipitation will fall
as raindrops, rather than snowflakes, leaving downstream water
users vulnerable.
… the Coachella Valley, home to a thriving agricultural
industry and a large population of Latino farmworkers, provides
a backdrop for Trump to highlight the region’s water and
agricultural needs, as well as immigration. Latinos constitute
almost 98% of Coachella, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
… Trump criticized California as being horribly
mismanaged, primarily blaming Harris and Democratic Gov. Gavin
Newsom, especially when it comes to crime, the high cost of
living and water policy.
On average, more than half of California’s developed water supply originates in the Sierra Nevada and the southern spur of the Cascade Range. Our water supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests, which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought, wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
Participants joined us as we journeyed into the Sierra to examine water issues that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts downstream and throughout the state.
State water management officials must work more closely with
local agencies to properly prepare California for the effects
of climate change, water scientists say. Golden State
officials said in the newly revised California Water
Plan that as the nation’s most populous state, California
is too diverse and complex for a singular approach to manage a
vast water network. On Monday, they recommended expanding the
work to better manage the state’s precious water resources —
including building better partnerships with communities most at
risk during extreme drought and floods and improving critical
infrastructure for water storage, treatment and distribution
among different regions and watersheds.
Last year’s snow deluge in California, which quickly erased a
two decade long megadrought, was essentially a
once-in-a-lifetime rescue from above, a new study found. Don’t
get used to it because with climate change the 2023 California
snow bonanza —a record for snow on the ground on April 1 — will
be less likely in the future, said the study in Monday’s
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t part
of the study but specializes in weather in the U.S. West, said,
“I would not be surprised if 2023 was the coldest, snowiest
winter for the rest of my own lifetime in California.”
Explore the lower Colorado River firsthand where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to some 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs is the focus of this tour.
Hilton Garden Inn Las Vegas Strip South
7830 S Las Vegas Blvd
Las Vegas, NV 89123
State health officials know that extreme heat can cost lives
and send people to the hospital, just like wildfire smoke. Now,
new research finds that when people are exposed to both hazards
simultaneously — as is increasingly the case in California —
heart and respiratory crises outpace the expected sum of
hospitalizations compared to when the conditions occur
separately. … The study joins a growing body of research
about the intersection of different climate risks. Last month,
California-based think-tank the Pacific
Institute published a report about how converging
hazards — including wildfires, drought, flooding, sea level
rise and intensifying storms — are harming access to drinking
water and sanitation in California and other parts of the
world. The deadly 2018 Camp fire in Butte
County impacted an estimated 2,438 private wells, the
report said.
After more than two decades of
drought, water utilities serving the largest urban regions in the
arid Southwest are embracing a drought-proof source of drinking
water long considered a supply of last resort: purified sewage.
Water supplies have tightened to the point that Phoenix and the
water supplier for 19 million Southern California residents are
racing to adopt an expensive technology called “direct potable
reuse” or “advanced purification” to reduce their reliance on
imported water from the dwindling Colorado River.
The climate-driven shrinking of the
Colorado River is expanding the influence of Native American
tribes over how the river’s flows are divided among cities, farms
and reservations across the Southwest.
The tribes are seeing the value of their largely unused river
water entitlements rise as the Colorado dwindles, and they are
gaining seats they’ve never had at the water bargaining table as
government agencies try to redress a legacy of exclusion.
Every five years the California Department of Water Resources
updates its strategic plan for managing the state’s water
resources, as required by state law.
The California Water Plan, or Bulletin 160, projects the
status and trends of the state’s water supplies and demands
under a range of future scenarios.
A new but little-known change in
California law designating aquifers as “natural infrastructure”
promises to unleash a flood of public funding for projects that
increase the state’s supply of groundwater.
The change is buried in a sweeping state budget-related law,
enacted in July, that also makes it easier for property owners
and water managers to divert floodwater for storage underground.
The states of the Lower Colorado
River Basin have traditionally played an oversized role in
tapping the lifeline that supplies 40 million people in the West.
California, Nevada and Arizona were quicker to build major canals
and dams and negotiated a landmark deal that requires the Upper
Basin to send predictable flows through the Grand Canyon, even
during dry years.
But with the federal government threatening unprecedented water
cuts amid decades of drought and declining reservoirs, the Upper
Basin states of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico are
muscling up to protect their shares of an overallocated river
whose average flows in the Upper Basin have already dropped
20 percent over the last century.
They have formed new agencies to better monitor their interests,
moved influential Colorado River veterans into top negotiating
posts and improved their relationships with Native American
tribes that also hold substantial claims to the river.
This tour explored the lower Colorado River firsthand where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to some 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Hilton Garden Inn Las Vegas Strip South
7830 S Las Vegas Blvd
Las Vegas, NV 89123
This special Foundation water tour journeyed along the Eastern Sierra from the Truckee River to Mono Lake, through the Owens Valley and into the Mojave Desert to explore a major source of water for Southern California, this year’s snowpack and challenges for towns, farms and the environment.
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.
When the Colorado River Compact was
signed 100 years ago, the negotiators for seven Western states
bet that the river they were dividing would have ample water to
meet everyone’s needs – even those not seated around the table.
A century later, it’s clear the water they bet on is not there.
More than two decades of drought, lake evaporation and overuse of
water have nearly drained the river’s two anchor reservoirs, Lake
Powell on the Arizona-Utah border and Lake Mead near Las Vegas.
Climate change is rendering the basin drier, shrinking spring
runoff that’s vital for river flows, farms, tribes and cities
across the basin – and essential for refilling reservoirs.
The states that endorsed the Colorado River Compact in 1922 – and
the tribes and nation of Mexico that were excluded from the table
– are now straining to find, and perhaps more importantly accept,
solutions on a river that may offer just half of the water that
the Compact assumed would be available. And not only are
solutions not coming easily, the relationships essential for
compromise are getting more frayed.
With 25 years of experience working
on the Colorado River, Chuck Cullom is used to responding to
myriad challenges that arise on the vital lifeline that seven
states, more than two dozen tribes and the country of Mexico
depend on for water. But this summer problems on the
drought-stressed river are piling up at a dizzying pace:
Reservoirs plummeting to record low levels, whether Hoover Dam
and Glen Canyon Dam can continue to release water and produce
hydropower, unprecedented water cuts and predatory smallmouth
bass threatening native fish species in the Grand Canyon.
“Holy buckets, Batman!,” said Cullom, executive director of the
Upper Colorado River Commission. “I mean, it’s just on and on and
on.”
Managers of California’s most
overdrawn aquifers were given a monumental task under the state’s
landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: Craft viable,
detailed plans on a 20-year timeline to bring their beleaguered
basins into balance. It was a task that required more than 250
newly formed local groundwater agencies – many of them in the
drought-stressed San Joaquin Valley – to set up shop, gather
data, hear from the public and collaborate with neighbors on
multiple complex plans, often covering just portions of a
groundwater basin.
Momentum is building for a unique
interstate deal that aims to transform wastewater from Southern
California homes and business into relief for the stressed
Colorado River. The collaborative effort to add resiliency to a
river suffering from overuse, drought and climate change is being
shaped across state lines by some of the West’s largest water
agencies.
This tour explored the lower Colorado River firsthand where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to some 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Hyatt Place Las Vegas At Silverton Village
8380 Dean Martin Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89139
Climate scientist Brad Udall calls
himself the skunk in the room when it comes to the Colorado
River. Armed with a deck of PowerPoint slides and charts that
highlight the Colorado River’s worsening math, the Colorado State
University scientist offers a grim assessment of the river’s
future: Runoff from the river’s headwaters is declining, less
water is flowing into Lake Powell – the key reservoir near the
Arizona-Utah border – and at the same time, more water is being
released from the reservoir than it can sustainably provide.
The lower Colorado River has virtually every drop allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Hyatt Place Las Vegas At Silverton Village
8380 Dean Martin Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89139
For more than 20 years, Tanya
Trujillo has been immersed in the many challenges of the Colorado
River, the drought-stressed lifeline for 40 million people from
Denver to Los Angeles and the source of irrigation water for more
than 5 million acres of winter lettuce, supermarket melons and
other crops.
Trujillo has experience working in both the Upper and Lower
Basins of the Colorado River, basins that split the river’s water
evenly but are sometimes at odds with each other. She was a
lawyer for the state of New Mexico, one of four states in the
Upper Colorado River Basin, when key operating guidelines for
sharing shortages on the river were negotiated in 2007. She later
worked as executive director for the Colorado River Board of
California, exposing her to the different perspectives and
challenges facing California and the other states in the river’s
Lower Basin.
Land and waterway managers labored
hard over the course of a century to control California’s unruly
rivers by building dams and levees to slow and contain their
water. Now, farmers, environmentalists and agencies are undoing
some of that work as part of an accelerating campaign to restore
the state’s major floodplains.
Stretching 450 miles long and up to
50 miles wide, the Sierra Nevada makes up more than a quarter of
California’s land area and forms its largest watersheds,
providing more than half of the state’s developed water supply to
residents, agriculture and other businesses.*
Water is flowing once again
to the Colorado River’s delta in Mexico, a vast region that
was once a natural splendor before the iconic Western river was
dammed and diverted at the turn of the last century, essentially
turning the delta into a desert.
In 2012, the idea emerged that water could be intentionally sent
down the river to inundate the delta floodplain and regenerate
native cottonwood and willow trees, even in an overallocated
river system. Ultimately, dedicated flows of river water were
brokered under cooperative
efforts by the U.S. and Mexican governments.
This tour guided participants on a virtual journey deep into California’s most crucial water and ecological resource – the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 720,000-acre network of islands and canals support the state’s two major water systems – the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. The Delta and the connecting San Francisco Bay form the largest freshwater tidal estuary of its kind on the West coast.
Las Vegas, known for its searing summertime heat and glitzy casino fountains, is projected to get even hotter in the coming years as climate change intensifies. As temperatures rise, possibly as much as 10 degrees by end of the century, according to some models, water demand for the desert community is expected to spike. That is not good news in a fast-growing region that depends largely on a limited supply of water from an already drought-stressed Colorado River.
On average, more than 60 percent of
California’s developed water supply originates in the Sierra
Nevada and the southern spur of the Cascade Range. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
This tour ventured into the Sierra to examine water issues
that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts downstream and
throughout the state.
As California’s seasons become
warmer and drier, state officials are pondering whether the water
rights permitting system needs revising to better reflect the
reality of climate change’s effect on the timing and volume of
the state’s water supply.
A report by the State Water Resources Control Board recommends
that new water rights permits be tailored to California’s
increasingly volatile hydrology and be adaptable enough to ensure
water exists to meet an applicant’s demand. And it warns
that the increasingly whiplash nature of California’s changing
climate could require existing rights holders to curtail
diversions more often and in more watersheds — or open
opportunities to grab more water in climate-induced floods.
Twenty years ago, the Colorado River
Basin’s hydrology began tumbling into a historically bad stretch.
The weather turned persistently dry. Water levels in the system’s
anchor reservoirs of Lake Powell and Lake Mead plummeted. A river
system relied upon by nearly 40 million people, farms and
ecosystems across the West was in trouble. And there was no guide
on how to respond.
Radically transformed from its ancient origin as a vast tidal-influenced freshwater marsh, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem is in constant flux, influenced by factors within the estuary itself and the massive watersheds that drain though it into the Pacific Ocean.
Lately, however, scientists say the rate of change has kicked into overdrive, fueled in part by climate change, and is limiting the ability of science and Delta water managers to keep up. The rapid pace of upheaval demands a new way of conducting science and managing water in the troubled estuary.
Practically every drop of water that flows through the meadows, canyons and plains of the Colorado River Basin has reams of science attached to it. Snowpack, streamflow and tree ring data all influence the crucial decisions that guide water management of the iconic Western river every day.
Dizzying in its scope, detail and complexity, the scientific information on the Basin’s climate and hydrology has been largely scattered in hundreds of studies and reports. Some studies may conflict with others, or at least appear to. That’s problematic for a river that’s a lifeline for 40 million people and more than 4 million acres of irrigated farmland.
Sprawled across a desert expanse
along the Utah-Arizona border, Lake Powell’s nearly 100-foot high
bathtub ring etched on its sandstone walls belie the challenges
of a major Colorado River reservoir at less than half-full. How
those challenges play out as demand grows for the river’s water
amid a changing climate is fueling simmering questions about
Powell’s future.
This event explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
The islands of the western
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are sinking as the rich peat soil
that attracted generations of farmers dries out and decays. As
the peat decomposes, it releases tons of carbon dioxide – a
greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. As the islands sink, the
levees that protect them are at increasing risk of failure, which
could imperil California’s vital water conveyance system.
An ambitious plan now in the works could halt the decay,
sequester the carbon and potentially reverse the sinking.
Shortly after taking office in 2019,
Gov. Gavin Newsom called on state agencies to deliver a Water
Resilience Portfolio to meet California’s urgent challenges —
unsafe drinking water, flood and drought risks from a changing
climate, severely depleted groundwater aquifers and native fish
populations threatened with extinction.
Within days, he appointed Nancy Vogel, a former journalist and
veteran water communicator, as director of the Governor’s Water
Portfolio Program to help shepherd the monumental task of
compiling all the information necessary for the portfolio. The
three state agencies tasked with preparing the document delivered
the draft Water Resilience Portfolio Jan. 3. The document, which
Vogel said will help guide policy and investment decisions
related to water resilience, is nearing the end of its comment
period, which goes through Friday, Feb. 7.
The Colorado River is arguably one
of the hardest working rivers on the planet, supplying water to
40 million people and a large agricultural economy in the West.
But it’s under duress from two decades of drought and decisions
made about its management will have exceptional ramifications for
the future, especially as impacts from climate change are felt.
Many of California’s watersheds are
notoriously flashy – swerving from below-average flows to jarring
flood conditions in quick order. The state needs all the water it
can get from storms, but current flood management guidelines are
strict and unyielding, requiring reservoirs to dump water each
winter to make space for flood flows that may not come.
However, new tools and operating methods are emerging that could
lead the way to a redefined system that improves both water
supply and flood protection capabilities.
It’s been a year since two devastating wildfires on opposite ends
of California underscored the harsh new realities facing water
districts and cities serving communities in or adjacent to the
state’s fire-prone wildlands. Fire doesn’t just level homes, it
can contaminate water, scorch watersheds, damage delivery systems
and upend an agency’s finances.
California is chock full of rivers and creeks, yet the state’s network of stream gauges has significant gaps that limit real-time tracking of how much water is flowing downstream, information that is vital for flood protection, forecasting water supplies and knowing what the future might bring.
That network of stream gauges got a big boost Sept. 30 with the signing of SB 19. Authored by Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa), the law requires the state to develop a stream gauge deployment plan, focusing on reactivating existing gauges that have been offline for lack of funding and other reasons. Nearly half of California’s stream gauges are dormant.
The Colorado River Basin’s 20 years
of drought and the dramatic decline in water levels at the
river’s key reservoirs have pressed water managers to adapt to
challenging conditions. But even more extreme — albeit rare —
droughts or floods that could overwhelm water managers may lie
ahead in the Basin as the effects of climate change take hold,
say a group of scientists. They argue that stakeholders who are
preparing to rewrite the operating rules of the river should plan
now for how to handle these so-called “black swan” events so
they’re not blindsided.
The majestic beauty of the Sierra
Nevada forest is awe-inspiring, but beneath the dazzling blue
sky, there is a problem: A century of fire suppression and
logging practices have left trees too close together. Millions of
trees have died, stricken by drought and beetle infestation.
Combined with a forest floor cluttered with dry brush and debris,
it’s a wildfire waiting to happen.
Fires devastate the Sierra watersheds upon which millions of
Californians depend — scorching the ground, unleashing a
battering ram of debris and turning hillsides into gelatinous,
stream-choking mudflows.
Even as stakeholders in the Colorado River Basin celebrate the recent completion of an unprecedented drought plan intended to stave off a crashing Lake Mead, there is little time to rest. An even larger hurdle lies ahead as they prepare to hammer out the next set of rules that could vastly reshape the river’s future.
Set to expire in 2026, the current guidelines for water deliveries and shortage sharing, launched in 2007 amid a multiyear drought, were designed to prevent disputes that could provoke conflict.
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
This tour explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs is the focus of this tour.
Silverton Hotel
3333 Blue Diamond Road
Las Vegas, NV 89139
Although Santa Monica may be the most aggressive Southern California water provider to wean itself from imported supplies, it is hardly the only one looking to remake its water portfolio.
In Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people, efforts are underway to dramatically slash purchases of imported water while boosting the amount from recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation. Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014 announced a plan to reduce the city’s purchase of imported water from Metropolitan Water District by one-half by 2025 and to provide one-half of the city’s supply from local sources by 2035. (The city considers its Eastern Sierra supplies as imported water.)
Imported water from the Sierra
Nevada and the Colorado River built Southern California. Yet as
drought, climate change and environmental concerns render those
supplies increasingly at risk, the Southland’s cities have ramped
up their efforts to rely more on local sources and less on
imported water.
Far and away the most ambitious goal has been set by the city of
Santa Monica, which in 2014 embarked on a course to be virtually
water independent through local sources by 2023. In the 1990s,
Santa Monica was completely dependent on imported water. Now, it
derives more than 70 percent of its water locally.
The growing leadership of women in water. The Colorado River’s persistent drought and efforts to sign off on a plan to avert worse shortfalls of water from the river. And in California’s Central Valley, promising solutions to vexing water resource challenges.
These were among the topics that Western Water news explored in 2018.
We’re already planning a full slate of stories for 2019. You can sign up here to be alerted when new stories are published. In the meantime, take a look at what we dove into in 2018:
As stakeholders labor to nail down
effective and durable drought contingency plans for the Colorado
River Basin, they face a stark reality: Scientific research is
increasingly pointing to even drier, more challenging times
ahead.
The latest sobering assessment landed the day after Thanksgiving,
when U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fourth National Climate
Assessment concluded that Earth’s climate is changing rapidly
compared to the pace of natural variations that have occurred
throughout its history, with greenhouse gas emissions largely the
cause.
In the universe of California water, Tim Quinn is a professor emeritus. Quinn has seen — and been a key player in — a lot of major California water issues since he began his water career 40 years ago as a young economist with the Rand Corporation, then later as deputy general manager with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and finally as executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. In December, the 66-year-old will retire from ACWA.
Just because El Niño may be lurking
off in the tropical Pacific, does that really offer much of a
clue about what kind of rainy season California can expect in
Water Year 2019?
Will a river of storms pound the state, swelling streams and
packing the mountains with deep layers of heavy snow much like
the exceptionally wet 2017 Water Year (Oct. 1, 2016 to Sept. 30,
2017)? Or will this winter sputter along like last winter,
leaving California with a second dry year and the possibility of
another potential drought? What can reliably be said about the
prospects for Water Year 2019?
At Water Year
2019: Feast or Famine?, a one-day event on Dec. 5 in Irvine,
water managers and anyone else interested in this topic will
learn about what is and isn’t known about forecasting
California’s winter precipitation weeks to months ahead, the
skill of present forecasts and ongoing research to develop
predictive ability.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
Amy Haas recently became the first non-engineer and the first woman to serve as executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission in its 70-year history, putting her smack in the center of a host of daunting challenges facing the Upper Colorado River Basin.
Yet those challenges will be quite familiar to Haas, an attorney who for the past year has served as deputy director and general counsel of the commission. (She replaced longtime Executive Director Don Ostler). She has a long history of working within interstate Colorado River governance, including representing New Mexico as its Upper Colorado River commissioner and playing a central role in the negotiation of the recently signed U.S.-Mexico agreement known as Minute 323.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
We headed into the foothills and the mountains to examine
water issues that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts
downstream and throughout the state.
GEI (Tour Starting Point)
2868 Prospect Park Dr.
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670.
Our annual Water Summit, being held Sept. 20, will
feature critical conversations about water in California and
the West revolving around the theme: Facing
Reality from the Headwaters to the
Delta.
As debate continues to swirl around longer-term remedies for
California’s water challenges, the theme reflects the need for
straightforward dialogue about more immediate, on-the-ground
solutions.
Nowhere is the domino effect in
Western water policy played out more than on the Colorado River,
and specifically when it involves the Lower Basin states of
California, Nevada and Arizona. We are seeing that play out now
as the three states strive to forge a Drought Contingency Plan.
Yet that plan can’t be finalized until Arizona finds a unifying
voice between its major water players, an effort you can read
more about in the latest in-depth article of Western Water.
Even then, there are some issues to resolve just within
California.
Brenda Burman, commissioner of the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, will give the keynote lunch address
at our 35th annual conference, the Water
Summit, to be held Sept. 20 in Sacramento.
The daylong event will feature critical conversations about water
in California and the West revolving around the
theme: Facing Reality from the Headwaters to the
Delta.
We explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop
of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad
sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and
climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs was the focus of this tour.
Hampton Inn Tropicana
4975 Dean Martin Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89118
Learn what new tree-ring studies in
Southern California watersheds reveal about drought, hear about
efforts to improve subseasonal to seasonal weather forecasting
and get the latest on climate change impacts that will alter
drought vulnerability in the future.
At our Paleo
Drought Workshop on April 19th in San Pedro, you will hear
from experts at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, University of
Arizona and California Department of Water Resources.
Dramatic swings in weather patterns
over the past few years in California are stark reminders of
climate variability and regional vulnerability. Alternating years
of drought and intense rain events make long-term planning for
storing and distributing water a challenging task.
Current weather forecasting capabilities provide details for
short time horizons. Attend the Paleo Drought
Workshop in San Pedro on April 19 to learn more about
research efforts to improve sub-seasonal to seasonal
precipitation forecasting, known as S2S, and how those models
could provide more useful weather scenarios for resource
managers.
California’s 2012-2016 drought
revealed vulnerabilities for water users throughout the state,
and the long-term record suggests more challenges may lie ahead.
An April 19
workshop in San Pedro will highlight new information about
drought durations in Southern California watersheds dating
back centuries.
Every day, people flock to Daniel
Swain’s social media platforms to find out the latest news and
insight about California’s notoriously unpredictable weather.
Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, famously coined the
term “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” in December 2013 to describe
the large, formidable high-pressure mass that was parked over the
West Coast during winter and diverted storms away from
California, intensifying the drought.
Swain’s research focuses on atmospheric processes that cause
droughts and floods, along with the changing character of extreme
weather events in a warming world. A lifelong Californian and
alumnus of University of California, Davis, and Stanford
University, Swain is best known for the widely read Weather West blog, which provides
unique perspectives on weather and climate in California and the
western United States. In a recent interview with Western
Water, he talked about the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, its
potential long-term impact on California weather, and what may
lie ahead for the state’s water supply.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
This three-day, two-night tour explored the lower Colorado River
where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand
is growing from myriad sources — increasing population,
declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs is the focus of this tour.
Best Western McCarran Inn
4970 Paradise Road
Las Vegas, NV 89119
Evidence shows that climate change is affecting California with
warmer temperatures, less snowfall and more extreme weather
events. This guide explains the causes of climate change, the
effects on water resources and efforts underway to better adapt
to a changing climate. It includes information on both California
water and the water of the Colorado River Basin, a widely shared
resource throughout the Southwest.
Lake Tahoe is one of the world’s most beautiful yet vulnerable
lakes. Renowned for its remarkable clarity, Tahoe straddles the
Nevada-California border, stretching 22 miles long and 12 miles
wide in a granitic bowl high in the Sierra Nevada.
Tahoe sits 6,225 feet above sea level. Its deepest point is 1,645
feet, making it the second-deepest lake in the nation, after
Oregon’s Crater Lake, and the tenth deepest in the world.
Drought and climate change are having a noticeable impact on the
Colorado River Basin, and that is posing potential challenges to
those in the Southwestern United States and Mexico who rely on
the river.
In the just-released Winter 2017-18 edition of River
Report, writer Gary Pitzer examines what scientists
project will be the impact of climate change on the Colorado
River Basin, and how water managers are preparing for a future of
increasing scarcity.
Rising temperatures from climate change are having a noticeable
effect on how much water is flowing down the Colorado River. Read
the latest River Report to learn more about what’s
happening, and how water managers are responding.
This issue of Western Water discusses the challenges
facing the Colorado River Basin resulting from persistent
drought, climate change and an overallocated river, and how water
managers and others are trying to face the future.
The atmospheric condition at any given time or place, measured by
wind, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, cloudiness and
precipitation. Weather changes from hour to hour, day to day, and
season to season. Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as
the average weather, during a period of time ranging from months
to thousands or millions of years.
Variations in the statistical analysis of the climate on all time
and space scales beyond that of individual weather events is
known as natural variability. Natural variations in climate over
time are caused by internal processes of the climate system, such
as El Niño, and
phenomena such as volcanic activity and variations in the output
of the sun.
California agriculture is going to have to learn to live with the
impacts of climate change and work toward reducing its
contributions of greenhouse gas emissions, a Yolo County walnut
grower said at the Jan. 26 California Climate Change Symposium in
Sacramento.
“I don’t believe we are going to be able to adapt our way out of
climate change,” said Russ Lester, co-owner of Dixon Ridge Farms
in Winters. “We need to mitigate for it. It won’t solve the
problem but it can slow it down.”
California had its warmest winter on record in 2014-2015, with
the average Sierra Nevada temperature hovering above 32 degrees
Fahrenheit – the highest in 120 years. Thus, where California
relies on snow to fall in the mountains and create a snowpack
that can slowly melt into reservoirs, it was instead raining.
That left the state’s snowpack at its lowest ever – 5 percent on
April 1, 2015.
Because he relays stats like these, climate scientist Brad Udall
says he doesn’t often get invited back to speak before the same
audience about climate change.
This 30-minute documentary, produced in 2011, explores the past,
present and future of flood management in California’s Central
Valley. It features stories from residents who have experienced
the devastating effects of a California flood firsthand.
Interviews with long-time Central Valley water experts from
California Department of Water Resources (FloodSAFE), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Central Valley Flood
Management Program and environmental groups are featured as they
discuss current efforts to improve the state’s 150-year old flood
protection system and develop a sustainable, integrated, holistic
flood management plan for the Central Valley.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
20-minute DVD that explains the problem with polluted stormwater,
and steps that can be taken to help prevent such pollution and
turn what is often viewed as a “nuisance” into a water resource
through various activities.
Water truly has shaped California into the great state it is
today. And if it is water that made California great, it’s the
fight over – and with – water that also makes it so critically
important. In efforts to remap California’s circulatory system,
there have been some critical events that had a profound impact
on California’s water history. These turning points not only
forced a re-evaluation of water, but continue to impact the lives
of every Californian. This 2005 PBS documentary offers a
historical and current look at the major water issues that shaped
the state we know today. Includes a 12-page viewer’s guide with
background information, historic timeline and a teacher’s lesson.
Water as a renewable resource is depicted in this 18×24 inch
poster. Water is renewed again and again by the natural
hydrologic cycle where water evaporates, transpires from plants,
rises to form clouds, and returns to the earth as precipitation.
Excellent for elementary school classroom use.
Redesigned in 2017, this beautiful map depicts the seven
Western states that share the Colorado River with Mexico. The
Colorado River supplies water to nearly 40 million people in
Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
and Mexico. Text on this beautiful, 24×36-inch map, which is
suitable for framing, explains the river’s apportionment, history
and the need to adapt its management for urban growth and
expected climate change impacts.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Water Rights Law, recognized as
the most thorough explanation of California water rights law
available to non-lawyers, traces the authority for water flowing
in a stream or reservoir, from a faucet or into an irrigation
ditch through the complex web of California water rights.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the State Water Project provides
an overview of the California-funded and constructed State Water
Project.
The State Water Project is best known for the 444-mile-long
aqueduct that provides water from the Delta to San Joaquin Valley
agriculture and southern California cities. The guide contains
information about the project’s history and facilities.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Central Valley Project
explores the history and development of the federal Central
Valley Project (CVP), California’s largest surface water delivery
system. In addition to the project’s history, the guide describes
the various CVP facilities, CVP operations, the benefits the CVP
brought to the state and the CVP Improvement Act (CVPIA).
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
Climate change involves natural and man-made changes to weather
patterns that occur over millions of years or over multiple
decades.
In the past 150 years, human industrial activity has accelerated
the rate of change in the climate due to the increase in
greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide,
among others). Scientific studies describing this climate change
continue to be produced and its expected impacts continue to be
assessed.
This printed issue of Western Water looks at California
groundwater and whether its sustainability can be assured by
local, regional and state management. For more background
information on groundwater please refer to the Foundation’s
Layperson’s Guide to Groundwater.
This printed issue of Western Water This issue of Western Water
looks at climate change through the lens of some of the latest
scientific research and responses from experts regarding
mitigation and adaptation.
This issue of Western Water looks at the BDCP and the
Coalition to Support Delta Projects, issues that are aimed at
improving the health and safety of the Delta while solidifying
California’s long-term water supply reliability.
This printed issue of Western Water features a
roundtable discussion with Anthony Saracino, a water resources
consultant; Martha Davis, executive manager of policy development
with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency and senior policy advisor
to the Delta Stewardship Council; Stuart Leavenworth, editorial
page editor of The Sacramento Bee and Ellen Hanak, co-director of
research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of
California.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the issues
associated with the State Water Board’s proposed revision of the
water quality Bay-Delta Plan, most notably the question of
whether additional flows are needed for the system, and how they
might be provided.
This printed issue of Western Water explores the
historic nature of some of the key agreements in recent years,
future challenges, and what leading state representatives
identify as potential “worst-case scenarios.” Much of the content
for this issue of Western Water came from the in-depth
panel discussions at the Colorado River Symposium. The Foundation
will publish the full proceedings of the Symposium in 2012.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the
Colorado River drought, and the ongoing institutional and
operational changes underway to maintain the system and meet the
future challenges in the Colorado River Basin.
This printed issue of Western Water looks at the energy
requirements associated with water use and the means by which
state and local agencies are working to increase their knowledge
and improve the management of both resources.
This printed copy of Western Water examines climate change –
what’s known about it, the remaining uncertainty and what steps
water agencies are talking to prepare for its impact. Much of the
information comes from the October 2007 California Climate Change
and Water Adaptation Summit sponsored by the Water Education
Foundation and DWR and the November 2007 California Water Policy
Conference sponsored by Public Officials for Water and
Environmental Reform.
Perhaps no other issue has rocketed to prominence in such a short
time as climate change. A decade ago, discussion about greenhouse
gas (GHG) emissions and the connection to warming temperatures
was but a fraction of the attention now given to the issue. From
the United Nations to local communities, people are talking about
climate change – its characteristics and what steps need to be
taken to mitigate and adapt to the anticipated impacts.
This issue of Western Water looks at climate change and
its implications on water management in a region that is wholly
dependent on steady, predictable wet seasons to recharge supplies
for the lengthy dry periods. To what degree has climate change
occurred and what are the scenarios under which impacts will have
to be considered by water providers? The future is anything but
clear.
The inimitable Yogi Berra once proclaimed, “The future ain’t what
it used to be.” While the Hall of Fame baseball player was not
referring to the weather, his words are no less prophetic when it
comes to the discussion of a changing climate and its potential
impacts on water resources in the West.
