Tag: california

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California Water: Face of the Drought

It’s California Water Saturday in these parts. Let’s see if I can keep it simple:

Continued wet weather means most of the state’s reservoirs are filling up. But if your definition of drought means all reservoirs brim-full, no, we’re not out of the woods yet. (My KQED Radio News colleague Amy Standen just finished a story that will air Monday: “Is the Drought Over?” (I have a starring role in her accompanying blog post.) Another take on our drought status comes from the U.S. Drought Monitor. Over the last couple of weeks, this report has shown a dramatic contraction of the area of the state affected by drought.

The face of the drought: At the end of January, the state Department of Water Resources issued its latest drought update (18-page PDF). The most interesting aspect of the document is the way it adopts the Westlands Water District as a proxy for the drought’s impact on agriculture throughout the state. It’s not a subtle touch, either: the front and back covers of the drought report contain dramatic photographs, courtesy of Westlands, of dead orchards. We’re to understand from the context that drought has killed these productive groves. Inside the report, there’s a writeup on Westlands, complete with a table on page 12 showing the reduction in planted acreage since 2006–a little misleading to use as an index year since it was a decidedly wet year when no one had to worry about water supplies. The table does show that virtually all field, seed, and truck crops have experienced dramatic reductions since ’06 (exception: wheat, for which acreage grew by 53.4 percent, and garbanzo beans, which had a 42.5 percent increase in acreage). At the same time, though, the Westlands table shows that the acreage in tree and vine crops–remember the dead orchards?–has increased by 20 percent since the drought began. Most of that jump has been in almonds, which grew from 55,000 acres in 2006 to 70,000 acres in 2008 before falling back to 67,000 acres last year.

Now, there is no question at all that the district, which includes about 1,000 square miles along the western fringe of the mid-San Joaquin Valley, has been hit hard by the shortage of water. It’s dry country and because the district was formed relatively recently (in the 1950s), it’s near the bottom of the totem pole for getting a share of the water pumped into the valley from up north. Yes, land has been fallowed and fieldworkers have lost jobs–pretty much the same way that’s happened during every dry cycle. The question is whether Westlands really represents the face of the drought across the state. Reading about the plight of the district, one would hardly guess that the state’s harvest of processing tomatoes–by acreage the biggest vegetable crop in California–hit an all-time high in 2009 (data by way of the U.S.D.A.’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in its latest “California Vegetable Review“).

Of course, the processing-tomato harvest doesn’t tell you much, either–by itself. And neither does Westlands, if your interest is understanding the wide impact of California’s water challenges. Of course, if your interest is putting the grimmest possible face on the drought to scare up support for a new round of dam- and canal-building–which is exactly what many environmentalists say the Department of Water Resources is doing–then Westlands will do just fine as a poster child.

Delta pumps–turn up the volume: The biggest water news of the week came out of the Fresno courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Oliver W. Wanger (W. is for Winston, not Wendell; and those who know say his last name rhymes with “ranger”) in a case featuring Central Valley chinook salmon, federal fishery and water managers, and (again) the Westlands Water District. On Friday, Wanger issued a temporary restraining order that blocks a federal plan to protect endangered chinook salmon that migrate back and forth through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The plan limits, but does not halt, exports from the Delta to avoid sucking fish into the pumps that send water south. Westlands and other water districts argued that pumping limits are letting hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water escape into the ocean instead of being shipped to San Luis Reservoir, the main storehouse for San Joaquin Valley irrigation supplies. Letting the water flow out to sea would amount to irreparable harm to communities depending on it for growing crops and providing jobs.

Wanger agreed, issuing a 23-page decision that sets aside the federal protection plan for two weeks, pending a permanent ruling. He found a) that recent pumping in the Delta hasn’t killed enough endangered winter-run chinook to threaten the species’ survival; b) that our wet weather has caused flows that ought to be captured now; and c) that the federal defendants have brought this ruling on themselves by failing to assess the impact of their salmon plan on people. A portion of the ruling that’s gone generally unnoticed, as far as I can tell, acknowledges that it’s unknown what effect increased pumping will have on migrating juvenile winter-run salmon. That being the case, “the temporary restraining order … shall initially be for a period of fourteen days, subject to renewal by plaintiffs upon an affirmative showing that neither the species’ nor their critical habitat will be jeopardized by continued injunction” of the pumping limits (emphasis mine). In other words, Westlands and company will need to prove that the increased flow of water they’re getting hasn’t caused a big jump in the number of salmon killed off at the pumps. (You can follow the dead salmon count at home, if you’re inclined: the federal Central Valley Project, which runs one set of the pumps in question, publishes a daily report, Chinook Salmon Loss Data.)

The key piece of Wanger’s decision, though, is not really about the amount of water being pumped out of the Delta. It’s about the winning legal strategy (in this court, anyway) used by Westlands and its allies in arguing that the agencies trying to enforce the Endangered Species Act must weigh their actions’ impact on human communities. The judge seems to be saying, “Yes, you can protect plants and animals that we humans have driven to the edge of extinction–but only if protecting them doesn’t harm us humans.” Wanger made a similar ruling last year in a case involving endangered species protection for the delta smelt. Legal Planet, an environmental law blog from UC-Berkeley and UCLA, called his findings “curious” and said, “Judge Wanger is asking the agency to balance on an absolute knife edge, ensuring that it doesn’t deny farmers a single drop of water that the fish don’t critically require.”

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Journal of Self-Promotion: Salmon Edition

The big project for the last three weeks has been my first radio feature–on Northern California’s coho salmon populations nearing extinction. The story involved lots of driving–too much for someone doing a story that in many ways is about the larger state of our environment. And it involved lots of anxiety over whether I could sort through all the “tape” (I actually used a flash recorder) and manage to tell a coherent story that reflects the complexity of the subject. Overall, I’m happy with the way it came out. The audio to the story is embedded below, and here are a couple other story links for good measure:

KQED’s Quest: Saving California’s Coho Salmon:
Quest blog: Rewriting the coho’s story


QUEST on KQED Public Media.

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California Water: Enough for Everyone Except You Fish

The results of the state Department of Water Resources monthly snowpack survey are in. On the surface, the news looks good. The snowpack is 115 percent of normal for the end of January, and nearly double the amount for a year ago, when we had gone through a very dry January. But the state water managers want to make sure we don’t think the glass is half-full:

“Today’s snow survey offers us some cautious optimism as we continue to play catch-up with our statewide water supplies,” said DWR chief deputy director Sue Sims. “We are still looking at the real possibility of a fourth dry year. Even if California is blessed with a healthy snowpack, we must learn to always conserve this finite resource so that we have enough water for homes, farms, and businesses in 2010 and in the future.”

True, true: Our water account has not been replenished to the point where we can start writing blank checks again. Maybe, given our growing population, we’ll never have that sense about water again. Losing that mindset, in fact, would be a good thing. To the degree that Chief Deputy Director Sims reminds us of that, I applaud her.

But it’s notable that she omits the California environment from her list of clients for the state’s precious water supplies. Maybe she’s not aware that the state is now populated by a host of endangered fish species, once-abundant populations that have been driven to the brink of extinction in large part because of the way we have managed water and aquatic ecosystems.

In reality, of course, Sims and everyone else in the state’s water bureaucracy know all about the fish issue–in fact, they can’t help but be preoccupied with it. So declining to mention the environment in a statement like this is really a kind of negative policy statement about who ought to get water and who will have to fight for it.

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U.S. 101 in the Rain

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Friday morning: Heading north from San Rafael on my way to Santa Rosa. Yes–that San Francisco-bound rush-hour traffic wasn’t doing too well in the rain. Driving up again tomorrow to do some reporting on a radio story. It’s supposed to storm again. Not too much of a deluge, please, rain gods/goddesses.

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California Water: Is the Drought Over?

Is California’s drought over? OK, let me take a step back. Yes, I realize one could debate whether the last three years in California actually constitute a drought. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I think everyone can agree that we’ve had lower-than-average precipitation for the past three years.

The only reason to ask the question is that, after the first half of the wet season delivered only spotty rain, we’ve had a pretty solid week of downpours. Water is sluicing into our reservoirs, and the hills are greening up. All of that is a sign of what we think winter should be here. ( My favorite water statistic of the week: when the storms were at their heaviest around Lake Shasta, California’s biggest reservoir, water was flowing into the lake at about 500,000 gallons per second. That’s 1.5 acre feet, or about enough for three “average” households for a year, every second.*)

Amazing numbers like that aside, the people who get paid to think about whether the drought is over say “not yet.” The San Jose Mercury News published a good summary of the situation a couple days ago: “It’s soaking. But the drought’s not over just yet.”

That story does contain one bit of typically odd California thinking about rain and water, though. It quotes a very knowledgeable local meteorologist, Jan Null, about where we stand in terms of normal rainfall. He says: “”We need February and March to be wetter than January to really end the drought. You have to look at the long game here. This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

The last sentence stopped me: “This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

Of course, Mr. Null recognizes better than most that the amount of rain we get and when we get it is out of anyone’s control. Still, “we’ve got to keep it going.” Maybe he’s a professional rainmaker.

Once you understand the importance of water in California, once you get how crucial the winter rains are, there’s a score-keeping aspect to weather-watching here. It becomes second nature to study the rain gauge and the seasonal precipitation table as an index of performance, a reflection on whether a great collective goal is being attained. Lots of rain means we’re doing well (and that we can put the complexities of water supply out of our minds). A dry spell means we’re failing (and that there will be hell to pay, or at least the strong possibility of stringent conservation measures).

But in reality, there’s no performance going on. The rain is the rain, and the climate is the climate. California’s rainfall is famously variable. Dry spells can be counted on, and the current run of dry years is the third we’ve had since I arrived in Berkeley in the ’70s. My first California winter, 1976-’77, was bone dry and was in fact the second year of the driest two-year period ever recorded here. A decade later, from roughly 1986 through 1992, we had another run of dry years. And if our winter rains were to stop now, we’d be in the fourth year of drier-than-normal years. In between these periods we’ve had average years and very wet years and years that didn’t quite hit the average. That might not be too different from anywhere else. The reason it’s a bigger deal here than it might be in, say, central Wisconsin, is that we have a six-month dry season, we need to store water to get through that, and we have 37 million people and millions and millions acres of farmland that need water whether it’s falling from the sky or not. Thus the need to believe we can wish the rain to keep going during the wet season and the tendency to feel disappointment when the winter turns into a string of dry, sunny days.

*500,000 gallons per second. Here’s the arithmetic: California Department of Water Resources figures (here: http://bit.ly/6HzIuu) show that in the hour between noon and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19, the net inflow into the lake was 66,288 cubic feet per second. That’s the highest inflow figure for any single hour all week. One cubic foot equals 7.48 gallons. 66,288*7.48=495,834.24 gallons. One acre foot=325,851 gallons. And 495,834.24/325,851=1.52 acre feet. Per second. For the entire 24 hours of the 19th, Lake Shasta’s inflow averaged just over 1 acre foot a second.

Bonus feature! KQED’s latest California Reservoir Watch map, updated earlier today:


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

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California Weather Art

The top image is the current National Weather Service radar mosaic for California (yellow and orange splashes represent areas of heavier rain). The image below that is the quantitative precipitation forecast from the California Nevada River Forecast Center.

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Storms: Promised and Delivered

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After light showers Friday and Saturday and a steadier drizzling rain much of Sunday, we got heavy rain Monday morning. Just like the weather forecasters and their models predicted. But the summary of coming weather rarely does justice to the reality. In Monday’s case, a pounding early morning rain gave way to showers and then a long, windy break complete with a few flying patches of blue sky. We went out to the Albany Bulb–the old garbage dump of the little suburb just north of us that protrudes into the bay–and gave the dog a run. How was it out there? Blustery, windy enough that a little swell had come up on the Bay and waves were driving all the way up the pocket beach near the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. It started showering again pretty soon after we got back to the car. The next storm arrived, as predicted, early, early this morning, Tuesday. It was heralded by long, deep peals of thunder that at first only The Dog was hearing–he growled every time one sounded. Just before daybreak, the sky opened up for about four hours of thundering, pounding rain. Water shot down the gutters, and all day after and tonight, too, water seems to be flowing everywhere. We had some heavy showers through the day, and tonight the next storm is moving in. It’s supposed to be more intense than today’s. On my last walk with The Dog this morning, I could have sworn I heard a rumbling in the distance, something gathering itself to roll in across the coast; either that, or a string of diesel engines getting ready to roll up the Southern Pacific tracks just west of here.  

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A Fan’s Notes on Water Supply

When you first move to California from someplace where rain is just a normal part of life all year round, some of the information that shows up on the newspaper weather page seems a little odd. I'm thinking especially of the rainfall totals, calculated between July 1 and June 30, and of the reservoir and snow-depth reports. Yeah, it's vaguely comforting to know some big lake somewhere is nearly full of water, and it's troubling when it's not. The snow report makes sense when you, the auslander, learn that a lot of the water that will wind up in the reservoirs starts out as vast quantities of white stuff in the higher reaches of the Sierra Nevada. The snow and water tables in the paper generally include references  to the total for a year ago and to what's "normal" for the date. If you spend any time at all on the weather page, you develop a sort of rooting interest. Wet years with more than 100 percent of the expected rain and snow can make you feel like the home team is playoff bound. Dry years resemble those lost seasons when all the supposed stars flop and nothing quite goes right.

If the precipitation and snowfall reports are the daily standings of the water year, then meteorologists  serve as both play-by-play announcers and analysts. If you're a serious fan and want to go beyond the entertainment offered by most TV weather presenters or the few vague words that make up most newspaper and online forecasts, then you have to go to the meteorological analyses published online by government weather services. Even in that world, there are circles within circles: for the interested generalist, there's the Area Forecast Discussion posted several times daily by most National Weather Service offices (for example, here's the AFD from the Monterey, California office). Informing those discussions are weather models–vastly complex, supercomputed pictures of the weather many days into the future; the true weather fanatic learns at least the rudiments of the models, their individual peculiarities, and what they might mean in terms of observable local weather.

Me, I haven't pushed the geek level much. I'm pondering the meaning of terms like "500mb heights" and  "pressure surfaces" but don't employ them in polite company or even bar-room conversation. However, my interest is real. We're nearing a key date in our water year–the California Department of Water Resources will take its first formal snow measurements of the season in a couple of days. Fans will be watching closely because frankly our 2009-2010 water year hasn't gotten off to a great start; while most reservoirs are a little fuller than they were a year ago, most are also well under average levels.

Now, while I'm waiting for the pre-measurement festivities to begin, I'm consulting the oracles of the sport. Among my newer winter weather reading is the California-Nevada River Forecast Center's daily "Hydrometeorological Discussion." Issued at 9:30 a.m. every morning, it summarizes rainfall and snowfall for the last 24 hours, then reviews what the weather models are saying about incoming storms for the next three days. Whereas the Area Forecast Discussion focuses on conditions in the geographic districts they cover, the CNRFC discussion looks at conditions in watersheds and river drainages. If you live in California and you're preoccupied with  water supply, the rain falling in the mountains above Lakes Shasta and Oroville, the state's two biggest reservoirs, probably means a lot more than whatever happens to fall on your neighborhood–where there's no place to store all the water that's coming down.

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Journal of Self-Promotion: Water

As part of my job as a news editor at KQED, I’ve become a sort of part-time water watcher. In that capacity, I’ve done a couple of maps and a couple of posts for KQED’s Climate Watch blog. The latest post just went up yesterday: Everything You Know (About Water) Is Wrong. It’s a short writeup on a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California called “California Water Myths.” The institute is mostly trying to remind us opinionated Californians that we have a lot of misconceptions about how much water we have and how it’s used.