The boat ramp at Elk Creek Marina had to be temporarily closed so the docks could be moved out into deeper water. Colorado water managers are not happy that emergency releases from Blue Mesa Reservoir are impacting late summer lake recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
Colorado water managers unhappy with timing of emergency releases
In an effort to prop up water levels at the declining Lake Powell, federal water managers are negatively impacting recreation on Colorado’s biggest man-made lake.
That’s the message from Colorado water managers and marina operators at Blue Mesa Reservoir in Gunnison County. On Aug. 1, the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the reservoir, began emergency releases. By the time the releases are finished the first week of October, Blue Mesa is projected to fall to its second-lowest level ever, just 215,000 acre-feet, or 22.8% of its 941,000-acre-foot capacity.
As of Sept. 1, the reservoir was 37% full, which is about 68 feet down from a full reservoir, and a ring of muddy shoreline was growing. Parking lots and boat slips sat empty, and Pappy’s Restaurant was closed for the season. The dwindling water levels are first impacting Iola, the easternmost of Blue Mesa’s three basins. Iola is where the Gunnison River now cuts through a field of mud.
Eric Loken, who operates the reservoir’s two marinas (Elk Creek and Lake Fork), said he was given only nine days’ notice to empty Elk Creek Marina’s 180 slips. The dock system’s anchors, which are not built for low water, had to be moved deeper. He said about 25 people lost their jobs six weeks earlier than normal and the marinas lost about 25% of its revenue for the year.
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Sam Klomhaus):
Vega State Park’s boat ramps have been left high and dry this summer.
Every one of the park’s boat ramps are closed because of low water.
It was a bleak season for visitors to get boats on the high-elevation reservoir.
According to Park Manager James Masek, only one of the lake’s three boat ramps, the Island boat ramp, was even able to open this season, but it closed July 29.
Normally, Masek said, the Island, Early Settlers and Oak Point boat ramps open in May, and on good years, Island is able to stay open until October…
Vega Reservoir ended last year pretty low, Masek said, and didn’t get the snowpack on Grand Mesa needed to fill back up…
The park’s water level goes down as the summer progresses because the water is used for irrigation…
The visitation isn’t quite as high as it was last year, when the park saw a huge spike from people heading outside during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s consistent with previous years.
The planet would store 580 billon tons less carbon in plants and soil by the end of the century if the Montreal Protocol had never existed. That’s more than all the carbon held in Earth’s forests. Credit: Marc Pell/Unsplash
The international treaty that phased out the production of ozone-depleting chemicals has prevented between 0.65°C and 1°C of global warming, according to research.
The study also showed that carbon stored in vegetation through photosynthesis would have dropped by 30% without the treaty, which came into force in 1989.
Researchers from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States wrote in Nature that the Montreal Protocol was essential in protecting carbon stored in plants. Studies in the polar regions have shown that high-energy ultraviolet rays (UVB) reduce plant biomass and damage DNA. Forests and soil currently absorb 30% of human carbon dioxide emissions.
“At the ends of our simulations, which we finished around 2100, the amount of carbon which is being taken up by plants is 15% the value of our control world where the Montreal Protocol is enacted,” said lead author and atmospheric scientist Paul Young of Lancaster University.
In the simulation, the UVB radiation is so intense that plants in the midlatitudes stop taking up a net increase in carbon.
Plants in the tropics fare better, but humid forests would have 60% less ozone overhead than before, a state much worse than was ever observed in the Antarctic ozone hole.
A “World Avoided”
The study used a chemistry climate model, a weather-generating tool, a land surface model, and a carbon cycling model. It links ozone loss with declines in the carbon sink in plants for the first time.
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), ozone-depleting chemicals phased out by the Montreal Protocol, are potent greenhouse gases. The study estimated that CFCs would warm the planet an additional 1.7°C by 2100. Taken together, the damage from UVB radiation and the greenhouse effect of CFCs would add an additional 2.5°C warming by the century’s end. Today, the world has warmed, on average, 1.1°C at the surface, leading to more frequent droughts, heat waves, and extreme precipitation.
Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would reach 827 parts per million by the end of the century too, double the amount of carbon dioxide today (~412 parts per million).
The work analyzed three different scenarios: The first assumes that ozone-depleting substances stayed below 1960 levels when massive production kicked in. The second assumes that ozone-depleting chemicals peaked in the late 1980s before tapering off. The last assumes that ozone-depleting chemicals increase in the atmosphere every year by 3% through 2100.
The last scenario, called the “World Avoided,” assumes not only that the Montreal Protocol never happened but also that humans had no idea CFCs were harming ozone, even when the effects would become clear in the 2040s. The models also assume one kind of UVB damage to all vegetation, when in reality, plants react differently.
The ozone layer over Antarctica has stabilized and is expected to recover this century. Credit: Amy Moran/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
“The Montreal Protocol is regarded as one of the most successful global environmental treaties,” said University of Leeds atmospheric scientist Martyn Chipperfield, who was not involved in the research. “CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances are potent greenhouse gases, and the Montreal Protocol is known for having real benefits in addressing climate change by removing previous levels of high CFCs from the atmosphere.”
The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2016 brought climate change to the forefront. Countries agreed to gradually phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in applications such as air conditioning and fire extinguishing systems. HFCs originally replaced hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) and CFCs because they do not harm ozone. Yet HFCs are potent greenhouse gases.
The Montreal Protocol was the “best accidental climate treaty,” said Young. “It is an example of where science discovered there was a problem, and the world acted on that problem.”
Injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere has been proposed as one geoengineering solution to slow global warming. “People are seriously talking about this because it’s one of the most plausible geoengineering mechanisms, yet that does destroy ozone,” Young said. Calculating the harm to the carbon cycle is “the obvious follow-up experiment for us.”
The research highlights the importance of the U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) this fall, which will determine the success of worldwide climate targets.
Immediate and rapid reductions in greenhouse gases are necessary to stop the most damaging consequences of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Screen shot from the Vimeo film, “Rio Grande Headwaters Restoration Project: Five Ditches,” https://vimeo.com/364411112
Here’s the release from the Colorado Department of Agriculture:
The Colorado Department of Agriculture is accepting applications for a competitive grant program to assist with projects that help Colorado anticipate, prepare for, mitigate, adapt to, or respond to any event, trend, or climatological disturbance related to drought or climate. Resulting from Senate Bill 21-234, this funding is intended to support drought and climate resilience efforts for agricultural producers.
“Many farmers and ranchers have been affected by multi-year hazards: 2018 drought, 2019 freeze, 2020 drought and wildfires. Climate extremes can be very detrimental to producers and the 2021 season does not look any more forgiving,” said Conservation Services Division Director Les Owen. “These hardships have caused deep economic and ecological costs to agriculture in Colorado and this program aims to mitigate some of those losses and help prepare ag producers for changing climatic conditions.”
The purpose of the competitive grant program is to respond to Colorado’s prolonged drought conditions caused by absent monsoon seasons, record-high temperatures, and extreme evaporative demands from wind, low humidity and high temperatures. After several years of unusual weather patterns, a warm spring, dry summer, and critically hot autumn further contributed to the 2020 record-breaking wildfire season. So far in 2021, Colorado has experienced a long lasting and severe drought in most parts of the state.
CDA will award approximately $1.5 million in grants for drought-related projects. Projects that can demonstrate long-term and widespread benefits will be the most competitive. Funding can also be used to match investments in new projects.
Applications for the competitive grants are open now and the deadline to apply is September 30, 2021. All applications must be submitted via an online form (to see all application questions, click here but please note that this is for informational purposes only and cannot be used to submit an application). Applicants will be asked to include narrative statements about the project they are applying for, including the expected outcomes and drought preparedness impacts.
Eligible entities include Tribes; state government, municipalities, enterprises, counties and agencies; districts including Authorities, title 32/Special Districts (conservancy, conservation and irrigation districts); Federal agencies that apply with a state entity; Private Incorporated entities including mutual ditch companies, homeowners associations and corporations; Private individuals, partnerships and sole proprietors; and Non-Governmental Organizations.
We agreed there should be balance between lockdown measures and economic interests.
We patiently accumulated evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
We kept our cool through every quack remedy and grifter treatment.
We offered guidance to the confused and correctives to the misinformed.
We forbore ignorant assertions that the coronavirus was a hoax, bratty defiance of public health orders, puerile abuse of “freedom,” looney vaccine conspiracies.
We did this all with fear, as we watched wave after wave of infections disrupt our lives and kill members of our families.
But now, as we suffer through a second summer of illness and death, we find ourselves confronted with a category of people whose behavior is despicable — the COVID obstructionists, the ones who not only refuse to protect themselves but actively prevent others from doing so.
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There’s no point trying to understand them, no reasoning with them. They deserve no patience, no forbearance. The only reasonable response to these miscreants is anger. White hot anger.
Last weekend, Jefferson County Public Health staff were forced to close a mobile vaccination clinic after medical professionals were harassed and threatened. At one clinic someone threw some kind of liquid at a nurse. Passengers in cars threw garbage at the staff.
“It’s the epitome of selfishness and I am angry today,” Dawn Comstock, the agency’s executive director told The Denver Post.
Comstock speaks for all of us who have tried to do our part for the wellbeing of the community. We trusted the science. We recognized the obligation we have to our friends and neighbors. We accepted the inconvenience of mask-wearing and the negligible risks of vaccinations. We did this in service to the greater good. And in return, COVID deniers, pandemic conspiracists and vaccine obstructionists are literally killing us with their stupidity and selfishness. They are inflicting illness on our loved ones, and now we are angry.
What Comstock’s medical staff experienced is only one instance of a vile pattern of behavior in America. Blame starts with certain leaders.
From the very beginning of the pandemic some elected officials downplayed the danger. Former President Donald Trump assured Americans that the virus would magically disappear. He also promoted pea-brained treatments and made a show of not wearing a mask.
Colorado has long had its own COVID deniers, like Republican state Rep. Patrick Neville, who sued the governor over mask mandates, and various sheriffs who refused to enforce mask rules, and Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, who defied a public health order when she kept her Rifle restaurant open for sit-down service in May 2020.
Such tantrums set the tone for what was to come.
The emergence of vaccines held the promise of a return to normal life. But protection depended on community-wide participation, and too many Americans by the time the first vaccines were administered in December had been persuaded that the vaccines were unsafe or some nefarious form of government control. That meant that even with this pandemic-ending miracle of medical science at hand, some of our leaders and neighbors decided they would rather show off their imbecility than help eradicate the virus. Anti-vaccine parents were so threatening toward members of a school board in Grand Junction that board members had to have police escorts to their cars after a recent meeting. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis moved to block Florida schools from issuing mask mandates. Fox News host Tucker Carlson encouraged viewers to harass people wearing masks and call police on parents of mask-wearing kids. Eleven states have prohibited mask mandates. And there are innumerable individual acts of obstruction of the sort witnessed in Jefferson County last weekend.
To what end? The country is gripped by a fourth wave of infections, and hospitals in many parts of the country, including Colorado, are approaching or exceeding capacity as unvaccinated patients pour in.
In the beginning of the pandemic, it was easier to tolerate ignorance and stubbornness. Not anymore, not with nearly 700,000 or more dead and the highly-contagious delta variant tearing through the population. Now we want severity. We want mask requirements. We want vaccine mandates. We want crisis standards of care that prioritize vaccinated patients.
We will grieve for the unvaccinated who don’t make it, but there’s only so much room in our hearts, because we’re grieving the loss of our own loved ones who did not have to die. They could still be with us, and we are angry that they’re not.
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Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.
A new study in Nature reports that oil, gas and coal production must begin falling immediately to have even a 50 percent chance of keeping global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
After a summer of weather extremes that highlighted the urgency of limiting global warming in starkly human terms, new research is clarifying what it will take to do so. In order to have just a 50 percent chance of meeting the most ambitious climate target, the study found, the production of all fossil fuels will need to start declining immediately, and a significant majority of the world’s oil, gas and coal reserves will have to remain underground over the next few decades.
While the research, published Wednesday [September 8, 2021] in the journal Nature, is only the latest to argue that meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement goals to limit warming requires a rapid pivot to clean energy, it lays out with clear and specific figures exactly how far from those targets the world remains.
“The inescapable evidence that hopefully we’ve shown and that successive reports have shown is that if you want to meet 1.5 degrees, then global production has to start declining,” said Daniel Welsby, a researcher at University College London, in the United Kingdom, and the study’s lead author. As part of the Paris Agreement, nations agreed to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
The study found that nearly 60 percent of global oil and gas reserves and about 90 percent of coal reserves must be left unexploited by 2050, though a portion of those fuels could be produced in the second half of the century. Total oil and gas production must begin declining immediately, the research said, and continue falling at about 3 percent annually through 2050. Coal production must fall at an even steeper rate.
While the authors noted a few signs of change, including that coal production is already on the decline, the current course is far off what’s needed. In March, the International Energy Agency warned that oil production was on track to rebound from a pandemic-driven dip and would surpass 2019 levels within a couple of years. That projection came on the heels of a separate report in December by the United Nations Environment Program, which said energy producing countries are set to expand fossil fuel output for years.
The new paper builds on these studies and other related work to estimate the “unextractable” portion of the fossil fuel stores that are currently considered profitable to exploit—so-called proven reserves. Put another way, the research effectively says that most of the fossil fuels that energy companies currently list as financial assets, or that governments report as strategic ones, would be rendered worthless if the world is to have a shot at limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Click here to go to the Water for Colorado website tool for local funding initiatives:
Solving Colorado’s Water Issues
Colorado needs long-term funding to conserve, maintain, and restore our water supplies, river and stream flows, and economy in the face of numerous challenges, from prolonged drought and rising temperatures driven by climate change and population growth. Maintaining healthy river systems and water availability is essential to sustain Colorado’s way of life, preserve natural resources, grow our crops, and bolster our economy.
Our State Water Plan Lacks Sustainable Funding
The Colorado Water Plan, developed by the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2015, sets forward a path to secure our water future by protecting Colorado’s rivers, securing clean, safe, reliable drinking water for our communities, and preserving our agricultural heritage.
Colorado’s existing public funding resources are insufficient to address the current and future needs identified in the Water Plan to secure our water future. Establishing new sources of funding – whether local or statewide – will help to keep Colorado’s rivers healthy and flowing to continue to support clean drinking water for all Coloradans and reliable water supplies for farms and ranches across the state.
In the last few years, Coloradans have illustrated their support for water funding by approving three different tax increases where water is the beneficiary. In 2019, the passing of Proposition DD legalized sports betting in Colorado with the majority of the proceeds of the betting taxes funding Colorado’s Water Plan. At the local level, both the Colorado River Water Conservation District and the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District successfully passed public funding initiatives to increase their mill levies in the fall of 2020, with other municipalities like the cities of Denver and Boulder and counties like Summit and Chaffee passing voter-approved funding for water and rivers in the last three years. Coloradans clearly understand the need for additional water funding and they are willing to pay for it.
How (and Why) to Use This Guide
The purpose of this guide is to assist water conservancy districts, nonprofits, local governments, citizen stakeholder initiatives and others in learning more about successfully implementing new local sources of public funding for water in Colorado. This guide is intended to help you understand the general process and important questions to ask when pursuing a public funding measure, such as a bond, property tax, sales tax, or mill levy increase. You will also see video interviews with individuals and organizations that have participated in public funding measures in Colorado, as well as with experts in the field of public funding.
Book Cliffs and Mt. Garfield (on right, approximate altitude 6,600′) in Mesa County, Colorado. By User Skez on en.wikipedia – Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is (was) here03:31, 2 March 2006 Skez 992×708 (137,232 bytes) (Near Grand Junction, CO Taken by Sean Davis http://flickr.com/photos/skez/32161524/), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=835434
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Sam Klomhaus):
A group of concerned Grand Valley organizations announced Wednesday they plan to appeal a decision by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to implement total maximum daily levels of selenium and recoverable iron in watersheds north of the Colorado River in the Grand Valley.
Selenium, recoverable iron and E. Coli are all “pollutants of concern” in the watershed, according to a CDPHE report on the total maximum daily levels.
According to the report, elevated selenium levels can cause mortality, deformity and reproductive failure in fish and aquatic birds.
The decision, which would affect 14 “washes” from the Government Highline Canal diversion to below Salt Creek, was announced Aug. 10. The appeal would stop the decision from being forwarded to the Environmental Protection Agency and formally implemented while the appeal process is ongoing.
Mark Harris, general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association, said Wednesday he was “saddened and surprised” by the CDPHE’s decision, which he said ignored ongoing efforts to mitigate selenium levels in area water, as well as the amount of selenium that naturally occurs in area soils and gets washed into the watershed whenever it rains…
Harris said that while protecting water quality is important, the amount of selenium reduction the CDPHE is requiring is impossible from a practical and cost standpoint.
To comply with the regulations, Harris explained, the economic and physical landscape of the Grand Valley would have to change. The cost of complying with CDPHE’s proposed regulations would be borne by area governments and passed on to residents, Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce CEO Diane Schwenke said.
Organizations supporting the appeal are Associated Members of Growth and Development, city of Fruita, city of Grand Junction, Mesa County Valley School District 51, Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce, Grand Valley Water Users Association, Housing and Building Association of Colorado, Mack airport, Mesa County, Orchard Mesa Irrigation District, Palisade Irrigation District and Western Colorado Contractors Association.
The selenium in the soil is washed out of the Bookcliffs and into the watershed, Harris said, and mitigation efforts include lining irrigation canals and ditches to keep the selenium from leeching in.
Harris said there has already been a lot of success reducing the selenium levels in the watershed since the 1970s and 80s, success he contends the CDPHE has ignored.
A lateral brings water from the Grand Valley Irrigation Company canal to this parcel of land, which is owned by private equity firm Water Asset Management, a company that has been accused of water speculation. A state work group has released its report on investment water speculation, but failed to come to a consensus and did not make recommendations to lawmakers. CREDIT: BETHANY BLITZ/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Trying to recommend ways to improve on Colorado’s anti-water speculation law is a tough job, primarily because the state’s constitution, statutes and legal precedence already do a good job of it.
It doesn’t take much to set off alarms in Colorado’s water community, and in 2019 there were purchases of irrigated land by entities not normally associated with water use. According to water journalist Allen Best, “large, water-rich ranches in the Grand Valley on the West Slope by investment banks” tripped all kinds of alarms across the state. Of all the nightmares that keep Colorado water interests awake at night, water speculation is among the spookiest.
During the 2020 legislative session, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 20-048, which directed the director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources to convene a working group to recommend ways to shore up the state’s protections against water speculation.
Joe Frank, manager of the Lower South Platte Water Conservancy District, was named to the 22-member working group, which submitted its final report, titled “Report of the Work Group to Explore Ways to Strengthen Current Water Anti-Speculation Law,” last month on Aug. 13, just two days short of the deadline.
Critics immediately denounced the report, saying it has little value because it doesn’t actually make any recommendations to the Legislature. In an interview with Best, Frank said there’s still work to be done before any new laws can be written.
Talking last week with the Journal-Advocate, Frank said it’s going to be difficult to figure out ways to strengthen something that’s already quite strong.
“We took it upon ourselves to define two types of water speculation,” Frank said. “There’s traditional speculation, which is already pretty well addressed. And then we defined what we call ‘investment water speculation,’ and that’s harder to get your hands around.”
Under Colorado water law the water in Colorado is a public resource for beneficial use by public agencies, private persons and entities. A water right, which is owned, is created to use a portion of the public’s water resources, and is subject to water availability and under the terms specified by a water court. Those specifications — date of priority, physical location, and the amount that can be used by the water right – appear in what is called a decree.
Cities own water rights and the infrastructure to deliver such rights, so people are purchasing water from the city even though water in Colorado is a public resource. Water rights are real property rights and can be sold and traded as long as it is continued to be put to beneficial use…
According to Frank, about the only way to prevent “investment water speculation” is to define actions that prove intent, and that raises the specter of yet another agrarian nightmare; trampling on a property owner’s right to sell his property.
“Is it the intent to come in and profit from the increased value of water?” Frank asked. “It has to do with point of sale and real property. But can you pass a law that says you can interfere with the market?”
In other words, in order to prove intent, it would be necessary to examine and have some legal control over the sale of land and water rights. In theory, an investor from Manhattan could buy several irrigated farms, allow the water to be used for crops for a period of time while the dollar value of those shares increases, and then sell those shares to, say, a growing Denver suburb and pocket the profit.
State Sen. Don Coram, who wrote SB 20-048, has gone on record saying he doesn’t want the state to get involved in curtailing property rights.
Frank said there may be no easy way to write anti-speculation legislation, but rather it may take a series of smaller actions.
“The over-arching issue that we have to solve is supply and demand,” Frank said. “When there’s more demand than supply, that drives up the price of water. Conservation and efficiency only go so far, and nobody is creating any more water.”
A scenic lake in western Colorado is poised to become the public destination admirers have long envisioned.
That’s after the announcement of Sweetwater Lake entering the U.S. Forest Service portfolio.
A recent press release promised wildlife protection and new recreation access to the 488 acres in a remote pocket between Garfield and Eagle counties, backdropped by Flat Tops Wilderness. Previously, the shores had been privately held and feared to be in the crosshairs of development.
“Save the Lake” was the fundraising campaign waged by Eagle Valley Land Trust. Last year, in partnership with The Conservation Fund, the lake was saved to the tune of $7.1 million.
Now, thanks to millions of more dollars from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, Sweetwater Lake has been transferred to White River National Forest. After decades-long shortages, Congress’s move to fully restore that fund last summer was seen as critical for federal land managers to take control of the lake.
Wildfires burn millions of acres of land every year, leaving changed landscapes that are prone to flooding. Less well known is that these already vulnerable regions can also intensify and in some cases initiate thunderstorms.
Wildfire burn scars are often left with little vegetation and with a darker soil surface that tends to repel rather than absorb water. These changes in vegetation and soil properties leave the land more susceptible to flooding and erosion, so less rainfall is necessary to produce a devastating flood and debris flow than in an undisturbed environment.
Burn scars can also initiate or invigorate thunderstorms, raising the risk both of flooding and of lightning that could spark more fires in surrounding areas, as my research with fellow atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Page has shown.
Factors contributing to thunderstorms
Three things contribute to the potential for burn scars to fuel thunderstorms: lack of vegetation, reduced soil moisture and lower surface albedo – essentially how well it reflects sunlight. When burned soil is darker, it absorbs more energy from the sun.
These factors contribute to higher surface temperatures over the burn scar area relative to unburned areas nearby. The temperature difference can drive air currents, causing convection – the motion of warmer air rising and cooler air sinking. When that rising warm air draws in more humid air from surrounding areas, it can produce cumulonimbus clouds and even thunderstorms that can trigger rain and flooding.
Fire officials explain how burned land becomes more flood prone.
In an analysis of a flash flood that occurred on burn scars in Australia in 2003, scientists found that the soil’s moisture was low and its albedo in the burn area had fallen from 0.2 to 0.08. To put that into perspective, charcoal has an albedo of about 0.04 and fresh snow is nearly the maximum of 1. When the scientists simulated those changes in a computer model, they found that if the land hadn’t been burned, just over a tenth of an inch of rain would have fallen. Instead, those changes led to 1.25 inches and severe flooding.
Studies have found that the intensity of this effect of burn scars on storm potential decreases over time, but the risk remains until the vegetation regrows.
When I used to pilot sailplanes, also known as gliders, I often rode the thermals – upward currents of warm air – in the Santa Catalina Mountains near Tucson and in Colorado’s Front Range. The best locations for catching thermals were on the south and southwest slopes of rugged terrain, where the thermals became chutes of rapidly rising air.
A wildfire in one of these locations would burn more intensely because of the swift air currents, leaving a dark, water-repelling surface with little vegetation behind. With moisture from the Southwest Monsoon that arrives in the region in late summer, these thermal chutes, intensified by burn scars, are prime locations for initiating or intensifying storm-producing cumulonimbus clouds and flooding.
In these arid regions, plant recovery may take three to five years or more, particularly in locations where intense fires burned on south- and west-facing slopes where sunlight is more intense. Many of the record-breaking 2020 wildfires in Colorado and Arizona occurred in mountainous terrain where flash flooding on burn scars has been deadly in the past. These areas will continue to be of particular concern over the next few years.
How long burn scars will continue to fuel storms depends on how arid the region is and how quickly vegetation recovers.
Forecasters, emergency responders and people living in and near wildfire burn scars need to be aware that these areas are at risk both for potential major flooding and debris flows, and for invigorated storms with a potential for heavy precipitation.
Record downpours from Hurricane Ida overwhelmed cities across the Northeast on Sept. 1, 2021, hitting some with more than 3 inches of rain an hour. Water poured into subway stations in New York City, and streets flooded up to the rooftops of cars in Philadelphia. The storm had already wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast after hitting Louisiana three days earlier as a Category 4 hurricane.
Ida had weakened well below hurricane strength by the time it reached the Northeast, so how did it still cause so much rain?
Two major factors likely contributed to its extended extreme rainfall.
First, Ida’s tropical moisture interacted with developing warm and cold fronts.
Second, evidence is mounting that, as the climate warms, the amount of precipitation from heavy rainstorms is increasing, especially in the central and eastern U.S.
As hurricanes move northward from the tropics, they often transition from their characteristic circular shape to become “extratropical cyclones” with warm and cold fronts extending outward from the low pressure at the center. Even though they no longer have the intense winds that they did in the tropics, they still bring tropical humidity. That moist air is lifted along the fronts, and long-lasting, very heavy rain can result. That was happening as Ida’s remnants moved toward the Northeast.
Forecasters emphasized the threat of flash flooding well ahead of its arrival, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Prediction Center issued a rare “high risk” of excessive rainfall outlook for parts of the Northeast a day in advance.
The widespread, intense rainfall overwhelmed rivers and drainage systems in the highly populated corridor from Philadelphia to New York to Boston. That led to major flash flooding and at least 50 deaths in the region, in addition to at least 17 deaths earlier along the Gulf Coast. Newark, New Jersey, recorded 8.41 inches of rain, their most ever in a single day, shattering the old record by over 1.5 inches. Weather stations in New York City saw rain rates over 3 inches per hour. The extreme rainfall arrived with tornadoes in several states, including Maryland and New Jersey.
Warmer climate, heavier rainfall
Extreme rain and flash flooding aren’t new to the Northeast, and they often result from hurricanes or their remnants. The remains of Hurricanes Agnes (1972), Floyd (1999), Irene (2011), Lee (2011) and Sandy (2012), among others, all brought widespread rainfall and flooding through the area.
Yet, heavy downpours are becoming more common in the region as the climate warms.
The reasons are fairly simple: Warmer air can have more water vapor in it. With every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) increase in temperature, there can be about 7% more moisture in the air. This is formally known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.
Because the amount of rain that a storm produces is closely connected to the amount of water vapor in the air, this means that, all else being equal, heavy downpours are more likely in a warmer climate. It explains why heavy rain occurs year-round in the tropics, whereas it is much more likely in summer than winter in the U.S.
This is also why the intensity of rainfall is expected to increase as the climate warms. When weather patterns that bring together the ingredients for heavy rainfall, like hurricanes, occur in a warmer world, more moisture is available, and more rain falls. Unfortunately, this is not a linear process: A small bit of added moisture can lead to a lot more rain.
Observed changes in heavy precipitation across the U.S., from the 4th National Climate Assessment. This figure shows four different metrics of heavy precipitation change. For example, the upper right panel shows that in the northeastern U.S., the amount of rain in the heaviest precipitation events increased by 55% from 1958-2016. 4th National Climate Assessment
Hurricanes are limited to certain areas, but extreme rainfall from other types of storms can occur just about anywhere – think of intense cloudbursts during the summer monsoon in the Desert Southwest, or organized thunderstorm systems like the one that caused deadly flooding in Tennessee in August 2021.
Many communities are already highly vulnerable to the type of extreme precipitation that has been observed historically. Floods have always been a hazard, and intense rainfall can test the infrastructure even in places where it happens often. But as the climate changes, these risks will only increase further.
This article was updated Sept. 3 with the Northeast death toll rising.
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During meteorological summer (June-August), the average temperature for the Lower 48 was 74.0°F, 2.6°F above average, nominally eclipsing the extreme heat of the Dust Bowl in 1936 by nearly 0.01°F and essentially tying 1936 for the warmest summer on record. A record 18.4 percent of the contiguous U.S. experienced record-warm temperatures for this season. For August, the contiguous U.S. average temperature was also 74.0°F, 1.9°F above the 20th-century average and ranked as the 14th-warmest August on record. For the year to date, the contiguous U.S. temperature was 55.6°F, 1.8°F above the 20th-century average, ranking 13th warmest in the January-August record.
The summer precipitation total across the Lower 48 was 9.48 inches, 1.16 inches above average, ranking eighth wettest in the historical record. The August precipitation total for the contiguous U.S. was 3.09 inches, 0.47 inch above average, ranking 14th wettest in the 127-year period of record. The year-to-date precipitation total across the contiguous U.S. was 21.19 inches, 0.48 inch above the long-term average, ranking in the middle third of the January-August record.
Devastating flash flooding and fatalities resulted from multiple events during August including Tropical Storm Fred in western North Carolina, convective flooding from a complex of storms across middle Tennessee, Hurricane Ida across Louisiana and portions of the Northeast in early September and from Tropical Storm Henri, also across parts of the Northeast. With 35 fatalities accounted for during August*, it was the deadliest month for flooding across the U.S. since Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Wildfires continued to spread across the western U.S. during August as the Dixie Fire in north-central California became the second-largest fire in the state’s history. The Caldor Fire also in California grew rapidly during August, threatening South Lake Tahoe communities. Air quality remained a concern across the U.S. as ash and fine particulates from the many wildfires obscured the skies.
*The remnants of Hurricane Ida impacted the Northeast in early September, raising the 2021 fatality count outside of the August observation period.
This monthly summary from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides to government, business, academia and the public to support informed decision-making.
August
Temperature
August temperatures were above average across the West Coast, Southwest and from the Plains to the East Coast. Vermont and New Hampshire both had their warmest August on record while Maine and Massachusetts ranked second warmest. Much of the above-average warmth can be attributed to warm overnight temperatures. Temperatures were near to below average across much of the northern Rockies and the southern Plains.
The Alaska average August temperature was 49.4°F, 0.1°F below the long-term mean, ranking in the middle third of the 97-year period of record for the state. Temperatures were above average across portions of the Southeast Interior, Panhandle and Aleutian regions. Temperatures were cooler than average across the North Slope, Northeast Interior, northern West Coast and parts of Bristol Bay. A persistent cold low-pressure system over the northern Chukchi-Beaufort Seas during August contributed to the cooler-than-average temperatures and the largest observed sea ice extent over the Chukchi Sea since 2006.
Precipitation
Precipitation was above average across portions of the central and northern Rockies, the northern Plains, Great Lakes and from the Deep South to southern New England. Mississippi ranked fourth wettest while Tennessee had its fifth-wettest August on record. The Southwest monsoon continued to be active in August, eliminating much of the year-to-date precipitation deficit across the region. Tucson, Arizona, had its wettest August and second-wettest summer on record. Precipitation was below average across portions of the West, southern Rockies, central Plains, Midwest, northern Great Lakes and northern New England.
Statewide precipitation for Alaska was above average for August, but varied by region. Precipitation was below average across the Aleutians, Bristol Bay and Northwest Gulf regions while the interior regions, Northeast Gulf and Panhandle regions experienced above-average precipitation for the month.
According to the August 31 U.S. Drought Monitor report, approximately 46.6 percent of the contiguous U.S. was in drought, slightly more than the coverage at the beginning of August. Drought conditions expanded or intensified across the Northern Tier, the Pacific Northwest and portions of California. Drought coverage and/or intensity lessened across parts of the Four Corners region, the Midwest, Hawaii and Puerto Rico and was eliminated in Alaska.
An additional note on Hurricane Ida precipitation and temperature implications: As is typical with very heavy rainfall events, localized bands of very heavy rain may not be completely captured by the gauge-based observing network, which is the basis for this analysis. This circumstance can lead to an underrepresentation of actual rainfall totals. The issue can be compounded by disruptions to the observers’ ability to report values during or following a severe event and, in this case, several of our reporting stations posted missing data for both temperature and precipitation during this event. Additionally, quality assurance routines may flag large valid precipitation values as erroneous, resulting in underestimated values. NCEI is working to ensure all reports are indeed validated. As a result, a more complete accounting of the temperature statistics and precipitation across Louisiana during August will be available with the September report.
Summer (June-August)
Temperature
Summer temperatures were above average to record warmest from the West Coast to the Great Lakes and into the Northeast as well as across portions of the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast. California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Idaho each reported their warmest June-August on record. Sixteen additional states had a top-five warmest summer on record. No state ranked below average for the summer season. Temperatures were below average across portions of the southern Plains and Southeast. Warm overnight temperatures heavily influenced the warm summer temperatures, especially across portions of the Southeast, where daytime temperatures were below average for the season.
The Alaska statewide average temperature for the summer was 51.4°F, 1.0°F above average and ranked in the warmest one-third of the 97-year record. Temperatures were warmer than average across much of the eastern half of the state as well as across the Aleutians and near average for much of the rest of the state.
Precipitation
Precipitation was above average across portions of the Great Basin and Southwest, from the southern Plains to the Great Lakes and across much of the eastern U.S. Mississippi had its wettest summer on record with Alabama, Michigan, New York and Massachusetts ranking among their five wettest summers on record. Precipitation was below average from the Northwest to the western Great Lakes and into the central Plains. Minnesota had its seventh-driest summer on record.
Precipitation in Alaska was above average across much of the northern half of the state as well as across portions of the Northeast Gulf and Panhandle regions. Precipitation was below average in the southwestern portion of the state. Kotzebue had its wettest summer on record, reporting 9.21 inches and besting the previous record, set in 1963, by nearly an inch. The wildfire season was well-below average with only 254,000 acres consumed — less than half of the median value.
Year-to-date (January-August)
Temperature
Year-to-date temperatures were above average from the West Coast to the Great Lakes and into the Northeast as well as across parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast. California and Maine each reported their third-warmest January-August on record. Sixteen additional states had a top-ten warmest year-to-date period. Temperatures were below average across much of the southern Plains and lower Mississippi Valley.
Year-to-date temperatures across Alaska were near average with above-average temperatures observed across the southwestern portion of the state. Much of the rest of the state experienced near average temperatures for this period.
Precipitation
January-August precipitation was above average from the Deep South to the Midwest, across the Southeast and portions of the Northeast. Mississippi had its third-wettest such year-to-date period on record. Precipitation was below average from the West Coast to the western Great Lakes and across portions of northern New England. Montana ranked fifth driest while three additional states ranked among the driest 10 January-August periods on record.
For Alaska, January-August precipitation was above average across the West Coast, North Slope and from the Central Interior to the Panhandle. Precipitation was below average in parts of the Cook Inlet region.
For more detailed climate information, check out our comprehensive August 2021 U.S. Climate report scheduled for release on September 14, 2021.
Synopsis: A transition from ENSO neutral to La Niña is favored in the next couple of months, with a 70-80% chance of La Niña during the Northern Hemisphere winter 2021-22.
In the last month, ENSO-neutral continued with near-to-below average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) persisting in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. In the last week, all of the Niña index values ranged from -0.2oC to -0.3oC. Negative subsurface temperature anomalies (averaged from 180-100oW) remained steady in August, reflecting below-average temperatures that extended from the surface to ~250m depth in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Low-level wind anomalies were easterly over the western Pacific Ocean, while upper-level wind anomalies were westerly over the western and east-centralPacific. Tropical convection was suppressed near and west of the Date Line and enhanced over Indonesia. Given these conditions, the ocean-atmosphere system reflected ENSO-neutral, but is edging toward La Niña.
The IRI/CPC plume average of forecasts for the Niño-3.4 SST region from the last month favored borderline or weak La Niña during the fall and winter 2021-22. The forecaster consensus this month, however, favors the latest predictions from the NCEP CFSv2 and the North American Multi-Model Ensemble, which suggest higher chances for the emergence of La Niña. At this time, forecasters anticipate La Niña to be of weak strength (seasonal average Niño-3.4 index values between -0.5oC to – 0.9oC). In summary, a transition from ENSO-neutral to La Niña is favored in the next couple of months, with a 70-80% chance of La Niña during the Northern Hemisphere winter 2021-22 (click CPC/IRI consensus forecast for the chances in each 3-month period).
The dry bed of the Arkansas River near the Santa Fe Trail crossing at Cimarron, Kansas. The Ogallala aquifer groundwater levels in much of western Kansas started dropping in the 1950s as pumping increased, according to the Kansas Geological Survey. File Photo / Max McCoy
For decades, the Texas Panhandle was green with cotton, corn and wheat. Wells drew a thousand gallons (3,785 liters) a minute from the seemingly bottomless Ogallala aquifer, allowing farmers to thrive despite frequent dry spells and summer heat.
But groundwater that sustained generations is drying up, creating another problem across the Southern plains: Without enough rain or groundwater for crops, soil can blow away — as it did during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
“We wasted the hell out of the water,” says Muleshoe, Texas, farmer Tim Black, recalling how farmers irrigated when he was a kid. Water flooded furrows or sprayed in high arcs before farmers adopted more efficient center-pivot systems.
His grandfather could reach water with a post-hole digger. Black is lucky to draw 50 gallons (189 liters) a minute from wells up to 400 feet (122 meters) deep.
Now farmers are facing tough choices, especially in parts of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Some are growing less-thirsty crops or improving irrigation. Others, like Black, are replacing some cash crops with cattle and pastureland.
And more are planting native grasses that go dormant during drought, while deep roots hold soil and green with the slightest rain…
Black, a former corn farmer, plants native grasses on corners of his fields, as pasture for cattle and between rows of wheat and annual grass.
The transition to cattle, he hopes, will allow his oldest son to stay on the land Black’s grandparents began plowing 100 years ago. His younger son is a data analyst near Dallas…
More than half the currently irrigated land in portions of western Texas, eastern New Mexico and the Oklahoma Panhandle could be lost by the end of the century, according to a study last year. And the central part of the aquifer could lose up to 40% of irrigated area by 2100.
Those losses might be slowed as farmers adapt to lower water levels, researchers say. But the projections underscore the need for planning and incentives in vulnerable areas.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is prioritizing grasslands conservation in a “Dust Bowl Zone” in parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
But reestablishing native vegetation in the sandy soil over the Ogallala has proven difficult where irrigation ceased on former Kansas farmland. The same is true on land outside the Ogallala previously irrigated with river water, including in Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley.
Extended periods of drought that plagued the Southwest over the past 20 years likely will continue, says meteorologist Brad Rippey with the USDA.
So farmers may need to use some remaining groundwater to reestablish native grasses, says study co-author Meagan Schipanski, an associate professor of soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University.
Historic photo of the High Plains in Haskell County, Kansas, showing a treeless semi-arid grassland and a buffalo wallow or circular depression in the level surface. (Photo by W.D. Johnson, 1897)
In response to the severe drought conditions in the West and Great Plains, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today its plans to help cover the cost of transporting feed for livestock that rely on grazing. USDA is updating the Emergency Assistance for Livestock, Honey Bees and Farm-raised Fish Program (ELAP) to immediately cover feed transportation costs for drought impacted ranchers. USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) will provide more details and tools to help ranchers get ready to apply at their local USDA Service Center later this month.
“USDA is currently determining how our disaster assistance programs can best help alleviate the significant economic, physical and emotional strain agriculture producers are experiencing due to drought conditions,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “The duration and intensity of current drought conditions are merciless, and the impacts of this summer’s drought will be felt by producers for months to come. Today’s announcement is to provide relief as ranchers make fall and winter herd management decisions.”
ELAP provides financial assistance to eligible producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish for losses due to disease, certain adverse weather events or loss conditions as determined by the Secretary of Agriculture.
ELAP already covers the cost of hauling water during drought, and this change will expand the program beginning in 2021 to cover feed transportation costs where grazing and hay resources have been depleted. This includes places where:
Drought intensity is D2 for eight consecutive weeks as indicated by the U.S. Drought Monitor;
Drought intensity is D3 or greater; or
USDA has determined a shortage of local or regional feed availability.
Cost share assistance will also be made available to cover eligible cost of treating hay or feed to prevent the spread of invasive pests like fire ants.
Under the revised policy for feed transportation cost assistance, eligible ranchers will be reimbursed 60% of feed transportation costs above what would have been incurred in a normal year. Producers qualifying as underserved (socially disadvantaged, limited resource, beginning or military veteran) will be reimbursed for 90% of the feed transportation cost above what would have been incurred in a normal year.
A national cost formula, as established by USDA, will be used to determine reimbursement costs which will not include the first 25 miles and distances exceeding 1,000 transportation miles. The calculation will also exclude the normal cost to transport hay or feed if the producer normally purchases some feed. For 2021, the initial cost formula of $6.60 per mile will be used (before the percentage is applied), but may be adjusted on a state or regional basis.
To be eligible for ELAP assistance, livestock must be intended for grazing and producers must have incurred feed transportation costs on or after Jan. 1, 2021. Although producers will self-certify losses and expenses to FSA, producers are encouraged to maintain good records and retain receipts and related documentation in the event these documents are requested for review by the local FSA County Committee. The deadline to file an application for payment for the 2021 program year is Jan. 31, 2022.
Additional USDA Drought Assistance
USDA has authorized other flexibilities to help producers impacted by drought. USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA) extended deadlines for premium and administrative fee payments and deferred and waived the resulting interest accrual to help farmers and ranchers through widespread drought conditions in many parts of the nation. Additionally, RMA authorized emergency procedures to help streamline and accelerate the adjustment of losses and issuance of indemnity payments to crop insurance policyholders in impacted areas and updated policy to allow producers with crop insurance to hay, graze or chop cover crops at any time and still receive 100% of the prevented planting payment. This policy change supports use of cover crops, which improves soil health can help producers build resilience to drought.
Meanwhile, USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) provides technical and financial assistance to improve irrigation efficiency and water storage in soil, helping producers build resilience to drought. In response to drought this year, NRCS targeted $41.8 million in Arizona, California, Colorado and Oregon through Conservation Incentive Contracts, a new option available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, focused on drought practices.
USDA offers a comprehensive portfolio of disaster assistance programs. On farmers.gov, the Disaster Assistance Discovery Tool, Disaster Assistance-at-a-Glance fact sheet (PDF, 4.7 MB), and Farm Loan Discovery Tool can help producers and landowners determine all program or loan options available for disaster recovery assistance.
The rise of coronavirus variants has highlighted the huge influence evolutionary biology has on daily life. But how mutations, random chance and natural selection produce variants is a complicated process, and there has been a lot of confusion about how and why new variants emerge.
Until recently, the most famous example of rapid evolution was the story of the peppered moth. In the mid-1800s, factories in Manchester, England, began covering the moth’s habitat in soot, and the moth’s normal white coloring made them visible to predators. But some moths had a mutation that made them darker. Since they were better camouflaged in their new world, they could evade predators and reproduce more than their white counterparts.
We are an evolutionary biologist and an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh who work together to track and control the evolution of pathogens. Over the past year and half, we’ve been closely following how the coronavirus has acquired different mutations around the world.
Coronaviruses use RNA to store information, and small changes in that genetic code can lead to new strains of the virus. Vchal/ iStock via Getty Images Plus
How a virus mutates
For any organism, including a virus, copying its genetic code is the essence of reproduction – but this process is often imperfect. Coronaviruses use RNA for their genetic information, and copying RNA is more error-prone than using DNA. Researchers have shown that when the coronavirus replicates, around 3% of new virus copies have a new, random error, otherwise known as a mutation.
Each infection produces millions of viruses within a person’s body, leading to many mutated coronaviruses. However, the number of mutated viruses is dwarfed by the much larger number of viruses that are the same as the strain that started the infection.
Nearly all of the mutations that occur are harmless glitches that don’t change how the virus works – and others in fact harm the virus. Some small fraction of changes may make the virus more infectious, but these mutants must also be lucky. To give rise to a new variant, it must successfully jump to a new person and replicate many copies.
The bottleneck of transmission is what limits the ability of a new variant to infect another person. Vaughn Cooper via Biorender, CC BY-ND
The small odds of a mutant being transmitted is called the “population bottleneck.” The fact that it is only a small number of the viruses that start the next infection is the critical, random factor that limits the probability that new variants will arise. The birth of every new variant is a chance event involving a copying error and an unlikely transmission event. Out of the millions of coronavirus copies in an infected person, the odds are remote that a fitter mutant is among the few that spread to another person and become amplified into a new variant.
Mutations have changed the structure of the spike protein, seen in red, and made the coronavirus better able to infect cells using the ACE2 receptor, seen in blue. Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
How do new variants emerge?
Unfortunately, uncontrolled spread of a virus can overcome even the tightest bottlenecks. While most mutations have no effect on the virus, some can and have increased how contagious the coronavirus is. If a fast-spreading strain is able to cause a large number of COVID-19 cases somewhere, it will start to out-compete less contagious strains and generate a new variant – just like the delta variant did.
Many researchers are studying which mutations lead to more transmissible versions of the coronavirus. It turns out that variants have tended to have many of the same mutations that increase the amount of virus an infected person produces. With more than a million new infections occurring every day and billions of people still unvaccinated, susceptible hosts are rarely in short supply. So, natural selection will favor mutations that can exploit all these unvaccinated people and make the coronavirus more transmissible.
Under these circumstances, the best way to constrain the evolution of the coronavirus is to reduce the number of infections.
Vaccines stop new variants
The delta variant has spread around the globe, and the next variants are already on the rise. If the goal is to limit infections, vaccines are the answer.
Even though vaccinated people can still get infected with the delta variant, they tend to experience shorter, milder infections than unvaccinated individuals. This greatly reduces the chances of any mutated virus – either one that makes the virus more transmissible or one that could allow it to get past immunity from vaccines – from jumping from one person to another.
Eventually, when nearly everyone has some immunity to the coronavirus from vaccination, viruses that break through this immunity could gain a competitive advantage over other strains. It is theoretically possible that in this situation, natural selection will lead to variants that can infect and cause serious disease in vaccinated people.
However, these mutants must still escape the population bottleneck. It is unlikely that vaccine-induced immunity will be the major player in variant emergence as long as there are lots of new infections occurring. It’s simply a numbers game, and for now, the modest benefit the virus would get from vaccine evasion is dwarfed by the vast opportunities to infect unvaccinated people.
The world has already witnessed the relationship between the number of infections and the rise of mutants. The coronavirus remained essentially unchanged for months until the pandemic got out of control. With relatively few infections, the genetic code had limited opportunities to mutate. But as infection clusters exploded, the virus rolled the dice millions of times and some mutations produced fitter mutants.
The best way to stop new variants is to stop their spread, and the answer to that is vaccination.
Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor.
US Drought Monitor map September 7, 2021.
High Plains Drought Monitor map September 7, 2021.
West Drought Monitor map September 7, 2021.
Colorado Drought Monitor map September 7, 2021.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
This Week’s Drought Summary
This U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week saw continued improvement in conditions across drought-stricken areas of the Central and Northern Plains states as well as in Iowa and Minnesota where light-to-moderate rainfall accumulations were observed. Despite recent precipitation in the Northern Plains, hay shortages and the associated costs of purchasing and transporting supplemental feed are forcing some ranchers to sell livestock. In response to the emerging situation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced expansion of emergency assistance through the ELAP program to help cover feed transportation costs for drought-impacted ranchers. In the Northeast, the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought intense, heavy rains (5 to 10+ inches) and devastating flooding to areas of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. In the Southeast, short-term dryness (past 30- to 60-day period) and declining soil moisture and streamflow levels led to degradation on the map in portions of the Carolinas. In the South, short-term precipitation shortfalls and declining soil moisture levels led to some degradation of conditions in areas of Arkansas and Oklahoma that have largely missed out on recent rainfall events. Out West, dry conditions prevailed across most of the region this week. However, some beneficial rainfall was observed across isolated areas of the Southwest in association with the remnants of Hurricane Nora…
On this week’s map, areas of the region—including eastern portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas—saw isolated improvements in response to continued rainfall activity. The heaviest rainfall in the region was observed in eastern Kansas where accumulations ranged from 2 to 7 inches, while areas further to the north in Nebraska and the Dakotas received 1-to-4-inch accumulations in isolated areas. For the last 30-day period, the percentage of normal precipitation has ranged from 100 to 300% of normal across a widespread area of the Central and Northern Plains. However, isolated pockets of dryness have persisted—particularly in western portions of the region that have not benefited from the recent rainfall events. According to the USDA for the week ending September 5, the percentage of topsoil in North Dakota rated short to very short was 63%, while neighboring South Dakota was rated 66% short to very short…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending September 7, 2021.
For the week, most of the region continued to experience dry conditions, although some residual moisture from Hurricane Nora worked its way into the Southwest leading to some isolated shower activity. On this week’s map, improvements were made in isolated areas of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah where recent monsoonal rainfall has continued to improve drought conditions on a shorter-term basis. For the monsoon season (to date), some impressive rainfall totals have been observed in areas of southern and central Arizona and New Mexico as well as in areas of Utah. In Arizona, Tucson is currently having its 3rd wettest monsoon season on record with 12.41 inches (as of September 7), Flagstaff 10.35 inches (4th wettest), Payson 13.06 inches (2nd wettest), and Las Cruces, New Mexico 5.06 inches (3rd wettest). Elsewhere in the region, much of California, western Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, and the Northern Rockies have experienced drier-than-normal conditions during the past 90-day period. In Washington, drought and associated precipitation deficits dating back to the springtime, combined with extreme summer heat, have severely impacted the state’s wheat crop which is reportedly had its lowest output since 1973. According to the USDA, the percentage of topsoil rated short to very is as follows: Washington 100%, Oregon 89%, Idaho 75%, Montana 93%, Wyoming 70%, and California 85%. According to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (Sept 1), reservoir storage levels were below normal across all the western states except for Washington state (data not yet available for Montana)…
After the passing of Hurricane Ida, the region experienced some drying out this week as compared to the previous week’s deluge. For the past 30-day period, above-normal precipitation levels (130 to 300% of normal) have been observed across southeastern Louisiana, Mississippi, and much of Tennessee. Conversely, precipitation has been below normal across much of Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma during the past month, leading to expansion of areas of Abnormally Dry (D0). This includes around Tulsa, Oklahoma, which observed only 0.85 inches (normal 3.64 inches) for the month of August and no precipitation to date for September. Elsewhere, some minor improvements were made in an area of Moderate Drought (D1) in the Trans-Pecos region in the vicinity of Big Bend National Park where the Chisos Basin observing station reported 10.42 inches of rain (340% of normal) for the month of August. Likewise, the Pine Springs Guadalupe National Park observing station in the Trans-Pecos logged 8.98 inches (560% of normal) during August 2021. For the week, average temperatures were above normal (3 to 9 deg F) across Texas, Oklahoma, and western portions of Louisiana and Arkansas while areas to the east were 1 to 6 deg F below normal…
Looking Ahead
The NWS WPC 7-Day Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) calls for moderate-to-heavy rainfall accumulations ranging from 2 to 5+ inches along the Gulf Coast of Texas, Louisiana, Florida Panhandle, and areas of southern Georgia. Across the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, light rainfall accumulations (generally < 1 inch) are expected; except for coastal areas of Massachusetts and Maine where accumulations of approximately 2 inches are predicted. In the Midwest, light precipitation accumulations (generally < 1 inch) are forecasted across the eastern half of the region, while areas in the western extent will be drier over the coming week. From the Plains to the West Coast, mainly dry conditions will prevail with the exception of areas of isolated, light precipitation possible across the Central and Southern Rockies and the northern Great Basin, while slightly greater accumulations (generally around 1 inch) are expected in the Northern Rockies. The CPC 6-10-day Outlooks are for a moderate-to-high probability of above-normal temperatures across the northern half of the conterminous United States as well as along the Eastern Seaboard extending into New England. Across much of the Pacific Northwest, North Dakota, and the Upper Midwest, normal temperatures are expected. In terms of precipitation, there is a low-to-moderate probability of above-normal precipitation across New England, the Midwest, the South, and the eastern half of Texas. Below-normal precipitation is expected across most of the Western U.S.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending September 7, 2021.
Just for grins, here’s a gallery of early September US Drought Monitor maps for the past several years.
Global surface temperature each year compared to the 1981-2010 average from three datasets: NOAA (red line), NASA (orange), and University of East Anglia (pink). The background image from the NOAA DISCOVR/EPIC mission shows Hurricane Laura coming ashore in Louisiana on August 26, 2020. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, adapted from State of the Climate in 2020. [Correction (08-25-21): The original version of this graphic and the caption indicated the temperature data were compared to the 20th-century average. They are compared to the 1981-2010 average.]From NOAA (Jessica Blunden):
A new State of the Climate report confirmed that 2020 was among the three warmest years in records dating to the mid-1800s, even with a cooling La Niña influence in the second half of the year. New high temperature records were set across the globe. The report found that the major indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet. Several markers such as sea level, ocean heat content, and permafrost once again broke records set just one year prior. Notably, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere also reached record highs in 2020, even with an estimated 6%–7% reduction of CO2 emissions due to the economic slowdown from the global pandemic.
These key findings and others are available from the State of the Climate in 2020 report released online today [August 25, 2021] by the American Meteorological Society (AMS).
The 31st annual issuance of the report, led by NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, is based on contributions from more than 530 scientists from over 60 countries around the world and reflects tens of thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets (full report). It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice and in space.
The report’s climate indicators show patterns, changes and trends of the global climate system. Examples of the indicators include various types of greenhouse gases; temperatures throughout the atmosphere, ocean, and land; cloud cover; sea level; ocean salinity; sea ice extent and snow cover.
Report highlights include these indications of a warming planet:
Greenhouse gases were the highest on record. As they do each year, and again in the midst of a global pandemic that slowed economic activity around the world, the major greenhouse gas concentrations, including CO2, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide, rose to new record high values during 2020. The global annual average atmospheric CO2 concentration was 412.5 parts per million.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. On the geologic time scale, the increase to today’s levels (orange dashed line) looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lüthi et al., 2008, via the NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
This was 2.5 parts per million greater than 2019 amounts and was the highest in the modern 62-year measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years. The year over year increase of methane (14.8 parts per billion) was the highest such increase since systematic measurements began.
Global surface temperature was near-record high. Annual global surface temperatures were 0.97°–1.12°F (0.54°–0.62°C above the 1981–2010 average, depending upon the dataset used). This places 2020 among the three warmest years since records began in the mid- to late 1800s.
The graph shows average annual global temperatures since 1880 (source data) compared to the long-term average (1901-2000). The zero line represents the long-term average temperature for the whole planet; blue and red bars show the difference above or below average for each year. (These data were among the sources of data used in the State of the Climate in 2020’s temperature analysis, but here are compared to the 20th-century average. In the report, they are compared to the 1981-2010 average.)
This was the warmest year on record without the presence of El Niño. The seven warmest years on record have all occurred in the past seven years, since 2014. The global average surface temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.14°F (0.08°C) per decade since the start of the record; since 1981, the rate of increase has been more than twice as high.
Upper atmospheric temperatures were record or near-record setting. In the region of the atmosphere just above Earth’s surface, the globally averaged annual lower troposphere temperature equaled the record high of 2016. In the layer above that, the lower stratosphere temperature continued to decline, as expected in a warming world.
Sea surface temperatures were near-record high. The globally averaged 2020 sea surface temperature was the third highest on record, surpassed only by 2016 and 2019, both of which were associated with El Niño conditions.
Global upper ocean heat content was record high. Globally, upper ocean heat content reached record highs in 2020 in the upper layer measured from the surface to 2,300 feet (700 meters), according to four of the five datasets analyzed in the report. This record heat reflects the continuing accumulation of thermal energy in the top 2,300 feet of the ocean.
This map shows heat content anomalies—differences from the long-term average—in the top 700 meters (~2,100 feet) of the global ocean. Positive anomalies mean the ocean gained heat in 2020 (orange); negative anomalies mean the ocean lost heat energy (blue) in 2020. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data provided by John Lyman.
Ocean heat content was also record high in the deeper layer beneath, from 700 to 2,000 meter depth, according to all five datasets. Oceans absorb more than 90% of Earth’s excess heat from global warming. The warmer upper ocean waters can drive stronger hurricanes and increase melting rates of ice sheet glaciers around Greenland and Antarctica.
Global sea level was highest on record. For the ninth consecutive year, global average sea level rose to a new record high and was about 3.6 inches (91.3 millimeter) higher than the 1993 average, the year that marks the beginning of the satellite altimeter record.
Increase in global mean sea level based on satellite altimeter data. NOAA Climate.gov, adapted from Figure 3.15a in State of the Climate in 2020.
Global sea level is rising at an average rate of 1.2 inches (3.0 centimeter) per decade due to changes in climate. Melting of glaciers and ice sheets, along with warming oceans, account for the trend in rising global mean sea level.
Change in sea level since the 1993. Blue indicates places where sea level has increased by up to 20 centimeters (8 inches); brown indicates places where sea level has dropped by the same amount. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data from P. Thompson, UHSLC.
Oceans absorbed a record amount of CO2. The ocean absorbed about 3.0 billion metric tons more CO2 than it released in 2020. This is the highest amount since the start of the record in 1982 and almost 30% higher than the average of the past two decades. More CO2 stored in the ocean means less remains in the atmosphere, but this also leads to increasing acidification of the waters, which can greatly harm or shift ecosystems.
The report also documents key regional climate and climate-related events.
The Arctic continued to warm; minimum sea ice extent was near-record low. The annual mean surface air temperature for the Arctic land areas was the highest in the 121-year record, at 3.8°F (2.1°C) above the 1981–2010 average. This was the seventh straight year with an annual temperature more than 1°C higher than the 1981–2010 average. On June 20, a temperature of 38°C was observed at Verkhoyansk, Russia (67.6°N), provisionally the highest temperature ever measured within the Arctic Circle. The Arctic continues to warm at a faster pace than lower latitudes. With the warmth came fires. The Arctic experienced its highest fire year in terms of the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, surpassing the record set in 2019 by 34%. The majority of the fires occurred in northeastern Siberia where abnormally high temperatures also occurred.
At the annual maximum ice extent in March 2020, only 2% of the Arctic ice cover consisted of old, thick ice (white). Most of the ice cover consist of ice that was less than a year old—i.e. seasonal ice that doesn’t survive the summer. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
In March, when sea ice reached its annual maximum extent, thin, first-year ice comprised ~70% of the ice; the thickest ice—usually more than four years old—had declined by more than 86% since 1985 to make up just 2% of total ice in 2020. When the minimum sea ice extent was reached in September, it was the second smallest in the 42-year satellite record, behind 2012.
Sea ice concentration across the Arctic Ocean on September 15, 2021, the day of the summer minimum. The yellow line shows the median extent (middle value) of the ice cover between 1981 and 2020. NOAA Climate.gov image based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast was open for about 2.5 months, from late July through mid-October, compared to less than a month typically.
Antarctica saw extreme heat and a record-long ozone hole. Extreme warmth was observed across parts of Antarctica during austral summer, contributing to a major heat wave. On February 6, Esperanza Station reached 64.9°F (18.3°C), the highest temperature ever recorded on the continent, surpassing the previous record set in 2015 by 2.0°F (1.1°C). The warmth also led to the largest late-summer surface melt event in the 43-year record, affecting more than 50% of the Antarctic Peninsula and impacting elevations as high as 1,700 meters.Later in the year, the Antarctic polar vortex was unusually strong and persistent, with polar temperatures in the stratosphere at record low levels throughout November and December. This strong vortex was linked to the longest-lived ozone hole over the Antarctic region, which lasted to the end of December. Record-low ozone values in late austral spring and early summer led to unusually high levels of UV radiation across the Antarctic region.
Ozone concentration over Antarctica the week of September 14–20, 2020. To allow comparisons from year to year, experts define the “ozone hole” as the area in which ozone levels are below 220 Dobson Units (dark blue, marked with black triangle on color bar). NOAA Climate.gov image, based on TOAST data from the NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab.
Tropical cyclones were well-above average overall. There were 102 named tropical storms during the Northern and Southern Hemisphere storm seasons, well above the 1981–2010 average of 85. Three tropical cyclones reached Saffir–Simpson scale Category 5 intensity. The North Atlantic hurricane basin recorded a record 30 named storms, surpassing the previous record of 28 in 2005. Seven of those storms became major hurricanes, matching 2005 for a record number. Major Hurricanes Eta and Iota made landfall along the eastern coast of Nicaragua in nearly the same location within a two-week period, impacting over seven million people across Central America. In the western North Pacific, Super Typhoon Goni was the strongest tropical cyclone to make landfall in the historical record and led to the evacuation of almost one million people in the Philippines. Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Gati made landfall over Somalia, the first storm of such intensity to do so.
Geographical Regional Highlights
North America
Mexico reported its warmest year in its 49-year record, tied with 2017 and 2019.
The contiguous United States reported its fifth-warmest year. Alaska reported its coolest year since 2012, although it was still warmer than its 1981–2010 average. The annual temperature for Alaska has increased at an average rate of 0.50°C per decade over the past half century.
Most of Mexico was drier than average in 2020 due to the late onset of a weak North American Monsoon and a lack of tropical cyclones on the Pacific side. The United States was dominated by warm, dry air in the West and an active storm track that brought wet conditions to much of the East. In Canada, the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland was hit by a strong blizzard with hurricane force winds in January. The storm contributed to the snowiest January on record for Saint John’s.
Central America and the Caribbean
The annual average temperature over the Caribbean basin was the second highest since the start of the record in 1891. Annual average maximum temperatures were record high for stations in The Bahamas, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Powerful Category 4 Hurricanes Eta and Iota impacted Central America in November, making landfall along the eastern coast of Nicaragua in nearly the same location within a two-week period.
South America
Most of South America had above-average temperatures during the year. Central South America reported its second-warmest year for the region in its 61-year record, behind only 2015. During a strong heat wave in October, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, recorded four of its five all-time daily maximum temperatures.
The Bolivian lowlands suffered one of its most severe droughts on record during autumn. Drought also spanned the Chaco and Pantanal in Bolivia, Paraguay and southern Brazil. The Paraguay River shrank to its lowest levels in half a century. A decadal “mega drought” in south-central Chile continued through its 11th year, with extreme conditions in the most populated areas. Argentina reported its driest year since 1995.
Africa
Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean off East Africa, observed its highest annual temperature in the record dating to 1972. In West Africa, Nuguru, Nigeria, observed about 80 days of maximum temperatures exceeding 104°F (40°C) in 2020, surpassing its previous record of 77 days in 2019.
Extremely heavy rains in April triggered widespread flooding and landslides in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi. The Lake Victoria region was the wettest in its 40-year record, and the lake itself rose more than three feet (one meter) due to the excessive rain.
Europe
The year 2020 was the warmest year on record for Europe, with all five of the warmest years occurring since 2014. Record warmth was reported for Belarus, Belgium, European Russia, Estonia, Finland, France, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine.
In February, almost all areas in Europe observed temperatures more than 5°F (3°C) higher than average. Biarritz in southern France reached a temperature of 80.0°F (26.6°C), which is higher than the monthly average for July and August.
The Middle East experienced an extreme drought during autumn, with most places reporting 0%–20% of their typical precipitation in September and no precipitation at all in October.
Asia
In 2020, Japan and Russia each observed their highest annual temperature on record. In northern Siberia, annual temperatures were more than 9°F (5°C) above average across vast territories. The average winter temperature for all of Russia was 5°C above normal. In East Asia, Hong Kong, China, reported 50 hot nights, where the daily minimum temperature did not dip below 82.4°F (28.0°C), and 47 very hot days, where the daily maximum temperature reached at least 91.4°F (33.0°C), both of which set new annual records.
The 2020 Southwest Asian Monsoon season (June–September) was the wettest since 1981, coincident with the emergence of La Niña. The Meiyu season (July–August), a typical rainy season over the Yangtze and Huaihe River Valleys of China, doubled its typical duration by two months in 2020. The May–October total rainfall averaged over the area was the most since the start of the record in 1961. Associated severe flooding affected about 45.5 million people.
As is typical, several tropical cyclones impacted Asia in 2020. Super Typhoon Goni was the strongest storm on record anywhere in the world to make landfall. More than one million people were evacuated from its path in the Philippines. Eight tropical cyclones directly affected Vietnam. Typhoon Molave was one of the most intense storms to reach the country in the past 20 years.
Oceania
Most locations across Micronesia were drier than average during the first half of 2020 and wetter than average at all locations in the second half. For the year, Kosrae was record wet, while Kapingamarangi and Saipan observed near-record low annual rainfall totals.
The last days of 2019 and first days of 2020 saw particularly hazardous fire weather in eastern Australia, where multiple fires had been burning since austral spring 2019. The emergence of La Niña was a welcome change for the Australian region, with this phase of ENSO contributing to increased rainfall over the continent, after a very significant 2019/20 fire season. Even with increased rainfall, this was Australia’s fourth-warmest year in its 111-year record. Both November and spring as a whole had record high temperatures.
Aotearoa, New Zealand, reported its seventh-warmest year since records began in 1909, in part due to its warmest winter on record. La Niña conditions contributed to higher temperatures in the latter part of the year. From late-December 2019 through February 2020, several areas across New Zealand observed record or near-record dry spells, that is, at least 15 consecutive days with less than one millimeter of rain each day. A 64-day dry spell, the longest on record, was reported in Blenheim, a town on the northern tip of the South Island.
The State of the Climate in 2020 is the 31st edition in a peer-reviewed series published annually as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The journal makes the full report openly available online.
Researchers are finding that when pulverized rock is applied to agricultural fields, the soil pulls far more carbon from the air and crop yields increase. More studies are underway, but some scientists say this method shows significant benefits for farmers and the climate.
On a hot and humid August day near Geneva, New York, Garrett Boudinot stands in a field of hemp, the green stalks towering a foot or more over his 6-foot, 4-inch frame. Today, the mustached Cornell University research assistant will harvest six acres of the crop, weigh it in red plastic garbage bins, and continue to analyze the hundreds of water samples taken with measuring devices called lysimeters that have been buried in the field over the last three months.
Boudinot, part of a research team at Cornell University, will sweat through the next two days of field work to see whether an unusual component added to the soil earlier in the year helped increase yields and sequester carbon. This soil amendment “we just call lovingly ‘rock dust,’ which isn’t very descriptive,” says Boudinot. “But it’s really silicate rocks that have been pulverized to a fine powder.”
The hemp field trial is just one of the projects being led by Ben Houlton, dean of Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. For the last two years, he and colleagues at the Working Lands Innovation Center, a research consortium based at the University of California, Davis, have been testing various soil amendments that grab carbon from the air and trap it below ground. They’ve tested biochar, manure, and rock dust used on the New York land and California farm plots, and so far, the most effective soil treatment is basalt pulverized into dust.
“As far as I can tell,” says Houlton, “ours is the largest-scale project of its kind, using this intensive sort of scientific approach.”
The hemp field experiments go beyond testing which amendments increase yields and sequester carbon and examine how much rock dust should be applied for best results. Some sections got 20 tons of rock dust per acre, while others got 40, allowing the researchers to get a more fine-tuned picture of the relationship between the dust, the soil, and the crops. The research adds to a growing body of scientific work showing the potential for these soil amendments to become one of the many measures needed to help solve our climate crisis.
Agriculture accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, making the farming sector an important part of efforts to reach net zero by 2050 and limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, an increase scientists warn the world should not surpass if we want to avert some of the more drastic consequences of climate change. To help reduce carbon in the atmosphere, scientists once proposed seeding the oceans with iron. That tactic was criticized as environmentally damaging and ineffective and has not gained widespread acceptance. But seeding soils with carbon-capturing rock dust could.
In addition to Houlton, scientists from the United Kingdom to Canada are testing various soil amendments on agricultural lands, assessing how much carbon they sequester through a process called enhanced weathering. While Houlton’s researchers apply basalt to hemp in New York and to alfalfa and olive trees in California, scientists working with the University of Sheffield’s Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation in the U.K. are spreading basalt on cornfields in Illinois and on sugarcane in Australia. In Ontario, Canada, researchers are applying wollastonite from a nearby mine on soybean and alfalfa fields.
esearcher Zack Kozma gathers a water sample from a field where rock dust has been added to the soil at Cornell’s AgriTech Agricultural Experiment Station. Photo credit: GARRETT BOUDINOTA clump of soil containing rock dust. Photo credit: SOPHIE NASRALLAH
According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rocks naturally remove 1 gigaton (1 billion tons) of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere (a number that has changed over time). Adding rock dust to agricultural lands speeds up the chemical reactions that lock carbon up — for thousands of years — in soil. If applied to croplands globally, rock dust could theoretically help suck an estimated 2 to 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, between 34 and 68 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions produced by agriculture annually. And though treating so much land might be unrealistic, the process has the potential to scale up quickly because rock dust isn’t in short supply and farmers don’t need to purchase new gear to apply it: They’ve already got fertilizer-spreading equipment in their barns.
“This is an incredibly exciting technology that has a lot of wins for society and, frankly, we could deploy this very quickly,” says Houlton.
Basalt, the additive being used in the Cornell project, is a byproduct of mining and manufacturing operations and is found all over the world. Some estimates show that there’s enough basalt rock dust stockpiled to treat the planet’s croplands for several years.
“Rock extraction is one of the largest things we do as a species,” says Phil Renforth, an engineer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, who works on carbon capture. “By mass we do more than twice as much rock extraction as we do food production.”
Basalt contains magnesium, calcium, and silica, among other components. When the rock is pulverized and applied to soils, magnesium and calcium are released from the silica and dissolve in water as it moves through the soil. The minerals in the soil react with the water and carbon that would otherwise go back into the atmosphere, forming bicarbonates, which can hang around in water for thousands of years, eventually making their way to the oceans where they can precipitate out as limestone and stay on the seafloor for millions of years.
Different amendments result in slightly different chemical reactions in the soils, and the soils provide various conditions, such as different pHs. Some amendments, like wollastonite, may be better at sequestering carbon but aren’t as abundant. Others may contain heavy metals, which can harm crops and groundwater. “There’s the chemistry of the rock; there’s the availability of the rock; and then there’s the carbon benefits of the material, as well as the potential for what I would call ‘negative consequences’ to emerge,” says Houlton.
The varied lands on which crops are grown require a number of field trials to assess how much more carbon stays in the soil, but the results are encouraging. On plots in California, initial results show a doubling of carbon uptake. That’s surprising, says Houlton, considering that the crops were grown under the driest conditions in the state’s history.
ock dust applied to an experimental field at the University of California, Davis. Photo credit: IRIS HOLZER
Leverhulme Centre director David Beerling, who is five years into a decade-long effort to investigate enhanced weathering on croplands, published a paper last year in Nature that demonstrated the potential of the method. He and colleagues found that if China, India, and the United States applied rock dust to all of their agricultural lands, 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide could be removed from the atmosphere.
The research results so far are significant enough that the IPCC mentioned enhanced weathering in its most recent report, listing the method of spreading ground-up rocks on soils as a way to capture more carbon and stimulate cropland productivity.
But scientists are still weighing the costs and benefits of such applications, including the expense of transporting the material and better calculating the carbon storage and crop yield benefits. Researchers may have more data to draw on soon: Results of much larger trials by Houlton and Beerling could be published as soon as next year.
Rock dust applications could benefit more than just the climate — they could help farmers, too. Field tests on corn and alfalfa show increases in crop yields thanks to rock dust, which releases other essential nutrients like phosphorous and potassium. In some cases, yields are 30 percent higher, results that could entice farmers looking to decrease inputs while increasing harvest. Initial weight measurements show potentially higher yields on the hemp fields in New York as well.
The rock dust may also affect the nitrogen cycle, Beerling points out, ultimately allowing farmers to apply less nitrogen fertilizer. That could lead to fewer nutrient pollution issues, especially in Corn Belt states where runoff drains into the Mississippi watershed and down into the Gulf of Mexico. Beerling and researchers are currently working on a map of available basalt and crops on which it could be applied in 13 states in the Midwest.
Reducing atmospheric carbon doesn’t yet provide an income stream to farmers, although incentivizing “carbon farming” has been floated by the Biden administration. Both Houlton and Beerling are looking to quantify exactly how much carbon a crop can capture so that if a market does come to fruition, farmers could be paid for the amount of carbon they sequester.
To accomplish that, Boudinot is looking at the soil water chemistry from the hemp fields to see how much bicarbonate formed at a foot below the surface. That data, along with information from the experimental plots in California and results from the first five years of research led by the Leverhulme Centre, could provide critical evidence for the farming community.
“What do you think of a carbon dioxide removal technology that reuses waste rock dust, captures carbon, improves soils, restore soils, and improves yields?” asks Beerling. “It’s a no-brainer, at least in the short term, if you’ve got this material and the evidence stacks up. Why wouldn’t you do it?”
This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit investigative news organization.
Liz Gardener remembers how some people worried that a new water-saving landscaping concept could alter Denver’s image as the Emerald City of the Plains. “We have to keep it green,” they warned.
The concept “is green,” replied Gardener, a former Denver Water conservation officer who so enjoyed gardening that she’d changed her name to reflect that passion. “But it’s also red and yellow and purple.”
Spurred by the droughts of the late 1970s, a task force led by Denver Water employees had set out to create a new kind of gardening, one that would counteract the effects of a growing population on Denver’s water supply. One novel idea was a landscaping technique that prioritizes water conservation.
In 1981, Denver Water adopted the concept and named it “xeriscape landscaping,” or xeriscaping.
“Nancy [Leavitt] came up with the term,” Gardener recalls. “She had a background in botany and biology, and she knew about xeros.” The Greek word means “dry,” and Leavitt thought to combine it with “scape.” But others immediately said, “People are going to hate that word,” she remembers. They worried that “xeri,” similar to “zero” in pronunciation, would be equated only with rocks and cacti — gardens that didn’t need water at all.
People don’t always see the connection between water supply and water demand, Gardener continues. And they often have different perceptions of what makes a beautiful garden — especially if they previously lived in lush places that receive more than Denver’s 14.5 inches of rain a year.
But over the past forty years, xeriscaping has inspired a cultural shift in Colorado. The practice has become part of the city’s ecosystem, enshrined in ordinances and included in planning documents, and can be credited with helping decrease Denver water usage even as the city’s population has exploded over the past four decades.
Xeriscape was not an easy sell in the early days, however, and its confusing name was only part of the problem…
Xeriscape has served as “a powerful teaching methodology,” says Kelaidis. It illustrates how thoughtful planning can conserve water, which leads to conversations about where the water comes from and why it’s important to be prudent with its use…
The seven principles of xeriscape take into consideration how a garden might most efficiently use water. For example, families may choose to keep a portion of their yard covered in grass. But they can plan to irrigate the lawn so that runoff water hydrates other plants instead of trickling into the street. They can also plant flowers, shrubs and trees that need less water to begin with…
Along with Denver Water, the Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado State University and the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado have worked to get the principles of xeriscape out through books, seminars, demonstration gardens and plant cultivation…
Mrs. Gulch’s Blue gramma “Eyelash” patch August 28, 2021.
The Denver Botanic Gardens has one of a number of demonstration gardens meant to connect these concepts and create a blueprint for ways to garden beautifully yet consciously. When people first enter the grounds, the plants and design reflect European and coastal environments, but farther down the pathways are more native and drought-tolerant gardens. “People end up saying, ‘Hey, these are beautiful, too,’” says Kelaidis.
But a sizable portion of those native plants weren’t available when xeriscaping principles were first adopted forty years ago. “Many of these plants were out there, but they’re kind of rangy and look a little scruffy,” Kelaidis explains.
So Kelaidis personally brought back native plants such as “red birds in a tree” and a hardy form of Arizona cypress from Cookes Peak, New Mexico, as well as the Pawnee Buttes sand cherry that grows northeast of Denver. He also traveled to similar semi-arid and steppe regions around the world, such as South Africa, where he found the “ice plant.” Kelaidis explains that while some believe in only cultivating native species, there are many garden flowers that originated in steppe regions, including lilacs, bearded irises, peonies and the Persian rose.
Kelaidis and others at the DBG also teamed up with CSU, as well as local nurseries, garden centers and gardening professionals, to create Plant Select in 1997. The nonprofit helps to educate gardeners and sell and distribute plants that grow well in high plains and intermountain regions. In addition to finding species with beautiful blooms and textures, Plant Select cultivates plants that can better handle fluctuations in temperature, lack of water and different kinds of soil; many are also more pest-resistant.
Although Plant Select caters primarily to Colorado, it also provides plants to out-of-state retailers in Wyoming, Montana, Texas, Oregon, New Mexico, South Dakota, Nebraska, Utah and California.
According to Plant Select’s Demonstration Garden Survey Summary in 2020, seven of its 24 gardens were watered three times a week, seven were watered bi-weekly, and seven were watered once a week. “They’re always coming out with new native varieties, with a new list of plants that are adaptable to the Colorado environment,” says Phil Steinhauer, president of the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado board of directors. “They’re marketing it so that people are asking for it.”
[…]
The more water-wise gardening there is, the more xeriscaping becomes normal — which is exactly what proponents hoped for when they coined the concept forty years ago.
Still, there is work to be done. Xeriscaping gets a boost every time there is a drought cycle, such as the years from 1999 to 2003. But afterward, the demand recedes.
The Republican River’s South Fork near Hale, Colorado, with the region’s seemingly endless fields. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Jeffrey Beall
FromThe La Junta Tribune-Democrat (Candace Krebs):
The Republican River Water Conservation District is hosting a series of meetings this week to discuss changes in rates paid for conservation contracts along the South Fork. Due to a 2016 resolution approved by the Republican River Compact Administration, Colorado was granted 100% credit for water delivered by the compact compliance pipeline now located in northeastern Colorado. In exchange for this, Colorado agreed to retire up to 25,000 acres in the South Fork Republican drainage area. The agreement requires 10,000 acres be retired by the end of 2024 and the remaining 15,000 acres by the end of 2029. To offset the added expense for increased conservation payments, the RRWCD is considering increasing the annual water use fee to a total of $30 per irrigated acre next year. This increase would be on the 2022 tax-roll and would be payable in early 2023. The last informational meeting on the topic is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Friday at the Burlington Event Center.
A center-pivot sprinkler near Wray, Colo. Photo/Allen Best
Click here to read the report (Neal T. Graham, Gokul Iyer, Mohamad I. Hejazi, Son H. Kim, Pralit Patel & Matthew Binsted). Here’s the abstract:
Governance measures such as restrictions on groundwater pumping and adjustments to sectoral water pricing have been suggested as response strategies to curtail recent increases in groundwater pumping and enhance sustainable water use. However, little is known about the impacts of such sustainability strategies. We investigate the implications of such measures, with the United States (U.S.) as an example. Using the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) with state-level details in the U.S., we find that the combination of these two governance measures can drastically alter agricultural production in the U.S. The Southwest stands to lose upwards of 25% of their total agricultural production, much of which is compensated for by production increases in river basins on the east coast of the U.S. The implementation of future sustainable water governance measures will require additional investments that allow farmers to maximize production while minimizing water withdrawals to avoid potentially detrimental revenue losses.
Colorado state health officials said they’re hopeful a recent federal court ruling that effectively overturned Trump-era rules reducing oversight of Western rivers and streams will allow states to revert back to a more protective standard.
“We are aware of Arizona’s court decision and are following what it means for other states, especially arid states such as Colorado. We are hopeful the Arizona ruling will apply nationwide because it has the potential to allow states to revert back to standards that protected our state waters more,” said Trisha Oeth via email.
Oeth, who is the environmental health and protection policy director at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), also said the state understood the need to ensure that more certainty regarding the regulations was critical to protect all the interest groups affected by them.
The Trump rule sought to overturn Obama Administration rules that expanded the scope of the Clean Water Act. But Aug. 30, the Arizona court rejected it, saying it harmed streams in Western states and ignored important science. It has directed regulators across the country to use a set of rules developed prior to the Obama Administration’s actions until the Biden Administration can develop new regulations.
Since 2019, when the Trump-era rule was finalized, the CDPHE has been working, without success, on a proposed permitting program that lawmakers would have to approve. The permitting program would have covered streams and rivers left unprotected by the Trump rule. The so-called dredge-and-fill permits proposed by the state would be required when activities such as road and home building affect streams no longer covered by the Trump rule.
But farm interests, developers and contractors remain concerned that the Clean Water Act (CWA) rule, known as the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, will remain mired in legal battles and regulatory uncertainty, delaying projects and raising their costs.
“It’s a big fear of ours,” said Zach Riley, the Colorado Farm Bureau’s director of public policy. The organization, which has 23,000 members, had supported the narrower WOTUS rule.
The political seesaw has been going on for decades with the CWA legally hamstrung over murky definitions about which waterways fall under its jurisdiction, which wetlands must be regulated, what kinds of dredge-and-fill work in waterways should be permitted, what authority the CWA has over activities on farms and Western irrigation ditches.
Administered by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency, the CWA is credited with making U.S. waters some of the cleanest in the world. But it has also been difficult to administer, in part because the country is home to widely different geographies and because of numerous court cases that have altered how it is interpreted by different presidential administrations.
Western states have been particularly concerned because in the Midwest and East, for instance, major rivers that carry barge and shipping traffic are clearly “navigable,” the term early courts used to determine how water would be regulated. If a stream was navigable, it was subject to federal law.
But Colorado and other Western states rely on shallow streams that often don’t flow year round and don’t carry traditional commercial traffic. Over the years many of those streams too became protected by the Clean Water Act.
The Trump administration’s WOTUS rule, however, excluded them, saying that only navigable streams would be regulated, meaning that thousands of miles of streams in Colorado and other Western states that don’t flow year round or carry commercial shipping traffic would no longer have been protected.
Whether Colorado can or should craft a new permitting regulation that will remove it from the political back-and-forth that has dogged WOTUS and provide industry and environmental groups with more certainty isn’t clear yet.
The CDPHE has not yet said what it plans to do, saying it is still analyzing the Arizona decision.
“At the state level, it will be interesting,” said Alex Funk, senior counsel and director of water with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which has advocated for a new state permitting program. “We’re still supportive of a state program to get out of this habit of having new WOTUS rules every four years…we need something that will survive at the federal level.”
Still others want the CDPHE to take a breather, to wait and see how the EPA and other agencies interpret this latest ruling before trying to create a new state regulation.
“Given the pace of change and the multiple rounds of litigation, the state could take more time to discuss what’s needed,” said Gabe Racz, an attorney who represents water utilities and industry at the Colorado Water Congress.
And Racz said he believes there is a chance that the Biden Administration will be able to craft new rules that can endure at the federal level, regardless of who is in the White House.
“The Biden Administration announced they planned to develop a durable rule. I’m hopeful. That’s a step in the right direction,” Racz said.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Spruce beetle-impacted forest in Southwestern Colorado with moderate levels of tree mortality. Photo credit: Sarah Hart
Click here for all the inside skinny and to register:
Participate in person or virtually on September 21st
The Southwestern Water Conservation District and Four Corners Water Center at Fort Lewis College are partnering to present “Water Connections: Adaptation from Forests to Deserts.”
This hybrid event will be held on Tuesday, September 21st from 5:00-8:00 p.m. at Fort Lewis College. Register now to reserve your in-person seat for $15.
If you prefer to view the livestream from home, please register to receive the Zoom link at no cost.
Below is a preview of the evening’s agenda:
5:00 p.m. Appetizers and Networking Outdoors
5:30 p.m. Snowtography – Forest Treatments and Hydrology
Joel Biederman, Research Hydrologist with USDA’s Southwest Watershed Research Center, presents his recent hydrology studies tied to forest treatments and upcoming test cases in southwestern Colorado
6:30 p.m. Break
6:45 p.m. Survey of Adaptation Strategies – From Our Forests to Our Deserts
Moderated by Steve Wolff, SWCD’s General Manager
Aaron Kimple, Mountain Studies Institute, regional forest health initiatives.
Selwyn Whiteskunk, Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Councilman, adapting to drought from the water user and tribal perspectives.
Carrie Padgett, Harris Water Engineering, southwest Colorado planning for future water needs.
Becky Mitchell, Colorado Water Conservation Board Director and Colorado Commissioner to the Upper Colorado River Commission, how aridification affects our water management.
In 1999, a strange virus began to afflict pig farmers in Malaysia. Patients suffered headaches, fevers and brain inflammation; ultimately more than 100 Malaysians died. Named the Nipah virus for the village where it was first identified, the pathogen is carried by fruit bats, which had been driven from their natural habitat by deforestation and fire and were foraging in orchards surrounding pig farms. It is believed that the bats were transmitting the virus to pigs, which passed it to humans. Nature’s deterioration, it seems, had spawned a public health crisis.
The Nipah virus spillover provided evidence of a profound truth: Our fate is inextricably linked to the biodiversity that surrounds us. Insects pollinate our crops; oceans feed us; forests provide us with shelter. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the fact that when nature suffers, human well-being follows suit—loss of habitat and more contact with wildlife increases the risk of transmitting zoonotic viruses to humans. “Healthy waters, healthy lands, healthy people—all are part of a cohesive and integrated whole,” says Lynn Scarlett, chief external affairs officer for The Nature Conservancy.
To keep that whole intact, delegates from nearly 200 countries will convene for the next meeting of the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity, which will set global priorities for safeguarding habitats, saving species and protecting the ecological services that sustain human communities. Although a date for the convention is uncertain due to global travel restrictions at the time of publication, its mission couldn’t be more urgent. Since the late 19th century, the world has lost approximately half of its coral reefs, and other critical ecosystems, like wetlands and tropical forests, are shrinking fast. Around 1 million species are threatened today with extinction. “The arc of conservation is at a pivot point,” Scarlett says.
To meet that challenge, a suite of innovative conservation strategies has evolved. Consider what happened in 2020 when a hurricane bludgeoned a coral reef in Mexico with wind speeds exceeding 100 knots. The damage from Hurricane Delta triggered a payout of about $850,000 from an insurance policy, taken out by the state of Quintana Roo with TNC’s assistance—perhaps the first such policy ever purchased on a natural feature. Within days the funds put locals to work cementing corals back into place and planting new colonies, rebuilding the living sea wall that will defend their coastline from future storms.
“We have increasingly come to realize that we can’t just create a preserve and put our picket fence around it,” Scarlett says. “And that means we need to be engaging a world of environmental stewards.”
But using out-of-the-box tactics and working with local partners are only half the battle. Tackling the scope of today’s mass-extinction crisis—the most severe since a hunk of space rock is believed to have set the dinosaurs on a crash course toward oblivion—requires a global perspective. Animals from gray whales to monarch butterflies cross national borders during their migrations; invasive species leap between continents; and climate change casts its net over the entire planet. The high seas, the vast expanse of ocean that lies beyond any nation’s territorial waters, have long been virtually lawless. But since 2018 U.N. delegates have been negotiating a treaty that would conserve and protect marine diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction—proof that international consensus is possible.
Scarlett is counting on the upcoming conference to ratify a similarly bold global vision: a commitment known as “30×30,” under which nations would pledge to protect 30% of their lands and seas by 2030. She also hopes that the conference will create new conservation funding sources; a recent report by TNC and its partners estimates that at least $598 billion more per year is needed to stave off the collapse of nature’s systems.
Fulfilling such lofty objectives won’t be easy—the world failed to achieve the previous targets the convention established in 2010. But signs of hope are not hard to find: At least 17% of land and inland water worldwide is already protected, and as much as 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity can be found on the lands of Indigenous peoples, who make up less than 5% of the global population. Conservation efforts have pulled dozens of species back from the brink, including the California condor and the Przewalski’s horse. And even as the window for preserving biodiversity grows narrower every year, we have no choice but to try. “When it comes to ambition,” Scarlett says, “more is better.”
Stream stage is an important concept when analyzing how much water is moving in a stream at any given moment. “Stage” is the water level above some arbitrary point in the river and is commonly measured in feet. For example, on a normal day when no rain has fallen for a while, a river might have a stage of 2 feet. If a big storm hits, the river stage could rise to 15 or 20 feet, sometimes very quickly. This is important because past records might tell us that when the stage hits 21 feet, the water will start flowing over its banks and into the basements of houses along the river — time to tell those people to move out! With modern technology, the USGS can monitor the stage of many streams almost instantly.
Hydrologists are able to convert stage height into streamflow volume by determining a rating curve for each site.
Colorado and the West face unprecedented drought conditions, impacts from wildfires, and water scarcity driven by climate change. The Colorado River shortage declaration on August 16th is a sharp warning that the river system is in crisis. If we do not act quickly, the future could be even tougher. But, there are important things we can do now to keep the Colorado we love strong by building climate change resilience in our watersheds.
A recent report from Audubon and conservation partners suggests that we need to start investing now in solutions for the long-term. These solutions include improving forest health, restoring and protecting our natural water infrastructure (stream floodplains and wetlands), and practicing regenerative agriculture. Work must be done on a scale to match the scale of the water problems we’re facing.
Relatively affordable natural solutions are critical to have in the toolbox alongside traditional strategies. One such natural affordable method for restoring our source watersheds is called “low-tech process-based restoration (PBR).” PBR is a low-cost, high-benefit option designed to restore headwater rivers, floodplains, wet meadows, and wetlands. PBR methods benefit rivers and communities by restoring natural river processes like hydrology, sediment movement, and nutrient cycling by reconnecting deeply cut degraded streams with their floodplains and adjacent wetlands, if historically present.
PBR methods benefit the entire riverscape—streams, floodplains, wetlands, and the vegetation surrounding them. Riverscapes support habitat critical to birds and other wildlife and ecological services that directly influence water quality and quantity. Many studies in the past decade show that this type of restoration approach results in restoring natural ecological and hydrological stream processes that provide benefits beyond traditional restoration methods. The benefits include improved water quality and aquifer recharge, reduced flood risks, and improved riverscape ecology (see here and here).
Lower Beaver Creek. Process-based restoration methods can be successfully applied in a variety of ecosystems. Photo credit: Jackie Corday via Audubon Rockies
Existing natural systems that are particularly important for birds—such as riparian areas, floodplains, and wetlands—slow runoff and promote groundwater recharge by effectively storing water and slowly releasing it back to the surface water system. In this way, these natural systems fill a role similar to traditional reservoirs. The hydrologic characteristics of these natural systems also improve water quality by filtering sediment and pollutants.
Models show that climate change and historic drought will continue to affect the Colorado River Basin in the coming years and further increase the severity and frequency of wildfires. These fires create devastating impacts for communities, wildlife, and forest ecosystems, including Colorado’s rivers and waterways. In the wake of Colorado’s three historic wildfires in 2020 and future wildfires, PBR techniques can help reduce the impacts of wildfires on water supplies and assist in wildfire recovery by sustaining riverscape plant communities.
(Two Utah landowners describe their experience using stream restoration to heal their land.)
The good news is that PBR methods help create resilience for our watersheds and are pretty affordable. PBR techniques can be scaled up to benefit all water uses and the cost is approximately $50,000 – $100,000 per mile on small streams.
Also, PBR techniques for stream restoration can reduce sedimentation loading in storage reservoirs. In 2010, Denver Water invested nearly $30 million in dredging Strontia Springs Reservoir after the Cheesman Fire, and it’s almost in need of dredging again. Dredging reservoirs temporarily takes care of the problem of loss of storage space and dam safety, but it is not a long-term solution that addresses the actual problem of sedimentation coming from degraded watersheds. Studies are showing healthy floodplains upstream of reservoirs capture and store more sediment while degraded riverscapes deliver more sediment [Disclaimer: Link is to a Coyote Gulch post, thanks!].
Riverscapes and wetlands are disproportionally important to birds and provide habitat for severely declining and climate-vulnerable species. Audubon Rockies is a partner in the Healthy Headwaters Working Group, a statewide collective of stream restoration experts, scientists, and agency, academic, and nonprofit staff who are working together to amplify headwater restoration in Colorado. Scaling up PBR projects in Colorado’s source watersheds can improve our long-term water security for people and wildlife in the face of increasing climate change impacts.
All of us depend on natural systems for clean and reliable water. When we invest in the health of Colorado’s watersheds and rivers, we invest in our resilience to climate change.
Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson Center
Click here for all the inside skinny and to register:
In any given year of late, demands for water in the Colorado River Basin exceed supply. Chronic drought, record heat, and rampant wildfires are already affecting the Basin’s overall health and resilience, and the historically low levels in Lakes Mead and Powell have caused an unprecedented call on the river. These historic challenges come at a time when several key components of the “Law of the River” are sunsetting in 2026. Key players are already revisiting the 2007 Interim Guidelines, Minute 323, and the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan. Relatedly, endangered fish recovery programs relevant to the region expire in 2023. Meanwhile, 48% of Tribal households in the U.S. do not have access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water, or basic sanitation. These harsh realities hasten the need to advance sustainable water management, improve watershed resilience, and ensure clean water access through collaborative decision-making. We look forward to bringing together diverse expertise and perspectives from across the region to draw the roadmap to an equitable future in the Colorado River Basin.
Part 1: Universal Access to Clean Water on Tribal Lands (Thursday morning)
Part 2: Ecosystem Health of the Colorado River Basin (Thursday afternoon)
Part 3: CRB Hydrology & Management Guideline Renegotiations (*Friday)
Opening Reception
Wednesday, September 29
5:30-7:30 p.m.
Wolf Law Building, Schaden Commons
We look forward to reconnecting with friends and colleagues, as well as
celebrating the 25-year career of Dr. Doug Kenney who retired at the end of 2020.
41st Annual Colorado Law Conference on Natural Resources
Thursday, September 30 and Friday, October 1
9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
Wolf Law Building, Wittemyer Courtroom
Here’s the release from the University of Arizona (Mikayla Mace Kelley):
Scientists have long believed that temperature – especially freezing cold – limits diversity of plant species as they proliferate out from the tropics and adapt to colder regions nearer the poles. The idea that temperature alone is behind the pattern of decreasing diversity is dubbed the tropical conservatism hypothesis.
A new University of Arizona-led study, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, uses big data to reveal further nuance in the pattern of plant diversity and explain why some regions are more species rich than others.
The research team – led by Brian Enquist, a professor in the UArizona Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology – found that drought and seasonal fluctuations in rainfall are larger drivers of evolutionary diversity than warm temperatures.
To understand evolutionary diversity, it helps to imagine a family reunion where each person represents a different species. You can have the same number of people in a room, but you would have more evolutionary diversity if those people were cousins many times removed rather than siblings and first cousins.
The researchers created maps of evolutionary diversity across North, Central and South America, as well as maps of the different biomes that are home to specific temperature and precipitation patterns.
Their findings provide evidence supporting a more nuanced view of the tropical conservatism hypothesis.
If the hypothesis were taken at face value, then deserts of the American Southwest would be more evolutionarily diverse than the forests of the American Northeast, simply because the desert is warmer. But this is not the case. The desert is warm like the tropics, but dry. The Northeast is wet like the tropics, but cold. Yet, the Northeast has more evolutionary diversity, therefore indicating that drought has a stronger influence on plant diversity than temperature.
“If the tropical conservatism hypothesis were right, then natively, with climate change, you would think if cold regions warm up to tropical levels, maybe that’s going to be a good thing for biodiversity there,” Enquist said. “But that’s not the case. In fact, our droughts are going to become much more prevalent, and that will drive local extinctions not just in the wet tropics but in many rainy regions outside of the tropics as well.”
“The morphological and physiological attributes that allow species to thrive in arid environments have evolved in very few groups of plants. This indicates that, over evolutionary timescales, the adaptive challenge of extreme conditions is more challenging in arid environments than in freezing temperatures,” said lead study author Danilo Neves, a former UArizona postdoctoral fellow who worked under Enquist on the paper and is now an assistant professor in the Institute of Biological Sciences at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil.
The deserts of the American Southwest perfectly illustrate the surprising principles highlighted in their paper, the researchers said.
“Deserts of the American Southwest have more plant species compared to the wet forests of the American Northeast, but those desert species are from very few groups of plants. They are clustered on the tree of life, with little evolutionary diversity,” said Neves.
Although the researchers focused on plants, their findings can be applied to animals as well, as plants are the foundation of the ecosystem, Neves said.
The researchers were surprised by their results. The tropical conservatism hypothesis has been around for a long time, and the team was simply hoping to assess it with a much larger dataset than ever before. Instead, the team found that drought, which was neglected in previous studies, is perhaps more important than temperature in shaping biodiversity patterns at continental, and likely global, scales.
“We only found this pattern because we leveraged this massive dataset compiled by professor Enquist and colleagues,” Neves said.
“We were dealing with hundreds of millions of observations,” Enquist said. “It’s the largest botanical biodiversity dataset ever collected. We thought, this is great to assess the strength of the hypothesis and map it out across the Americas. However, to our surprise, we weren’t finding the expected strength of the tropical conservatism hypothesis, which emerged only after we incorporated seasonality of rainfall and drought and mapped it out.”
Next, the team wants to assess how current and future increases in temperature and drought will influence global patterns of biodiversity.
“Our results indicate that climate change will not only drive changes in global patterns of species distributions due to increasing temperature, but more importantly due to the increasing impacts of more extreme drought,” Enquist said. “If droughts and extreme temperatures become more prevalent under the worst-case climate change scenarios, our findings indicate that biodiversity may be more impacted than we thought, as only a limited subset of species on Earth have the ability to cope with the adaptive challenge of these extreme temperature and drought conditions.”
Area above Dillon Reservoir, seen in the upper left, before thinning and then after. Photos/Denver Water
A scene in Summit County, between Farmers’ Corner and Summit Cove, overlooking Dillon Reservoir, both pre-treatment and afterward.
Here’s a long-read from Alejandra Borunda that’s running in National Geographic. Click through for the photographs and to read the whole article. Here’s an excerpt:
Overgrown forests and climate change are making record-breaking wildfires commonplace, but land managers can “treat” forests to change their behavior during burns.
California’s Caldor Fire ripped its way across the Tahoe Basin this week, forcing thousands to evacuate, burning homes and communities in its path, and staining Lake Tahoe’s iconic blue waters with falling ash.
The fire, like many others burning across the U.S. West this year, spread rapidly in part because it’s burning intensely, propelled by hot, dry, windy weather conditions and forests overpacked with trees—food for hungry fire.
But it has also run up against some areas that have been “treated” to reduce their fire risk, patches of forest—some big, some not so big—that have been trimmed in the past, either by hand with chainsaws and masticators or with carefully managed prescribed fire. These treatments are intended to make forests healthier and more resilient to all kinds of pressures, including fire.
In the fires burning across California this year, and in other major recent fires, experts say these treatments may have done their job—which is not to stop the fires but to lower their intensity enough that they can be controlled.
The treatments serve many purposes, but one crucial role is that “they’re meant to give firefighters an opportunity to defend life and property,” says Kelly Martin, the former chief of fire for Yosemite National Park. “Now what we’re seeing is, we have several hundred-thousand-acre fires bearing down on these communities—for what it’s worth, they’ve done their job.”
The megafire era
Fires in the West are getting bigger and more intense. 2020 saw the country’s first “gigafire,” a burn that spanned more than a million acres, much of which burned at high severity—the kind of fire that generally causes great harm to homes and ecosystems alike.
The reasons for these changes are many. Crucially, the weather conditions that spur fast-spreading and intensely burning wildfires are becoming more common as climate change heats up and dries out many parts of the West. The fire season overall is lengthening, starting earlier in summer and stretching later into fall, so long that it’s essentially fire season year-round, a captain in California’s firefighting service has said. Dry air is becoming even drier; summer rainfall is sparser; nights are staying warmer, keeping fires active through times that used to provide a window in which to fight them; and the winds that fan the flames are as strong as ever during summer and fall, the riskiest times in much of the region.
At the same time, the West is facing a “fuels” overload. The region’s landscapes used to burn frequently; estimates suggest at least four million acres of California used to burn annually from a combination of fires set intentionally by Native Americans and natural lightning ignitions. Native American fire practitioners say that many areas burned every few years or sometimes even more often. In the northern Sierra Nevada, where the Caldor and Dixie Fires burn now, lower elevation forests probably burned every five to 30 years or so. But from the early 1900s until the late 1970s, federal policy dictated that any and all fires should be suppressed thoroughly and quickly; the “10 a.m. rule”—that any new fire needed to be out by 10 the following day—guided the U.S. Forest Service until 1978…
“The average fuel load right now is probably something like 50 tons per acre. Under the old fire regime,” when Native people managed the land, “it was probably more like 7 tons per acre—an order of magnitude less than what it is now across large areas,” says Rob York, a forestry expert with the University of California, Berkeley.
Such fuel loads change the way fire behaves. Super-charged burns that get up into tree crowns can not only damage the trees but also help kick off embers that can fly miles ahead of the fire front, starting new blazes and driving quick expansion…
Fuels treatments aren’t a panacea. Super hot fires or wind-driven spread can overwhelm even a treated area. But treatments—either mechanical thinning or prescribed fire, or ideally a combination—can help drop flame lengths and the “fireline intensity,” measures of how intensely a fire burns. In turn, that can help slow the pace of fire spread.
While we can’t change the weather patterns or climate pressures, York says, at least not in the short term, we can control the fuels. It’s possible to thin out the region’s overloaded landscapes, using chainsaws, masticators, and other tools to thin trees and lower-level brush, and setting carefully managed, low-intensity “good fire.” Research suggests that in overgrown areas, using both strategies may improve outcomes.
From the Environmental Defense Fund (Christopher Kuzdas):
In June, a portion of my neighborhood in Flagstaff, Arizona, was put on pre-evacuation notice due to a nearby wildfire. A few weeks later, storms dumped heavy rains over a burn scar from a 2019 fire that caused destructive floods through parts of town. So far, this summer has been our third-wettest monsoon season on record, a complete contrast from our two driest monsoon seasons on record in 2019 and 2020.
These extremes are just a few local examples of the havoc that climate change is causing around the world. Here in the West, we are now in uncharted territory with the first-ever shortage declaration on the Colorado River.
What the shortage declaration means
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation recently confirmed the Colorado River will be operated under never-before-used shortage rules, called a “tier 1” shortage, starting in 2022.
Under the rules defined by the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), other agreements and the river’s operating guidelines, Arizona will absorb the brunt of this shortage. About one-third less water will flow through the Central Arizona Project canal to the Phoenix and Tucson areas, primarily impacting farmers. Nevada and Mexico will also see mandatory but smaller water cuts.
Though overused and overallocated, the Colorado River still provides water for 40 million people in the United States, Mexico and 30 Native American tribes. Water use across the Colorado River Basin has been unsustainable for years, and it was set up to be that way, going back to the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided up the river. But climate change is now magnifying and accelerating problems in the basin. Photo credit: The Environmental Defense Fund
Even more concerning are water supply projections for 2023 and beyond.
Bureau of Reclamation projections forecast Lake Mead could fall close to a threshold where there are no rules outlining additional water cuts to avoid a crash to dead pool — when no water can flow out of Hoover Dam. This risk of an acceleration in plummeting water levels — which also jeopardizes water levels in Lake Powell — has prompted basin state representatives to initiate meetings to discuss additional actions that might be needed if water levels in Lake Mead fall below 1,020 feet.
It will get hotter and drier
This unprecedented situation offers a glimpse into our future. Warming scenarios from the latest IPCC report suggest that we could exceed 2 degrees Celsius of warming around midcentury, with more than 5 degrees by the end of the century, in the absence of action to curb carbon emissions.
Brad Udall: Here’s the latest version of my 4-Panel plot thru Water Year (Oct-Sep) of 2019 of the #coriver big reservoirs, natural flows, precipitation, and temperature. Data goes back or 1906 (or 1935 for reservoirs.) This updates previous work with @GreatLakesPeck
Why does this matter for the Colorado River? Colorado River flows are highly sensitive to warming, and aridification caused by climate change is already reducing the water flowing in the river. With each additional 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the Colorado River’s average flow drops by 9.3%, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Colorado River flows could be up to one-third less than the current average within a generation, unless meaningful and immediate reductions in carbon emissions are achieved.
The outlook for the Colorado River is overwhelming. But what our future looks like is still our choice. We can, and should, choose to pursue a just transition to a basin with significantly less water. While in no way comprehensive, below are four ways to get started on that path.
1. Reconcile water demand with our climate reality.
Reconciling demands with our climate reality, at the very least, will involve updating river operating rules, scaling up conservation programs and shifting away from outdated expansionism.
The rules that determine how we balance supply and demand, and the underlying rights and agreements that collectively determine who gets how much water and when, will play a major role in how we transition to a basin with less water.
River operating rules have become more flexible to some extent as they evolved through new agreements like the DCP. However, current river operating rules still don’t account for the full suite of climate change impacts, especially those impacts under more dire climate scenarios. While river operating rules are already a focus of discussion, updating them will require thoughtful leadership, as well as attention to climate and other social and environmental considerations.
Scaling up conservation programs such as system conservation in the Lower Basin and demand management in the Upper Basin will also play an important role. If not for water conserved in Lake Mead, a “tier 1” shortage would have occurred years ago. Our challenge moving forward will be expanding the scale and impact of these programs, and in the Upper Basin, moving much faster to do so.
To fully reconcile demands with our climate reality, we must also finally shift away from legacy expansionism and boosterism that still show up through unnecessary project proposals like the Lake Powell Pipeline. We can do more with less.
Lake Mead water levels have dropped to a record low. Overall water use must also go down, and it must go down significantly to meet our climate reality. Photo: Chris Richards/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Audubon
2. Address long-standing inequities.
Long-standing inequities should be addressed to ensure water security for all. Two of the many considerations are inclusive decision-making and fully recognizing tribal water rights.
Inclusive and transparent processes to make decisions are essential to developing solutions that account for multiple values and goals. In the past, decision-making was often exclusive and responded primarily to a narrow set of private interests. That is changing.
From the 2018 Tribal Water Study, this graphic shows the location of the 29 federally-recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Map credit: USBR
For example, Arizona’s DCP process included some tribes and conservation groups, and the process would not have been successful without the leadership of the Gila River Indian Community and the Colorado River Indian Tribes. More diversity at the table enables more creativity and better solutions.
Although the Colorado River Basin’s 30 sovereign Native American tribes have unique rights and claims to a significant portion of the Colorado River’s flow, not all are using their water for several reasons. Those reasons include aging or inadequate infrastructure; limited funding; and significant legal, policy and administrative barriers.
Overcoming such barriers to accessing Colorado River water and confirming and fulfilling tribal water rights will be critical for many tribes to achieve goals such as meeting basic water needs and securing livelihoods. Addressing those barriers is a step toward dealing with long-standing inequity and should be a priority for policymakers.
3. Take a whole-portfolio approach.
A whole-portfolio approach includes new watershed-focused actions to support communities in adapting to and mitigating the steadily compounding risks and extremes of climate change. The recently published Ten Strategies for Climate Resilience report describes a suite of local and watershed-scale projects to do just that, including forest health and restoration, naturally distributed storage, regenerative agriculture and new crop markets.
A whole-portfolio approach also necessitates adequate management and planning for our other water supplies. However, that’s not fully possible across a large part of the basin without changes in state-level water law and policy. For example, Arizona, which makes up almost half the landmass of the Colorado River Basin, already depends on groundwater for 40% of its annual water supply and will only become increasingly dependent on groundwater as Colorado River flows shrink. Arizona does not manage groundwater across most of the state, and local rural communities have little to no power to do so.
Changing this free-for-all approach to groundwater in rural Arizona is critical if we hope to have a water-secure future for all people in the basin.
4. Lead on climate.
More warming means less water in the Colorado River Basin. How much water dries up depends on how fast we can get off fossil fuels. Across the basin, and globally, freshwater agendas must start including actions to stop heating the planet. Climate leadership is water leadership.
The road ahead is difficult. But what our shared future looks like in the Colorado River Basin is our own choice. Let’s choose to collectively pursue a just transition to a basin with less water.
For Colorado Springs, August is making weather headlines as the 4th driest and 2nd warmest on record for the city. The average temperature was 74° which ties 2nd place for warmest with 2020. The record-holder is 2011 at an average temperature of 74.1°.
Colorado Springs saw a measly 0.20″ of rain in August, making for the 4th driest on record. August is typically the second wettest month for the city at an average of 2.96″.
In Pueblo, the stats aren’t as dramatic with August being the 15th warmest on record at 76.4°. Pueblo received 1.23″ of rain which is 0.88″ below average.
Statewide, eastern Colorado was hot and dry this month and western Colorado was wet and cool.
These patterns had an influence on drought, with improvement seen in the west and worsening in the east.
Colorado Drought Monitor one month change map ending August 31, 2021.
But as a whole, Colorado Springs is running near average for the 2021 water year thus far, after running on a surplus from spring and early summer.
Could a $134 million pipeline recycling suburban water help wean communities off depleted aquifer sources? The latest complex solution for the arid, fast-growing West…
For the H20 molecules lying thousands of feet underground in the Denver Basin aquifer, trapped by millions of years of geologic shifts, there would be a long journey ahead.
Should they get sucked up a well owned by a northern El Paso County water agency, the water drops may first be sprinkled on a lawn in, say, the Woodmoor district east of Monument. From there, the water would sink back underground and flow downhill toward Monument Creek. On into Fountain Creek, and south toward the Arkansas River.
Then the drops would ripple past Colorado Springs, which is desperate to entrap more water of its own for future growth, and is pushing for unloved dams 100 miles away to bring more Western Slope water over the Continental Divide.
On the water would glide past Security, Widefield and other communities, which are struggling to secure clean water supplies of their own in the wake of contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) running off firefighting foam used for decades at a local military base.
Still going, the hardworking aquifer water then would pass farmland that will eventually be dried up by Woodmoor and other northern suburbs buying agriculture water for their own growth. At the town of Fountain, the water would pass a town that has slowed new homebuilding because it doesn’t have enough future supply for new water taps.
Chilcott Ditch looking towards headgate. Photo credit: Chilcott Ditch Company
And then those precious H20 molecules would hit a curve of Fountain Creek where the Chilcott Ditch headgate looms like an ominous fork in the road of life: If Woodmoor and its allies get their way, the molecules they pulled from the timeless aquifer will get diverted here and sent into a $130 million-plus pipeline, to be shipped back north to the top of El Paso County. The journey for those molecules would begin all over again, in a project appropriately dubbed The Loop, until — in the official water rights phrase — the original aquifer water has been “used to extinction.”
But that only happens if El Paso County and local water agencies convince the keepers of the federal American Rescue Plan that the stimulus funds can be used for water projects like the Loop, and not just highways.
Can this tortured trip for the ancient, sandstone-filtered water really be the best solution to Colorado’s relentlessly expanding water demands?
“There’s something in it for everybody,” said Jessie Shaffer, Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District manager and a key proponent of the Loop…
Backers of the Loop idea say it would solve many problems at once.
It would reduce unsustainable withdrawals from the Denver Basin aquifers, with local water providers already on notice they need to find alternative sources. The pipeline would allow the homes in subdivisions north and east of Colorado Springs to use southern water rights they’ve already purchased but can’t access. And it would promote water recycling, considered a key to Colorado’s water use future, by allowing those northern areas to reuse aquifer water after it’s run off into Fountain Creek and shipped north again by the Loop.
From a purely practical standpoint, drilling new wells into the aquifer is getting so expensive that the suburban districts think twice even when they own the rights. As the aquifer sinks from overuse, drilling prices soar.
Williams mentioned a northern exurban community that spent more than a million dollars on a well to water its new golf course…
A map being shown around El Paso County by suburban water agencies traces the path of the Loop, a complex $134 million pipeline and pumping project that would allow northern and eastern communities in the county to reuse aquifer water returning to Fountain Creek, and pipe along water rights they have bought up on the southern side of the county. (Provided by Woodmoor Water and Sanitation District)
El Paso County grew by more than 17%, and more than 100,000 people, between 2010 and 2020. As developers work to build out planned communities in areas like Flying Horse or Banning Lewis Ranch, the county’s population is projected to expand by hundreds of thousands more in the coming decades.
State water engineers who control withdrawals from aquifers have allowed cities and other water buyers to take out water at a rate protecting a 100-year life for the underground pools. Alarmed at the drops in the Denver Basin pools, El Paso County changed the local standard to preserve 300 years of life for the aquifers. That was another push to local water providers to find other sources.
The Loop pipeline, Shaffer said, is a key to shifting “off of a finite and exhaustible water supply onto a long term, renewable and sustainable water supply.”
[…]
That’s where the American Rescue Plan, signed by President Biden in March, comes into the picture. State and local agencies will battle over the $1.9 trillion stimulus funding for years to come, but Colorado water officials are hopeful some grants can be used for drinking water supply projects. There also may be far more stimulus and infrastructure funding to come, in a building package awaiting final U.S. House approval and a greatly expanded recovery budget that may pass under reconciliation.
Martin Drake Coal Plant Colorado Springs. The coal plant in downtown Colorado Springs will be closed by 2023 and 7 gas-fired generators moved in to generate power until 2030. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
Eighteen coal-fired power plants down. Another dozen to go as Colorado shifts its electricity supply system off fossil fuels.
The latest shutdown at the massive Martin Drake Power Plant in downtown Colorado Springs last week brings the share of electricity generated by burning coal statewide to less than 36%, federal Energy Information Administration data shows. That’s down from 68% a decade ago, though Colorado still lags behind the national 19% share. The state’s remaining coal plants are scheduled to close by 2040.
“If we can do this in the heart of the West, in a state that used to be one of the most reliant on coal generation, states across the nation can do it too,” Colorado Energy Office director Will Toor said.
A growing reliance on solar and wind energy alternatives “can be leveraged,” Toor said, for electric vehicles and electric-powered heating of buildings.
Air along Colorado’s Front Range no longer will be infused with the pollution that for nearly 100 years has risen from Drake’s towering chimneys. This means 201 tons a year less sulfur dioxide, 25 tons less lung-clogging particulates, 257 tons less carbon monoxide, and 1,007 tons less nitrogen oxides that lead to ozone smog, according to data from state air quality control officials.
Drake emitted more than 1.3 million tons a year of pollutants overall, including carbon dioxide and smaller amounts of benzene, hydrogen chloride, sulfuric acid and chloroform, state data shows.
Shifting beyond coal “will help improve air quality nearby and across the state,” Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment director Jill Hunsaker Ryan said.
Drake for decades has loomed as one of the nation’s last urban industrial coal plants. City-run utility crews relied on coal, burning up to 3,000 tons a day, to handle up to a third of local electricity demands. For now, utility workers are focusing on a delicate transition. They’ll supply electricity temporarily using portable natural gas generators, along with coal-fired power from the Ray Nixon power plant southeast of the city. The coal unit there isn’t scheduled to close until 2029…
America The Beautiful Park, photo by James Van Hoy via The City of Colorado Springs
Dismantling Drake will open about 50 acres along Fountain Creek in the heart of Colorado Springs, where leaders have created the America the Beautiful Park, a new soccer stadium and the Olympics Museum just north of the plant.
Future uses of that site depend on cleanup, followed by land and creek habitat restoration. When the chimneys come down, contractors will inject bleach 18 inches deep in the ground, and soil will be imported to the site, Colorado Springs Utilities chief executive Aram Benyamin said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state health officials and community groups for years have pressed Colorado Springs leaders to cut pollution from Drake, particularly the sulfur dioxide. But government agencies never ordered a shutdown. In the end cost as well as the environment played a role, as city council members last year voted to close Drake ahead of their previously scheduled deadline of 2035.
Max Schmidt, general manager of the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District in Palisade. (Photo by Osha Gray Davidson)
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Sam Klomhaus):
[Max] Schmidt, 72, has managed the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District since 2009. Before that, he spent almost 20 years with the Natural Resource Conservation Service designing irrigation systems. And, before that, he was a produce farmer in West Texas.
In Texas, Schmidt cultivated cabbage, carrots, watermelon, broccoli, spinach, sweet corn, cantaloupe and peppers.
When he was 40, Schmidt realized he was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and he wanted to watch his three children grow up, so he packed up and headed to the Grand Valley. He loves it here, and so do his kids…
Schmidt says he thoroughly enjoyed farming when he did it, and he misses it sometimes, but “I like watching other people farm.”
Agriculture is very important to Schmidt, and it’s clear that’s one of the things he likes best about his job and living in Western Colorado…
Working in water means Schmidt understands the complicated subject of water rights better than most.
“Colorado’s water history is really interesting,” he said. Some of the buildings he manages are 110 years old…
Orchard Mesa Irrigation District power plant near Palisade. Water from Colorado’s snowpack is distributed across the region through a complex network of dams, pipelines and irrigation canals. Photo credit: Orchard Mesa Irrigation District
The Orchard Mesa irrigation District and Grand Valley Water Users Association are looking to build a new hydro plant adjacent to the current one in Orchard Mesa, to the tune of about $10 million.
Schmidt said he plans to retire after the new plant is completed. After that, he wants to travel. He said he’s going to start with all the national parks, and maybe ride some trains around.
Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of regional violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk like Esalen and avocados.
Now wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year even Greenland burned.
Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger; fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry, but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. This summer’s Dixie fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, after taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going, and now Lake Tahoe is under the gun.
The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichés, ready to spill into the culture wars.
The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, we’ve hit field capacity. What more can we say?
Fires rage across continents, sparking panic and discord among the public, scientists, and media alike. (Photo Credit: Michael Held via Unsplash)
One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.
I’m a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening, but as an emergent property that’s intrinsic to life on Earth.
So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest — all the flames we see.
But then there are fires that should be present and aren’t — the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed “a second nature.”
But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower we remade second nature into “a third nature,” one organized around industrial combustion.
Humans and fire have coexisted for years. But reorganizing our society around constant combustion may burn it to the ground. (Photo Credit: Issy Bailey, @bailey_i, via Unsplash)
Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good, and way too much combustion overall.
Add up all those varieties of burning, and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction, and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.
It’s said that every model fails but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age — a Pyrocene — gives us, is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.
Steve Pyne via Writers on the Range
What we have made — if with unintended consequences — we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.
We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.
Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next.
A man, woman and young boy sit in a horse-drawn buggy next to a decorated truck ready for a Labor Day celebration in Alamosa (Alamosa County), Colorado. They wear suits and hats; the young boy has a ribbon sash criss-crossed over his suit that has a small American flag attached to it. The truck is decorated with sheaves of wheat and plants. In the rear is a taxidermic eagle, with an American flag in its beak, and a stuffed mule deer head. Date [between 1900 and 1915]. Photo credit: Denver Public Library
Atmospheric rivers, commonly defined as long, narrow corridors in the atmosphere, much like rivers in the sky, transport moisture from the tropics. These “rivers” can produce large amounts of snow accumulation when they make landfall during the cold season. With over half of the streamflow in the Colorado River originating from water released by snow melt, it’s important to understand how atmospheric rivers can affect snowpack in the region.
In a new Geophysical Research Letter article, authors Mu Xiao, and Dennis P. Lettenmaier, identify the atmospheric rivers in the Upper Colorado River basin during a 65-year-long historical record and evaluate their contribution to mountain snowpack. It was found that almost one-third of the snowpack in the basin is attributed to atmospheric river induced snowfall. The primary origin of these atmospheric rivers are from the southwest, however, the pathways do not affect the amount of snow they yield.
“Given that over 70% of the Colorado River’s natural flow originates from snowmelt, it is of great importance to understand the characteristics of snow in the basin. In this study, we determine that on average atmospheric rivers contribute to nearly 30% of the basin’s total snow accumulation, which can yield over 20% of annual streamflow. We also find that atmospheric river related snow is highly important to the region during warm winters,” said author Mu Xiao.
This study was partially funded by the MAPP program.
Governor Mark Gordon’s Colorado River Working Group will hold its first meeting from 9 am to noon on Sept. 7 in Rock Springs. The group will discuss important Colorado River matters and monitor potential impacts to Wyoming. The kickoff meeting will be open to the public and led by the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office.
The formation of the Working Group comes in response to continuing drought conditions in the Colorado, Green and Little Snake River basins and associated issues concerning Colorado River Basin management. The Governor’s charge to the Working Group is to discuss and share Colorado River information with interested stakeholders in the Green and Little Snake River Basins. It is a continuation of a coordinated and proactive outreach effort that has been underway in Wyoming since 2019.
This group is made up of representatives of key water use sectors in the Green and Little Snake River Basins. Working Group members are:
Municipal interests
Ben Bracken — Green River/Rock Springs/Sweetwater Joint Powers Board (retired)
Brad Brooks — Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities
Agriculture interests
Chad Espenscheid
Legislative interests
Senator Larry Hicks — Senate District 11
Representative Albert Sommers — House District 20
Environmental interests
Jen Lamb — The Nature Conservancy
Industrial interests
Aaron Reichel — Genesis-Alkali
Ron Wild — PacifiCorp
The September 7th meeting will be held at Western Wyoming Community College in Business Office Room #3650 A&B in Rock Springs. More information, including background materials and future meeting agendas, will be posted on the Colorado River Working Group web page on the Wyoming State Engineer’s website: https://seo.wyo.gov/interstate-streams/wyoming-colorado-river-working-group.
Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam is used to produce hydropower that is delivered over a 17,000-mile transmission grid, reaching six states and 5 million people. Photo courtesy Western Area Power Administration.
The federal agency that distributes electricity from hydropower plants in the Upper Colorado River Basin will ask its customers, including more than 50 here in Colorado, to help offset rising costs linked to Lake Powell’s inability to produce as much power due to drought.
The Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), which distributes Lake Powell’s electricity, is gathering public comments and asking its customers how best to cope with long-term drought conditions that have pushed Powell and other reservoirs to historically low levels.
As flows in the Colorado River have declined due to climate change and a 20-year megadrought, there is less water in its storage reservoirs and, therefore, less pressure to power the turbines, causing them to generate less electricity.
WAPA has had to nearly double the amount of extra power it has had to buy this year to ensure it can meet its contract obligations to its customers.
“It’s all bad news, but it isn’t necessarily unexpected,” said WAPA spokesperson Lisa Meiman.
WAPA power is among the most sought-after in Western states because it is sold at cost and because it is a renewable power resource, something highly valued in places such as Colorado, where utilities are working to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
WAPA often buys extra power if for some reason its customers’ electricity needs don’t match up with its hydropower production on a given day. It delivers power over a 17,000-mile transmission grid to six states and 5 million people.
But as flows in the Colorado River have shrunk, those purchases have become larger and more frequent.
Last year it bought an extra 413,000 megawatts of power. This year it has already purchased 833,000 megawatts of additional power, according to Meiman, and the agency expects that number to grow this year and likely again next year as the drought continues with no relief in sight.
These turbines at Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam are at risk of becoming inoperable should levels at Powell fall below what’s known as minimum power pool due to declining flows in the Colorado River. Photo courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
This year, because of the power demands of the West’s growing population and the need for air conditioning to combat ultra-high temperatures, power costs are already soaring.
Last year WAPA paid $25 per megawatt for its replacement power, Meiman said. This year it is paying $33 per megawatt, a 30% jump.
In Colorado, WAPA sells power to some of the state’s largest electric utilities, such as Tri-State Generation and Transmission, as well as cities, small towns and rural electric co-ops.
“We’re watching the situation closely,” said Natalie Eckhart, a spokesperson for Colorado Springs Utilities, which is a WAPA electric customer and which also draws a significant portion of its water from the Colorado River system.
“The bottom line is we care about this on all fronts,” Eckhart said.
Few expected power generation at Lake Powell to decline so quickly. The Colorado River Basin serves seven U.S. states and 30 Native American Tribes. For months, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Upper Colorado River Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been nervously watching what’s known as the minimum power pool level at Powell, the lowest elevation at which power can be produced, which is 3,490 feet. If the reservoir drops lower than that, all hydropower production will stop.
In July, as water levels at Powell continued to plummet, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, as part of the Upper Basin’s Drought Contingency Plan, began emergency releases of water from Utah’s Flaming Gorge, Colorado’s Blue Mesa, and New Mexico’s Navajo reservoirs to boost levels and protect Powell’s hydropower production.
And while those releases are expected to help keep the turbines functioning, the releases won’t be enough to restore them to full production, leaving WAPA little choice but to look at restructuring the way it sells power and to raise its prices.
WAPA is forecasting a 35% increase in its costs, but is working to minimize the impact on utilities that purchase its power and anticipates a 12% to 14% rate increase as early as December. Some utilities are preparing to buy power elsewhere, when possible, to reduce their costs.
Holy Cross Energy, a rural electric co-op based in Glenwood Springs that is also a WAPA customer, has spent years converting its power portfolio from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources including wind, solar and biomass, as well as hydropower.
While WAPA electricity comprises just 3% of its power portfolio, Holy Cross CEO Bryan Hannegan is worried that this renewable, low-cost power source is in jeopardy if flows from the Colorado River into Lake Powell continue to decline, as they are projected to do.
“It’s one of the cleanest and lowest-cost sources of power for a whole range of utilities,” Hannegan said. “It’s been a bedrock on which we built the West. For it not to be available … it’s a big deal.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
This map shows the snowpack depth of the Maroon Bells in spring 2019. The map was created with information from NASA’s Airborne Snow Observatory, which will help water managers make more accurate streamflow predictions. Jeffrey Deems/ASO, National Snow and Ice Data Center
Every month the Bureau of Reclamation attempts to peer two years into the future of the Colorado River and its reservoirs.
Reclamation’s 24-month study is a staple forecasting product for the federal agency that manages a chain of dams in the watershed, including those that control lakes Mead and Powell, the country’s largest reservoirs — and currently two of its most consequential. The reservoirs are a key source of drinking water for about 40 million people, plus they store water that irrigates millions of acres of farmland and generates electricity for the Southwest. The reservoirs are also alarmingly dehydrated right now — about one-third full, the lowest since they were first filled. The entire basin is on alert.
The 24-month study, in the simplest terms, projects water levels for the next two years at 12 federal reservoirs in the Colorado River basin. Produced monthly, it’s one of several forecasting products that give water managers a sense of possible futures. It is also the foundation of essential water management decisions in the basin. Reclamation’s other forecasts, updated less frequently, look at mid-term (five years out) and long-term (multiple decades) scenarios.
Typically nested in wonkish obscurity, the 24-month study acquired newfound public prominence in recent weeks. The August results are the most important of all the months because they determine how much water will be released in the following year from Mead and Powell. Because Mead is so low, the August results triggered the first-ever Tier 1 shortage on the lower Colorado River, a declaration that means mandatory cuts in water deliveries in 2022 to Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico. Because Powell is so low, dam managers will release a comparative trickle of water next year, so little that Mead is likely to plunge even lower.
More eyes than usual on a technical product that was designed to guide reservoir operations means more potential for misinterpretation, especially by people unfamiliar with the study and its assumptions. Carly Jerla, Reclamation’s senior water resources program manager, said that the study has its defined uses but also its limits.
“It’s important to understand that we’re not saying that this is what we think is going to happen this year,” Jerla told Circle of Blue about the reservoir levels outlined in the 24-month study. “We’re not saying, ‘Plan for this and only this because we have crystal ball knowledge of what is going to happen.’”
Reclamation’s models, in fact, are not a crystal ball. Critics say that they are not pessimistic enough about the potential for extremely dry years. But as the Colorado River basin dries due to a warming planet, Jerla and others are actively considering how best to convey to the public and water managers alike the looming risks to water supplies and to prepare people, at least mentally, for the possibility that reality could turn out much worse than the forecast had projected…
Accurate mid-term weather forecasts, those that extend out a couple weeks and up to a year, are notoriously difficult to achieve, said Jeff Lukas, an independent climate researcher in Colorado who has worked in the basin for 20 years. It’s especially true in the mountainous terrain of Colorado and Wyoming, where the Colorado River and its main tributaries have their headwaters. Well-known seasonal patterns like the cyclical warming of the eastern Pacific during El Nino years can indicate wetter or drier, but without substantial precision.
Because the future is hazy, the models instead rely on the recent past as a guide, Lukas said. “We’re basically saying in the absence of real prognostic information, we’ll substitute history.”
Here’s how that works. The 24-month study process begins with the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, a team of scientists operating within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Their task is to assess what the rivers might do.
The River Forecast Center starts with current land and water conditions: soil moisture, snowpack, stream flow. From that baseline hydrologists feed their model, one by one, with historical weather observations from the years 1981 to 2015. In effect, it’s as if the temperature and precipitation from each year were repeated in today’s world. That produces 35 possible hydrological futures, each representing the past laid on top of the present.
The Bureau of Reclamation team takes those hydrological futures and uses them in its model of the Colorado River system. The aim of this system model, which includes water inflows and water uses, is to simulate reservoir levels as well as hydropower generation. Fed by the output from the hydrological model, the system model also produces future scenarios, called runs.
The middle result — the most probable — is the one that is presented in the main 24-month study report. It’s the result that determines how Mead and Powell will be operated. It’s called the most probable because it’s in the middle, if each of the runs was ordered from wettest to driest. It means that historically half the time it was wetter than the middle result and half the time it was drier.
There are drawbacks to this approach. The runs are not assessed as to how likely they are to occur, which means that a repetition of each of the past years is considered equally likely. The problem: there are more wet years in the 1981 to 2015 period than dry ones. (Runoff in 1983, for instance, was so extremely high that it almost broke Glen Canyon Dam.) Because of this imbalance, the middle result is arguably skewed toward wetter conditions, Lukas said.
Jerla said there is no scientifically valid way to privilege the likelihood of one outcome over another.
An update of the River Forecast Center’s data sets will soon help reduce the skew. Cody Moser, a senior hydrologist at the Center, told Circle of Blue that data from the years 2016 through 2020 will be added this fall. Instead of 35 historical hydrologies fed through the models, there will be 40. Adding the drier recent years will push the most probable outcome to a drier result, with reservoir projections in the 24-month study likely pushed downward at the same time…
The 24-month study is most associated with the most probable scenario. But recently Reclamation has expanded its offerings to include two other reservoir scenarios, now produced monthly: the minimum probable and the maximum probable. The minimum probable is the tenth percentile, meaning the third or fourth driest of those 35 historical hydrologies. The maximum probable is the ninetieth percentile, or the third or fourth wettest historical hydrology.
For the minimum probable, the tenth percentile of flows is used in the first year of the 24-month study, but the second year of the study is calculated with the twenty-fifth percentile, under the assumption that consecutive extremely bad years would not happen.
If you look only at the most probable result, you’re not seeing how bad things might plausibly get. Lake Mead today, when it is one-third full, sits at elevation 1,068 feet. The most probable elevation for July 2023 is 1,037 feet, when Mead would be 26 percent full. The minimum probable elevation for that date is 1,027 feet, when the gasping reservoir would be 23 percent full.
That’s a significant difference in elevation, and if the drier scenario came about it would change basin operations. But even the minimum probable has a flaw. It is not as pessimistic as it could — or maybe should — be.
“The minimum probable does not represent a worst-case scenario,” Jerla said. “If you wanted to be the ultimate pessimist, which I think probably makes sense given where the system is, things could be worse than what is provided in that minimum probable because it is only the tenth percentile.”
In other words, the minimum probable is not the minimum possible. There have been years in the last two decades with worse river flow conditions than what is represented by the minimum probable. Things could be drier still.
As Jerla puts it regarding the minimum and maximum probable: “There is an area above and below those that have futures that folks should be aware of.”
[…]
Reclamation already runs its five-year projections with what it calls “stress test” hydrology. This scenario is a replication of the years 1988 to 2019, and represents hotter and drier conditions that have settled over the basin. Udall and others argue that Reclamation should consider running its models with an even more stressful test: the years 2000 to 2004, the last time that Lake Powell almost crashed.
Brad Udall: Here’s the latest version of my 4-Panel plot thru Water Year (Oct-Sep) of 2019 of the #coriver big reservoirs, natural flows, precipitation, and temperature. Data goes back or 1906 (or 1935 for reservoirs.) This updates previous work with @GreatLakesPeck
“That five-year period is really unique,” Udall explained. Annual runoff averaged 9.4 million acre-feet, a fraction of what coursed through the river throughout the last century. The average annual runoff in the years for the stress test hydrology is about 13.3 million acre-feet. That makes the first years of this century unique, Udall said. And frightening. “There’s nothing like it in the 20th century. It’s stunning how bad a period it is, and we could be in the middle of that right now.”
[…]
The next update of the five-year projections will come out in early September. Five years is a tricky time frame to analyze, Jerla said. It’s far enough in the future that current conditions lose their predictive power. But it’s close enough to be relevant for farmers, city utilities, and marina operators — all of whom need to plan for near-term water supply. Jerla and her colleagues are trying to thread that needle, thinking hard about how to “provide the public with a good understanding of future outcomes and future risks without confusing the heck out of them.”
The boat ramp at Elk Creek Marina had to be temporarily closed so the docks could be moved out into deeper water. Colorado water managers are not happy that emergency releases from Blue Mesa Reservoir are impacting late summer lake recreation. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
In an effort to prop up water levels at the declining Lake Powell, federal water managers are negatively impacting recreation on Colorado’s biggest man-made lake.
That’s the message from Colorado water managers and marina operators at Blue Mesa Reservoir in Gunnison County. On Aug. 1, the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the reservoir, began emergency releases. By the time the releases are finished the first week of October, Blue Mesa is projected to fall to its second-lowest level ever, just 215,000 acre-feet, or 22.8% of its 941,000-acre-foot capacity.
As of Sept. 1, the reservoir was 37% full, which is about 68 feet down from a full reservoir, and a ring of muddy shoreline was growing. Parking lots and boat slips sat empty, and Pappy’s Restaurant was closed for the season. The dwindling water levels are first impacting Iola, the easternmost of Blue Mesa’s three basins. Iola is where the Gunnison River now cuts through a field of mud.
Eric Loken, who operates the reservoir’s two marinas (Elk Creek and Lake Fork), said he was given only nine days’ notice to empty Elk Creek Marina’s 180 slips. The dock system’s anchors, which are not built for low water, had to be moved deeper. He said about 25 people lost their jobs six weeks earlier than normal and the marinas lost about 25% of its revenue for the year.
“There are tons of people who would like to be out here boating and are very disappointed,” Loken said. “Normally on Labor Day weekend, you can barely find a place to park. So it’s definitely been a big hit to us as a business for sure.”
The Elk Creek Marina and restaurant are closed for the season, although the boat ramp is still open and is expected to be accessible through the end of the month. The Lake Fork Marina is open through Labor Day, but the boat ramp has closed for the season. The Iola boat ramp is restricted to small boats only and is scheduled to close after Labor Day.
“We are just trying to make it through the holiday weekend and then we will be shutting up this marina too,” Loken said.
The Bureau announced July 16 that it would begin emergency releases through early October from three Upper Basin reservoirs: 20,000 acre-feet from Navajo, on the San Juan River; 125,000 acre-feet from Flaming Gorge, on the Green River; and 36,000 acre-feet from Blue Mesa, on the Gunnison River. The goal of the releases is to prop up water levels at Lake Powell to preserve the ability to make hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam. The 181,000 acre-feet from the three upstream reservoirs is expected to boost levels at Powell by about 3 feet.
The three reservoirs are part of the Colorado River Storage Project, and their primary purpose is to control the flows of the Colorado River; flatwater recreation has always been incidental. But the releases at Blue Mesa illustrate the risks of building an outdoor-recreation economy around a highly engineered river system that is now beginning to falter amid a climate change-fueled drought.
The boat ramp at the Lake Fork Marina closed for the season on Sept. 2 due to declining reservoir levels. The Bureau of Reclamation is making emergency releases out of Blue Mesa Reservoir to prop up levels in Lake Powell and preserve the ability to make hydropower. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Timing concerns
Although the secretary of the Interior can authorize emergency releases without coordination from the states or local entities, Loken, along with some Colorado water managers, is not happy about the timing or the lack of notice from the bureau. Under normal drought-response operations, the federal government would consult with state and local water managers before making releases.
“We had very little time to handle this decision that was made that none of us have any power over,” Loken said.
John McClow, general counsel for the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District, said Colorado should make noise and complain about what he called a clumsy execution of the releases. McClow has also served on the Colorado Water Conservation Board and is an alternate commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“There’s no reason they couldn’t have waited another couple weeks or another month to release that water from Blue Mesa to get it to Lake Powell,” McClow said. “It goes back to consultation and timing. Had they even asked, it would have been easy to say, ‘Hey, can you wait so you don’t kill our business?’”
Last month at Colorado Water Congress’ summer conference — a gathering of water managers, researchers and legislators in Steamboat Springs — Rebecca Mitchell, CWCB’s executive director and the state’s representative to the UCRC, told the audience that the impacts of ending the boating season early at Blue Mesa trickle down to all Coloradoans.
“That means dollars in Colorado. That is who we are in Colorado,” she said. “It’s definitely had an impact in that local community when we talk about the recreation. That is heavy.”
Mitchell said water managers in the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Utah) will be carefully monitoring the impacts of the reservoir releases and figuring out how to quantify those impacts, which she called devastating. The states will work with the bureau to develop a plan for how to send water to Lake Powell in future years, taking into consideration the timing, magnitude and duration of the releases, she said.
“Where can the states and the bureau make the best decisions to lessen the impacts?” she said.
The National Park Service operates the Curecanti National Recreation area, including the campsites, picnic areas, visitors centers and boat ramps that run the 20-mile length of the reservoir. According to numbers provided by the Park Service, Curecanti gets nearly a million visitors a year. The reservoir is popular among anglers for its trout and Kokanee salmon fishing. Blue Mesa is one of three reservoirs — along with the much smaller Morrow Point and Crystal reservoirs — on the Gunnison River, collectively known as the Aspinall Unit.
Barefoot Dance In The Snow New York, New York March 8, 1916. Girls of the Marion Morgan School of Dance in Los Angeles perform barefoot in the snow in Central Park. Underwood Archives by Underwood Archives
Gunnison Country Chamber of Commerce Director Celeste Helminski said her organization is planning an event later this month: the world’s largest snow dance. A big winter would help refill Blue Mesa.
“The water definitely has me concerned for the future,” she said. “We see a lot of summer recreationists who come and spend the whole summer at several of the campgrounds. It’s just going to take a lot to replace that water. It’s going to take awhile to get back to levels of what recreationists come for.”
Bureau spokesperson Justyn Liff could not provide any insight into how the timing decision for the releases was made, but pointed out that although lake recreation was impacted, downstream rafting and fishing in the canyon are getting a boost from the roughly 300 cubic-feet-per-second extra water that the releases provide. The Gunnison River below the Gunnison Tunnel diversion, which takes a large portion of the river’s outflow from the Aspinall Unit for delivery to downstream irrigators, was running around 600 cfs the first few days of September, according to USGS stream gauge data. This is a critical data point for boaters running the Black Canyon or Gunnison Gorge sections of the river, which are below the stream gauge. At 600 cfs, the river is flowing 11% above the median for this time of year.
“If we had waited six weeks, that would have been six weeks less of commercial rafting/guided fishing on the Gunnison River downstream from Aspinall,” Liff said.
Some boats were still in the water the first week of September at the Lake Fork Marina. Across Blue Mesa Reservoir, the Elk Creek Marina’s boat slips were emptied early because of declining water levels in the reservoir. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Hydropower production
Although the local impacts to recreation are acute, the impacts of not being able to make hydropower at Lake Powell would probably be much worse. The dams of the CRSP are known as “cash register” dams. The power they produce is used to repay the costs of building the project, maintain operations and provide power to millions of people.
The Western Area Power Administration distributes Lake Powell’s electricity, including to some power providers in Colorado. According to Water Education Colorado, electric costs will surge as Glen Canyon Dam struggles to produce hydropower because of declining water levels.
The bureau’s target elevation for Lake Powell is 3,525 feet, in order to provide a buffer that protects hydropower generation; if levels fall below 3,490, all power production would stop. Lake Powell is currently about 31% full, at 3,549 feet, which is the lowest surface level since the reservoir began filling in the 1960s and ‘70s. According to projections released by the bureau in July, Lake Powell has a 79% chance of falling below the 3,525 threshold in the next year. The emergency releases are intended to address this.
“A loss of power generation is a pretty significant issue compared to a few months of boating on Blue Mesa,” McClow said. “Locally, yes, it hurts, but in the big picture, I don’t know if you can make a fair comparison.”
As water levels at Blue Mesa continue to fall, Loken worries that this may be just the beginning of an era of empty reservoirs.
“(The releases) don’t solve the long-term problem,” Loken said. “We are just going to end up with an empty Lake Powell and a bunch of empty reservoirs upstream. I think the powers that be really need to put pencil to paper and figure this out.”
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. For more, go to http://www.aspenjournalism.org.
According to a press release from the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Manager Justin Ramsey, the district remains in a Stage 1 drought per its drought management plan.
This marks the sixth week in a row that the district has been in a Stage 1 drought. The PAWSD board initially approved entering the stage on July 19.
Ramsey notes that the primary driver of this drought stage is the San Juan River flow in conjunction with the U.S. Drought Monitor, which indicates our area is in a severe to moderate drought…
Colorado Drought Monitor map August 31, 2021.
Drought report
The National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) was updated on Aug. 24, re- porting the same numbers for the second consecutive week.
The NIDIS website indicates 94.84 percent of Archuleta County is abnormally dry and 67.46 per- cent of the county is in a moderate drought.
The NIDIS website also notes that 41.2 percent of the county is in a severe drought stage.
Additionally, the NIDIS website notes that 9.12 percent of the county remains in an extreme drought, mostly in the southwestern portion of the county.
The NIDIS website notes that under an extreme drought stage, large fires may develop and pasture conditions worsen.
No portion of the county is in an exceptional drought.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the San Juan River was flowing at a rate of 39.7 cfs in Pagosa Springs as of 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 1.
Based on 85 years of water records at this site, the average flow rate for this date is 154 cfs.
The highest recorded rate for this date was in 2008 at 1,290 cfs. The lowest recorded rate was 8.66 cfs, recorded in 2002.
As of 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 1, the Piedra River near Arboles was flowing at a rate of 31.5 cfs.
Based on 50 years of water records at this site, the average flow rate for this date is 191 cfs.
The highest recorded rate for this date was 1,210 cfs in 2008. The lowest recorded rate was 5.42 cfs in 2002.
The fund set up to help protect the Yampa River has exceeded its endowment goal two years ahead of expectations, fund managers announced Wednesday.
Annual grants are awarded through the fund, which launched in 2019, for projects aimed at protecting the Yampa River, especially considering the hotter, drier climate and lower river flows. The fund’s total is now estimated to be $5.3 million by 2023, surpassing the original goal of $4.75 million.
The fund held its first grant cycle in February 2020. Over the past three years, more than 100 donors have contributed to the fund, including an anonymous donor who gave $1 million this summer. The fund has so far awarded $400,000 in grants to projects throughout the Yampa Valley, which have supported water releases during times of low flows, environmental restoration projects and agricultural infrastructure improvements…
A partnership of 21 public, private and nonprofit entities representing the entire Yampa River Basin collaborated to create the board that governs the Yampa River Fund.
As coal mining fades, a diverse coalition of Moffat County residents and leaders is planning for the next chapter with a focus on protecting resources while managing recreation and tourism.
How can northwest Colorado entice and manage visitors, protect natural landscapes like the Green River’s stunning Gates of Lodore and prop up an economy girding for the looming departure of coal mining?
“As our coal leaves, what do we have left?” asks Jennifer Holloway, the executive director of the chamber of commerce in the town of Craig, where she grew up. “We have an amazing experience that can change lives. How can we share that, but also protect it?”
Three years ago, Moffat County “had some challenges with our identity,” Holloway says, describing how her father, when she was little, walked away from the family farm to work in the better-paying coal mines. “Not everyone had a coal job, but we focused on coal and neglected other things.”
Those other things — like tourism, agriculture and outdoor recreation — are no longer being neglected. It’s been a year since Tri-State Generation and Transmission and Xcel Energy announced they would be closing their coal-fired electrical plants and nearby coal mines starting in 2028. The closures will cost northwest Colorado as many as 800 jobs.
A community-based transition plan focuses on growing the region’s tourism and recreational amenities while protecting agricultural heritage and natural resources. The communities of Moffat County, downstream from the bustling resort of Steamboat Springs, are essentially a blank slate. They are taking cues from other Western Slope communities, hoping to glean lessons on what works and what does not. And the wheels are turning.
“Our community is on the cusp of doing great things, transformational things,” Holloway says.
Craig has applied for a $1.8 million federal grant for the roughly $2.7 million Yampa River Corridor Project, which hopes to revamp boat ramps and add a whitewater park as part of an effort to bolster the region’s appeal with river runners and paddlers. An additional phase of the plan would build a trail connecting Craig to the Yampa River…
First in line for state’s new rural assistance program
Nathan Fey, the head of Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office has joined the Office of Economic Development and International Trade in recruiting students from the University of Colorado to map recreational assets in Moffat County as well as business infrastructure.
That case study will inform a larger project that will include local residents in shaping how northwest Colorado is presented to both visitors and outdoor recreation businesses. That larger project is part of Colorado’s new Rural Technical Assistance Program, or RTAP, which offers rural communities technical education that deploys online tools to help community leaders identify needs and build a plan for future growth. The second phase of the rural program involves technical assistance for planning and finally the state will help the community implement its strategic plan.
Moffat County is among the first communities to go through the new Rural Technical Assistance Program.
Say, for example, a snowmobile business or manufacturer approaches the state with an idea about relocating to Colorado. Fey can suggest Craig and Moffat County, offering maps of snow trail systems where the company can test designs as well as insights into supply chain management, broadband and commercial space. And residents in the community would already have expressed interest in welcoming that kind of business.
As he gazes up at massive sandstone cliffs above the Green River near its confluence with the Yampa River, [Andrew Grossman] riffs on what a shifting valuation for tourism economies might look like. Is it attracting wealthier visitors who leave more money in the community? But what if those high-rollers arrive on a private jet and emit that much more carbon than a less affluent visitor? One thing that is going away: the former yardstick for measuring success that was based solely on numbers of visitors.
“Maybe it’s time we apply a triple bottom line that considers resident sentiments, carbon footprints and economic benefit?” Grossmann says. “We have to reshift our value proposition.”
PFAS contamination in the U.S. via ewg.org. [Click the map to go to the website.]
Here’s the release from the Environmental Protection Agency:
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), published a draft of the first EPA-validated laboratory analytical method to test for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in eight different environmental media, including wastewater, surface water, groundwater, and soils. This method provides certainty and consistency and advances PFAS monitoring that is essential to protecting public health.
“This new testing method advances the science and our understanding of PFAS in the environment, so we can better protect people from exposure,” said EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan. “This illustrates the progress we can make when working with federal partners in an all of government approach. I want to thank the Department of Defense for its leadership on this issue and for working with us to achieve this important milestone.”
A partnership between EPA and the Department of Defense’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program has produced draft Method 1633, a single-laboratory validated method to test for 40 PFAS compounds in wastewater, surface water, groundwater, soil, biosolids, sediment, landfill leachate, and fish tissue. Until now, regulated entities and environmental laboratories relied upon modified EPA methods or in-house laboratory standard operating procedures to analyze PFAS in these settings. With the support of the agency’s Council on PFAS, EPA and DoD will continue to collaborate to complete a multi-laboratory validation study of the method in 2022.
“This is one of many examples of strong EPA – DoD Collaboration on issues of national importance. Currently the Department is working with EPA, other federal agencies, academic institutions, and industry on over 130 PFAS-related research efforts, and we expect further progress in the future,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience Richard Kidd.
This draft method can be used in various applications, including National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. The method will support NPDES implementation by providing a consistent PFAS method that has been tested in a wide variety of wastewaters and contains all the required quality control procedures for a Clean Water Act (CWA) method. While the method is not nationally required for CWA compliance monitoring until EPA has promulgated it through rulemaking, it is recommended now for use in individual permits.
Draft Method 1633 complements existing validated methods to test for PFAS in drinking water and non-potable water.
Draft Method 1633 complements existing Safe Drinking Water Act methods to test for 29 PFAS compounds in drinking water and a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act method for 24 PFAS compounds in non-potable water.
EPA publishes laboratory analytical methods (test procedures) that are used by industries, municipalities, researchers, regulatory authorities and other stakeholders to analyze the chemical, physical, and biological components of wastewater and other environmental samples. EPA regularly publishes methods for CWA compliance monitoring on its CWA Methods website. Doing so does not impose any national requirements to use the method. Only after EPA promulgates a CWA analytical method through rulemaking (at 40 CFR Part 136) does it become nationally required for use in NPDES permit applications and permits.
The work the agency is doing to provide new laboratory analytical methods reflects the work that the EPA Council on PFAS is undertaking to support federal, state, local, and Tribal efforts to protect all communities from the harmful impacts of PFAS contamination.
A longer walk from the dock to the water is in store for boaters at the Elk Creek marina, Blue Mesa Reservoir. Blue Mesa is being drawn down to feed critically low Lake Powell, as continued dry weather and rising demand deplete the Colorado River. (Courtesy photo/National Park Service) August 2021 via the Montrose Daily Press
FromColorado Public Radio (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
Climate change is drying up Colorado’s water supply
Climate change is leading to less snowpack, and warmer temperatures mean less water is making it into the Colorado River. Blue Mesa is Colorado’s largest reservoir, and it hit its second-lowest level on record for the end of August.
Parks service officials issued the order because Elk Creek’s floating dock and marina are likely to hit the lake’s bottom. Eric Loken, the head of operations at the marina his family has managed for more than 30 years, said the early closure is cutting six weeks out of his five-month season…
A 20-year, climate change-fueled megadrought has dealt a double blow to Blue Mesa this summer. The dry conditions have led to lower levels directly, but the lake is also hurting from drought problems in other states.
For the first time, the federal government is taking emergency action by taking water from Blue Mesa to help out another reservoir — Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. Loken said the withdrawals hurt more given Blue Mesa’s low water levels…
The states that share Colorado River water agreed to this plan in 2019. Low levels in Lake Powell would trigger an emergency release from three reservoirs upstream…
The water taken from Blue Mesa is being used to make sure hydroelectric power turbines at Lake Powell can keep spinning and generating electricity for millions of people in the West, including customers in Colorado.
John McClow, a lawyer for the Upper Gunnison River Conservancy District, said this scenario is what Blue Mesa and the other reservoirs were built for in the 1960s — drought emergencies, not recreation. It’s a bank of water that states can tap when they need to…
Although the water in Blue Mesa has always been earmarked for Lake Powell if Colorado needed help meeting its legal obligation to send more flow to downstream states, McClow said the timing of the release was unnecessarily disruptive. He wishes the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation would have waited to take the water until October when lake tourism starts slowing down.
Erik Knight, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist, said that while the timing of the water releases might have hurt the lake, it improved rafting and fishing downstream of Blue Mesa, including parts of the Gunnison River that were so low that commercial rafting was likely to have been canceled.
