Day: May 9, 2024

#Drought news May 9, 2024: In S.W. #Kansas and adjacent E. #Colorado #FlashDrought conditions continued and severe and moderate drought expanded in coverage

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

US Drought Monitor map May 7, 2024.
High Plains Drought Monitor map May 7, 2024.
West Drought Monitor map May 7, 2024.
Colorado Drought Monitor map May 7, 2024.

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

This Week’s Drought Summary

Heavy precipitation fell in western Oregon and adjacent southwest Washington and northwest California this week, and across large portions of the central U.S., as a series of storm systems caused continued bouts of severe thunderstorms and unfortunately included more significant tornadoes. The wet weather across portions of the Great Plains and Midwest led to either scattered or widespread improvements to ongoing drought or abnormal dryness, dependent on precipitation amounts, improvements to soil moisture and streamflow, and the degree of long-term dryness remaining in different locations. In Virginia, the Carolinas, and eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, heavy rains or lack thereof this week led to localized improvements or degradations in areas of short-term moderate drought or abnormal dryness. Very dry weather for the past few months led to increased fire danger in parts of the Florida Peninsula, and short-term moderate drought and abnormal dryness expanded in coverage. In southwest Kansas and adjacent eastern Colorado, mostly to the west of where this week’s showers and thunderstorms occurred, flash drought conditions continued and severe and moderate drought expanded in coverage. In Hawaii, wet weather continued on the windward sides of the islands, and some improvement to conditions occurred in Lanai and western Maui. Another wet week in Puerto Rico allowed for the removal of abnormal dryness from the northwest corner of the island…

High Plains

Moderate to heavy rain amounts fell in eastern portions of the High Plains region, especially in central and eastern Nebraska, northern and eastern Kansas and eastern North Dakota. Temperature anomalies varied across the region, with temperatures coming in 3-6 degrees above normal in southern Kansas, while northwest Colorado and Wyoming finished the week at 3-9 degrees colder than normal. In eastern Kansas and Nebraska and in eastern North Dakota, heavy rains continued the recent wet pattern, leading to improvements in ongoing drought and abnormal dryness. In parts of eastern Nebraska, improvements were somewhat tempered by remaining long-term precipitation deficits and hydrologic impacts from those deficits. In southwest Kansas and adjacent southeast Colorado, many areas mostly or completely missed out on recent rains, continuing the very dry weather from the last few months, during which Dodge City tied its record for the driest April on record there (with just 0.02 inches of precipitation). In these areas, flash drought conditions continued, and severe and moderate short-term drought expanded. Given the time of year during which this drought began, severe impacts to the wheat crop in portions of Kansas have occurred. Recent dryness led to some expansion of drought and abnormal dryness in portions of eastern Wyoming as well…

Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending May 7, 2024.

West

The West region this week saw heavy precipitation (locally exceeding 2 inches) fall in eastern Montana, while portions of northern California, northeast Oregon, and western Oregon and southwest Washington also saw heavy precipitation amounts (locally exceeding 5 inches in northwest California and western Oregon). Streamflows improved amid the wet weather in northwest Oregon. Farther north in Washington, short-term dryness continued, especially in parts of the Cascade and Olympic ranges, where snow-water content and streamflow remained low, and moderate drought and abnormal dryness expanded. The heavy rains in eastern Montana ended a recent stretch of dry weather there, preventing any degradation to ongoing drought. The effects of these rains across the eastern plains will be evaluated further next week. Except for eastern New Mexico and parts of Arizona, most of the West region was colder than normal this week. Parts of Oregon, southern Idaho, northern Utah and northern Nevada saw temperature readings 6-12 degrees below normal…

South

Widespread heavy rains fell across portions of the South region, especially in western Arkansas, central and eastern Oklahoma, and central and eastern Texas. Heavier rain also occurred in a few spots in northern Mississippi and Tennessee. Most of the region had warmer-than-normal temperatures this week, with departures of 6-9 degrees above normal being common in northern Mississippi and Tennessee, while 3-6 degrees above normal was common elsewhere. In areas of improvements to drought and abnormal dryness in central and eastern Oklahoma and Arkansas, recent showers and thunderstorms continued to improve precipitation deficits, streamflow and soil moisture. In central Texas, a tight gradient in long-term drought conditions has developed, as heavier rains have recently fallen along the northern edge of moderate to extreme long-term drought conditions. Some reservoirs have seen some recent improvement in levels in the area, though significant deficits remain. In deep south Texas, dry weather over the last month or two has led to significant short-term precipitation deficits, and a small area of short-term moderate drought developed. Heavier rains (or lack thereof) in Tennessee led to small-scale improvements and degradations in areas of moderate drought and abnormal dryness…

Looking Ahead

As of time of writing (the afternoon of May 8), precipitation forecasts from the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center show mostly dry weather west of the Continental Divide within the contiguous U.S. through the evening of Monday, May 13. East of the Continental Divide, 0.5-1 inch of rain, with locally higher amounts, is forecast for portions of central and eastern Colorado, western Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, western Oklahoma and northeast New Mexico. Heavier rain amounts (locally exceeding 2 inches) are forecast from eastern Texas eastward across Louisiana, southern portions of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and in Tennessee. Separate areas of forecasted rainfall above an inch are in north-central Iowa and from south-central New York to south-central Pennsylvania.

For May 14-18, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecast favors warmer-than-normal temperatures across most of the contiguous U.S., with the exceptions of portions of the south-central U.S. from Oklahoma to Tennessee and in the northwest half of Washington. Except for far northeast Alaska, the forecast favors colder-than-normal weather in most of Alaska, especially southwest, south-central and southeast Alaska. Near-normal temperatures are most likely in Hawaii. Precipitation forecasts in the contiguous U.S. favor near- or above-normal precipitation across most areas, except for the Pacific Northwest and a small part of southwest Texas. The highest confidence for wetter-than-normal weather is in the Southeast region. Wetter-than-normal weather is favored in most of Hawaii, with the highest confidence for above-normal precipitation in Niihau and Kauai. Above-normal precipitation is also favored in Alaska.

US Drought Monitor one week change map ending May 7, 2024.

#Vermont passes bill to charge #FossilFuel companies for damage from #ClimateChange

This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML

Click the link to read the article on the NBC News website (Maura Barrett and Lucas Thompson). Here’s an excerpt:

May 7, 2024

Vermont lawmakers passed a bill this week that is designed to make big fossil fuel companies pay for damage from weather disasters fueled by climate change. The legislation is modeled after the Environmental Protection Agency’s superfund program, which requires the companies responsible for environmental contamination to either clean sites up themselves or reimburse the government for the costs of work to do so.  Vermont’s bill, referred to as its Climate Superfund Act, would similarly mandate that big oil companies and others with high emissions pay for damage caused by global warming.

The amounts owed would be determined based on calculations of the degree to which climate change contributed to extreme weather in Vermont, and how much money those weather disasters cost the state. From there, companies’ shares of the total would depend on how many metric tons of carbon dioxide each released into the atmosphere from 1995 to 2024. The law passed with just three no votes in Vermont’s state Senate in early April, followed by approval in the state House on Monday. The Senate will deliver a final vote later this week before the bill heads to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk.  State Sen. Anne Watson, a co-sponsor of the bill, said she hopes that if the law goes into effect, it pushes big oil companies “to become purveyors of renewable energy sources and keep fossil fuels in the ground.”

New #ColoradoRiver Guidelines are Only the Beginning: “What we advocate for in the paper is that the other issues not be lost in our rush to solve the mass balance problem” — John Fleck (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification

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)

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

May 9, 2024

Much attention is focused right now on rewriting Colorado River operating rules, to replace the soon-to-expire 2007 reservoir operating guidelines. But there is a growing frustration that the struggle to solve that relatively narrow problem “mass balance” problem (how much water, and where?) leaves out a range of incredibly important issues:

That’s from a new policy brief from my friends and colleagues at the Colorado River Research Group, a collaborative of researchers across the basin whose mission is to provide “an independent, scientific voice for the future of the Colorado River.” The brief grew out of conversations among the group’s members about both the strengths, as well as the shortcomings, of the current process.

We are mindful that much of what CRRG has been advocating for is directly on the table in the various proposals now being considered for post-2026 river management:

But there are so many other important issues left untouched by the P26 process (sorry, yes, some of us have started shortening it to “P26”) that the list we came up with among CRRG members is too long to blockquote here in a blog post – click through to read the white paper, it’s not too long.

What we advocate for in the paper is that the other issues not be lost in our rush to solve the mass balance problem.

“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

Audubon getting into West’s transmission: Organization believes new transmission will be crucial to address #ClimateChange but wants science foundation to do it right — Allen Best (@BigPivots)

Transmission lines and red rock. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

April 30, 2024

Audubon is hiring. The conservation organization wants to bring the science for which it is noted among conservation organizations to the selection of electrical transmission in Colorado and other intermountain states of the West.

“We don’t want to be an organization that stops something, because climate change is literally the existential threat to birds. And the renewable energy and storage that is needed require more transmission lines. So how do we work together to make this happen?” says Alice Madden, a former state legislator from Louisville who joined the National Audubon Society in March as senior director of climate strategy.Loui

Audubon already has a person working with developers on five proposed transmission lines in the Midwest. There an organized market called a regional transmission organization, or RTO, exists.

Western states remain fragmented in integration of electricity into an organized market. Colorado is akin to an island. The person that Madden hires will be responsible for working with developers to put new lines along highways, railroads, and other areas of disrupted habitat. If that is impossible, then the goal will be to route the transmission in the ways that cause least impact to birds.

“Routing is important, and Audubon has incredible mapping tools … so we can provide a wealth of information,” she says.

The organization already has had success in the West, though. Madden cites the organization’s work with developers of SunZia, a 550-mile high-voltage direct-current transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona.

Like most transmission lines, this one had a long history. It was proposed in 2006 and had a 17-year journey to final permitting. Audubon credits Pattern Energy, which joined the project in 2018 and partnered with Audubon to initiate early and active engagement with project developers.

“We literally guided them to best practices for routing, best practices for tower design, ways to avoid interruption of flight patterns,” says Madden.

Plus, the company committed to using an ultraviolet light-based system that was developed at Audubon’s Rowe Sanctuary. At the sanctuary, located along the Platte River in Nebraska, the technology has dramatically reduced mortality among sandhill cranes because of collisions. The technology makes the transmission lines that birds collide with most frequently more visible to them.

A 2023 Audubon report, “Birds and Transmission: Building the Grid Birds Need,” cites the work in New Mexico and Arizona as an approach that is “essential to optimize mitigation for birds, ensure the best data and science are used, and make projects into long-term successes worth of Audubon’s support.”

In the report’s preface, Marshall Johnson, the chief conservation officer for Audubon, speaks to the urgency of replacing fossil fuel generation with renewables. “The window to slow the rate of global temperature rise is narrowing, but the window still exists. If we are to make the most of this waning opportunity, we need to act quickly.”

Johnson goes on to lay out the need to develop renewable generation and then transmit it to population centers. Experts say the United States needs to add effectively double or triple transmission capacity. “How and where new transmission is constructed will have a tremendous impact on birds and our communities,” he wrote.

Audubon also issued the 2019 report, “Survival by Degrees: 389 Species on the Brink,” which warned that two-thirds of bird species in North America were vulnerable to extinction unless emissions are lowered.

That same report examined Colorado with greater granularity: 125 out of 241 species are climate vulnerable in summer if temperatures rise 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F). If temperature rise can be kept to 1.5 degrees C — which appears unlikely — the number of vulnerable species declines to 84.

Colorado in recent years has adopted two laws. One requires the state’s electrical utilities to join a regional transmission organization so that they can better share low-cost renewables over a broad hunk of real estate and in more than one time zone. Another law created the Colorado Electric Transmission Authority, or CETA, which heard the latest report from Audubon representatives in January. The organization has broad powers to build transmission that will help Colorado deeply decarbonize its electricity sources even as electricity expands into sectors now dominated by combustion of fossil fuels.

State Sen. Chris Hansen, a Democrat from Denver, the author of these and many other key pieces of energy transition legislation, says he believes Colorado and other states need to accelerate development of transmission.

Some have argued that the National Environmental Policy Act needs to be tweaked. Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis, in their 2022 book, “The Big Fix,” make the case for revisions.

“In the book, we call for carefully thought-out reform, not just in NEPA,” said Gillis, a former reporter for the New York Times, in an interview with Big Pivots. “There’s a whole suite of land-use policies where, if we just leave them as is, it will take us 30 to 40 years to do that which really needs to be done over the next 10 years.”

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, in a meeting with Pitkin County commissioners on April 9, mentioned the difficulty of transmission when crossing federal lands and the perceived need for streamlining regulation. Idaho is about 66% federal lands, Nevada is 85% federal lands, Colorado is 35%. NEPA, he said, is part of a broader conversation about whether regulatory review can be streamlined without losing the environmental scrutiny that is needed.

That conversation, Ritter added, is not just a Colorado one, but a national one.

“I just had a conversation with U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, and I think there’s ambition inside the United States Senate to try and streamline the reform and try and not lose anything in the process. It’s a federal statute that would have to be passed in order to modify NEPA and they’re trying to understand how to do that with bipartisan support as we speak.”

Madden is wary about reform of NEPA. Those things that motivated the creation of NEPA in 1969 remain. “But there are many, many ways it can be done faster,” she said. “This administration in particular has been trying to do that by employing more people to review these projects.”

“There are a lot of red-herrings about why this takes so long. I think the worst problem is not the permitting. It is the interconnection queue.”

She says 12,000 renewable energy projects across the United States are waiting to be connected to the grid. She identifies utilities as being the challenge.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently reported nearly 2,600 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are actively seeking grid interconnections. That is an eight-fold increase since 2014.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently released the Transmission Interconnection Roadmap that offers possible solutions to speeding up the interconnection of clean energy.

See: DOE releases first-ever roadmap to accelerate connecting more clean energy projects to the nation’s electric grid.

In her new position at Audubon, Madden has responsibility for implementing the organization’s climate strategy at the state and local levels. She previously was policy and political director for Greenpeace USA. She had also directed the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy & the Environmental at the University of Colorado School of Law.

Along the way she had also worked at the Department of Energy, was a climate change advisor to Ritter during the last two years of his term, and before that had been a member of the Colorado House of Representatives.