Citizen Scientists Document a Recovering #ColoradoRiver: The Returning Rapids Project charts a resurgent waterway and its surrounding ecosystems — Smithsonian Magazine #COriver #aridification

January 25, 2024

Click the link to read the article on the Smithsonian Magazine website (Margaret Osborne):

Sitting around a fire at a campsite along the Colorado River in Utah, boater Mike DeHoff flips through old photos of the area. Scientists from the United States Geological Survey circle around him and peer interestedly over his shoulder. He points to an old picture of the North Wash boat ramp, where the group is camped. The ramp was built about 20 years ago as a temporary take out for boaters running Cataract Canyon, a popular section for whitewater rafting, flowing through Canyonlands National Park upstream of Lake Powell. But in the past few decades, the ramp has deteriorated rapidly as water levels receded in the lake and the river here cut away at the land.

DeHoff, a welder based in Moab, Utah, runs the Returning Rapids Project, which documents annual changes in a section of the Colorado river called Cataract Canyon. The project brings external scientists out to survey species, measure sediment changes in the riverbed and examine the geology of newly exposed rock formations. The team presents this information, along with their own observations, to various organizations across the region and to the public. DeHoff and his team do this work, in part, to help provide important information before officials make crucial water management decisions regarding the river.

DeHoff is helping coordinate this March sediment survey with the USGS’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, in a portion of the river that was once part of Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. In the past few decades, drought, climate change and the overuse of water have caused the lake level to drop, spurring a crisis for the millions of people who rely on it for water and hydropower. But as the lake receded, DeHoff began noticing something unexpected: The river upstream flourished.

DeHoff helps USGS researchers take out their boat at the eroded North Wash ramp—a task that requires rollers, winches and a team of several people. Margaret Osborne

DeHoff started seeing changes in Cataract Canyon in 2002—about when the region’s drought started. Lower water levels led rapids to form. Cottonwoods and seep willows sprouted in areas that were once underwater. As Lake Powell shrunk, the river cut through the layers of sediment left behind—dams halt the flow of rivers and stop sediment from moving freely. Yet, despite these rapid changes, DeHoff saw little scientific research or public attention focused on this section of the river. Instead, he says, efforts went downstream to the Grand Canyon, on the other side of the lake.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area map from the official brochure National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain

A brief history

Before engineers dammed the river, Cataract Canyon was notorious for its massive, churning rapids—earning it the nickname “The Graveyard of the Colorado.” In 1964, Glen Canyon Dam was built near what’s now Page, Arizona, to supply power to areas of the West and to form the Lake Powell reservoir. In the United States, the Lake Powell reservoir is second in size only to Lake Mead, which is located 360 river miles downstream.

Raft in the Big Drop Rapids, Cataract Canyon. By National Park Service – National Park Service, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8327636

Seventeen years after the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built, the reservoir hit full capacity—or “full pool”—and stretched 186 miles long. It inundated a stretch of river called Glen Canyon, which is sometimes referred to as “America’s lost national park.” The canyon was once home to a variety of plant and animal species as well as unique rock spires, arches, slot canyons and more than 3,000 ancient ruins. Just upstream of Glen Canyon, 65 percent of Cataract Canyon was also flooded, and many of its fearsome rapids disappeared.

The dam has also trapped millions of tons of sediment behind it in Lake Powell, which deprives the Grand Canyon downstream of sand and silt. The sediment holds critical nutrients for life and can form and replenish beach habitats that are important for plants and animals—and campsites for the 27,000 yearly Grand Canyon boaters.

A dwindling supply of water

The West is in the middle of its worst mega-drought in 1,200 years. In just the past few decades, Lake Powell has dropped more than 100 feet. This past March, when the USGS was completing its sediment survey, the reservoir sat at about 22 percent of full pool, just 30 feet above the amount needed to continue producing power.

“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall

States, tribes, legislators, the public and other stakeholders are all competing for the dwindling water in the Colorado River, which was originally divided up in the 1923 Colorado River Compact. This agreement among the federal government and Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming was based on science that overestimated the amount of water that would be available in the years to come. And it left Native American tribes and Mexico out of the deal altogether. Over the years, subsequent agreements, court decisions and decrees have been added to the 100-year-old document to determine how water is split up. But at the end of 2026, some of these guidelines governing the system will expire and need to be renegotiated. Experts say deep cuts will need to be made to water usage. It may even mean drilling bypass tubes around the dam, which would essentially drain Lake Powell—one of the solutions the Bureau of Reclamation proposed last year.

The research facilitated by the Returning Rapids Project could help give officials a more holistic view of how their decisions will affect the entire river system. “Everybody knows that there’s going to have to be big decisions made about how we manage the Colorado River,” DeHoff says. “The way we’re using the river, and how we’re storing its water, is outdated.”

Environmentalists have proposed decommissioning Glen Canyon dam for decades to restore the health of the river and help conserve water. Some proponents, including the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, advocate to “Fill Lake Mead First,” a proposal that would combine the water from both reservoirs into Lake Mead. The proposal includes the construction of diversion tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam, allowing the river to flow freely through it and restoring Glen Canyon to its picturesque glory. According to a study commissioned by the institute, filling Lake Mead first would save about 300,000 acre-feet of water per year that would have otherwise been lost to ground seepage or evaporation in Lake Powell—about the amount allocated yearly to the state of Nevada. But a 2016 study from Utah State University has put this number closer to 50,000 acre-feet.

Record-breaking snowfall last winter in Utah has caused water levels to rise again. Lake Powell is now around 35 percent full. But scientists caution the drought is not over, and the precipitation is just a temporary fix to the region’s longstanding water shortage.

DeHoff chats with researchers about the river. Margaret Osborne

How the project formed

The shop DeHoff founded, Eddyline Welding in Moab, welds boats, frames and equipment for river runners. Private, commercial, USGS and National Park Service boaters gather there to swap stories and information.

Around 2017 or 2018, Peter Lefebvre, a longtime raft guide, began chatting with DeHoff about his observations in Cataract Canyon. “It was like, ‘Oh, so have you seen this rock sticking out of the river over here?’” Lefebvre says. The two formed the Returning Rapids Project with another local, Bego Gerhart. They wanted to investigate when the rapids would return to Cataract Canyon as Lake Powell receded. So far, they’ve documented the return of 11 rapids.

DeHoff and his partner, Meg Flynn, who’s the assistant director of the local library, have spent hours finding archival photos of the river upstream from Lake Powell. Project members pinpoint where the photos were taken and return to the same spots via raft, by motorboat or on foot to snap images, often at the same time of day and year, to compare the river and the landscape.

“It’s a treasure hunt,” Flynn says. “It’s super fun to figure out.”

Peter Lefebvre takes a photo to match an image taken previously. Margaret Osborne

The project soon grew, and in 2019, the Glen Canyon Institute, which advocates for a free-flowing river through the dam, took the Returning Rapids Project under its wing, allowing it to receive donations. The project now has four core part-time investigators: DeHoff, Flynn, Lefebvre and Chris Benson, a geologist, pilot and former raft guide. They’ve also recently involved some younger members in research and boat operations.

“All these government offices and agencies were kind of all doing their own thing and not really paying attention to this,” Benson says. “With all this change, all this worry about levels and drought, people weren’t really studying this.”

But scientists have now published multiple papers based on data collected with the help of the Returning Rapids Project.

Returning Rapids has also given presentations to various groups, including the Utah Geological Association, the Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies, the Colorado Plateau River Guides and classes of university students. They’ve shared their findings with National Park superintendents, decision makers at the Bureau of Reclamation and Utah raft guides. In Moab, they’ve spoken at local events and even given a talk for visiting high school students from California.

The team’s observations, historical research and photo matching are published in yearly field binders for the public to read. Commercial river guides sometimes share the binders with passengers on their trips.

“It’s gone from having a conversation in the welding shop to being a part of meetings of every superintendent who has anything to do with the Colorado River with the National Park Service,” DeHoff says. “And trying to help them think about it, which is nuts.”

In the field

Back at the campsite, the USGS researchers listen as DeHoff chats more about the history of the area. In the morning, the scientists set up equipment and board research vessels, which will collect data on sediment in the riverbank that they can compare to previous surveys.

One boat carries a sonar device with 512 beams to map the floor of the river and a lidar instrument, which uses lasers to scan the riverbank. The team spends the day motoring up and down a section of the river—“mowing the lawn” they call it—near the Dirty Devil confluence. On two computer screens, raw data appears as textured images of the riverbed. “This mossy-colored, brown-looking texture is indicative of sand,” researcher Katie Chapman says, pointing to the screen.

Researchers Katie Chapman and Paul Grams collect data on the USGS boat. Margaret Osborne

Between 2020 and May 2022, USGS geomorphologist Paul Grams saw the river scour the riverbed 36 feet deeper, and the water is now encountering resistant bedrock. In this section, the river is flowing along a different path than its historical channel. Grams says a waterfall or rapid could form here if the water level continued to drop, which would change how sediment moves in the river and shift the river dynamics and ecosystems upstream. A waterfall could also act as a barrier for migrating fish and affect infrastructure decisions, such as where to build a boat ramp.

As the USGS group mows the lawn, Returning Rapids motors around the river to match photos and measure river depth using a fish-finder device.

In a follow-up survey in the early summer, Grams documented an even more dramatic scouring—about 33 feet in just six months—thanks to the season’s high water flows.

DeHoff uses a fish finder to figure out the depth of the river. Margaret Osborne

Making a big scientific impact

A few months before this trip, back in the library in Moab, DeHoff pulled out an 11-foot-long map of the Colorado River and laid it flat on the table in front of him. He pointed out areas that have changed over the years. “We’ve seen all kinds of like native flora and fauna come in and repopulate the areas where the river has restored itself,” he said.

Ecologist Seth Arens of the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment, who organized the first Returning Rapids science trip in 2019, says the region is a fascinating natural laboratory. Arens was inspired to research the Lake Powell area because of conversations with DeHoff on a private trip. He’s been conducting plant surveys in side canyons and says he’s the first to research the terrestrial landscape that was once underwater, an area that’s about 100,000 acres.

So far, Arens has documented shrubs, cottonwood trees, native grasses, wildflowers, early signs of cryptobiotic soil crusts and unique vertical ecosystems called hanging gardens—all of which have appeared in the last few years. He says this knowledge could be useful for understanding how landscapes change in arid regions as reservoirs dry and dams are removed.

A USGS boat “mows the lawn.” Margaret Osborne

Arens makes it clear he is not advocating for the removal of Glen Canyon Dam, but he says his research should be taken into account when officials make their decisions around future water management. Though he hasn’t published his data yet, he says he’s submitted comments to the Bureau of Reclamation. If Lake Powell refills, it will come at a cost, he adds.

“There will be ecological resources that are again submerged and lost,” he says. “I think it’s fair for that information to be part of that decision-making process.”

Cari Johnson, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Utah, has also been on several Returning Rapids science trips. She says the Returning Rapids Project has made her research on sediments safer and more efficient. The group has helped her get permits, work with management agencies and provided practical knowledge about boating.

“I wouldn’t be able to do any of the science that I have done so far without [DeHoff],” she says. “He has been incredibly effective at getting smart people all together.”

The stratosphere is talking down to the troposphere, but will it listen? — NOAA

January 30, 2024

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Amy Butler and Laura Ciasto):

With the occurrence of a major disruption to the polar vortex (or sudden stratospheric warming) on January 16 2023 [footnote 1], one of the first questions everyone asks is “How can a disruption way up in the Arctic stratosphere affect the winds and weather far below in the troposphere?”.

A stratospheric traffic accident

Scientists have a pretty good understanding of how a reversal of the winds ~19 miles above the Arctic influences the winds at lower altitudes, at least down to about the tropopause (the altitude where the troposphere transitions to the stratosphere, ~6-8 miles above earth’s surface at the poles). As we mentioned in this post, huge planetary-scale waves in the atmosphere can travel into the stratosphere, but only when the stratospheric winds are blowing west-to-east, as is generally the case during winter.

Imagine cars on a highway that suddenly find the road blocked by a giant concrete wall (since we’re imagining, let’s say they are driverless cars, so no humans are injured in this analogy). The first car crashes into the roadblock and stops; but the next car runs into that car, slightly further back from the roadblock, and so on and so forth until you have a massive traffic collision that extends for miles.

Analogously, a major sudden stratospheric warming can cause a similar chain reaction throughout the depth of the stratosphere. By definition, when one of these events occurs, the winds ~19 miles altitude reverse direction and now flow east-to-west. Winds that are blowing east-to-west essentially act as a roadblock to large atmospheric waves. So the next big wave that tries to travel into the stratosphere after a major warming will hit this roadblock, and the wave will break, slowing or reversing the winds just below the initial wind reversal. Then we rinse and repeat: the next wave will hit the roadblock of east-to-west winds slightly lower than before, slowing the winds at the next level down, until wind changes way up in the mid-stratosphere work their way all the way down to the bottom of the stratosphere.

Under normal wintertime conditions, when the wind blows from west-to-east, the largest atmospheric waves can travel through the stratosphere. However, if a major disruption of the stratospheric polar vortex occurs, the winds in the middle stratosphere reverse direction and blow from east-to-west, and the temperature warms. Large atmospheric waves cannot travel through winds blowing in this direction, so the next wave to travel into the stratosphere breaks just below where the reversal occurred. This “wave breaking” can reverse the winds in this lower layer, so that again, the next wave to travel into the stratosphere breaks even lower. In this way, the changes in the winds and temperatures in the middle stratosphere can descend to the tropopause, which represents the transition between the stratosphere and the troposphere. NOAA Climate.gov image.

The breaking waves also accelerate the transport of stratospheric air that sinks over the pole, which causes the air to warm and to build up atmospheric mass or pressure. If we look at a “paint drip” plot averaged over all observed major sudden stratospheric warming events, above the tropopause we can see a rapid increase in atmospheric thickness over the polar cap that occurs shortly after the disruption at 10 hPa (~19 miles). This increase in atmospheric thickness descends to the lower stratosphere over a period of days to a couple of weeks.

Differences from average atmospheric thickness (standardized geopotential height anomalies) in the column of air over the Arctic from the troposphere to the stratosphere for (left panel) the average over all observed major sudden stratospheric warmings and (right panel) recent observations and forecasts from the Global Forecast System (GFS) model. On average (left panel), increased atmospheric thickness (orange shading) is observed from the middle stratosphere to the tropopause after warming occurs on day 0. Atmospheric thickness is also enhanced below the tropopause but the magnitude is smaller and more intermittent in nature. In recent observations (right panel), atmospheric thickness was enhanced from the surface to the stratosphere for most of mid-January, but in the last 10 days has been lower than normal (purple shading) in the troposphere. Forecasts suggest the enhanced thickness associated with the major warming in mid-January is descending to the tropopause and may re-emerge in the troposphere in February. NOAA Climate.gov image adapted from original by Amy Butler (left panel) and Laura Ciasto (right panel).

While the polar vortex in the middle stratosphere tends to spring back into shape quickly after a major warming, any effects that reach the lower stratosphere can stay there for many weeks. We will explain the reasons for this in another post, but this persistence is a key element to why the stratosphere is such an important player for predictability on timescales of weeks to months.

Competing graffiti artists

Once the wind reversal in the middle stratosphere works its way down to the tropopause, our understanding of the physical mechanism for how it affects our weather becomes much foggier (weather nerd joke alert!). One thing that’s clear though is that below the tropopause, the increased atmospheric thickness over the pole becomes intermittent (they look like drips of paint, hence the name of the plots). These “drips” correspond to enhanced high pressure over the Arctic which can nudge the tropospheric jet stream southward, and they are not consistent in timing or magnitude from one major stratospheric warming to another.

This pattern suggests that, while the stratosphere exerts a predictable downward influence on the atmosphere, often for many weeks after a major warming, it’s not the only graffiti artist in town. The troposphere adds its own paint on top of what the stratosphere laid down; its processes and weather patterns can either enhance or destroy the stratosphere’s contribution of increased atmospheric thickness over the pole. For some major warmings, this means that we see almost no “paint drips” after the event [footnote 2].

There are additional characteristics of the coupling from the lower stratosphere to the surface that scientists don’t fully understand, such as why the polar atmospheric thickness increases more near the surface compared to the middle troposphere. It seems likely that atmospheric waves in the troposphere help to reinforce the wind changes coming from above, but even this additional reinforcement isn’t enough to fully explain the amplification of the signal at the surface that we observe.

What is the atmospheric graffiti art looking like now?

While we can get a clear overall picture of how the stratosphere influences the troposphere by averaging over many major sudden warmings, individual sudden warming events are often unique, because the troposphere is adding its own paint strokes and sprays to the stratosphere’s work of art. As we mentioned in the last post, the stratosphere and troposphere were coupled through most of mid-January, but this appears more related to the minor warming around January 5th and to the somewhat unusual nature of the major warming on January 16th when the stratospheric polar vortex was disrupted from the troposphere upwards.

Since the major warming, the stratosphere’s mark on the atmosphere has been covered up by whatever masterpiece the troposphere has in mind. The negative anomalies in polar atmospheric thickness in the troposphere that have stuck around since ~Jan 20th tend to keep the tropospheric jet stream shifted poleward, promoting warmer than normal temperatures across North America and parts of Europe. However, forecasts suggest that the paint colors added by the major warming will re-emerge as we head into February, perhaps bringing colder than normal temperatures over these regions back into the picture.

NOAA’s Global Ensemble Forecasting System (GEFS for short) predicts that the Northern Hemisphere polar vortex will strengthen to slightly above average wind speeds in early February (heavy magenta line), following a major sudden stratospheric warming on January 16 (where heavy purple line fell below 0 meters per second wind speed). The spread of the individual forecasts (thin magenta lines) remains wide in mid- to late-February. A couple individual forecasts predict another polar vortex reversal and major warming, while one individual forecast predicts record strong winds near the end of the forecast period. Climatology of highest and lowest daily values is from Climate Forecast System Reanalysis. NOAA Climate.gov graph, adapted from original by Laura Ciasto.

Meanwhile in the middle stratosphere, the polar vortex winds have already recovered after the major disruption, back to near average wind speeds. The vortex looks to strengthen somewhat in early February, but after that there is large uncertainty about what the stratosphere will throw on the atmospheric canvas next.

Footnotes

[1] This is the date the reversal occurred according to NASA’s GEOS FP assimilation system, but the exact date can depend on which “reanalysis” product is used; see for example: https://csl.noaa.gov/groups/csl8/sswcompendium/majorevents.html

Reanalysis products take multiple observational sources like satellite and balloon measurements and assimilate them into a model to create a product that is both temporally and spatially complete at each grid space of the model, and is constrained by observations. These products are widely used to study the stratosphere, though they can have significant biases; for an extensive evaluation of stratospheric reanalyses, see here: https://s-rip.github.io/report/structure.html

[2] It’s been found that only about ⅔ of observed major sudden stratospheric warmings have an apparent downward influence on the surface. The other ⅓ of major warmings likely either (a) weren’t strong enough disruptions to reach the lower stratosphere, which is key to having an influence on the troposphere, or (b) had an effect but the troposphere was creating stronger anomalies in the opposite direction. Notably, if we look at computer model simulations of thousands of major warmings, the “paint drip” plots cease to look drippy, suggesting that the “drippiness” is largely arising from all the variations caused by weather in the troposphere.

Reference

Baldwin, M. P., Ayarzagüena, B., Birner, T., Butchart, N., Butler, A. H., Charlton-Perez, A. J., et al. (2021). Sudden stratospheric warmings. Reviews of Geophysics, 59, e2020RG000708.https://doi.org/10.1029/2020RG000708

What is an atmospheric river? A hydrologist explains the good and bad of these flood-prone storms and how they’re changing — The Conversation

A satellite image shows a powerful atmospheric river hitting the Pacific Northwest in December 2023. Darker greens are more water vapor. Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory

Qian Cao, University of California, San Diego

A series of atmospheric rivers is bringing the threat of heavy downpours, flooding, mudslides and avalanches to the Pacific Northwest and California this week. While these storms are dreaded for the damage they can cause, they are also essential to the region’s water supply, particularly in California, as Qian Cao, a hydrologist at the University of California, San Diego, explains.

What are atmospheric rivers?

An atmospheric river is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated water vapor transported in the atmosphere. It’s like a river in the sky that can be 1,000 miles long. On average, atmospheric rivers have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon River.

When atmospheric rivers run up against mountains or run into local atmospheric dynamics and are forced to ascend, the moisture they carry cools and condenses, so they can produce intense rainfall or snowfall. https://www.youtube.com/embed/w3rtYM0HtIM?wmode=transparent&start=0 A satellite view of atmospheric rivers.

Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world, most commonly in the mid-latitudes. They form when large-scale weather patterns align to create narrow channels, or filaments, of intense moisture transport. These start over warm water, typically tropical oceans, and are guided toward the coast by low-level jet streams ahead of cold fronts of extratropical cyclones.

Along the U.S. West Coast, the Pacific Ocean serves as the reservoir of moisture for the storm, and the mountain ranges act as barriers, which is why the western sides of the coastal ranges and Sierra Nevada see so much rain and snow.

Why are back-to-back atmospheric rivers a high flood risk?

Consecutive atmospheric rivers, known as AR families, can cause significant flooding.

The first heavy downpours saturate the ground. As consecutive storms arrive, their precipitation falls on soil that can’t absorb more water. That contributes to more runoff. Rivers and streams fill up. In the meantime, there may be snowmelt due to warm temperatures, further adding to the runoff and flood risk.

California experienced a historic run of nine consecutive atmospheric rivers in the span of three weeks in December 2022 and January 2023. The storms helped bring most reservoirs back to historical averages in 2023 after several drought years, but they also produced damaging floods and debris flows.

An animation shows filaments of water heading toward the coast. — Atmospheric rivers forming over the tropical Pacific Ocean head for the U.S. West Coast. NOAA

The cause of AR families is an active area of research. Compared with single atmospheric river events, AR families tend to be associated with lower atmospheric pressure heights across the North Pacific, higher pressure heights over the subtropics, a stronger and more zonally elongated jet stream and warmer tropical air temperatures.

Large-scale weather patterns and climate phenomena such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, also play an important role in the generation of AR families. An active MJO shift occurred during the early 2023 events, tilting the odds toward increased atmospheric river activity over California.

A truck drives through muddy streets that fill a large section of town. People stand on one small patch of pavement not flooded. — An aerial view shows a flooded neighborhood in the community of Pajaro in central California on March 11, 2023, after a series of atmospheric rivers. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

A recent study by scientists at Stanford and the University of Florida found that storms within AR families cause three to four times more economic damage when the storms arrive back to back than they would have caused by themselves.

How important are atmospheric rivers to the West Coast’s water supply?

I’m a research hydrologist, so I focus on hydrological impacts of atmospheric rivers. Although they can lead to flood hazards, atmospheric rivers are also essential to the Western water supply. Atmospheric rivers have been responsible for ending more than a third of the region’s major droughts, including the severe California drought of 2012-16.

Atmospheric rivers provide an average of 30% to 50% of the West Coast’s annual precipitation.

They also contribute to the snowpack, which provides a significant portion of California’s year-round water supply.

In an average year, one to two extreme atmospheric rivers with snow will be the dominant contributors to the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Together, atmospheric rivers will contribute about 30% to 40% of an average season’s total snow accumulation there.

A dam spillway with a full reservoir behind it. — After several winter storms brought record snowfall to California’s Sierra Nevada in early 2023, Lake Oroville, California’s second-largest reservoir, was at 100% capacity. The previous year, much of the state had faced water restrictions. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

That’s why my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, work on improving atmospheric river forecasts and predictions. Water managers need to be able to regulate reservoirs and figure out how much water they can save for the dry season while still leaving room in the reservoirs to manage flood risk from future storms.

How is global warming affecting atmospheric rivers?

As global temperatures rise in the future, we can expect more intense atmospheric rivers, leading to an increase in heavy and extreme precipitation events.

My research also shows that more atmospheric rivers are likely to occur concurrently during already wet conditions. So, the chance of extreme flooding also increases. Another study, by scientists from the University of Washington, suggests that there will be a seasonal shift to more atmospheric rivers earlier in the rainy season.

There will likely also be more year-to-year variability in the total annual precipitation, particularly in California, as a study by my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes projects.

Qian Cao, Hydrologist, Center For Western Weather and Water Extremes, University of California, San Diego

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

2024 #COleg: Clipping thirsty grasses at the margins in #Colorado — Allen Best (@BigPivots)

Wide green median in Erie. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

January 30, 2024

Relatively minor pushback in Colorado Senate to proposed limits to new water-thirsty grasses in urban areas that get little or no foot traffic

Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million for programs across the state for removal of thirsty turf classified as non-functional, meaning that the grass is mainly ornamental, to be seen but not otherwise used.

This morning [January 30, 2024] the Colorado Senate will review a bill that, if approved, will extend the concept.

“This bill is about not putting (in) that non-functional turf in the first place,” explained Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, in introducing SB24-005 to the Senate Agriculture and Water Committee last Thursday. “If you don’t put it in the first place, you don’t have to replace it.”

The committee approved the bill, titled “Prohibit Landscaping Practices for Water Conservation,” in a 4-1 vote.

The Colorado Municipal League registered opposition, but tellingly, no representatives of towns or cities showed up to argue against the bill. Instead, support was expressed by representatives of several local jurisdictions, including the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, the second largest water provider on the Western Slope, as well as the special district that provides water for Pueblo West.

The bill takes aim at Kentucky bluegrass and other species imported from wetter climatic zones that are planted along streets and in medians, amid parking lots, in front of government buildings as well as the expanses you often see around office parks and many business and industrial areas. The imported species can use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate.

Residential property is unaffected. Worried about a public backlash, legislators amended the bill to make that exemption doubly clear.

The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.

Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified based on input of stakeholders. Functional and non-functional turf were clarified. The bill was also modified to give cities and counties flexibility to determine areas of “community, civic and recreational” turf grasses, in effect letting them decide what is functional in some instances. The revised bill language also made it clear that installing native species of grass or those hybridized species that use less water would be OK. The revised bill also give municipalities and counties until Jan. 1, 2026, to review and revise their landscaping code and development review processes.

Part of the impetus to reduce water devoted to urban landscapes is a desire to protect water for agriculture in the San Luis Valley and other farm areas of Colorado. Photo/Allen Best

Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, a co-sponsor, called the bill a “natural extension” of the turf-buy-back bill from 2022. He said he was surprised at the reaction in Alamosa to that funding. The water district he manages began getting inquiries about how to participate. “It kind of inspired me that there’s more room for improvement here in this space,” he told committee members.

Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s South Slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the last 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture as necessary to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.

“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and doing everything we can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” said Simpson.

Nobody argues that the limits on expansion of what the bill calls non-functional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use. Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water.

But developing water for growing cities, particularly along the Front Range but even in the headwaters’ communities, has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21^stcentury, drier.

The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration during 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.

See also:

Part V: Colorado River crisis looms over state’s landscape decisions

Part IV: Why these homeowners tore out their turf

Part III: How bluegrass lawns became the default for urban landscapes

Part II: Enough water for lawns at the headwaters of the Colorado River?

Part I: Colorado squeezing water from urban landscapes

Disagreements remain about whether the state should create a state-wide standard, as is proposed in this legislation, or whether local governments should figure out their own solutions.

It’s a familiar arguing point in Colorado, but rarely are the divisions neat and simple. That’s also true in this case. Colorado Springs, the state’s second largest city, has a robust program for urban landscape transformation but was hesitant about the bill’s approach, wanting to ensure local flexibility.

Denver is fully behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly 6,000 acres. It says it doesn’t want to become parsimonious with its water only to see water used lavishly in new settlements.

Andrew Hill, the government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.

“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas (where) I think a consensus exists,” said Hill at the committee hearing.

Local governments can go further, and many have already. Colorado has 38 turf replacement programs, and Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf and another 9 plan to do so.

Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan areas, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, even taking aim at water devoted to front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River that it has been trying to develop for the last 40 years.

The Colorado Municipal League, a consortium of 270 towns and cities, insists that the proposal represents state overreach of one-size-fits-all policies for local landscapes. Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley, and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs.

“We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said. In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.

The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf removal programs. Some legislators have indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.

Removal of turf, such as at this library in Lafayette, has become more common in Colorado. Photo/Allen Best

Witnesses at the committee hearing repeatedly echoed what Roberts said in introducing the bill. Paying for turf removal is “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places said Lindsay Rogers, policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates, which helped shape the bill.

Rogers said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”

The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of “non-functional vs functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.

On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might well find buffalo and other indigenous grasses, if more conserving of water, less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in autumn.

Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.

Aspinall Unit Forecast for Operations January 30, 2024 #GunnisonRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):

Click the link to view the forecast graphics.

Changing #Climate Behind Sharp Drop in #Snowpack Since 1980s: Study finds steepest drops in areas of the Northern Hemisphere reliant on snow for water — NOAA #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Morgan Kelly):

January 24, 2024

Read the study

Scientific data from ground observations, satellites, and climate models have not agreed on whether climate change is consistently chipping away at the snowpacks that accumulate in high-elevation mountains and provide water when they melt in spring. This complicates efforts to manage the water scarcity that would result for many population centers.

A new Dartmouth study cuts through the uncertainty in these observations and provides evidence that seasonal snowpacks throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere have indeed shrunk significantly over the past 40 years due to human-driven climate change. The sharpest global warming-related reductions in snowpack—between 10% to 20% per decade—are in the Southwestern and Northeastern United States, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. The study was funded in part by NIDISthrough the NOAA Climate Program Office Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, & Projections (MAPP) program.

The Southwest and Northeast saw the greatest loss in spring snowpack between 1981 and 2020, raising concerns about water scarcity and economies reliant on winter recreation. The numbers at bottom correspond to the percentage of spring snowpack lost (red) or gained (blue) per decade, with losses concentrated in populated regions. Image by Justin Mankin and Alexander Gottlieb.

Dartmouth researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin report in the journal Nature that the extent and speed of this loss potentially puts the hundreds of millions of people in North America, Europe, and Asia who depend on snow for their water on the precipice of a crisis that continued warming will amplify.

“We were most concerned with how warming is affecting the amount of water stored in snow. The loss of that reservoir is the most immediate and potent risk that climate change poses to society in terms of diminishing snowfall and accumulation,” said Gottlieb.

“Our work identifies the watersheds that have experienced historical snow loss and those that will be most vulnerable to rapid snowpack declines with further warming,” Gottlieb said. “The train has left the station for regions such as the Southwestern and Northeastern United States. By the end of the 21st century, we expect these places to be close to snow-free by the end of March. We’re on that path and not particularly well adapted when it comes to water scarcity.”

Water security is only one dimension of snow loss, said Mankin, an associate professor of geography and the paper’s senior author.

The Hudson, Susquehanna, Delaware, Connecticut, and Merrimack watersheds in the Northeastern U.S., where water scarcity is not as dire, experienced among the steepest declines in snowpack. But these heavy losses threaten economies in states such as Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire that depend on winter recreation, Mankin syid—even machine-made snow has a temperature threshold, one that many areas are fast approaching.

“The recreational implications are emblematic of the ways in which global warming disproportionately affects the most vulnerable communities,” he said. “Ski resorts at lower elevations and latitudes have already been contending with year-on-year snow loss. This will just accelerate, making the business model inviable.”

“We’ll likely see further consolidation of skiing into large, well-resourced resorts at the expense of small and medium-sized ski areas that have such crucial local economic and cultural values. It will be a loss that will ripple through communities,” Mankin said.

In the study, Gottlieb and Mankin focused on how global warming’s influence on temperature and precipitation drove changes in snowpack in 169 river basins across the Northern Hemisphere from 1981 through 2020. The loss of snowpacks potentially means less meltwater in spring for rivers, streams, and soils downstream when ecosystems and people demand water.

Gottlieb and Mankin programmed a machine learning model to examine thousands of observations and climate-model experiments that captured snowpack, temperature, precipitation, and runoff data for Northern Hemisphere watersheds.

The researchers identified the uncertainties that the models and observations shared so they could hone in on what scientists previously missed when gauging the effect of climate change on snow. A 2021 study by Gottlieb and Mankin similarly leveraged uncertainties in how scientists measure snow depth and define snow drought to improve predictions of water availability.

“Snow observations are tricky at the regional scales most relevant for assessing water security,” Mankin said. “Snow is very sensitive to within-winter variations in temperature and precipitation, and the risks from snow loss are not the same in New England as in the Southwest, or for a village in the Alps as in high-mountain Asia.”

Gottlieb and Mankin found that 80% of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpacks—which are in its far-northern and high-elevation reaches—experienced minimal losses. Snowpacks actually expanded in vast swaths of Alaska, Canada, and Central Asia as climate change increased the precipitation that falls as snow in these frigid regions.

But it is the remaining 20% of the snowpack that exists around—and provides water for—many of the hemisphere’s major population centers that has diminished. Since 1981, documented declines in snowpack for these regions have been largely inconsistent due to the uncertainty in observations and naturally occurring variations in climate.

But Gottlieb and Mankin found that a steady pattern of annual declines in snow accumulation emerge quickly—and leave population centers suddenly and chronically short on new supplies of water from snowmelt.

Many snow-dependent watersheds now find themselves dangerously near a temperature threshold Gottlieb and Mankin call a “snow-loss cliff.” This means that as average winter temperatures in a watershed increase beyond 17 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius), snow loss accelerates even with only modest increases in local average temperatures.

Many highly populated watersheds that rely on snow for water supply are going to see accelerating losses over the next few decades, Mankin said.

“It means that water managers who rely on snowmelt can’t wait for all the observations to agree on snow loss before they prepare for permanent changes to water supplies. By then, it’s too late,” he said. “Once a basin has fallen off that cliff, it’s no longer about managing a short-term emergency until the next big snow. Instead, they will be adapting to permanent changes to water availability.”

Screenshot from the 2024 Climate Change in Colorado report

Get renewables right and get it going — Pete Kolbenschlag #ActOnClimate

Screenshot from the recently released Climate Change in Colorado Report update

From email from Pete Kolbenschlag:

In a world of often competing needs, sometimes it’s harder to find a common path forward than to simply plow one’s own. And when a project to be hurried along is for some greater good, then to steam through the process may seem warranted. This sometimes seems the case for calls to streamline clean energy development or to limit community input into new infrastructure. But shortcuts can make for long delays – and many an ambitious project runs into obstacles by not adequately involving impacted members of the public, who nonetheless will be heard.

So the Sentinel is correct to call for clarity on utility-sized solar as it has in a recent editorial. Which was also on the mark noting that more solar is welcomed. The opportunity is here now to secure investments in a cleaner energy future. But that does mean that we have to get it right.

Still, we shouldn’t delay. The need is real. How we power our lives and communities is quickly shifting and western Colorado should lead the way. It isn’t either/or. Siting of energy facilities and how they are integrated with the environment, farms, businesses and neighborhoods should always be a top concern. We must not repeat mistakes from our fossil fuel past when ecosystems and some communities were treated as sacrifice zones in the name of necessity. But we absolutely must transform our energy system and how we power our lives and economy.

Last February, my organization – the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance – issued its report on climate change in the Gunnison River Basin. Then 2023 happened. Last year is being widely reported as the hottest ever recorded as concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere – notably CO2 – hit levels likely not seen for millions of years. Meanwhile extreme weather and other climate disruptions continued to reset expectations about scope, onset and frequency.

Sure, there are still hold-outs who believe climate science is fiction and others who want hard to believe that some yet-unproven technology will allow the burning of methane-gas, oil and coal long into the future. But the economic, political and fact-based reality is that to a growing number of nations, decision-makers and institutions a rapid shift to clean energy is both necessary and inevitable. The data are clear: we must act with urgency and at scale if we are to address climate change.

That doesn’t skip over the need to meet community needs and issues. Federal legislation has made new funding available to help speed the deployment of more renewables. And the Colorado legislature is considering legislation, and could do more, to help direct where and how this renewable build out occurs. Still, local governments, like county commissioners, should not wait.

Taking effort to incentivize renewable projects that integrate with and benefit the communities where they are located is key. Not only for fairness but also to smooth development at the pace and scope required. The co-location of facilities, solar with agriculture for instance, or on rooftops and over parking lots, can help to mitigate some of the burden new development can place on others. Opportunities like workforce development programs, consumer cost savings, community-ownership are other outcomes that can and should be encouraged to make clean energy a win for the community as a whole, as well as for the climate.

One example is the agrivoltaics project the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance has been helping to steer in Delta County, that seeks to develop a community-rooted model for solar that pairs with and even benefits agriculture, putting more clean power on the grid while returning the cost-savings from production to its farm-based member-subscribers.

That is one place strong local leadership can help, in Mesa County and elsewhere, to guide where and how such projects are located. And state legislation can create stronger incentives to put more meaningful and community-centered benefits in renewable project design and power generation. For instance, by encouraging utilities, both investor-owned and rural cooperatives, to accept more community-solar on their systems, or making it easier to put solar production cost-savings directly on a consumer’s utility bill, as examples.

But we need to act now. With federal funding from recent laws, a growing recognition of the challenge at hand, and a willingness to lead we can develop a new energy economy that supports western Colorado communities and livelihoods. We need a thoughtful but strong and steady approach that meets and matches community needs and promptly puts more renewable energy to work powering Colorado.

Puckett Land Co. drops bid for Thompson Creek reservoir water rights — @AspenJournalism #CrystalRiver #RoaringForkRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

This photo shows the Thompson Creek drainage on the right as it flows into the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. A company with oil shale interests has voluntarily abandoned its conditional water rights for a reservoir on Thompson Creek. CREDIT: ECOFLIGHT

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

January 29, 2024

A company with ties to oil shale development in western Colorado has dropped its attempt to maintain water rights for a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek.

Puckett Land Co. on Jan. 26 filed a motion to dismiss its diligence application for conditional water rights that date to 1966 and are associated with the construction of a 23,983-acre-foot reservoir on Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. Later that day, a water court judge signed off on the motion, meaning the water rights have now been abandoned.

The Greenwood Village-based company holds interests in 17,500 acres of land in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, according to its water court filing. Attorney for Puckett Megan Christensen said the decision to voluntarily cancel these water rights was for business purposes. In its November filing, known as a diligence application, Puckett had said that current economic conditions are adverse to oil shale production.

“Puckett has a portfolio of water rights and in looking at them, they made the decision that this one wasn’t worth maintaining anymore, so they decided to just go ahead and dismiss it,” Christensen said in an interview with Aspen Journalism.

The proposed reservoir site had been on BLM land in Pitkin County within the boundaries of an area that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are proposing to withdraw from eligibility for new oil and gas leases. The proposed Thompson Divide withdrawal area is comprised of 224,713-acres in Garfield, Gunnison and Pitkin counties that generally straddles the ridge of mountains running from south of Glenwood Springs to the northern edge of the West Elk Wilderness, south of McClure Pass.

Carbondale conservation group Wilderness Workshop supports the withdrawal area and celebrated Puckett dropping the water rights as a win for the Crystal River.

“This is great news for the Thompson Divide, the Crystal River, and our local ecosystem and communities,” Will Roush, executive director of Wilderness Workshop, said in a prepared statement. “Puckett’s intention to cancel their conditional water rights demonstrates just how speculative conditional water rights associated with oil shale development are. Other holders of similar rights ought to follow Puckett’s lead.”

Proposed Thompson Creek reservoir

Map: Laurine Lassalle – Aspen JournalismSource: BLM, Pitkin CountyCreated with Datawrapper

Conditional water rights

Puckett is among the companies with an interest in western Colorado oil shale development, who have water rights dating to the 1950s and ‘60s, which were amassed in anticipation of a boom. A report produced by conservation group Western Resource Advocates in 2009 found that there were conditional water rights associated with oil shale development for 27 reservoirs with 736,770 acre-feet of water in the mainstem of the Colorado River basin.

Companies have been able to hang onto these conditional water rights in some cases for over 50 years without using them because Colorado water law allows a would-be water user to reserve their place in the priority system based on when they applied for the right — not when they put water to use — while they work toward developing the water. Under the cornerstone of water law known as prior appropriation, older waters rights get first use of the river.

To maintain a conditional right, an applicant must every six years file what’s known as a diligence application with the water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they “can and will” eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights they won’t soon use.

But the bar for proving diligence is low. Judges are hesitant to abandon these conditional water rights, even if they have been languishing without being used for decades.

Before Puckett dropped its diligence application, John Cyran, senior staff attorney for Western Resource Advocates’ Healthy Rivers Program, said holding onto conditional rights like these raised speculation concerns.

“The water is being held without a plan to use it, which violates a central tenet in western water law,” Cyran said in an email. “Water shortages are affecting Colorado’s communities, fish and wildlife. We cannot afford to let companies profit off these shortages by holding onto unused conditional water rights.”

Crystal River Ranch was the only entity to file a statement of opposition to Puckett’s application. The deadline to file a statement of opposition is Jan. 31.

Crystal River Ranch also expressed concern that the over-50-year-old water rights had never been used and said that over the five decades Puckett had not shown it would develop them.

“During that period, the applicant has failed to obtain the necessary federal, state and local permits required to develop this reservoir,” the statement of opposition reads. “Therefore, this subject conditional water right must be canceled and abandoned.”

The Thompson Creek water rights had been part of a proposed “integrated system” that includes conditional water rights for two proposed small reservoirs, and a pump and pipeline on Starkey Gulch, a tributary of Parachute Creek. The application did not specifically mention work regarding the Thompson Creek reservoir site in its list of diligence activities and Puckett had said that diligence on any part of the system constitutes diligence with respect to the entire system. It is unclear how the Thompson Creek reservoir would have operated with these other parts of the system, but Christensen alluded to the reservoir being conceived of as additional back-up supply.

Christensen said the water rights applications for the Starkey Gulch components are still going forward because those water rights are closer to Puckett’s landholdings. These diligence applications were filed on Nov. 30 and so far no entities have filed statements of opposition.

Map of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — via the BLM

In the last two weeks, #snowpack gains were 137 percent of average at our West Slope stations and 99 percent of average at our East Slope stations — @Northern_Water

January 29, 2024

The West Slope stations are now at 96 percent and East Slope stations are at 93 percent of median snowpack for this date.

Liberal, #Kansas: 2024 Ogallala Aquifer Summit “Building Trust, Mobilizing Collaboration” — Irrigation Innovation Consortium March 18-19, 2024

The Ogallala aquifer, also referred to as the High Plains aquifer. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration

Click the link for all the inside skinny and to register on the Irrigation Innovation Consortium website:

About: This highly interactive event convenes water management leaders and others from across the Ogallala region to learn about and from each other’s work to slow aquifer decline and support ecosystem and community resilience.

When? Please plan to attend both days :

Monday, March 18 1 pm-5 pm CDT & evening social 6:30-8:30 pm

Tuesday, March 19 8 am-4 pm CDT

#Snowpack news January 29, 2024

Colorado snowpack basin-filled map January 29, 2024 via the NRCS.

Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map January 29, 2024 via the NRCS.

Memo: West Fork Dam ‘does not align well’ with federal policy — @WyoFile #LittleSnakeRiver #YampaRiver

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack addresses an audience during a trip to Jackson Hole in 2015. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

January 25, 2024

Wyoming’s plan to construct the West Fork Dam in the Medicine Bow National Forest “does not align well” with federal policy and management plans, a forest official wrote in a 2022 brief intended for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

The Medicine Bow environmental policy analyst who evaluated the state’s plan for the 264-foot high dam also said the proposal might not meet a U.S. Forest Service public-interest standard necessary for a land swap that would enable dam construction.

The critical assessment was penned as Medicine Bow staff prepared a briefing paper on Wyoming’s plan to construct the dam and its 130-acre reservoir in Carbon County to serve fewer than 100 irrigators who want more late-season water. Forest officials sought staffers’ input on the proposed development above the Little Snake River.

Medicine Bow officials were preparing the late-2022 briefing for regional and Washington D.C. officials, unnamed VIPs and Secretary Vilsack, according to documents obtained by WyoFile through a records request.

In an internal Medicine Bow email, forest environmental policy analyst Matt Schweich asked that the briefing paper state that “[t]he Forest is concerned that the State’s current preferred concept does not align well with Forest Service policy and the Forest plan, that it may not be in the public interest, and is likely to be highly controversial with the public.”

Ninety-six percent of comments on the plan opposed the project, a WyoFile tally of submissions showed. Criticism ranged from the project’s environmental impacts to Wyoming’s rosy analysis of public benefits and the state’s willingness to fund the bulk of the project for the benefit of private irrigators.

An ongoing environmental review necessary to advance the Wyoming project will determine whether the dam plan meets federal policies and the Medicine Bow management plan. A federal-state land exchange necessary for construction must be found to be in the public interest. An environmental impact statement and associated reviews of the proposal have been delayed once, and their completion date remains uncertain.

A Medicine Bow spokesman said Schweich’s opinion does not reflect the official position of the agency, which will only be revealed through the environmental impact statement.

Last puzzle piece

The Forest Service, U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to complete the EIS in a process largely obscured from public view. The emails, however, provide another peek into the thinking of Forest Service specialists regarding the merits of the controversial project.

In another internal discussion previously reported by WyoFile, a Medicine Bow hydrologist expressed worry that the dam proposal wasn’t being thoroughly vetted. Medicine Bow spokesman Aaron Voos dismissed that worry last year, characterizing the criticism as healthy agency discussion.

Schweich added his newly revealed assessment of the dam plan in a Sept. 26, 2022 email exchange as Medicine Bow staffers were preparing a “Hot topic” report for leadership, including Vilsack. Fully four years before that, Wyoming water developers had settled on the size of the dam, the capacity and size of the reservoir and the site of the complex. Wyoming has not deviated significantly from those plans.

Little Snake River watershed S. of Rawlins. Water developers want to construct an $80 million, 264-foot-high dam on the West Fork of Battle Creek south of Rawlins. This artist’s conception shows what the reservoir would look like in a Google Earth rendition. Credit: Wyoming Water Development Office.

A month before Schweich wrote his 2022 assessment, Wyoming had provided the last piece of the puzzle, telling Medicine Bow officials the state would seek 1,762 acres of forest land in an exchange that would enable construction of the dam and reservoir. Jenifer Scoggin, director of the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments, provided that land-swap information to Medicine Bow officials in August 2022,according to a letter she wrote later that year.

Medicine Bow officials appeared to have known the size of the dam and reservoir, their location and the federal acreage Wyoming sought when the officials asked Schweich for his assessment.

A month after Schweich responded, Wyoming submitted its formal proposal to the Medicine Bow for a land exchange and dam construction.

Regardless how well-informed Schweich was when he made his 2022 assessment, spokesman Voos said it was unclear at that time exactly what the state intended.

“[T]he internal, draft email of Hot Topics updates [to which Schweich contributed] is prior to receipt of any formal land exchange proposal from the State,” Voos wrote WyoFile. “At the time, multiple informal discussions were taking place surrounding conceptual ideas.

“Since it was unclear what the State’s future use of any current National Forest System land might have been at that time,” Voos wrote, “then yes, there was the possibility for misalignment with our policy and Plan.”

WyoFile obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. Although the environmental impact statement is being written largely out of public view, the public had an opportunity to weigh in on the issue before the analysis began. People will be able to comment on the review when it is completed.

With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn #Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash — Inside Climate News #ActOnClimate

20231201 Dubai Foto Oficial COP28-cortesia COP281461. By Fotografía oficial de la Presidencia de Colombia – https://www.flickr.com/photos/197399771@N06/53368555045/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=141826566

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

January 28, 2024

Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.

As Earth’s annual average temperature pushes against the 1.5 degree Celsius limit beyond which climatologists expect the impacts of global warming to intensify, social scientists warn that humanity may be about to sleepwalk into a dangerous new era in human history. Research shows the increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlashes.

Established by the 2015 Paris Agreement and affirmed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1.5 degree mark has been a cliff edge that climate action has endeavored to avoid, but the latest analyses of global temperature data showed 2023 teetering on that red line.

One major dataset suggested that the threshold was already crossed in 2023, and most projections say 2024 will be even warmer. Current global climate policies have the world on a path to heat by about 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would threaten modern human civilization within the lifespan of children born today.

Paris negotiators were intentionally vague about the endeavor to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the goal in the context of 30-year global averages. Earlier this month, the Berkeley Earth annual climate report showed Earth’s average temperature in 2023 at 1.54 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, marking the first step past the target.

But it’s barely registering with people who are being bombarded with inaccurate climate propaganda and distracted by the rising cost of living and regional wars, said Reinhard Steurer, a climate researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.

“The real danger is that there are so many other crises around us that there is no effort left for the climate crisis,” he said. “We will find all kinds of reasons not to put more effort into climate protection, because we are overburdened with other things like inflation and wars all around us.”

Steurer said he doesn’t expect any official announcement from major climate institutions until long after the 1.5 degree threshold is actually crossed, when some years will probably already be edging toward 2 degrees Celsius. “I think most scientists recognize that 1.5 is gone,” he said.

“We’ll be doing this for a very long time,” he added, “not accepting facts, pretending that we are doing a good job, pretending that it’s not going to be that bad.”

In retrospect, using the 1.5 degree temperature rise as the key metric of whether climate action was working may have been a bad idea, he said.

“It’s language nobody really understands, unfortunately, outside of science,” he said. ”You always have to explain that 1.5 means a climate we can adapt to and manage the consequences, 2 degrees of heating is really dangerous, and 3 means collapse of civilization.”

Absent any formal notification of breaching the 1.5 goal, he hopes more scientists talk publicly about worst-case outcomes.

“It would really make a difference if scientists talked more about societal collapse and how to prepare for that because it would signal, now it’s getting real,” he said. “It’s much more tangible than 1.5 degrees.”

Instead, recent public climate discourse was dominated by feel-good announcements about how COP28 kept the 1.5 goal alive, he added.

“This is classic performative politics,” he said. “If the fossil fuel industry can celebrate the outcome of the COP, that’s not a good sign.” [ed. emphasis mine]

Like many social scientists, Steurer is worried that the increasingly severe climate shocks that warming greater than 1.5 degrees brings will reverberate politically as people reach for easy answers.

“That is usually denial, in particular when it comes to right-wing parties,” he said. “That’s the easiest answer you can find.”

“Global warming will be catastrophic sooner or later, but for now, denial works,” he said. “And that’s all that matters for the next election.”

‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’

Social policy researcher Paul Hoggett, professor emeritus at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said the scientific roots of 1.5-degree target date back to research in the early 2000s that culminated in a University of Exeter climate conference at which scientists first spelled out the risks of triggering irreversible climate tipping points above that level of warming.

“I think it’s still seen very much as that key marker of where we move from something which is incremental, perhaps to something which ceases to be incremental,” he said. “But there’s a second reality, which is the reality of politics and policymaking.”

The first reality is “profoundly disturbing,” but in the political world, 1.5 is a symbolic maker, he said.

“It’s more rhetorical. it’s a narrative of 1.5,” he said, noting the disconnect of science and policy. “You almost just shrug your shoulders. As the first reality worsens, the political and cultural response becomes more perverse.”

A major announcement about breaching the 1.5 mark in today’s political and social climate could be met with extreme denial in a political climate marked by “a remorseless rise of authoritarian forms of nationalism,” he said. “Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

An increasing number of right-wing narratives simply see this as a set of lies, he added.

“I think this is a huge issue that is going to become more and more important in the coming years,” he said. “We’re going backwards to where we were 20 years ago, when there was a real attempt to portray climate science as misinformation,” he said. “More and more right wing commentators will portray what comes out of the IPCC, for example, as just a pack of lies.”

The IPCC’s reports represent a basic tenet of modernity—the idea that there is no problem for which a solution cannot be found, he said.

“However, over the last 100 years, this assumption has periodically been put to the test and has been found wanting,” Hoggett wrote in a 2023 paper. The climate crisis is one of those situations with no obvious solution, he wrote.

In a new book, Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition, Hoggett says the climate emergency is one of the big drivers of authoritarian nationalism, which plays on the terror and anxiety the crisis inspires.

“Those are crucial political and individual emotions,” he said. “And it’s those things that drive this non-rational refusal to see what’s in front of your eyes.”

“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism,” he said.

“When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them. That’s the politics of the armed lifeboat.”

The Emotional Climate

“I don’t think people like facing things they can’t affect,” said psychotherapist Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “And in trauma, people do everything that they possibly can to stop feeling what is unbearable to feel.”

That may be one reason why the imminent breaching of the 1.5 degree limit may not stir the public, she said.

“We protect ourselves from fear, we protect ourselves from deep grief on behalf of future generations and we protect ourselves from guilt and shame. And I think that the fossil fuel industry knows that,” she said. “We can be told something over and over and over again, but if we have an identity and a sense of ourselves tied up in something else, we will almost always refer to that, even if it’s at the cost of pretending that something that is true is not true.”

Such deep disavowal is part of an elaborate psychological system for coping with the unbearable. “It’s not something we can just snap our fingers and get ourselves out of,” she said.

People who point out the importance of the 1.5-degree warming limit are resented because they are intruding on peoples’ psychological safety, she said, and they become pariahs. “The way societies enforce this emotionally is really very striking,” she added.

But how people will react to passing the 1.5 target is hard to predict, Weston said.

“I do think it revolves around the question of agency and the question of meaning in one’s life,” she said. “And I think that’s competing with so many other things that are going on in the world at the same time, not coincidentally, like the political crises that are happening globally, the shift to the far right in Europe, the shift to the far right in the U.S. and the shift in Argentina.”

Those are not unrelated, she said, because a lack of agency produces a yearning for false, exclusionary solutions and authoritarianism.

“If there’s going to be something that keeps me up at night, it’s not the 1.5. It’s the political implications of that feeling of helplessness,” she said. “People will do an awful lot to avoid feeling helpless. That can mean they deny the problem in the first place. Or it could mean that they blame people who are easier targets, and there is plenty of that to witness happening in the world. Or it can be utter and total despair, and a turning inward and into a defeatist place.”

She said reaching the 1.5 limit will sharpen questions about addressing the problem politically and socially.

“I don’t think most people who are really tracking climate change believe it’s a question of technology or science,” she said. “The people who are in the know, know deeply that these are political and social and emotional questions. And my sense is that it will deepen a sense of cynicism and rage, and intensify the polarization.”

Unimpressed by Science

Watching the global temperature surging past the 1.5 degree mark without much reaction from the public reinforces the idea that the focus on the physical science of climate change in recent decades came at the expense of studying how people and communities will be affected and react to global warming, said sociologist and author Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.

“It’s a fool’s errand to continue down that road right now,” she said. “It’s been an abysmal ratio of funds that are going to understand the social conflict that’s going to come from climate shocks, the climate migration and the ways that social processes will have to shift. None of that has been done.”

Passing the 1.5 degree threshold will “add fuel to the fire of the vanguard of the climate movement,” she said. “Groups that are calling for systemic change, that are railing against incremental policy making and against business as usual are going to be empowered by this information, and we’re going to see those people get more involved and be more confrontational.”

And based on the historical record, a rise in climate activism is likely to trigger a backlash, a dangerous chain reaction that she outlined in her new book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.

“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period,” she said. “And it will lead to clashes.”

Looking at the historic record, she said, shows that repressive crackdowns on civil disobedience is often where the violence starts. There are signs that pattern will repeat, with police raids and even pre-emptive arrests of climate activists in Germany, and similar repressive measures in the United Kingdom and other countries.

“I think that’s an important story to talk about, that people are going to push back against climate action just as much as they’re going to push for it,” she said. “There are those that are going to feel like they’re losing privileged access to resources and funding and subsidies.”

A government dealing effectively with climate change would try to deal with that by making sure there were no clear winners and losers, she said, but the climate shocks that come with passing the 1.5 degree mark will worsen and intensify social tensions.

“There will be more places where you can’t go outside during certain times of the year because of either smoke from fires, or extreme heat, or flooding, or all the other things that we know are coming,” she said. “That’s just going to empower more people to get off their couches and become activists.”

‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’

Public ignorance of the planet’s passing the 1.5 degree mark depends on “how long the powers-that-be can get away with throwing up smokescreens and pretending that they are doing something significant,” said famed climate researcher James Hansen, who recently co-authored a papershowing that warming is accelerating at a pace that will result in 2 degrees of warming within a couple of decades.

“As long as they can maintain the 1.5C fiction, they can claim that they are doing their job,” he said. “They will keep faking it as long as the scientific community lets them get away with it.”

But even once the realization of passing 1.5 is widespread, it might not change the social and political responses much, said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and activist in California.

“Not enough people care,” he said. “I’ve been a climate activist since 2006. I’ve tried so many things, I’ve had so many conversations, and I still don’t know what it will take for people to care. Maybe they never will.” [ed. emphasis mine]

2024 #COleg: After the Supreme Court gutted federal protections for half of #Colorado’s waters, can state leaders fill the gap?: Wetlands, seasonal streams no longer have federal protection from pollution, prompting legislation — The #Denver Post #WOTUS

The vegetation in this beaver wetland rebounded vigorously after the Cameron Peak Fire. Photo: Evan Barrientos/Audubon Rockies

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

When the Cameron Peak wildfire ripped across northern Colorado in 2020, it left hundreds of thousands of acres charred and dusty — except for a series of beaver ponds tucked inside Poudre Canyon. The wetlands survived the state’s largest recorded wildfire and acted as a buffer as the flames raged through the canyon. And after the flames were extinguished, they served as a sponge to absorb floodwaters sped by the lack of vegetation, minimizing flood damage downstream. But a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year left wetlands like the ones in Poudre Canyon — as well as thousands of miles of seasonal streams critical to the state’s water system — without protection under federal law. The court’s majority limited the coverage of the Clean Water Act, leaving protection gaps for more than half of Colorado’s waters that lawmakers, conservationists, developers and state water quality officials are rushing to fill…Colorado, like many states, relied on the federal government’s permitting process to regulate when people could dig up waterways or wetlands and fill them in — activities known as dredging and filling. Although Colorado has its own Water Quality Control Act that makes it illegal to pollute waters, there is now no process to vet proposed dredge and fill projects, or to issue permits allowing those projects to legally proceed…

Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie is crafting a bill this legislative session to give the CDPHE the authority to fill that gap. But key questions remain about how far lawmakers and state officials are willing to go in replacing federal protections…

In May, the high court’s justices ruled 5-4 that wetlands not connected on the surface to another body of federally protected water do not qualify for protection themselves under the Clean Water Act. The law also doesn’t protect wetlands connected to rivers or lakes via groundwater below the surface, the court found, and it doesn’t protect streams that flow seasonally or only after precipitation falls. The ruling left the protection of the newly exempt waters to the states, many of which do not have robust water protection laws…

Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org

The Department of Public Health and Environment in July enacted an emergency rule to provide some oversight over dredge and fill activities in waters that lost federal protection…The state policy states that the department will not punish people who dredge or fill in waters if the person notifies the CDPHE, the impacted area is small and the activities comply broadly with the federal law that existed before the Supreme Court decision. The goal, said Nicole Rowan, director of CDPHE’s Water Quality Control Division, is to give developers and others a way to proceed with projects without fearing legal trouble because of ambiguity in the law.

National Academy of Sciences honors geosciences professor Ellen E. Wohl for advancements in river science — Colorado State University #ActOnClimate

University Distinguished Professor Ellen Wohl is being honored for her exceptional research and publication record that has expanded understanding of fundamental river and watershed processes in diverse environments ranging from the Arctic to the tropics. Image provided by the National Academy of Sciences. Graphic credit: Colorado State University

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado State University website (Jayme DeLoss):

Colorado State University Geosciences Professor Ellen Wohl is so at home in rivers and streams that if you manage to catch her in her office on campus, she might be listening to stream sounds while she works.

The prolific field scientist and University Distinguished Professor has studied rivers and watersheds from ephemeral desert channels to torrents in the tropics on every continent except Antarctica. Today, the National Academy of Sciences announced that it will honor Wohl with the G.K. Warren Prize for her expansive research and advancements in river and watershed sciences.

“Her work has dramatically influenced and guided river management and restoration worldwide,” the academy said in its announcement. “Wohl is the author of an extensive number of publications and books, introducing broad audiences to river science, and is an extraordinary mentor and role model for women in science.”

Wohl is what’s known as a fluvial geomorphologist, or a scientist who studies river processes and physical characteristics. She was drawn to CSU by its legacy of water research and its location, where she would have quick access to mountain streams.

“We have such a great community of people to work with at CSU who are focused on all different aspects of water,” Wohl said. “If I have a question about water chemistry, fish, macro-invertebrates, riparian plants, whatever, there’s somebody I can talk to on campus.”

Ellen Wohl kayaks on the Great Slave Lake in Canada. Courtesy of Natalie Anderson

Respect for rivers

Wohl said that she couldn’t resist studying rivers and called them a delightful environment in which to work. They are also critically important, she added.

“Our survival absolutely depends on them. Particularly in Colorado,” Wohl said. “All our drinking water in the West, certainly in Fort Collins, comes from surface water. That’s not going to change.”

Her recent research examines how rivers respond to wildfire. After a fire, excess water and sediment rush down denuded slopes, causing flash floods, debris flows and sedimentation in drinking water reservoirs. Wohl’s goal is to improve river resilience for all the living things that rely on the water.

“What can we do that will make these systems better able to recover after fire and that will have downstream impacts on the communities that drink that water?”

Wohl said the answer lies in understanding the complexities, or as she calls it “messiness,” of river networks. Many U.S. rivers have been simplified to single channels that flush everything downstream very effectively. Her work has found that restoring some of the historic messiness, including floodplains, branching channels, fallen trees in the water and beaver activity, enhances river resilience.

Slowing downstream transport also gives microbes that live in the floodplain and underneath streams time to clean the water. Microbes and plants can break down excess nitrate, which is a serious issue along the Front Range, Wohl said.

Nitrate from agricultural fertilizer, feedlots and burning fossil fuels is transported in the atmosphere and falls as rain, snow or dry deposition on the eastern side of the Continental Divide, ending up in surface water. Consuming excess nitrate in drinking water is detrimental to human health. Excess nitrate in reservoirs also can lead to algae blooms that can be toxic to people and other organisms. Additionally, algae blooms can deplete oxygen in the water, causing fish kills.

“It’s a great concern for water quality managers to try and do what we can to reduce nitrate levels,” Wohl said.

Ellen Wohl does what she calls the “logjam limbo” to avoid portaging around a blockage – an occupational hazard. Courtesy of Ellen Wohl

Dry outlook

Wohl said Colorado’s future holds “more rainfall, but generally less water” due to continued warming and drying of the climate and human consumption. Snowpack, which supplies water to communities and feeds river ecosystems, will decline, along with river flows throughout the state.

“The good news is we have some wiggle room because we waste an awful lot of water, so we can conserve a lot more than we use,” she said. “But there’s a limit to how much you can conserve.”

The 1922 Colorado River Compact, which was renegotiated 100 years later to account for declining flow and a rapidly growing population, was based on a limited record of stream measurements taken during anomalously wet years, Wohl said, so the river’s water was overallocated from the start. Fluvial geomorphologists can extend the streamflow record and estimate long-term water supply by looking at geologic indicators – information that could help with future allocations.

Benefiting those downstream

Across the diverse environments in which Wohl has worked, the common thread is that they were all shaped by flowing water, the same force that has shaped a career she thoroughly enjoys.

“In addition to going to all the amazing natural places, by far one of the highlights of my career is working with really motivated, enthusiastic, capable people,” Wohl said.

The National Academy of Sciences will present Wohl with the G.K. Warren Prize April 28 during the NAS 161st Annual Meeting. The prize is awarded once every five years.

Wohl plans to use the $20,000 prize to establish a graduate student research fellowship through the Geological Society of America, in honor of her Ph.D. advisor Victor R. Baker.

Wohl’s award was among 20 announced today by the National Academy of Sciences that recognize extraordinary scientific achievements. View the full list of recipients in the NAS press release.

Save the Poudre is suing to stop NISP project that would provide water to 15 communities — The #FortCollins Coloradoan #PoudreRiver #SouthPlatte #River

U.S. Highway 287 runs through the future site of Glade Reservoir. The Larimer county Board of County Commissioners approved the 1041 Land Use Permit for NISP in September, 2020. Photo credit: Northern Water

Click the link to read the article on the Fort Collins Coloradoan website (Rebecca Powell). Here’s an excerpt:

Environmental group Save The Poudre has filed a lawsuit to try and stop the Northern Integrated Supply Project from going forward to construct two reservoirs and supply water to 15 communities…In the lawsuit, filed Thursday, Save The Poudre says the diversion of water from the Poudre River would cause severe damage to the river, including its aquatic life, the Poudre River Whitewater Park in Fort Collins and the riparian corridor…The lawsuit also alleges that in approving the permit, the Army Corps violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act because it didn’t adequately consider alternatives and didn’t choose the least environmentally damaging alternative, respectively…

NISP would divert water from the Poudre and South Platte rivers to store in two new reservoirs: Glade Reservoir north of Fort Collins and the smaller Galeton Reservoir east of Ault. Communities that would be served by the project include the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District and others in Weld and Boulder counties.

Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) map July 27, 2016 via Northern Water.

Aridity Could Dry Up Southwestern Mine Proposals — @InsideClimate News

The Bingham Canyon open-pit copper mine in Utah has operated since 1903. David Guthrie/Flickr, CC via Colorado State University

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Wyatt Myskow):

Critical minerals for the clean energy transition are abundant in the Southwest, but the dozens of mines proposed to access them will require vast sums of water, something in short supply in the desert.

One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches touting the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to preserve the declining Colorado River in November.

When Tao Etpison took the mic, his speech echoed those who went before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that has helped life in the Southwest flourish. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protection was lacking, and mining companies were looking to take advantage.

“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”

The question is one the state and the Southwest must answer. Mine claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition are piling up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoes aridification due to climate change and decades of overconsumption.

Mining opponents argue the proposals could impact endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water—both its quantity and its quality. Across the Southwest, the story of 2023 was how water users, from farmers in the Colorado River Basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that would be consumed by new mines.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe has fought for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site to the Apache and other Indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species like the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the town of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests with the U.S. District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing its development would violate Native people’s religious rights.

But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.

Throughout the mine’s lifespan, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acre feet of water—enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over roughly 40 years. And experts say the mine would likely need far more.

Map of the Salt River watershed, Arizona, USA. By Shannon1 – Shaded relief from DEMIS Mapserver (which is PD), rest by me, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14995781

“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.

The Resolution copper mine isn’t the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” like lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands.

“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits, including the case over Oak Flat.

‘The Lords of Yesterday’

To understand mining in the U.S., you have to start with the Mining Law of 1872.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law as a way to continue the country’s development westward, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers.

Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday”—a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a long-time environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year—referring to the industries like oil and gas drilling, ranching and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push Indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining.

That’s led mining to be viewed as the top use of public lands by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.

“You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”

Most of Nevada is completely reliant on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they look to acquire water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economics and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can impact local streams, groundwater levels and the quality of the water as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition gaining traction, there’s a new mining boom, prompting increasing concerns over how local ecosystems will be impacted. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mining claims related to lithium, the biggest of which are, of course, drawing controversy.

A large-scale evaporation pond at the Silver Peak lithium mine on Oct. 6, 2022. The evaporation process can take a year and a half to complete. (David Calvert/The Nevada Independent)

Water’s Role in Mine Fights

In northern Nevada, companies have proposed two massive lithium mines—Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge—in groundwater basins that are already over appropriated. Both have drawn heavy scrutiny, the former for being proposed on a sacred site for local Indigenous tribes that is also range for area ranchers and endangered sage grouse, and the latter for threatening an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world.

Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is looking to drill a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert.”

“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”

New Mexico’s Middle #RioGrande: forest of cottonwoods, forest of pecans — John Fleck (InkStain.net)

Belen AT&SF Rio Grande crossing, looking east, March, 1943. Note lack of trees. Jack Delano, courtesy Library of Congress

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):

This Rio Grande crossing, just south of Belen, 30-plus miles downstream from Albuquerque, has changed dramatically since Jack Delano took the picture above in spring 1943.

Beyond drains, a forest. John Fleck, January 2024

THE BOSQUE

I’ve stared at Delano’s picture often, because of the story it tells – a broad open river valley. It’s nothing like that today.

I pieced together some dirt roads and ditchbanks to visit the site on this morning’s bike ride. I had hopes of duplicating Delano’s picture, but the train traffic made standing in the middle of the tracks seem ill-advised. The picture to the right, facing the river looking east, should give you a feel. The Rio Grande here is now flanked by a magnificent cottonwood gallery forest, with low stands of coyote willow and salt cedar and some other stuff. We call it “the bosque.”

Looking at the picture last night as I was doing the map work to figure a sane bike route to get to the bridge, the date clicked: Spring 1943. In thinking about the modern relationship between human communities and the Rio Grande, 1941-42 is a dividing line – the last big flood years, the floods that drove the major changes in river management that created an ecological niche that the cottonwoods exploited in the second half of the twentieth century with full-throated glee.

Delano’s picture can be misleading. It wasn’t all treeless like that. The 1917-18 Rio Grande drainage survey, which is our best “before” snapshot of the valley, shows clumps of cottonwoods up and down the river. Following the 1941-42 floods, the federal Middle Rio Grande Project reengineered the main river channel with a series of sediment traps on the banks that were intended to push the river into a narrower central channel. In the process, they created ideal seed bed habitat for the cottonwoods to fill in the empty spaces.

A cottonwood forest in Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: Matthew Schmader/Open Space Division

The result is a linear cottonwood gallery forest more than 150 miles long. I’ve always called it “continuous,” but I just scanned the whole length using satellite imagery and found two short gaps. So “nearly continuous,” to add precision.

The bosque is often treated as one of the Middle Valley’s great natural treasures, and I don’t disagree. But “natural” may not be quite the right word.

Belen High Line Canal, feeding pecan orchards in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. John Fleck, January 2024

PECANS

Next stop: one of the most interesting climate change adaptation experiments underway in Middle Valley agriculture.

Past the railroad bridge, I found a ditch crossing and peeled away from the river toward the sand hills to the east, winding through the small farms of Jarales that make this stretch of the valley a lovely exemplar of the “ribbons of green” we talk about in the new book. Nearly all the farms were less than 10 acres – non-commercial, “custom and culture” agriculture, mostly alfalfa or other forage crops, lots of horses. Dodging the one busy highway the best I could, I veered into a neighborhood and under the interstate, where the road kicked up to a geomorphic bench in the sand hills maybe 30 feet in elevation above the nearby valley floor.

The pecans are in the distance in the picture to the right, though you can’t really see them. I was on relatively unfamiliar ground, and was cautious in my interpretation of the “No Trespassing” signs on the ditchbank road. It’s land that was once scrubland just like the land in the foreground. Now it’s irrigated with water from the ditch in the picture, to the tune of more than 1,000 acre feet per year. (We don’t know exactly. We don’t meter this use of water here.) There was a lot of controversy nearly 20 years ago when the land was brought into production. Critics (included regular Inkstain commenter Bill Turner, who was on the MRGCD board at the time) argued it wasn’t entitled to irrigation water from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s ditches. I’m not going to relitigate that argument here. Those objecting to serving the land with MRGCD irrigation water lost. Now the land is home to a fascinating experiment in climate change adaptation.

With a warming climate, the optimal range for pecans has moved north. (UNM Water Resources Program grad Tylee Griego took a deep dive into the pecans’ migration here.)

We have seen a century of failed efforts to foster a commercially successful crop in the valley – wheat, tomatoes, sugar beats, pinto beans, tobacco (!). Pecans are the latest, and rather than climate change making it harder to grow stuff, in this case it has made it easier. By increasing irrigated acreage in the valley. We usually think of agricultural climate change adaptation as “crop switching,” not “crop adding.” In addition to the big orchards by the river, the latest USDA CroplandCROS dataset, which uses satellite data and algorithms to identify crop types, is showing more pecans in small patches across the valley. I don’t full trust CroplandCROS – it gets a lot of pixels wrong ’round here, unfortunately. But this just means more bike rides needed to “ground truth” my blog posts. This is a part of the valley I don’t know as well, so fun ahead!

As I was riding through Jarales this morning and writing this post in my head, I was playing with the theme suggested by the two forests – each spread across a niche created by human alteration of the hydrologic system. Not sure it quite works, but I’ll leave it here.

“Santa Fe R.R. streamliner, the “Super Chief,” being serviced at the depot, Albuquerque, NM. Servicing these diesel streamliners takes five minutes”. Jack Delano’s original caption. Courtesy Library of Congress

A NOTE ON JACK DELANO

Jack Delano’s 1943 trip through New Mexico is worthy of note.

Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Ukraine, was one of the Farm Service Administration/Office of War Information photographers whose work dominates our visual understanding of the 1930s and early ’40s in the United States. His photographs of the AT&SF rail yard in Albuquerque, taken on the same spring 1943 trip that he took the Belen railroad bridge above, represent a remarkable documentation of a moment in time, as freight bustled through Albuquerque in service of the war effort.

We tend to think of the classic FSA photography as “documentary” work of the highest order – which it was. But it also was government propaganda – artists paid by the government to tell particular kinds of stories, and share particular kinds of messages.

Much of the classic visual vocabulary of the FSA pictures – think Dorothea Lange – is very much black and white. But with the development of Kodachrome in the 1930s, photographers of the period were beginning to shoot in color too. Most of Delano’s Albuuquerque pictures are in black and white, but his color picture of the Albuquerque rail yard, taken from the Lead Avenue orverpass circa 1943, is a classic.

Birds and water at Bosque de Apache New Mexico November 9, 2022. Photo credit: Abby Burk

Chaffee County Commissioners hear proposal for Clear Creek Reservoir expansion — The Chaffee County Times #ClearCreek #ArkansasRiver

Click the link to read the article on the Chaffee County Times website (Hannah Harn). Here’s an excerpt:

The presented concept project would be a partnership between Pueblo Water and [Colorado Springs Utilities] to enlarge the reservoir. Colorado Springs Utilities would use the enlarged space for the first 30 years, at which point Pueblo Water would get half of it. The reservoir’s dam was built in 1902 and was used by the Otero Irrigation Co. until 1955 when the reservoir was sold to Pueblo Water. Since then, [Alan] Ward said, Pueblo Water has “spent a lot of money doing various projects to upgrade the dam for improved safety.”

The purpose of the project “is to bring it up to modern dam safety standards,” Ward said. “The challenge with the dam as it is today … the dam is built on a foundation of rock and gravel, which allows a lot of water to seep through. We’ve constantly battled seepage issues over the years.”

The other reason for the enlargement is to increase water storage to “increase resiliency, reliability, and flexibility” in meeting future water needs for Pueblo Water and Colorado Springs Utilities. The current dam is 70 feet high with a capacity of 11,140 acre-feet (currently restricted at 9,100 af). The enlargement proposal would bring the dam to a height of 106 feet and 30,000 af capacity. The reservoir’s surface area would increase from 414 acres to 631 acres. The dam would be built on the downstream side of the current dam, closer to the highway. Another impact of the project…They also may be adding an upstream buttress to hold things in place in case of an earthquake…Around 30-40 acres of wetlands around the reservoir would be impacted as the reservoir backs further up the valley, as well as a few small areas at the base of the existing dam. Ward also noted the large boreal toad population in nearby ponds.

Arkansas River Basin — Graphic via the Colorado Geological Survey

The #USGS & @BLMNational have release a report with new oil and gas surface management guidance to support successful #reclamation at existing and future well pads — USGS

Click the link to read the release on the USGS website:

The report provides specific and comprehensive reclamation guidance for surface oil and gas exploration and development.

The U. S. Geological Survey, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, recently published an oil and gas reclamation techniques and methods report that will, for the first time, give land managers and oil and gas operators specific tools to successfully reclaim disturbed lands during and after oil and gas activities.

Pronghorns using habitat near oil and gas infrastructure. Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

Resource inventory, monitoring and protection of oil and gas sites are mandated by federal statutes and regulations, yet this is the first publication defining standards and guidelines for how to reclaim, monitor, and successfully reclaim disturbed oil and gas sites available at a national level.

The report also emphasizes the importance of best management practices, clear standards, effective monitoring and minimizing surface disturbance for successful land reclamation.

Initiated through an interagency agreement with the BLM, USGS and BLM drew upon existing federal reclamation policy, scientific literature review, practical field experience and expertise from various sources such as federal and state agencies, oil and gas contractors, and academia to produce the document, intended to be used for each reclamation step from start to finish.

“The BLM’s land management experience and the USGS’s best available science come together to create this powerful tool in the toolbox for federal agencies working on surface management of oil and gas to ensure environmentally responsible outcomes,” said Benjamin Gruber, BLM Acting Assistant Director for Energy, Minerals and Realty Management. “We’re proud to partner with the USGS to produce this guide that is relevant for all parts of the process—from the time a company develops its drilling application to monitoring reclamation activities after wells are plugged.”

Successful oil and gas Pad reclamation established grass Utah May 17, 2022. Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

New, comprehensive guidelines

Prior to this report, the industry relied on a set of guidelines known as the ‘Gold Book’ for practical information about oil and gas leasing and permitting, operations, bonding and reclamation planning processes. However, the Gold Book lacks the type of precise guidance often found in instructional memorandums and handbooks produced by surface management agency offices, multi-jurisdictional groups or state agencies.

To maximize the efficacy of reclamation efforts, a set of national guidance and policies specific to oil and gas monitoring and assessment were needed.

This new USGS-BLM report supplements the Gold Book and other existing guidance by providing thorough and definitive steps and metrics for reclamation surface management. The report provides these kinds of uniform monitoring protocols and standards covering standardized soil and vegetation field monitoring methods, indicators, benchmarks, appropriate designs and analyses and electronic data capture and repositories supports planning procedures, leasing, permitting processes and bond release decisions.

While it was designed to be specific to the oil and gas industry, many of the report’s concepts and practices hold the potential to benefit reclamation of other fluid minerals development and land disturbance, including wind and solar energy development.

Vegetation data collection at a reclaimed wellpad April 26, 2021. Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

Leveraging ecological science to achieve success

Land reclamation, in essence, is aimed at techniques that set highly disturbed or degraded ecosystems on a trajectory that benefits native plants and animals and restores functioning habitats and ecological communities similar to surrounding, naturally occurring environments. During this process, the impacts of oil and gas development are minimized.

This means a major component of land reclamation involves repopulating the landscape with locally appropriate vegetation. Therefore, the report provides useful information about repositories and data collection platforms such as the Landscape Data Commons, Esri ArcGIS Online Survey123, the Database for Inventory Monitoring and Assessment (DIMA) and LandPKS.

The report also provides guidance for developing quantitative benchmarks to determine if erosion and vegetation standards have been met, including indicators of erosion and site stability, species composition and community structure.

“This technical publication provides a solid foundation based on current ecological science. It is the product of a collaborative effort between leading ecologists and reclamation scientists at the BLM, USGS, other agencies, and private organizations,” said USGS Deputy Associate Director for Ecosystems Paul Wagner. “The report addresses the need for well-managed data collection to inform reclamation plans, operations, approval decisions, and adaptive management strategies.”

Factors such as climate change, drought, intense storms, swings in temperature and invasive species all affect seedling survival rates. Ensuring that seedlings survive is crucial for agencies and operators to meet federal requirements and achieve reclamation success.

Successful reclamation is achieved when the standards defining soil and vegetation recovery are met, and a self-sustaining, vigorous, diverse, native, or approved plant community that minimizes visual land disturbance, provides forage, stabilizes soils and prevents noxious weeds from taking hold is in place.

Near Farmington, New Mexico. Photo credit: USGS

Who does this report support?

In conjunction with the Gold Book, this report supports the BLM — the largest surface management agency in the U.S. — with tools to monitor oil and gas reclamation and ensure environmentally responsible outcomes. BLM field office staff guide operators to create reclamation plans and to ensure that reclamation goals and expectations are clear. They inspect reclamation projects’ progress and status, complete quality assessments and quality control of operators’ monitoring data, and provide feedback.

This report will also be particularly useful for operators and contractors who conduct oil and gas activities on U.S. federal or Tribal lands, surface management agencies who are responsible for advising and enforcing those activities, stewards of private lands and other landowner reclamation projects.

Reclamation has several phases, including interim and final reclamation, which each have differing overall goals. The report can help foster relationships between surface management agencies and operators, highlight timeframes, and provide operators with specific steps and goals in the reclamation process.

The report may prove particularly useful for restoration efforts funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $4.7 billion for orphaned well site plugging, remediation and reclamation across federal, Tribal, state and private lands (see Through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, 24 States Set to Begin Plugging Over 10,000 Orphaned Wells).

Read the full report online: Oil and gas reclamation—Operations, monitoring methods, and standards: U.S. Geological Survey Techniques and Methods

USFWS, BLM, and USGS examining a large, newly reclaimed oil or gas pad. Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

Water Measurement Rules Now in Effect for #YampaRiver, #WhiteRiver, #GreenRiver, and #NorthPlatteRiver Basins — #Colorado Division of Water Resources

Scott Hummer, former water commissioner for District 58 in the Yampa River basin, checks out a Parshall flume installed on an irrigation ditch in this August 2020 photo. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

From email from the Colorado Division of Water Resources (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):

January 26, 2024

The Colorado Division of Water Resources announced that as of January 16, 2024, new rules governing the measurement of surface and groundwater diversions and storage are now in effect for Division 6. The division includes the Yampa, White, Green and North Platte River basins.

“The Division 6 Measurement Rules are the first set of rules covering surface water measurement in the State of Colorado and are a significant milestone for the Division of Water Resources,” said Erin Light, Division 6 Engineer. “The adoption of the rules will provide the Division of Water Resources greater leverage in assuring that the diversion and use of water is administerable and properly measured and recorded.”

For background, Colorado statutes include a requirement that owners of ditches and reservoirs install headgates where water is taken from the natural stream. These statutes also give the state and division engineer the authority to require owners and users of water rights to install measuring devices.

“Accurate measurement of diversions is critical to protect Colorado’s entitlement to water, including under the Colorado River Compact, and to ensure we are maximizing the beneficial use of the public’s water resource for consumptive and environmental purposes,” said Jason Ullmann, Deputy State Engineer.

The statutes, however, do not include any specifics regarding what is considered an acceptable headgate or measuring device. Historically, it has been administered by the Division of Water Resources (DWR) through issuing orders to owners for the installation of headgates or measuring devices.

“Over several years, Division 6 has issued hundreds of orders for the installation of operable headgates and measuring devices with varying degrees of success,” said Division Engineer Light. “I believe that these rules will help water users in Division 6 by providing clarity regarding what structures require measurement and what is considered an acceptable level of accuracy for the required measurement methods.”

The rules describe two types of measurement methods: measuring devices, which are physical devices (flumes, weirs, etc) that are placed in a diversion for measurement. Then there are alternative measurement methods, which are typically indirect methods of measuring flow rates without a physical device.

Water users are provided the following time periods to comply with the rules:

Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 cfs – 12 months (January 16, 2025);

Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 2.0 cfs and less than 5.0 cfs – 18 months (July 16, 2025);

Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights less than 2.0 cfs – 24 months (January 16, 2026);

Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 AF – 12 months (January 16, 2025);

Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights less than 5.0 AF – 24 months (January 16 2026).

Water users unsure of their decreed water right or permitted well permit flow rates and volumes can use DWR’s online tools available through CDSS (https://dwr.state.co.us/Tools/) to find this information. Anyone who has questions regarding how these Rules apply to their diversion or how to install a measuring device on their system can contact the DWR’s Division 6 Lead Hydrographer at (970) 291-6551. The Rules are available on the DWR website as a Laserfiche imaged document.

Map of the North Platte River drainage basin, a tributary of the Platte River, in the central US. Made using USGS National Map and NASA SRTM data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79266632

White River Basin. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69281367

Mining Monitor: Uranium buzz, buzz, buzz — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk) #ActOnClimate

Graphic credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 26, 2024

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

The uranium-mining buzz is reaching a fevered pitch lately as uranium prices climb above $100 per pound, the highest since October 2007. I already reported on Energy Fuels’ intent to begin or resume production at its Pinyon Plain and La Sal complex mines. But nearly every day another press release lands in my inbox touting a big find or big plans somewhere on the Colorado Plateau.

Let’s start with the headline that irks me the most: “Churchrock could pump out 31 million lb of US uranium over three decades, Laramide PEA shows.” On its surface, this one looks like just another attempt to drive up share prices. And it probably is. But it’s the location and the name that gets to me: The project is just a couple of miles from the 1979 Church Rock disaster, when a uranium mill tailings dam failed, sending 94 million gallons of acidic liquid raffinate and 1,100 tons of uranium mill tailings rushing down the Puerco River and across the “checkerboard” area of the Navajo Nation. The slug of material, containing an estimated 1.36 tons of uranium and 46 trillion picocuries of gross-alpha activity, continued past Gallup and down the Puerco for another 50 miles or more, seeping into the sandy earth and the aquifer as it went, and leaving behind stagnant and poisonous pools from which livestock drank.

The Rio Puerco, an ephemeral tributary of the Rio Grande, west of Albuquerque, crossing the eastern edge of the Tohajiilee Indian Reservation; December 2016. By Dicklyon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54602926

It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.

Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:

It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.

Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:

Laramide is busy these days: They also recently announced the U.S. Forest Service has restarted the environmental review and permitting process for the company’s proposed La Jara Mesa project north of Grants, New Mexico. During the uranium industry’s last “renaissance” (lasting from 2007 to 2011), Laramide looked to open an underground mine on Cibola National Forest land. They made it as far as a draft environmental impact statement, released in 2012, before low uranium prices stalled the project.

Nexus Uranium says it will begin exploratory drilling on its Wray Mesa claims near La Sal, Utah, on the northern edge of the Lisbon Valley.

Anfield’s subsidiary, Highbury Resources, acquired another 12 Department of Energy uranium leases from Gold Eagle Mining in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado. The tracts are near Slickrock, on Monogram Mesa south of the Paradox Valley, and near Uravan. Anfield also says it plans to reopen the Shootaring uranium mill near Ticaboo, Utah, although it appears to have made little progress in that regard.

Thor Energy says it has found high-grade uranium at its Wedding Bell and Radium Mountain projects on a mesa just east of the Dolores River in western Colorado.

Kraken Energy got the Bureau of Land Management’s go-ahead to drill on Harts Point, right along the northeast border of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. This is the second time the company (or its partners Atomic Minerals and Recoupment Exploration) have purportedly received a drilling permit for the slickrock peninsula adjacent to the Indian Creek climbing area. The first time the company failed to come up with a reclamation bond and the permit was cancelled.

Australia-based Okapi Resources is set to begin exploratory drilling near Cañon City, Colorado, raising concerns among the locals.

And, perhaps the only big buzz in the lithium space right now (lithium prices are in the dumps): American Battery Metals is pushing its Lisbon Valley lithium project. Well, that is to say they are looking to get exploratory drilling permitted.

Explore the above projects and more on the Land Desk Mining Monitor Map.

Pictorial representation of the In situ uranium mining process. Graphic credit: (source: Heathgate Resources)

Five-year field study by Argonne and @NREL finds that strategic planting of native grasses and flowering plants at solar sites fosters growth in vegetation that attracts insect communities #solar #ActOnClimate

A solar-pollinator habitat, dominated by purple prairie clover and black-eyed susan flowering plants. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Lee Walston.)

Click the link to read the release on the Argonne National Laboratory website (Marguerite Huber):

January 17, 2024

Two solar facilities built on rehabilitated agricultural land were restored with native plants. Argonne researchers observed pollinators thrive.

Bumblebees buzz from flower to flower, stopping for a moment under a clear blue Minnesota sky. Birds chirp, and tall grasses blow in the breeze. This isn’t a scene from a pristine nature preserve or national park. It is nestled between photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays on rehabilitated farmland.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.

Smart land use choices provide multiple benefits

Global insect biodiversity has been in decline due to habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. Restoration of insect habitat paired with smart land use changes toward renewable energy developments could help reverse the course.

For instance, as a carbon-neutral source of electricity, expanded PV solar energy development is critical to mitigating climate change. According to the DOE’s Solar Futures Study, approximately 10 million acres of land in the U.S. will be needed for large-scale solar development by 2050 in order to meet grid decarbonization and climate change goals. But some lands are better suited for PV solar development than others. Disturbed lands such as former agricultural fields are ideal locations to hold rows of solar panels compared to lands that have been previously undisturbed.

An Argonne scientist surveys for pollinators at a utility-scale solar facility. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Lee Walston.)

Even more strategies can be added to this winning combination to support insect conservation. Agrivoltaics is the combination of solar energy production with agricultural and vegetation management practices. One type of agrivoltaics focuses on the establishment of habitat for insect pollinators and other wildlife that can provide important ecosystem services, such as pollination. Pairing solar energy facilities on previously disturbed lands with habitat enhancement sounds like a logical win-win strategy to address energy and biodiversity challenges. To date, however, there has been little field data available to document the feasibility and the ecological benefits of this novel land use approach.

If you build it, will they come?

The two studied solar sites were planted with native grasses and flowering plants in early 2018. From August 2018 through August 2022, the researchers conducted 358 observational surveys for flowering vegetation and insect communities. They evaluated changes in plant and insect abundance and diversity with each visit.

“The effort to obtain these data was considerable, returning to each site four times per summer to record pollinator counts,” said Heidi Hartmann, manager of the Land Resources and Energy Policy Program in Argonne’s Environmental Sciences division, and one of the study’s co-authors. “Over time we saw the numbers and types of flowering plants increase as the habitat matured. [ed. emphasis mine] Measuring the corresponding positive impact for pollinators was very gratifying.”

By the end of the field campaign, the team observed increases for all habitat and biodiversity metrics. There was an increase in native plant species diversity and flower abundance. In addition, the team observed increases in the abundance and diversity of native insect pollinators and agriculturally beneficial insects, which included honeybees, native bees, wasps, hornets, hoverflies, other flies, moths, butterflies and beetles. Flowers and flowering plant species increased as well. Total insect abundance tripled, while native bees showed a 20-fold increase in numbers. The most numerous insect groups observed were beetles, flies and moths.

In an added benefit, the researchers found that pollinators from the solar sites also visited soybean flowers in adjacent crop fields, providing additional pollination services.

The benefits of solar-pollinator habitats

A monarch caterpillar on a common milkweed leaf. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory/Lee Walston.)

“This research highlights the relatively rapid insect community responses to habitat restoration at solar energy sites,” said Lee Walston, an Argonne landscape ecologist and environmental scientist who was lead author of the study. “It demonstrates that, if properly sited, habitat-friendly solar energy can be a feasible way to safeguard insect populations and can improve the pollination services in adjacent agricultural fields.” Walston also serves as head of the Ecology, Natural Resources, and Managed Systems department in Argonne’s Environmental Science division.

The research findings suggest two important implications of habitat-friendly solar energy. One is that habitat-friendly solar sites can play an important role in conserving biodiversity. Large amounts of ground-mounted solar is expected to be developed in the future, but if properly sited, habitat-friendly solar can offset the losses of natural areas to provide biodiversity benefits. Second, habitat-friendly solar sites can help mitigate land-use conflicts associated with the conversion of farmland for solar energy production. As approximately 80% of future ground-mounted solar development could occur on agricultural lands, the proper siting of habitat-friendly solar energy on marginal farmland can not only preserve prime farmland, but it could make prime farmland more productive through the pollination services provided by habitat-friendly solar energy.

Overall, additional research is needed to understand the feasibility of habitat-friendly solar across different regions and to meet different ecological goals such as conserving a target insect or wildlife species.

Funding was provided by the InSPIRE project through the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.

Grand County Organizations Awarded Grants in Second Year of Funding — @Northern_Water

Members of Learning By Doing tour the Fraser Flats on Sept. 27, 2016. Photo credit: Denver Water

Click the link to read the release on the Northern Water website:

In its second year of grant funding, the Windy Gap Environmental Fund (WGEF) has awarded four Grand County organizations funds for various environmental projects. The Northern Water Municipal Subdistrict contributed funding as part of the settlement to end the federal lawsuit over Chimney Hollow Reservoir. The WGEF Committee awarded $680,000 in 2023, in addition to $1,065,000 of grant funding allocated in 2022, for a total of nearly $1.75 million.

The largest grant awarded in December 2023 was for $401,179 to Learning by Doing for its final design and implementation of the Willow Creek Restoration Project. Learning by Doing is a solution-focused collaborative group of local, state, federal and nonprofit water stakeholders charged with safeguarding Grand County rivers and streams. Learning by Doing was also awarded another $25,000 grant for the design of a stream restoration project at Kaibab Park.

Additional grants awarded include:

$150,000 to the Town of Fraser to complete a stormwater infrastructure survey.

$104,144 to the Grand Lake Recreation Foundation for design of river restoration of the Colorado River in the vicinity of the Red Top Valley Ditch diversion.

The WGEF is administered by the Grand Foundation, while the WGEF Committee reviews proposals and allocates grant funding. The committee is composed of three representatives from the Municipal Subdistrict and three from the Upper Colorado Watershed Environmental Team.

Construction of Chimney Hollow Reservoir began in August 2021 after the Municipal Subdistrict won a federal lawsuit in the first round that challenged the permit issued by the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. The Municipal Subdistrict then settled during the appeal process, which required a $15 million contribution throughout the four-year construction timeline that will be administered by the Grand Foundation to pay for projects that enhance the Colorado River and its many tributaries in Grand County.

#Drought news January 25, 2024: Temperatures were below normal for all areas outside the plains of #Colorado and #Wyoming

Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.

US Drought Monitor map January 23, 2024.

Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:

This Week’s Drought Summary

The current period was dry over most of the country with the greatest amount of precipitation occurring along the west coast and from east Texas into Arkansas. Temperatures were well below normal for most locations east of the Rocky Mountains, where departures were 5 degrees or more below normal for most areas. The greatest departures from normal were over Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern portions of Alabama and Mississippi where readings were 20-25 degrees below normal. The warm winter continued in the West with temperatures 5-10 degrees above normal over a majority of the region. The warmer-than-normal temperatures have been a challenge for snow accumulation with many locations, especially in the northern Rockies, having a very challenging start to the snow accumulation season. With an active pattern through the central Plains into the Midwest the past few weeks, a reassessment of drought indicators was done in many locations this week to examine drought intensity levels and adjust where the data supported it. In most instances, drought remains but the data allowed for intensities to be reduced. The end of the period had an active pattern again developing in the southern Plains and into the South where widespread precipitation was anticipated after the data cutoff for this week. These locations will be assessed on next week’s map…

High Plains

It was a mostly dry week over much of the region with only eastern Kansas receiving widespread, albeit light, precipitation. Temperatures were below normal for all areas outside the plains of Colorado and Wyoming and northern North Dakota where they were 3-6 degrees above normal. Outside of these areas, temperatures were generally 9-15 degrees below normal for the week. The wetter pattern over the last several months allowed for a reassessment of the data to investigate potential changes in the drought intensity levels. It was noted that even though the last 9-12 months have a stronger signal toward the wet spectrum, there are still long-term issues that go out 24-36 months or more in much of the central Plains. In looking at the data, support for the existing extreme drought in eastern Nebraska was not there, so it was improved to severe drought this week. In Kansas, areas of moderate and severe drought were also improved based on the lagging support for these intensity levels. Degradation took place over portions of northern North Dakota and eastern Wyoming where abnormally dry conditions were expanded based on the short-term dryness in these regions…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending January 23, 2024.

West

Above-normal temperatures dominated much of the region with departures of 9-12 degrees above normal over portions of western Wyoming, northern Nevada, central Idaho and northeast Utah. Temperatures were cooler than normal over Washington, northern Oregon, northern Idaho and much of Montana. The greatest rains were along the coast with some flooding issues being reported this week, especially in southern California. Further inland, it remained dry and the dryness coupled with the warmer temperatures has allowed for snow drought to develop, especially in the northern Rocky Mountains. The wetter pattern over the most recent weeks allowed for a reassessment of conditions over New Mexico and into eastern Arizona, where improvements were made. Areas of extreme and exceptional drought were reduced this week in western New Mexico while severe drought was improved in western New Mexico into eastern Arizona. Moderate drought was expanded over western Wyoming and severe drought was expanded over western Montana. Oregon had moderate and severe drought improvements in the west while moderate drought expanded in the central portion of the state. Washington saw moderate drought improved along the northwest coast and western portions of the state with abnormally dry conditions expanding in the north central…

South

Cooler-than-normal conditions dominated the region with departures of 10-15 degrees below normal common in the region. The greatest rains took place in east Texas to southwest Arkansas and into southeast Oklahoma. These rains continued past the data cutoff period and everything from Tuesday morning forward will be assessed on the next map. The rains allowed for some improvements, with a full category change over much of east Texas and improvements to moderate drought over central and northern Arkansas as well as the far northwest corner of Louisiana and southeast Oklahoma…

Looking Ahead

Over the next 5-7 days, the active pattern over the South and Southeast will continue, with much of the region anticipating 3-5 inches of precipitation. The coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest also will remain active with the next system coming ashore. Dry conditions are expected over the central and northern Plains, northern Rocky Mountains and Southwest. Temperatures will flip back to a warmer-than-normal pattern for most of the country, with greatest departures above normal over the northern Plains and upper Midwest.

The 6–10 day outlooks show a high probability of warmer-than-normal temperatures over much of the U.S. during this period with the highest probabilities over the Plains and Upper Midwest. There is a high probability of below-normal temperatures over Alaska and much of Florida. The precipitation outlook has the highest probability of below-normal precipitation over much of the eastern third of the U.S. with the greatest chances over the Ohio River valley. There are above-normal chances of above-normal precipitation over much of the West and into the Plains during this time.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending January 23, 2024.

2024 #COleg: Resilience and Stewardship for #Colorado’s Waterways, 2024 Legislative Priorities: @Audubon supports proactive water strategies to benefit birds and people — Audubon Rockies

Click the link to read the article on the Audubon Rockies website (Abby Burk):

A new year brings a new opportunity for Colorado decision-makers to shore up water resource vulnerabilities and accelerate resilience and stewardship practices. Policy is born by addressing a solution to a problem. Impacts of climate change and unsustainable water demand bring uncertainty to Colorado’s birds, communities, watersheds, and waterways. Resilience and stewardship are top themes for 2024 legislation on water, our most valuable natural resource. Audubon Rockies is busy working with lawmakers, agencies, and partners to prioritize healthy, functioning, and resilient watersheds and river systems for people and birds—the natural systems that we all depend upon.

Below are the two top water priorities for Audubon in the 2024 Colorado legislative session. Please make sure you’re signed up to hear about opportunities to engage with them.

Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers

1. Clean Water Stewardship for Colorado

Speaker of the House McCluskie mentioned the need to restore protections removed from the Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency decision in her opening 2024 legislative session remarks:

“Water is intrinsic to the Colorado Spirit, and the lifeblood of our agriculture industry and tourism economies. The recent United States Supreme Court decision about the definition of Waters of the United States leaves many of our waterways in Colorado unprotected. In the wake of this difficult decision, we have an opportunity to take action to reestablish these critical protections.”

It is imperative to protect our waterways for all of Colorado to thrive. The United States passed the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972 for water quality and related public health protections, realizing the outsized importance of our rivers, streams, and wetlands to communities and wildlife. At the time when waterways were literally burning with industrial waste, Congress recognized the threat to public health and addressed the widespread problem with bipartisan support and passage of the CWA. The CWA aimed to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters and took a watershed approach due to the connectivity of waters from headwaters to lowlands. The CWA protects waterways and their many benefits by requiring certain activities such as the construction of highways to minimize or mitigate their impact.

Despite the CWA’s successes over the last 50 years, there has been a lot of litigation and legal interpretations over the years. Most recently, the United States Supreme Court, through the Sackett case decision, effectively rewrote the CWA by severely narrowing the scope of its protections. Before Sackett, the CWA provided for the protection of the majority of Colorado’s wetlands and streams at the federal level.

So what is the void created by the Sackett decision for Coloradospecifically? In Colorado, we no longer have a federal partner to help protect our waterways. The decision upended a regulatory system that protected water quality for public health. Wetlands and streams are crucial ecosystems, particularly in Colorado, where we are semi-arid to arid. Before Sackett, the CWA would have protected all Colorado waters with a significant affect on downstream water quality and availability. After the Supreme Court decision, protections were sharply reduced.

Here are some examples of waterways that now have reduced or no federal protections in Colorado:

These wetlands, located on a 150-acre parcel in the Homestake Creek valley that Homestake Partners bought in 2018, would be inundated if Whitney Reservoir is constructed. The Forest Service received more than 500 comments, the majority in opposition to, test drilling associated with the project and the reservoir project itself. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism

Wetlands that are not adjacent to a flowing river

Playa lakes, which are groundwater-dependent,

Iron Fen. Photo credit from report “A Preliminary Evaluation of Seasonal Water Levels Necessary to Sustain Mount Emmons Fen: Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests,” David J. Cooper, Ph.D, December 2003.

Fens, (a type of peat-accumulating wetland fed by mineral-rich ground or surface water)

Colorado River headwaters tributary in Rocky Mountain National Park photo via Greg Hobbs.

Headwater streams that flow only after precipitation events

In Colorado, 26 percent of streams only flow in response to rainfall, and 59 percent flow seasonally. By some estimates, as much as two thirds of Colorado’s waterways have lost protections.* Nationwide, approximately 63 percent of all wetlands are now unprotected.

With the loss of 3 billion birds in the past 50 years—in part due to dwindling wetlands and significant development of natural spaces—and Audubon science showing that two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction from climate change, action is needed at the state and federal levels to protect the water bodies and habitat that birds need to survive. Protecting water quality is a bipartisan stewardship issue and brings broad public support. We look forward to working with the state as it creates a wetlands and streams protection program for water quality protection that works for Colorado’s unique waterways. If Colorado does this right, it could be a model for other semi-arid Western states to follow suit.

Colorado snowpack basin-filled map April 16, 2023 via the NRCS.

2. Resilient tools to deal with long-term uncertainty in the Colorado River

Despite near-term optimism (and a momentary sigh of relief) from a heavy 2023 snowpack and recent January storms, climate change and unprecedented drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin for the last 24 years are threatening Colorado’s ability to satisfy water users, ecosystem needs, water-related recreation, and, potentially, interstate obligations. There are real consequences for people, birds, and every other living thing that depends on rivers in this region.

In 2023, the Colorado General Assembly determined that it is in the best interest of Colorado to form a task force to provide recommendations for programs to assist Colorado in addressing drought in the Colorado River Basin and the state’s interstate commitments related to the Colorado River and its tributaries (SB-295, Section 1). From August through December 2023, the Colorado River Drought Task Force and a sub-task force on Tribal matters, met to draft a report on recommendations for further actions. You can learn more about the recommendations here.

As Colorado contends with near-certainty of continued warming, severe drought, and declining river flows over the next several years, we need more flexible ways to manage and deliver water to support the Colorado River we love. Colorado needs tools and resources to proactively respond to drought conditions and maximize the benefits to the state, its water users, and river ecosystems from once-in-a-generation competitive federal funds available to address the Colorado River Basin drought. Audubon will be engaging this session for solutions that will provide new and innovative solutions to the water threats we face.

*The State is waiting for additional guidance from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to determine exactly how many of Colorado waters may lose protection.

Employment opportunity at the Colorado Division of Water Resources: Hydrographer (EPST II)

State Engineer’s Office Division boundaries. Division 1 in Greeley: South Platte, Laramie & Republican River Basins. Division 2 in Pueblo: Arkansas River Basin. Division 3 in Alamosa: Rio Grande River Basin.
Division 4 in Montrose: Gunnison & San Miguel River Basins, & portions of the Dolores River. Division 5 in Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Basin (excluding the Gunnison River Basin). Division 6 in Steamboat Springs: Yampa, White and North Platte River Basins. Division 7 in Durango: San Juan River Basin and portions of the Dolores River. Credit: Colorado State University

Click the link to go to the State of Colorado Job Opportunities website:

Description of Job

OPEN ONLY TO CURRENT RESIDENTS OF COLORADO. This posting may be used to fill more than one vacancy.

Hydrographer duties include measuring and evaluating data to determine the stream flow quantity at assigned stream gaging stations, and maintaining such gages; measuring water flow in canals and ditches in support of state Water Commissioners; servicing, calibrating, monitoring, and repairing all equipment associated with stream gaging stations, including telemetry equipment; inspecting water measurement structures, reporting on their accuracy and recommending solutions to any problems observed; and, evaluating and compiling official flow records for state and federal publication. These duties will be primarily performed within the Colorado River Basin.

Employment opportunity at the Colorado Division of Water Resources: Assistant Division Engineer (PE II)

Click the link for all the to go to the State of Colorado Job opportunities website:

Description of Job

This posting is open to current and non-current residents of the State of Colorado at the time of submitting your application. However, if you are selected and accept the position, you will be required to establish residence in the State of Colorado.

The purpose of this position is to provide leadership, guidance and oversight to the Division 5 operations group responsible for Augmentation Plan coordination and administration. This group supports water rights administration by developing methodologies to collect and analyze water diversion and delivery data to verify augmentation plan operators are operating in compliance with all applicable court decrees, statutes, rules and regulations and to analyze Water Court applications, including reports of engineering experts, consult with the Water Court Referee regarding all applications, write reports summarizing the agency’s position and negotiate or provide expert engineering support / testimony to litigate any conditions necessary to protect existing water rights; to supervise professional and technical staff; and provide assistance to the public in understanding Colorado water law.

Say hello to the Colorado Climate Blog — @ColoradoClimate

Annual average precipitation in Colorado (inches), using the 1991-2020 “climate normals” from the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University (https://prism.oregonstate.edu). The Continental Divide is highlighted in magenta. The color scale for the precipitation is based on the colors in the Colorado state flag.

Click the link to go to the Colorado Climate Center blog:

You can head over to https://climate.colostate.edu/blog and check out our latest blog posts now. For example, is the old 80/20 rule actually true (80% of our state’s precipitation falls on 20% of the population)?

In addition to checking out the website anytime, you can also subscribe to our blog mailing list – just use the sign-up form on the blog page. Once you subscribe, you’ll get our blog posts delivered directly to your inbox (about once a week). What could be better with your morning cup of coffee than learning a bit more about Colorado’s climate?!

#Greeley Water survey, workshops to shape new #conservation program — The Greeley Tribune #PoudreRiver #SouthPlatteRiver

A chock full Milton-Seaman Reservoir spilling June 8, 2019. Photo credit: Chuck Seest

Click the link to read the article on The Greeley Tribune website (Chris Bolin). Here’s an excerpt:

January 23, 2024

The city of Greeley launched a multi-language survey to gather thoughts on designing a new water conservation program to fit everyone’s needs, according to a city news release. City officials will also host a pair of community workshops to engage with residents and bridge the gap between the city and its water users.

“We want our conservation programs to serve all water users in our growing and diverse community,” Water Conservation Specialist Rita Jokerst said in the release. “And we’re excited to use this survey to hear from as many residents as possible.”

Residents can enter to win one of three $100 gift cards by filling out the survey at greeleygov.com/LILAC or by attending one of the two come-and-go community workshops. The first will be hosted from 4-7 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Greeley Recreation Center, 651 10th Ave. The second will take place from 5:30-7:30 p.m.Feb. 21 at the LINC Library, 501 8th Ave. Greeley Water Efficiency Resource Coordinator Margarita Padilla said she is excited about the survey and looks forward to engaging with the community…

For more information on the survey or workshop details, go to greeleygov.com/LILAC.

The active weather in recent weeks has greatly improved our #snowpack — @Northern_Water

On average, both the West Slope and East Slope stations are at 100 percent of median snowpack for January 23, 2024 — @Northern_WaterA live snow report is available on our website. View the dashboard at http://northernwater.org/snowpacksummary.

Analysis: World will add enough renewables in five years to power US and Canada — Carbon Brief #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround

Click the link to read the article on the Carbon Brief website (Josh Gabbatiss):

January 12, 2024

A boom in Chinese solar power construction drove another record-breaking year of renewables growth in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Carbon Brief analysis of figures in the IEA’s Renewables 2023 report show that the world is now on track to build enough solar, wind and other renewables over the next five years to power the equivalent of the US and Canada.

Rapid growth has also pushed the IEA to once again significantly upgrade its renewables forecast, adding an extra 728 gigawatts (GW) of capacity to a five-year estimate it made just a year ago. This is more than the electricity capacity of Germany and India combined.

The agency attributes this growth to plummeting costs of solar power and favourable policy regimes, particularly in China. New solar and onshore wind now provide cheaper electricity than new fossil fuel power plants almost everywhere, it says, as well as being cheaper than most existing fossil fuel assets.

Despite such accelerated expansion, the world is not currently on track to achieve the COP28target of tripling renewables capacity by 2030, according to the IEA.

However, it proposes various measures to further increase deployment, including more finance for developing countries.

‘Step change’

Last year was a “step change for renewable power growth” as the world built an extra 507GW of renewable capacity, primarily solar and wind power, according to the IEA.

This was a 49% increase on the previous year’s construction. It marked the 22nd year in a row that renewable capacity addition reached record levels.

Over the six-year period 2023-2028, an additional 3,684GW of renewables is expected to come online under the IEA’s “main” forecast. This is double the current total of renewable capacity installed globally.

In 2023, solar power both at utility-scale and on rooftops amounted to three-quarters of capacity additions, primarily due to growth in China. Over the next five years, 73% of the 3,174GW of new capacity will be solar, again driven largely by China. (See: China leads.)

By Carbon Brief’s calculations, this 2024-2028 period is on track to see an extra 4,963 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity generation from renewable sources.

This amounts to one-sixth of the world’s electricity output in 2022. As the chart below shows, this is equivalent to covering the entire electricity demand of the US and Canada with newly-built renewables.

Electricity generation in 2022 (dark blue) from key fuel sources and countries, terawatt-hours (TWh). Red bars indicate estimated electricity generation from the renewables built in 2019-2023 and set to be built in 2024-2028, according to the IEA’s “main case” forecast. Source: Carbon Brief analysis by Simon Evans of figures from the IEA Renewables 2023 and Renewables 2022 reports, the IEA world energy outlook 2023 and the Ember data explorer.

By 2028, the IEA forecasts that renewables will account for 42% of global electricity generation, with wind and solar power making up 25%. Despite showing no growth across this period, hydropower is still expected to be the largest single source of renewable power.

Taken together, the agency says renewables will overtake coal power as the largest source of power in “early 2025”. (A year ago, the agency said renewables would become the world’s largest electricity source within three years.)

One major driver of this growth is the plummeting cost of renewables, especially solar photovoltaics (PV). Spot prices for solar modules declined by almost 50% in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to the IEA.

Last year, 96% of newly installed utility-scale solar and onshore wind capacity generated cheaper electricity than new coal and gas plants, according to the IEA.

Moreover, three-quarters of new wind and solar power plants provided cheaper power than even existing fossil-fuel facilities.

The other key driver is the strong policy support that renewables enjoy in “more than 130 countries”, the IEA says. It notes that “policies remain key for attracting investment and enabling deployment”, with roughly 87% of the utility-scale renewable growth between 2023 and 2028 “expected to be stimulated by policy schemes”.

At the same time, the report highlights the impact of the “new macroeconomic environment” on the renewables sector, with inflation and high interest rates raising costs. Offshore wind has been hardest hit, with the IEA’s forecast for its growth outside China dropping by 15%.

The report also examines renewable heat consumption and the use of biofuels. Both are set to grow considerably in the coming years, but the IEA says neither are currently on track for the trajectories seen in its net-zero scenario, which aligns with the Paris Agreement.

Record revision

As a result of this growth, the IEA has again significantly raised its forecast for renewables capacity expansion, by a record amount.

It now sees an additional 728GW being built in the 2023-2027 period compared to its forecast from 2022 – a 33% increase. This is notable considering that, last year, the agency described a five-year 424GW adjustment as its “largest ever upward revision”.

The chart below shows the 120GW divergence between actual renewables growth in 2023 – some 507GW – and the forecast for that year of 387GW, made by the IEA in 2022.

Annual additions of renewable capacity (dark blue), with forecasts from 2022 (light blue) and 2023 (dark blue). The 2023 is based on the IEA’s “main case”. Unlike in previous IEA reports, solar power data for all countries has been converted to direct current (DC), increasing capacity for countries reporting in alternating current (AC). The 2022 forecast data has been converted to allow comparison. Source: Carbon Brief analysis of figures from the IEA Renewables 2023 and Renewables 2022, and historical data from the IEA.

The IEA has a long history of making relatively conservative predictions for renewable growth that are subsequently outstripped by reality, due to a combination of more favourable policy conditions and faster-than-expected cost reductions.

Forecasts from previous IEA renewables reports issued in 2020 and 2021 showed annual renewable growth rates remaining fairly stable at around 200GW and 300GW per year for the following five years, respectively.

However, these forecasts have not been included in the chart above as, for the first time, the agency has converted all of its solar power values to direct current, resulting in slightly different GW values. This means previous forecasts are not directly comparable, although the 2022 forecast figures have been converted for this purpose.

China leads

A key conclusion from the IEA’s new report is the global dominance of China in deploying solar and other renewables, which is set to increase in the coming years.

In the period 2005-2010, China built 39% of the world’s new renewable energy capacity. This increased to 47% in the 2017-2022 period and the IEA expects it to rise to 59% between 2023 and 2028. This can be seen in the chart below.

By 2028, the agency estimates that nearly half of China’s electricity will be generated by renewables. According to Ember, as of 2022 only around 30% of China’s electricity was from renewables.

During this period, the nation is set to deploy four times more renewables than the EU and five times more than the US.

Total renewable electricity capacity growth across six-year periods, including the forecasted growth under the IEA’s “main case” for 2023-2028. Growth in China is red and growth in the rest of the world is dark blue. Source: IEA Renewables 2023.

This growth is being driven by the nation’s success in solar power manufacture and installation, according to the IEA. In “almost all provinces”, generation costs for new utility-scale solar and onshore wind are now lower than for coal, which is generally used as the benchmark for electricity prices, the agency says.

The IEA attributes this progress to policy measures, including power market reforms, green certificate systems and province-level financial support to support rooftop solar installation. It also points to a “supply glut” that has helped solar module costs “plummet drastically”.

As China accounts for 90% of the upwards revision in the IEA’s forecast out to 2028, it notes that the nation’s solar achievements actually “hide slower progress in other countries”.

There have been a number of significant supportive policy changes in other countries and regions, however.

The US and the EU are expected to see renewable installation rates double across 2023-2028, compared to the previous six-year period – in both cases due primarily to solar expansion. The IEA attributes this to the US Inflation Reduction Act and supportive national policies – such as government renewable power auctions – across European nations.

The report also highlights the success of supportive policies in India and Brazil. It notes that while renewables are set to expand rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa – particularly South Africa – the region “still underperforms considering its resource potential and electrification needs”.

Tripling renewables

At COP28, nearly every government in the world agreed to a target of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. This would bring the total to 11,000GW, which is in line with the IEA’s own net-zero scenario.

As it stands, the new report concludes that under the IEA’s “main case” forecast, shown in yellow in the chart below, renewable capacity would increase to 7,339GW in 2028.

Following that trajectory, capacity would reach around 9,000GW in 2030 – roughly an increase to 2.5 times current levels.

This forecast is based on existing policies and takes into account “country-specific challenges that hamper faster renewable energy expansion”, the IEA says.

By contrast, the IEA’s “accelerated case” involves governments “overcom[ing] these challenges and implement[ing] existing policies more quickly”.

In this scenario, shown in red below, renewables growth is around 21% higher. Capacity increases to 8,130GW in 2028, putting the world on track for the tripling by 2030 target.

Global renewables capacity growth under the “main case” (yellow) and “accelerated case” (red) forecasts laid out by the IEA. The light blue bar shows the 2022 baseline on which the “tripling renewables by 2030” target (dark blue) is based. Source: IEA Renewables 2023.

The IEA lists a handful of broad measures that governments could take to achieve an “accelerated” trajectory.

These include: improved policy responses to the “new macroeconomic environment” such as higher inflation; more investment in grid infrastructure; and dealing with “cumbersome administrative barriers and permitting procedures and social acceptance issues”.

The IEA notes that “the lack of affordable financing remains the most important challenge to renewable project development in most EMDEs [emerging markets and developing economies], especially in countries where renewable policy uncertainties also increase project risk premiums”.

It emphasises the need to boost financing for EMDEs to overcome this barrier. Last year, renewable growth was concentrated in just 10 nations and tripling renewables requires “a much faster deployment rate…in numerous other nations”, the IEA says.

A solar farm off CO 17 in Alamosa County. Photo credit: Owen Woods/Alamosa Citizen

The World’s LARGEST Dam Removal: Klamath River PART 1 — Swiftwater Films #ActOnClimate #KlamathRiver

Dec 19, 2023

Embark on an exhilarating visual journey as we unveil the awe-inspiring transformation of the Klamath River over 5 months of meticulous deconstruction of Copco 2 dam. Immerse yourself in the grandeur of over 15,000 captivating images capturing the first and smallest of the four dams destined for removal by October 2024. Witness history in the making with the unveiling of the largest river restoration project ever undertaken! This mesmerizing time-lapse is just a glimpse into our ambitious 6-year independent feature film, “Undamming Klamath.” Join us as we bring this monumental river restoration story to life! This is an independent film and time-lapse project that needs your support. Tax-deductible donations through The Redford Center below:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted…

Produced by: Swiftwater Films Producer: Shane Anderson Timelapse Project Lead: Jesse Andrew Clark Timelapse Technicians: Olivia Vosburg and Jason Hartwick Project owner: Klamath River Renewal Corporation Owners rep: McMillen Deconstruction by: Kiewit Corporation Restoration Contractor: Resource Environmental Solutions Supported in part by: The Redford Center The Catena Foundation Resources Legacy Fund © SWIFTWATER FILMS LLC. UNDAMMINGKLAMATH.COM

ALL IMAGES PROPERTY OF SWIFTWATER FILMS LLC

Klamath river California Image from Public domain images website, http://www.public-domain-image.com/full-image/nature-landscapes-public-domain-images-pictures/river-public-domain-images-pictures/klamath-river-california.jpg.html. By Blake, Tupper Ansel, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/nature-landscapes-public-domain-images-pictures/river-public-domain-images-pictures/klamath-river-california.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24916463

#Colorado’s #snowpack gets boost from January snowstorms, but some regions remain in severe #drought: After dry start to winter, snowfall measured in feet raised levels closer to average — The #Denver Post

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

January 22, 2024

Statewide, the snowpack sat at 92% of the 30-year median on Monday, according to the National Water and Climate Center. That’s a significant improvement from the beginning of January, when the snowpack was sitting at just below 70% of the median. The storms from Jan. 11 to Jan. 15 dumped feet of snow on Colorado’s mountains, finally covering ski slopes that had been patchy with grass and closing highways across the state.

“This was a hugely beneficial storm cycle over the last couple of weeks, both with respect to the water situation and outdoor recreation,” said Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist and the director of the Colorado Climate Center. “Colorado looks a lot better than it did a couple of weeks ago.”

Colorado Drought Monitor map January 16, 2024.

Sixty-two percent of the state was in drought last week, according to the most recent data released by the U.S. Drought Monitor. That’s a slight improvement from 67% before the storms…Not all areas of the state are faring the same. While the snowpack in the Yampa and South Platte river basins are sitting at 98% of median levels, the amount of snow in the Upper Rio Grande basin is at 69% and the snowpack in the San Juan basin is at 80% of median…A swath of land in southern Colorado — including Conejos, Costilla, Rio Grande and Alamosa counties — remained in severe or extreme drought, representing 9% of the state.

The snowpack in the Colorado River headwaters measured 99% of the median on Monday.

#SteamboatSprings officials honing in on new #YampaRiver policies — Steamboat Pilot and Today #aridification

Tubing the Yampa River in Steamboat Springs. Tubing season typically begins in June and lasts through August. Conditions are reliant on the amount of snow-melt and rainfall Steamboat receives. If the water levels are too high or too low tubing will be halted. Photo credit: City of Steamboat Springs

Click the link to read the article on the Steamboat Pilot & Today website (Trevor Ballantyne). Here’s an excerpt:

January 22, 2024

A new forecasting tool to determine closing and opening procedures for the Yampa River is among a set of proposed regulations being discussed by city officials. The proposed policies are aimed at protecting “the biological integrity of the Yampa River while sustainably managing recreation,” according to a report provided to council members last week. Late last year, Parks and Recreation commission members approved the use of the new tool, provided by the Carbondale-based firm Lotic Hydrological, which will set closure and reopening decisions for the Yampa River based on a framework of scientific criteria. Craig Robinson, Parks and Recreation Open Space and Trails Manager, said the current regulations for the criteria to determine river openings and closures “are a little bit vague,” in that they are based on a number of factors and involve consultation with Colorado Parks and Wildlife…

Outfitters and anglers licensed by the city to use the Yampa River agree the health of the river’s ecosystem is most important, but depending on their interests, they don’t necessarily agree over the proposed policies. Backdoor Sports owner Pete Van De Carr noted the proposed system to close and reopen the river will likely result in less frequent but longer-term closures…

Brett Lee, the owner of Straightline Sports, provides angling tours for his customers on the Yampa River. Unlike Van De Carr, he said he welcomes the new opening and closing procedures being pitched by city staff because they will, hopefully, help mitigate the impact of tubing on the river…Adding to system for determining the opening and closing of the Yampa River, the city is also proposing new policies for licensed commercial outfitters that supply tubes and other guided services on the Yampa River. The proposed rules will require any tubes rented by outfitters or sold in the city must have a minimum 30-guage PVC thickness. If approved, they would also implement a three-year permit renewal process for outfitters and will specify that tube allocations for the outfitters are not considered as “real or personal property.” Additionally, if any business owner with tube allocations sells their business — and its tubing allocations — the city must be notified, and the new entity must reapply to assume their allocation.

Energy Guru Says Energy Gap Can be Bridged — Writers on the Range #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (David Marston):

January 22, 2024

The experts tell us an energy gap looms. Fossil fuels are phasing out, and solar and wind power can’t produce enough electricity to meet the demand in coming decades.

But that’s not the thinking of Amory Lovins, the 76-year-old co-founder of RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute in western Colorado.

A Harvard and Oxford dropout who’s been called the “Einstein of Energy Efficiency, Lovins said recently: “If we do the right things, we’ll look back and ask each other, ‘What was all the fuss about?’”

Lovins became famous in the 1970s after his research told him that building more polluting coal-fired power plants was a destructive mistake. His solution then was greater efficiency and reliance on renewables, and they, he insists, are still the answer.

“Though it’s invisible, efficiency will cut 50% of energy use and up to 80% if we do the right things,” he told me recently. “Most of the energy we use is wasted, which makes it much cheaper to save it, rather than buy it or burn it.”

According to a recent Princeton paper, he’s right: 84% of all energy consumed goes to waste during delivery or by leakage.

To prove it decades ago, he built a passive solar, super-insulated house at 7,100 feet of elevation in Old Snowmass, Colorado. It never had a heating system though winters regularly recorded 40 degrees below-zero temperatures.

When I arrived there recently at 8 a.m. it was 12 degrees F. Yet the house featured banana and papaya trees growing in natural light around a koi pond.

We became acquainted when he read my January 2023 Writers on the Range column entitled; “The energy gap nobody wants to tussle with.” I’d advocated building small modular nuclear reactors to bolster the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best

Lovins became famous in the 1970s after his research told him that building more polluting coal-fired power plants was a destructive mistake. His solution then was greater efficiency and reliance on renewables, and they, he insists, are still the answer.

“Though it’s invisible, efficiency will cut 50% of energy use and up to 80% if we do the right things,” he told me recently. “Most of the energy we use is wasted, which makes it much cheaper to save it, rather than buy it or burn it.”

According to a recent Princeton paper, he’s right: 84% of all energy consumed goes to waste during delivery or by leakage.

To prove it decades ago, he built a passive solar, super-insulated house at 7,100 feet of elevation in Old Snowmass, Colorado. It never had a heating system though winters regularly recorded 40 degrees below-zero temperatures.

When I arrived there recently at 8 a.m. it was 12 degrees F. Yet the house featured banana and papaya trees growing in natural light around a koi pond.

We became acquainted when he read my January 2023 Writers on the Range column entitled; “The energy gap nobody wants to tussle with.” I’d advocated building small modular nuclear reactors to bolster the grid when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

Lovins called to set me straight, and after a second conversation and more research, I’m beginning to think he’s right.

Though Lovins has many solutions for the energy gap, he touts three major ways to find more energy in what we already do. Tops on the list is changing how we build and retrofit existing structures because buildings consume 75% of the electricity we buy.

Most energy jobs in the United States are already increasing efficiency, ranging from upgrading windows and other retrofits, far outpacing the shrinking fossil fuels industry. (energy.gov)

As one example, Lovins advocates “outsulation” for older structures, defined as adding exterior insulating panels to save heat. Courtesy of the European Union, my Irish in-laws recently had their house “wrapped” and saw their heating bills plummet.

His second way is demand-response, which Lovins calls flexiwatts. An example is cycling air conditioners off for 15-30 minutes at a time, a barely noticeable adjustment that cuts demand for peaker-power plants, those big emitters of greenhouse gases.

His third way is using renewables more effectively. Diversifying renewables by location and type within a region evens gaps from windless and cloudy weather.

Coyote Gulch’s shiny new Leaf May 13, 2023

As for electric cars being a drain on the grid, they will prove to be sources of electricity, he said, as the next generation batteries will be cheaper and likely have double the storage. Daytime solar stored in vehicles will be bi-directional, spooling out power during peak evening demand.

Lovins also cites LED lights dramatically cutting the cost of energy. In just a decade, they’ve become 30 times more efficient, 20 times brighter and 10 times cheaper.

Lovins is quick to admit that an energy gap remains, but he predicts a single-digit gap—6%—between what renewables produce and what’s needed. That, he said, can be made up by stored, green hydrogen or ammonia, manufactured from water and air with solar energy, and burned in existing gas plants.

As for nuclear power plants, Lovins said even the best-case scenarios for the next generation of nuclear generators are at least a decade away, and at least eight times more costly than renewables today.

“It’s better to use fast, cheap and certain rather than slow, costly and speculative,” he said.

Though cutting loose from fossil fuels is a massive undertaking, Lovins said America is on track. “We are on or ahead of schedule on renewables, with 85% of net new additions to the grid from renewables, and $1 billion invested in solar in the United States daily.”

For these reasons and more, Lovins sees our energy future as more of what we’re already doing—only smarter and faster. [ed. emphasis mine]

Let’s hope that he’s right. Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that exists to spur lively dialog about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

Denver Water’s administration building is powered by solar panels. Photo credit: Denver Water.

NOAA Climate Program Office’s COM Program Awards Nearly Five Hundred Thousand Dollars To Improve Precipitation Datasets

*A land-based weather station that takes observations in recurring intervals. These observations are later used for data assimilation and forecasting.* *Credit: Pixabay*

Click the link to read the release on the NOAA Website

January 4, 2024

CPO’s Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM) program is announcing two new two-year projects in Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) that aim to improve the research on precipitation datasets. The competitively selected projects total four hundred seventy-nine thousand dollars in grants¹. These precipitation projects, chosen in response to the Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (DRSA) of 2022 and motivated by NOAA’s Precipitation Prediction Grand Challenge (PPGC) strategic objectives, will help improve NOAA monitoring and modeling capabilities. NOAA plays an important role in providing timely and accurate precipitation predictions to protect lives and property.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment, recently released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, finds that climate change “will continue to cause profound changes in the water cycle, increasing the risk of flooding, drought, and degraded water supplies for both people and ecosystems. These impacts will disproportionately impact frontline communities.” In 2023 (as of November 8), the U.S. has experienced 25 weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion, including two flooding events, 19 severe storm events, one tropical cyclone event, and one winter storm event.

To reduce the severity of these impacts, NOAA scientists need to build new databases for precipitation information, and these projects will facilitate that work.

The two new projects² funded by the COM Program in FY23 are:

Improving and Expanding Gridded Snowfall Analyses and Season-to-Subseasonal (S2S) Snowfall Forecasts

Snowfall is a critical resource within the hydrologic cycle of much of the continental United States (CONUS), especially in western states. Given this status, it is important to accurately quantify snowfall to maximize its benefits when it is abundant, and enable mitigation activities when it is lacking. This project will focus on the role of Snow-to-Liquid Ratio in analysis and forecasting by developing an improved methodology for a gridded snowfall product in the CONUS. This methodology will be then applied to create a novel gridded snowfall product for Alaska. The project will also produce a series of research-guided recommendations to produce S2S snowfall forecasts using output from the Unified Forecast System.

PI: Andrew Rosenow, University of Oklahoma

CoPI: Peter Veals, University of Utah

Developing Long-term High resolution precipitation dataset using deep learning with multi-source Earth System Data

The development of accurate, high-resolution gridded precipitation datasets over a long period of time is crucial for climate monitoring and forecasting. Although useful, current datasets exhibit great discrepancies and have different strengths and weaknesses. This project will develop an improved long-term high-resolution precipitation dataset over CONUS using machine learning techniques. It will integrate radar observations, gauge-based precipitation analysis data, climate reanalysis data, and satellite-based cloud data.

PI: Di Tian, Auburn University

¹The funding will be distributed over the life of the projects and future-year funding is conditional on appropriations.

²At the time of publication, all awards may not have been accepted by recipient institutions

Fremont County residents face exploratory uranium drilling “right in the front yard of the community” — The #Denver Post #ArkansasRiver

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

[Marijane] Sisson is among many residents of South T Bar Ranch alarmed by an Australian company’s plans to drill in the subdivision as a way to learn more about the uranium deposits beneath it. An appeal by a homeowner to stop the prospecting failed last week, allowing Global Uranium and Enrichment to proceed. It could drill as many as 20 holes in the area this year. While original homeowners in the community owned some of the mineral rights and knew drilling was a possibility, the plans caught others by surprise, said Skip Blades, who owns three parcels in South T Bar Ranch. He appealed the company’s plans…

The drilling by Global Uranium and Enrichment, previously known as Okapi Resources, comes as prices for the radioactive element soar. They reached a 16-year high Monday as global supplies tighten and demand for nuclear power rises — and as alternatives to oil and gas energy become more appealing. The market shift has spurred the opening of new uranium mines in the United States for the first time in eight years — including three in the Mountain West.

The company plans to drill over a 60-day period between May and December. The goal is to extract samples of the rock and minerals for further study. Crews will work 24/7 to drill 5-inch-diameter holes 700 feet into the ground to collect the samples, according to the company’s application for a Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safetypermit. Each hole will require a drill pad area of 6,400 square feet, cleared of grass and rocks, and will remain open for about six days. After the samples are extracted, the company will fill and cover the holes. More than 1,400 such holes have been drilled in the vicinity as different companies have come and gone…

Blades and Sisson worry the drilling could disrupt wildlife and contaminate their water supply. The drills will push through underground aquifers. Some of the drilling will occur near Tallahassee Creek, which feeds into the Arkansas River. Company representatives and staff from the Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety said water contamination was unlikely. Company representatives also said they would comply with wildlife officials’ recommendations to mitigate harm to wildlife and would try to minimize disturbances to the neighborhood. In a written response to Blades’ formal complaint, a company representative said the drill areas would quickly revegetate. The company also said it would point lights toward the ground at night to minimize light pollution, adding that noise from the drill to be used “is relatively muted when compared to other drills.”

SB-28 (#Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund) accounting: Almost entire $30M to retire wells is spent — @AlamosaCitizen #RioGrande

Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website:

January 21, 2024

Fund will retire approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water

When Colorado Senate Bill 28 was adopted during the 2022 legislative session, it created the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund with $30 million earmarked for irrigators in the Upper Rio Grande Basin.

The state money derived from Colorado’s share of federal COVID dollars that came through the American Rescue Plan Act would serve to incentivize local farmers to permanently retire more groundwater wells. Doing so would further reduce groundwater pumping and translate to fewer irrigated acres in the Valley as a whole.

Seven months after opening applications to the fund, the Rio Grande Water Conservation District has enough contracts to spend nearly the entirety of the $30 million. The contracts represent the full retirement of approximately 34 crop circles and partial restrictions on 28 circles, according to an accounting from the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.

When it’s all said and done, the $30 million will have paid for the retirement of approximately 11,296 acre-feet of water. An acre-foot represents around 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land.

Each application submitted to the Groundwater Compact Compliance Fund was reviewed by the Rio Grande Water Conservation District and Colorado Division of Water Resources. So far six applications representing $4,772,204 have been closed and the RGWCD now owns those water rights, according to deputy general manager Amber Pacheco.

The remaining applications have to be approved or rejected by March 31.

Republican River Basin. By Kansas Department of Agriculture – Kansas Department of Agriculture, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7123610

The senate bill also directed $30 million to sustainability efforts on the Republican River Basin in the eastern plains. Like the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, the Republican River Water Conservation District has been successful in administering the program, Pacheco said.

“We’ve been pretty successful,” she said at the Jan. 16 board meeting of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District. “It’s pretty shocking that in six months that amount of money was obligated.”

A small amount of funding will likely remain after current applications are all reviewed, Pacheco said.

The RGWCD received a total of 27 applications. Here’s a breakdown of applications by subdistrict. The applications represent 11,296 acre-feet of past annual withdrawals that would be retired.

Applications total approximately $29,000,000

14 applications in Subdistrict 1* – $11,700,000
2 applications in Subdistrict 3* – $1,200,000
1 application in Subdistrict 4 – $500,000
4 applications in Subdistrict 5 – $5,100,000
2 applications in Subdistrict 6 – $1,300,000
4 applications in Subdistrict 7 (Trinchera Subdistrict) – $9,300,000

*SD1 and SD3 both offered some type of incentive on top of the SB28 program.

Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868

#Snowpack news January 22, 2024

#Snowpack still below average peak levels — The Alamosa Citizen #RioGrande

Click the link to read the article on the Alamosa Citizen website (Chris Lopez):

January 20, 2024

Current levels are at 71 percent of normal for the Rio Grande Basin

The Rio Grande Basin has about another 70 days to get itself up to average peak levels for snowpack that would deliver a normal spring runoff year for San Luis Valley irrigators in 2024. Water from melting snow in the surrounding mountain ranges also irrigates farm fields in New Mexico and Texas through the Rio Grande Compact.

The snowpack levels and corresponding 2023 spring runoff was the focus of a presentation at the Rio Grande Water Conservation District’s quarterly meeting held on Tuesday, Jan. 16. Craig Cotten, Division 3 engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources, walked water managers through a series of slides showing the conditions of rivers and creeks all critical to Valley’s agricultural economy as well as Colorado’s ability to deliver water to the New Mexico state line for Rio Grande Compact obligations.

Rio Grande and Conejos River

These charts represent the two river systems tied to the Rio Grande Compact and the effect on stream flows from snow runoff during the spring of 2023. The winter of 2022-23 translated into significantly above-average runoff for several months and then by the first of July a drop in streamflows to below average on the Rio Grande and right at average to below on the Conejos River.

It’s the Rio Grande and Conejos that form the Rio Grande Compact between the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. The annual spring runoff determines how much water Colorado delivers to the New Mexico state line to fulfill its compact obligation. From the 2023 runoff Colorado delivered 29 percent of the streamflow or 208,000 acre-feet of water from the Rio Grande, and 47 percent or around 200,000 acre-feet from the Conejos River.

Los Pinos River near Ortiz

Los Pinos is the main contributor to the San Antonio River, which is a main tributary to the Conejos. Los Pinos had significant above-average runoff that resulted in some flooding on the lower end of the San Antonio in the spring of 2023. With its tributaries, the Conejos River had 411,000 acre-feet or 137 percent of its long-term average in 2023. Again, 47 percent of that water had to be delivered to the New Mexico state line to meet Colorado’s Rio Grande Compact obligations.

Saguache Creek near Saguache

Saguache Creek forms from runoff coming off the San Juan Mountains. It had above-average spring streamflows like others, and ended up below-average when the normal summer rains did not materialize in 2023.

Trinchera Creek above Turner’s Ranch

Trinchera Creek presented the biggest challenges for irrigators in 2023 due to less snow on the Sangre de Cristos than on the San Juans. Trinchera Creek was significantly below average for most of the irrigation season.

Ute Creek near Fort Garland

Ute Creek too forms from the Sangres. Unlike the Trinchera Creek, it got to average and a bit above for the peak of the 2023 spring runoff and then dropped to below-average streamflows for the year.

Alamosa Creek above Terrace Reservoir

The highlight of the heavy snow from 2022-23 and the corresponding spring runoff was the spilling of Terrace Reservoir for the first time in 40 years. “That was really neat to see,” Cotten said.

Spring and summer 2024 forecasts

Looking to the 2024 spring runoff, current snowpack levels are at 71 percent of normal for the Rio Grande Basin and the lowest for any basin in Colorado by a significant amount. “We do still have some time to get up that average,” Cotten said. “If we can get some good snowstorms coming our way, hopefully we’ll be in decent shape for this year.”

Precipitation outlook through March shows potential for more snow that would help build up the snowpack for spring water. The spring months show an equal chance for precipitation and then below-average forecasts for the summer months. The temperature forecasts for the summer do not predict the same type of record-setting heat as the summer of 2023.

Are We Headed for the First #ColoradoRiver Compact Tripwire? — Eric Kuhn and John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #CRWUA2023

Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Inkstain website (John Fleck):

The Bureau of Reclamation’s January 2024 “Most Probable” 24-month study forecasts that annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam for both Water Years 2025 and 2026 will be 7.48 million acre-feet per year (maf). If this happens, the ten-year total flow at Lee Ferry for the 2017-2026 period will drop to about 83.0 maf, only about 500,000 acre-feet above 82.5 million acre-feet, the first 1922 Compact hydrology “tripwire.”

That line – 82.5 maf feet of Lee Ferry deliveries over a ten year period – has become a dividing line between two contending interpretations of the most important unresolved question in the century-old Colorado River Compact: How much water must the Upper Basin deliver to the Lower Basin? What happens if it doesn’t?

September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.

The consequences of triggering the tripwire, which might happen in 2027, are significant. In the worst case scenario, it could plunge the basin into Supreme Court litigation over the interpretation of the 1922 Compact, which could result in a forced curtailment of post-compact water uses in the Upper Basin. Or, alternately, if the Basin States are willing to settle their long-term disputed issues or implement basic changes to the Law of the River via the renegotiations of the post-2026 operating rules, it could be a “non-event.” This is one of the fundamental issues facing the states as they meet to develop their basin-state alternative.

The 82.5 maf tripwire is based on the 1922 Compact’s two flow-related requirements at Lee Ferry; Article III(d) requires the four Upper Division States to not cause the progressive ten-year flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted be depleted below 75 maf. Additionally, Article III(c) provides that if there is not sufficient surplus water to meet the annual water delivery requirements of the 1944 Mexican Treaty, normally 1.5 maf, then each basin must provide half of the deficiency (the required annual delivery minus the available surplus). The Upper Division States must deliver their share of the deficiency at Lee Ferry in addition to their obligations under Article III(d).

The Upper Division and Lower Division States have never agreed on the meaning and interpretation of Article III(c). There have been numerous papers on the disputed issues by both compact scholars and practitioners and Article III(c) has never been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Suffice it to say that the Lower Division States believe that the Upper Division States must deliver at Lee Ferry a total of 82.5 maf every ten years (75 maf + 10 x 750,000), but the Upper Division States believe that they currently have no obligation to Mexico, so the number is at most 75 million. There are of course, nuances. The Lower Division States have suggested that the Upper Division States might also need to cover transit losses between Lee Ferry and Mexico and the Upper Division States have most recently suggested that if climate change, not Upper Basin depletions, is causing the ten-year flow to fall below 75 million, then their article III(d) non-depletion obligation must be appropriately adjusted. Further, if pursuant to either the extraordinary drought provision or a treaty minute, the required annual delivery to Mexico is less than 1.5 maf, then, even with no surplus, the Upper Division’s 50% share would be less than 750,000 acre-feet.

Paria River near Buckskin Gulch. By Seth G. Cowdery – Transferred from English Wikipedia. Original location was here., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=835575

One should recognize that the annual releases from the Glen Canyon Dam and the annual flow at Lee Ferry (the compact point) are not the same. Between the dam and Lee Ferry, the river gains flow from groundwater accretions (in part due to leakage around the dam) and from the Paria River. These gains can vary from about 30,000 acre-feet to over 300,000 acre-feet annually. The ten-year Lee Ferry flow for 2014-2023 was approximately 86.1 maf.

That amount – 86.1 maf – might seem like a safe cushion. But because it is a ten-year moving total, we are about to drop out years with big releases (9 million acre feet) and replace them with years with just 7.48 maf. At the end of 2024, because both 2014 (the year that drops out) and 2024 (the year that is added in) are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will stay about the same. The way the ten-year flow calculation works is next year, 2015 will drop out and 2025 will be added in, and so on, but here is the problem; From 2015 through 2019, the 2007 Interim Guidelines dictated an annual release of 9 maf per year. With accretions, flows at Lee Ferry averaged about 9.18 maf per year (source: UCRC 74^th Annual Report). Thus, if 2025 and 2026 are 7.48 maf years, the ten-year flow will lose about 1.5 maf/year making the total about 83 maf for the 2017-2026 period. Because the 2007 Interim Guidelines expire, we don’t know what the annual release will be in 2027, but if it’s less than about 8.5 maf, because 2017 was a 9 maf year, the ten-year Lee Ferry flow could drop below the tripwire – 82.5 maf (with two more 9 maf years, 2018 and 2019, in the pipeline).

We recognize that the 24-month studies don’t predict the future. They are a planning and management tool. It’s plausible that by 2027, a series of wet years could result in a ten-year flow that is much higher than 82.5 maf, something that is, in our view, unlikely. But as we sit here in January 2024, the 24-month study is the only planning tool we’ve got. It would behoove us to pay attention to what it is telling us.

If a future 24-month study projects that ten-year flows will fall below 82.5 maf, it will be a big deal for the basin. What provision of the Law of the River will control annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam – the post-2026 Operating Guidelines, the Lower Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (82.5 maf), or the Upper Division’s interpretation of the 1922 Compact (75 maf or less)? If the Lower Division States agree to a ten-year flow target of less than 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Upper Division States? If the Upper Division States agree to a flow target of 82.5 maf, are they effectively surrendering to the Lower Division States? If the Upper Basin states agree to either 82.5 maf or some smaller compromise delivery target and the hydrology remains bad, how will Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah – our states – approach the required water use reductions? What if there is not enough water in storage in Lake Powell (and the other CRSP reservoirs) to release sufficient water to bring the ten-year flows to 82.5 maf? Will the Lower Division insist that that the UCRC implement a curtailment of post-compact uses in the Upper Basin. If the UCRC refuses to do so, will that plunge the Basin into litigation?

The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)

At the recent 2023 CRWUA meeting, representatives of the Lower Division States stepped up and made it clear they own the “structural deficit,” and the conference was buzzing with talk of the innovative system approach the Lower Division has put on the table. This is great news, but as Colorado’s Royce Tipton concluded sixty years ago, the “structural deficit” is not a single number. It’s a range that depends on the interpretation of the Lee Ferry obligations of the Upper Division States under the 1922 Compact. If the average annual flow requirement is 8.25 maf/year, (which Tipton referred to as “fictional”) he calculated the deficit to be about 1.2 maf/year. Today we believe it’s about 1.4 -1.5 maf/year (Tipton’s assumptions about system losses were probably too low and perhaps his Lee Ferry to Lake Mead inflow assumptions too high). If, however, the average annual flow requirement is 7.5 maf/year, he calculated the deficit to be about 2 maf/year, today maybe 2.2 maf/year. This difference is huge, especially for the Central Arizona Project, the junior user on the Lower basin mainstem.

In the past decades, water managers in the Colorado River Basin have made accomplishments that even two decades ago were considered out of reach: The 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, the shortage sharing agreements with Mexico, the increased recognition of the rights of the Basin’s Native American communities are just a few. The Lower Division’s recent pronouncement that they own the structural deficit is another major step forward, but it has a fundamental flaw. Representatives of all seven Basin states continue to stubbornly insist that the Law of the River, and specifically, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, will serve as the “foundation” of the post-2026 operating guidelines. The flaw is that is that we don’t know if this foundation is based on a ten-year Lee Ferry flow of 82.5 maf, or 75 maf, or something different.

Put simply, the states agree that the Law of the River has to be the basis of what we do, but don’t agree on what the Law of the River actually says. [ed. emphasis mine] Without an agreement on this fundamental issue, calling the 1922 Compact a foundation is nothing more than self-delusional wishful thinking. Now that the Lower Division States have agreed to own the structural deficit, is the next step for all seven states and the federal government to openly acknowledge that given the impacts of climate change on the river, the 1922 Compact’s overallocation of water and its disputed Lee Ferry flow provisions are core problems for the basin, not the foundation? Finding a sustainable future, without litigation, will require accepting and acknowledging the basic problems we face, not avoiding them.

Excellent water quality starts with water in the stream — #Colorado Water Trust #BoulderCreek #CrystalRiver

North Fork of the Gunnison River. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Water Trust website (Sarah Klahn):

It is a bitterly cold December morning and I am tooling up Boulder Canyon to do some backcountry skiing above Nederland. As I slow down for a hairpin turn, the sun makes its way over the edge of the canyon and I notice some movement in the creek. It’s a little bird known as a Dipper, bobbing up and down on a rock in the creek—and now diving into a pool below a fallen tree. These incredible birds live year-round near flowing streams in the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the west. They dive underwater for their food—aquatic insects—and actually have an extra eyelid so they can see while they’re underwater! Dipper populations on a stream mean it has excellent water quality and low silt load—both characteristics of Boulder Creek in Boulder Canyon above the City of Boulder.

Excellent water quality for Dippers and other species that live in or around aquatic ecosystem starts—of course—with water in the stream. In Colorado, water use is controlled under the state’s “prior appropriation system”, which forms the legal framework for water distribution in the state. You may have heard the phrase “first in time is first in right” which simply means the more “senior” rights to use a quantity of water are associated with the earliest uses. In many parts of the state (for example the Cache La Poudre River near Fort Collins or the Rio Grande and its tributaries near Alamosa), many irrigation water rights pre-date statehood. And, while the act of putting water to use forms the basis of a water right, that right is only enforceable if confirmed by a district court or, since 1969, Colorado’s water courts.

The habitat of the American Dipper (Cinclus americana) is usually clear, rushing, boulder-strewn, mountain streams, within tall conifer forests. Photo via http://birdingisfun.com

In many, if not most streams in the state, the amount of water decreed far exceeds available water supplies. Such streams are “over-appropriated”, meaning that only in a very wet year will many of the more recent (“junior”) water rights get to divert water. In fact, Boulder Creek is over-appropriated at locations downstream of the City of Boulder. The Dippers are still safe in the canyon, where there are few actual diversions of water for consumptive use.

“Over-appropriated” as a concept gets a bad rap. At the time of European settlement, those turning the prairie and mountain valleys into farms and cities were focused on building new homes in an unfamiliar place. Whether we agree with these decisions today, at the time, claiming every drop of available water was an obvious start to settling in a place as arid as Colorado. But Colorado’s prior appropriation system also has flexibility that allows volumes of water to be assigned to “instream flow” uses—providing a means to leave water in the stream to benefit aquatic ecosystems, including our friend the Dipper.

The Colorado Water Trust is on the forefront of creative and thoughtful efforts to use flexibility in state water law to put water back into streams. The Trust works to identify both streams in need of additional flows and water rights owners who want to re-imagine the use of their consumptive water rights to improve stream health in their own neighborhood. Broadly, these tools fall into two categories: leases or loans, which are used by the Trust and water right owners who want to maintain ownership of their water rights; and purchase of water rights from owners who are interested in selling to the Colorado Water Trust.

An image of the Crystal River Valley from an EcoFlight mission in August 2022. The view is downvalley, toward Mount Sopris. A group is exploring a federal designation of wild and scenic for the Crystal River in Gunnison and Pitkin counties. Courtesy of Ecoflight

On the Crystal River, a tributary of the Colorado River, the Water Trust and Cold Mountain Ranch, a water user diverting from a critical reach of the Crystal River, entered into an agreement that compensates the Ranch for coordinating diversions in a manner that enhances stream flows. The result is two-fold: the Ranch coordinates its diversions during certain types of water years to benefit the stream flow, but maintains ownership of its valuable, senior irrigation rights for use when water is more plentiful; and the stream benefits in years in which the river reach would otherwise be dry.

The Trust has also, from time to time, purchased portions of water rights, including an interest in the McKinley Ditch which diverts from the Little Cimarron River near Gunnison. Historically, three miles of the Little Cimarron River near Gunnison ran dry during late summer, due to upstream water diversions. Working with the Trust’s frequent partner, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Trust obtained a change decree from the Division 4 Water Court. The change decree authorizes the Trust’s water, which would otherwise be limited to irrigation uses, to be left in the stream for the benefit of the aquatic ecosystem.

Sarah Klahn, Board Member, Colorado Water Trust, Shareholder, Somach Simmons & Dunn. Credit: Colorado Water Trust

The Dippers in Boulder Canyon are in good shape, given the water quality and flow regime in Boulder Creek below Barker Dam; any resident Dippers in the Cimarron or Crystal watersheds in the vicinity of the Water Trust’s projects are in better shape than they were before the Trust’s projects were initiated. And for other streams in Colorado that may experience extreme low flows (or dry up completely) during certain types of water years, the Water Trust is actively looking for opportunities to partner with senior water right owners and use available tools provided by the prior appropriation system to enhance stream flows and enhance and protect aquatic ecosystems.

Sarah Klahn is a member of the Water Trust Board of Directors and a shareholder in Somach Simmons & Dunn. Sarah represents farmers and ranchers, as well as institutional clients, on water rights matters in four western states.

Conservation of the North Rim area — Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Farm and Food Alliance) #GunnisonRiver #DoloresRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Stateline run of Dolores River around the turn of the last century. Photo credit: Pete Kolbenschlag

From email from Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Farm & Food Alliance):

The North Rim of the Black Canyon, in the National Park, which is accessed from Fruitland Mesa near Crawford – a remote region of ranches at the base of the West Elk Mountains – showcases an especially dramatic feature. Even among many spectacular places in western Colorado it impresses, marking where the Southern Rockies transition into the mesas, deserts and canyons of the Colorado Plateau. This cherished national treasure is also a local North Fork favorite, found on the way to Blue Mesa and the city of Gunnison.

The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is supportive of public lands conservation, for protecting the stunning landscapes near our home-base. Set into this amazing landscape are small towns like Crawford, Paonia and Hotchkiss, and scattered between and on the mesas all around are the farms, ranches, wineries and businesses that work hard to make it here.

As we consider how we can adapt rural communities to be resilient and prosperous in a changing climate and dynamic future, we think that land conservation and watershed health are two of the most important, and effective, strategies we can pursue. That is one reason, as we look even further west, across the Uncompahgre Plateau, into the heart of Colorado’s red rock canyon country along the Dolores River, we see opportunity.

Far less visited than Moab and Monticello, Utah which lie just on the other side of the La Sal Mountains and Paradox Basin, the looming Wingate cliffs along this tributary to the Colorado River, which it joins at Dewey Bridge just over the stateline, contain an unique, fascinating, often hardscrabble history.

Back in the North Fork Valley, the Black Canyon National Park is not the only nearby designated national park service or conservation area. Just downstream is the Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area. And above it is the Curecanti National Recreation Area which includes not only Blue Mesa reservoir, Colorado’s largest water body, but seldom visited upper reaches of the Black Canyon itself, with sweeping vistas of the San Juan Mountains and the Uncompahgre Plateau. Protected public lands are critical components of the economy in this region.

So lately as talk has percolated up from people who love the red rock Dolores River country, about securing protections to conserve what is unique and important about it, we pay attention. Sen. Bennet has long championed a bill to establish a national conservation area for part of the Dolores Canyon region. And more recently, a growing coalition of businesses, conservation groups and local elected officials are calling on President Biden to designate a national monument for a part of the region as well.

We think this could be a great opportunity to ensure what is unique there remains intact and that local businesses benefit from growing visitation to the region. Given the rich history in the West End of Montrose County, like the Hanging Flume and the town of Uravan – a critical player in the Atomic Age – it’s no wonder community leaders are wanting to protect the area.

Towns like Naturita and Nucla, with their markets and cafes, can serve as hubs that support local farms and residents, as they always have, and play host to visitors and activities, provide guides and services, and be the jumping off and provisioning point for the more adventuresome.

For places as rooted in tradition as are the rural communities of western Colorado, public land conservation and protecting the health of our lands and watersheds is a solid strategy to preserve what we care about most. And to welcome new opportunities. This is the strongest connection we see with our friends on the West End: protected public lands protect a rural way of life – and can help us better prepare for and better prosper in the future.

As 2024 opens to new possibilities, we cannot think of a better conversation than how to secure a locally-rooted, sustainable, and prosperous future for the Dolores Canyon Country and the rural, western communities of our local and nearby watersheds. As President Biden looks for legacy projects to leave with future generations, now is the time for Colorado’s leaders like Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet, and Governor Polis to speak up and urge the president to act.

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

Company with oil and gas interests seeking to keep rights alive for reservoir on #ThompsonCreek — @AspenJournalism #RoaringForkRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

A frozen Thompson Creek near its confluence with the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. A company with an interest in oil shale development in western Colorado is seeking to maintain conditional water rights for a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):

Puckett Land Co.’s 23,893 acre-foot proposal dates to 1966, part of “integrated system” involving lands in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties

A company with an interest in oil shale development in western Colorado is seeking to maintain its water rights associated with a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek that would be located within an area proposed for oil and gas lease withdrawal.

Puckett Land Co. is seeking to hold on to conditional water rights that date to 1966 for a 23,893-acre foot reservoir on Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. It would be nearly one-fourth the size of Ruedi Reservoir, which, when full, holds just over 100,000 acre-feet. The reservoir site is located on Bureau of Land Management land in Pitkin County.

According to water court documents filed in November, Puckett says the water is needed for the “commercial development of Puckett’s oil, gas, coalbed methane and/or oil shale minerals.” The water is decreed for industrial, domestic, recreational, irrigation, power, mining and all other purposes related to shale oil production, including the maintenance of a camp and community.

Puckett Land Co., based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, holds interests in 17,500 acres of land in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, according to the application. The Thompson Creek water rights are described as being part of an integrated system that includes conditional rights for two small reservoirs, and a pump and pipeline on Starkey Gulch, a tributary of Parachute Creek. Those Parachute Creek basin reservoirs have not been constructed.

Attorney for Puckett Land Co. Peter D. Nichols said that it would be inappropriate to respond to questions from Aspen Journalism while the application is pending in water court.

The proposed reservoir site is within the boundaries of an area that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are proposing to withdraw from eligibility for new oil and gas leases. The proposed Thompson Divide withdrawal area is comprised of 224,713-acres in Garfield, Gunnison and Pitkin counties that generally straddles the ridge of mountains running from south of Glenwood Springs to the northern edge of the West Elk Wilderness, south of McClure Pass.

Carbondale-based conservation group Wilderness Workshop supports the withdrawal, and executive director Will Roush said a reservoir on Thompson Creek is highly problematic for many reasons, including its many harmful effects on the ecosystem.

“The local community has been working for over a decade to protect Thompson Creek and the surrounding lands; damming the creek runs counter to these efforts and deeply held community values,” Roush said in a statement. “Furthermore, the intended use of this water would be to enable oil shale and other fossil fuel production. Given our water and climate crises, utilizing precious West Slope water to increase climate pollution is simply unacceptable.”

The proposed reservoir site is just upstream from Sunfire Ranch, which is near the confluence of Thompson Creek and the Crystal River. In 2020, Pitkin County spent $10 million to put a conservation easement on the property, meaning that most of the 1,240-acre property is protected from development. Pitkin County also has its own taxpayer-funded board, Healthy Rivers, that funds programs and grant requests that focus on improving water quality and quantity.

Pitkin County Attorney John Ely said he is evaluating Puckett’s application and deciding whether the county wants to weigh in. Interested parties have until Jan. 31 to file statements of opposition in water court. As of Friday, no such statements had been filed.

Proposed Thompson Creek reservoir

Conditional water rights

The reason Puckett has been able to hold on to water rights that are nearly 60 years old without putting them to beneficial use lies in a quirk of Colorado water law that at least one scholar says needs to be reformed. Conditional water rights allow a would-be water user to reserve their place in the priority system based on when they applied for the right — not when they put water to use — while they work toward developing the water. Under the cornerstone of water law known as prior appropriation, older waters rights get first use of the river.

To maintain a conditional right, an applicant must every six years file what’s known as a diligence application with the water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they “can and will” eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights they won’t soon use.

But the bar for proving diligence is low. Judges are hesitant to abandon these conditional water rights, even if they have been languishing without being used for decades. Andrew Teegarden, a water fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado School of Law, argues this is partly because in Colorado water is treated as a property right.

“Some of the standards I think are a little lackadaisical merely because they don’t require the holders to spell out and specify all of the diligence activities that an individual took,” Teegarden said. “Most of the diligence applications that you’ll see are not filled with tons and tons of information; it’s more general statements about things like maintenance and building infrastructure. … It seems like we could require a little bit more specificity out of some of these holders.”

In Puckett’s diligence filing, the company says that in the past six years, it has spent nearly $100,000 on maintaining, repairing and upgrading its infrastructure and overall water system on its properties in the Colorado River basin; spent more than $80,000 on operational activities such as road maintenance and erosion control; spent more than $16,000 on professional services, including survey and title work; and has spent more than $80,000 on legal services to protect and develop its water rights.

The application does not specifically mention work regarding the Thompson Creek reservoir site in its list of diligence activities and says that diligence on any part of the system constitutes diligence with respect to the entire system. It is not clear how the Thompson Creek reservoir would operate with other parts of the system.

Puckett also said in its application that current economic conditions are adverse to oil shale production, but that that should not be sufficient on its own to deny its diligence claim.

Diligence filings are common and often fly under the radar. In 2017, the last time Puckett filed a diligence application for the Thompson Creek reservoir, no parties filed statements of opposition in the case. In the diligence filing prior to that, in 2010, only one party — the owners of the Crystal River Ranch — came forward as opposers. In that case, Puckett agreed to abandon conditional rights for a pipeline that would have diverted water from a point below the proposed dam.

An aerial view of the Thompson Divide area, looking south along West Divide Creek, with the Bull Mountain pipeline running roughly parallel, to the left, of the creek bottom. Mount Sopris, at upper left, and Chair Mountain, upper right, frame the background. CREDIT: DAN BAYER / ECOFLIGHT

Oil shale and water use

In 2009, conservation group Western Resource Advocates produced a report called “Water on the Rocks” about oil shale water rights in western Colorado. According to the report, in anticipation of a boom, in the 1950s and ‘60s, companies with an interest in western Colorado oil shale amassed an enormous portfolio of water rights because extracting the oil from shale, a type of sedimentary rock, requires huge amounts of water. The report found that there were conditional water rights associated with oil shale development for 27 reservoirs with 736,770 acre-feet of water in the mainstem of the Colorado River basin.

If these conditional water rights were to be developed, the impacts could be felt by other water users throughout the basin. When the holders of conditional rights with older priority dates finally begin diverting water they have not used in decades, they may force junior rights holders to stop using water, something Teegarden calls “line-jumping.” The sheer volume of water tied to oil shale development, if ever used, could upend the whole system.

“As soon as some of these conditional rights begin coming online, they’re going to curtail these users that have been receiving that water in some cases for decades,” Teegarden said. “We have these users who have been making productive use of the state’s water for all this time and have been following all of the requirements of the law, but now they are the ones that might be punished for their use of the water.”

In a draft paper on the unintended consequences of conditional water rights in Colorado, Teegarden advocates for reforms to the anti-speculation and due-diligence standards. He says if users fail to put water to beneficial use within the typical 10-year abandonment period, the conditional water rights should be abandoned. With the help of the legislature, water courts could also implement a strict time limit for putting conditional rights to beneficial use and stop allowing them to exist indefinitely. For example, extensions through diligence filings could stop being granted after 50 years.

“I think that we really need to be serious about looking into and reforming these conditional rights before the time comes where we see some of these impacts to other water users across the state,” Teegarden said. “Because if we wait until that point, we won’t be able to guarantee a water-secure future, especially with the volumes of water that are associated with these conditional rights.”

Preliminary: #NewMexico’s #RioGrande Compact debt rose ~25,000 acre feet in 2023 — John Fleck (InkStain.net)

Elephant Butte Reservoir back in the day nearly full. Photo credit: USBR

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):

January 12, 2024

New Mexico once again fell short in 2023 of the requirement set out in the Rio Grande Compact to deliver water to Elephant Butte Reservoir for use in Southern New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, delivering ~25,000 acre feet less than the Compact requires, according to preliminary estimates presented at Monday’s meeting of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

These numbers are preliminary. The final, official numbers will be sorted out at this spring’s meeting of the Rio Grande Compact Commission. But if they hold, that would put New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt at ~125,000 acre feet.

Really bad things don’t start happening until New Mexico’s cumulative Compact debt rises above 200,00 acre feet, but lessbad things are already happening now as a result of the debt. Under Article VI of the Compact:

Translated, that means any runoff we could actually store in upstream reservoirs in 2024 we can’t use, but rather have to hang onto to run down to Elephant Butte after the end of the irrigation season.

RUN-OF-THE RIVER AGAIN FOR MIDDLE VALLEY IRRIGATORS, AND FOR THE FISH

There’s a complex interaction here between physical storage* and rules. But the bottom line is that once again this summer, water users in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, the stretch of the river between Cochiti Pueblo and Elephant Butte Dam, will be entirely dependent on natural runoff available after the farmers in the San Luis Valley of Colorado take their share of the river.

I would predict, as a result, that:

People who irrigate in the Middle Valley should expect a high risk of significant stretches with no ditch water in the summer,

Water available for instream flows for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow will once again be extremely tight, with a high likelihood of drying in the Isleta and San Acacia reaches this summer, and

The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority is likely to shut down river diversions for its drinking water plant at some point in the summer and switch over to groundwater pumping so I can keep taking showers.

* PHYSICAL STORAGE

El Vado Dam, built by the federal government and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District in the 1930s to store water during the spring runoff peak for irrigators to use in the late summer is under repair, a project taking way longer than expected. It’s likely that the necessary paperwork to store some water in Abiquiu Reservoir will be in place by runoff season, but the Compact Article VI debt means that water cannot be used for irrigation in 2024.

El Vado Dam and Reservoir. Photo credit: USBR

Navajo Dam operations update January 19, 2024 #SanJuanRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Bluff UT – aerial with San Juan River and Comb Ridge. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6995171

From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):

January 17, 2024

At 3:00 PM on January 29th (Monday), the release at Navajo Dam will be transferred to the 4×4 Auxiliary outlet, where the release will be reduced to 250 cfs. The minimum release will accommodate instream work for the Turley Manzanares Ditch Company Diversion Dam Rehabilitation Project. The release will be transferred back to the power plant and increased back to its current level of 350 cfs at 8:00 AM the following morning, January 30th, 2024 (Tuesday). You may expect some silt and discoloration downstream in the river during this time due to the location of the intake of the 4×4.

This scheduled operation is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please contact Susan Behery (sbehery@usbr.gov or 970-385-6560), or visit Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website at https://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html

Article: Significantly wetter or drier future conditions for one to two thirds of the world’s population — Nature #ActOnClimate

a, b Box-whiskers plots of cumulative change in precipitation regime over a 120-year period across GCMs for selected countries with higher agreement and affected populations. c, d Selected countries ranked by drying and wetting multi-model agreement (vertical lines denote intra-country variability showing the 10th and 90th spatial percentiles). e, f Spatial distribution of drying and wetting multi-model agreement for states. Rectangles on f very high emissions panel focusing on regions with strong intra-country variability are shown in detail on panels for g South America, h North America, i Africa, and Europe. White regions indicate no substantial agreement for drying and wetting. Refer to Figs. S1 and S2 and Supplementary Data for seasonal agreement across all countries and states globally.

Click the link to access the article on the Nature website (Ralph Trancoso, Jozef Syktus, Richard P. Allan, Jacky Croke, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg & Robin Chadwick). Here’s the abstract:

Future projections of precipitation are uncertain, hampering effective climate adaptation strategies globally. Our understanding of changes across multiple climate model simulations under a warmer climate is limited by this lack of coherence across models. Here, we address this challenge introducing an approach that detects agreement in drier and wetter conditions by evaluating continuous 120-year time-series with trends, across 146 Global Climate Model (GCM) runs and two elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios. We show the hotspots of future drier and wetter conditions, including regions already experiencing water scarcity or excess. These patterns are projected to impact a significant portion of the global population, with approximately 3 billion people (38% of the world’s current population) affected under an intermediate emissions scenario and 5 billion people (66% of the world population) under a high emissions scenario by the century’s end (or 35-61% using projections of future population). We undertake a country- and state-level analysis quantifying the population exposed to significant changes in precipitation regimes, offering a robust framework for assessing multiple climate projections.

Forest Service withdraws key permit for controversial #Utah oil-train project opposed by Coloradans — #Colorado Newsline #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround

A train of tanker cars travels the tracks along the Colorado River near Cameo on May 16, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Chase Woodruff):

January 18, 2024

A controversial Utah oil-train proposal opposed by Colorado communities and environmentalists was dealt another blow this week when the U.S. Forest Service withdrew a key permit for the project.

In an announcement published Wednesday, Ashley National Forest Supervisor Susan Eickhoff blocked the issuance of a permit to the Uinta Basin Railway to construct 12 miles of railroad track through a protected area of the national forest in northeast Utah. The stretch of track in question is part of the proposed railway’s 88-mile connection between the oil fields of eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin and the existing national rail network.

The project has drawn fierce opposition from Coloradans. A federal “downline analysis” estimated that 90% of the resulting oil-train traffic — as many as five fully loaded, two-mile-long trains of crude oil tankers per day — would be routed through environmentally sensitive and densely populated areas in Colorado, en route to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast. The oil trains would more than quadruple the amount of hazardous materials being shipped by rail through many Colorado counties.

Colorado’s Eagle County and five environmental groups sued to overturn the Uinta Basin Railway’s approval, and in August 2023 a panel of federal judges ruled that the approval process contained “numerous” and “significant” violations of the National Environmental Policy Act. The ruling vacated portions of the project’s environmental impact statement and ordered the federal Surface Transportation Board to redo its analysis of key environmental risks.

Because the Forest Service’s decision in August 2022 to grant a right-of-way permit to the project was based on that flawed analysis, the agency has withdrawn its decision pending further proceedings at the STB.

This map, included in U.S. Forest Service documents evaluating the Uinta Basin Railway proposal, shows the 88-mile length of the route. Tunnels are shown in yellow.
CREDIT: COURTESY IMAGE

“If the deficiencies are addressed and resubmitted for consideration, the Forest Service may issue a new decision,” Eickhoff wrote in a Jan. 17 letter.

“This is wonderful news for the roadless forest in Utah’s Indian Canyon and the wildlife who call it home,” said Ted Zukoski, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sued to block the project. “It’s a victory for the Colorado River and nearby communities that would be threatened by oil train accidents and spills, and for residents of the Gulf Coast, where billions of gallons of oil would be refined. If the oil train’s backers attempt to revive this dangerous scheme, we’ll be there to fight it again.”

In a press release, Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, who had urged multiple federal agencies to put a stop to the project, applauded the Forest Service’s move.

“A derailment along the headwaters of the Colorado River could have catastrophic effects for Colorado’s communities, water, and environment,” Bennet said. “I’m glad the Forest Service has taken this important step to protect the Colorado River and the tens of millions of people who depend on it.”

Backers of the railway project include the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a group of Utah county governments in the oil-rich Uinta Basin. The coalition’s petition for a rehearing of the case by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was denied in December, though the ruling could still be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We’re still looking at options,” Greg Miles, a Duchesne County commissioner and co-chair of the coalition, said during a Jan. 11 public meeting. “We may be making a decision here within the next month.”

Dirt track to the right leads to a borehole site for a tunnel under the Ashley National Forest roadless area, part of the Uinta Basin Railway proposal which U.S. Forest Service officials approved in July 2022.
CREDIT: AMY HADDEN MARSH/ASPEN JOURNALISM

12 not-so-easy steps to decarbonize the grid: Electrifying will make a difference if that power comes from clean sources — Jonathan P. Thompson (@HighCountryNews) #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround

Click the link to read the article on The High Country News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

When it comes to the country’s climate change culprits, the biggest offenders lurk in the transportation sector: Altogether, planes, trains and automobiles, etc., emit 28% of the nation’s greenhouse gases, plus other nasty pollutants that harm anyone who lives near highways and airports. Industrial sources — factories, cement plants, steel mills, etc. — spew nearly one-fourth of our climate-warming pollutants, while commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 13%, and agriculture contributes 10%.

Experts generally agree that the best way to reduce all these emissions is to electrify everything: Just replace petroleum-powered vehicles, natural gas-fired heaters and stoves and coal-fired cement kilns and steel furnaces with their electric analogs. After all, an electric vehicle’s tailpipe emits zero greenhouse gases or other pollutants. In fact, electric vehicles don’t even have tailpipes.

There is one nagging little detail, though: The energy producing all that electricity has to come from somewhere, generally from greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. The electric power sector is the nation’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after transportation. Electrifying everything might do little more than redistribute emissions from buildings and cars to the power grid. Unless, that is, the power grid is decarbonized, a simple — but monumental — task: The electric power sector needs to quit fossil fuels, cold turkey. And that requires massive investments in new power sources and innovation to remake the grid for a carbon-free world.

SOURCES: Energy Information Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon Solar Dashboard, California Independent System Operator, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News

$3.5 million
Funding the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority has allocated to help install rooftop solar on low-income households.

21,894 megawatt-hours
Amount of electricity produced by utility-scale solar facilities in Oregon in 2015.

1.69 million megawatt-hours
Amount produced in 2022.

500 megawatts
Amount of battery storage on California’s grid in 2018.

8,000 megawatts
Amount of battery storage on California’s grid today.

103.5%
Amount of California’s total demand met by solar power on May 8, 2022, a record.

16,044 megawatts
Amount of solar generation on the California grid on Sept. 6, 2023, just after noon, the all-time record so far.

1,000
Feet of irrigation canal to be covered by solar panels at a Gila River Indian Community project in Arizona.

1.05 billion tons
Amount of coal burned for electricity generation in the U.S. in 2007.

469 million tons
Amount burned in 2022.

7.1 trillion cubic feet
Amount of natural gas burned for electricity generation in the U.S. in 2007.

12.4 trillion cubic feet
Amount burned in 2022.

371.5 million metric tons
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas to generate electricity in 2007.

661 million metric tons
Amount emitted in 2022.

2.33 billion
2007 total emissions (natural gas and coal).

1.5 billion
2022 total emissions.

Illustrations by Hannah Agosta/High Country News

Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He is the author of Sagebrush Empire: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands.

A brief history

A dwindling supply of water

How the project formed

In the field

Making a big scientific impact

Share this:

Like this:

A stratospheric traffic accident

Competing graffiti artists

What is the atmospheric graffiti art looking like now?

Footnotes

Reference

Share this:

Like this:

What are atmospheric rivers?

Why are back-to-back atmospheric rivers a high flood risk?

How important are atmospheric rivers to the West Coast’s water supply?

How is global warming affecting atmospheric rivers?

Share this:

Like this:

See also:

Part V: Colorado River crisis looms over state’s landscape decisions

Part IV: Why these homeowners tore out their turf

Part III: How bluegrass lawns became the default for urban landscapes

Part II: Enough water for lawns at the headwaters of the Colorado River?

Part I: Colorado squeezing water from urban landscapes

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Conditional water rights

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

About: This highly interactive event convenes water management leaders and others from across the Ogallala region to learn about and from each other’s work to slow aquifer decline and support ecosystem and community resilience.

When? Please plan to attend both days :

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Last puzzle piece

Share this:

Like this:

‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’

The Emotional Climate

Unimpressed by Science

‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Respect for rivers

Dry outlook

Benefiting those downstream

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

‘The Lords of Yesterday’

Water’s Role in Mine Fights

Share this:

Like this:

A NOTE ON JACK DELANO

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

New, comprehensive guidelines

Leveraging ecological science to achieve success

Who does this report support?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️