Click the link to read the article on the Craig Press website (Ashley Dishman). Here’s an excerpt:
In a move to combat the drought crisis affecting the Colorado River Basin, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced on Thursday an $11.1 million cooperative agreement with the Foundation for Americaโs Public Lands. The partnership aims to enhance drought resilience in the region, which is vital for the millions of Americans who depend on the river for their livelihoods. The funding, made available through the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden Administration, is set to bolster efforts to ensure the sustainability of the Colorado River Basin…The BLM, which manages more public land in the Colorado River Basin than any other federal agency, recognizes drought as the most critical threat to the region. The drought impacts various sectors, including agriculture, grazing, wildlife and fisheries, recreation, cultural resource uses, and power generation and distribution.
The Foundation for Americaโs Public Lands, officially formed in 2022 and chartered by Congress in 2017, serves as the BLMโs charitable partner. The Foundation operates to raise private funds and awareness, increasing access to and stewardship of over 245 million acres of U.S. public lands and waters. The cooperative agreement between the BLM and the Foundation spans five years and aims to undertake restoration projects on a landscape scale. This approach will cover multiple states and invest in local communities that depend on and manage the land. The agreement also allows the Foundation to collaborate with other partner organizations, bringing in technical experts to enhance the effectiveness of the projects.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website:
Highlights
Temperatures were above average over much of the globe, while western North America, southern South America, and western Russia were cooler than average.
Sea surface temperatures were record warm for the 14th consecutive month.
Global tropical cyclone activity was above average, with five named storms.
May temperature
The May global surface temperature was 1.18ยฐC (2.12ยฐF) above the 20th-century average of 14.8ยฐC (58.6ยฐF), making it the warmest May on record. This was 0.18ยฐC (0.32ยฐF) above the previous record from May 2020. May 2024 marked the 48th consecutive May (since 1977) with temperatures at least nominally above the 20th-century average. May had a record-high monthly global ocean surface temperature for the 14th consecutive month.
Graph showing global temperature each May from 1850-2024 compared to the 20th-century average. Warmer-than-average years are red; cooler-than-average years are blue. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, created with Datawrapper.
The Northern Hemisphere also ranked as the warmest May on record at 1.44ยฐC (2.59ยฐF) above average. The Northern Hemisphere land temperature was also record warm in May (tied with 2020) and the ocean temperature was again record-high by a wide margin (0.25ยฐC/0.45ยฐF warmer than the previous record set in 2020). The Arctic region had its 11th warmest May on record.
May 2024 in the Southern Hemisphere also ranked warmest on record at 0.92ยฐC (1.66ยฐF) above average. The ocean-only temperature for May in the Southern Hemisphere ranked highest on record, while the land-only Southern Hemisphere temperature was 6th warmest on record. Meanwhile, the Antarctic region had its 23rd warmest May, 0.55ยฐC (0.99ยฐF) above average.
Temperatures in May 2024 compared to the 1991-2020 average. Places that were warmer than average are red; places that were cooler than average are blue. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
Record warm temperatures covered large parts of the African continent, northern China and Mongolia, areas neighboring the North Sea, and many parts of a region stretching from southern Brazil northward through most of Mexico.
Temperatures were warmer to much-warmer-than-average across much of the Arctic, the eastern U.S. and large parts of Canada, western Europe, the eastern half of Russia, southeast Asia, and much of Australia. In northern and central India and Pakistan, where temperatures for the month as a whole were warmer to much-warmer-than-average, a severe and persistent heat wave struck during the last half of the month.
In contrast, cooler-than-average temperatures covered areas that included western parts of Russia and Kazahkstan, much of the western U.S. and Alaska, and large parts of Greenland. May temperatures were also cooler-than-average in Argentina and Chile, where a succession of polar air masses brought the strongest cold wave in more than 70 years to parts of Chile.
Across the global oceans, record warm sea surface temperatures covered much of the tropical Atlantic and large parts of the Indian Ocean and the equatorial western Pacific as well as parts of the southwest Pacific and Southern Ocean. Record warm temperatures also occurred in the North Sea and neighboring seas in the North Atlantic. Positive anomalies also covered large parts of the northern Pacific. Record-warm temperatures covered approximately 16.1% of the world’s surface this May, which was the highest percentage for May since the start of records in 1951, and 11.2% higher than the previous May record of 2016.
Near-average to cooler-than-average temperatures covered large parts of the southeast Pacific, the southwest Atlantic, areas of the southwest Indian Ocean, and parts of the Southern Ocean. Only 0.2% of the world’s surface had a record-cold May.
May precipitation from land-based stations
Above-average May precipitation occurred across large parts of western and central Europe, central Asia, far northeastern China, Korea, and Japan. Other wetter-than-average areas included the southern half of India, central Australia, and much of the Seychelles and Mauritius. Precipitation was below average in the southwestern U.S., Mexico, Central America, much of Brazil and Argentina, and much of eastern Europe. Other areas with widespread drier-than-average conditions included much of the United Kingdom, Spain and neighboring parts of Morocco and Algeria, northern India and neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan, eastern China, southern and western areas of Australia, and many islands of the South Pacific.
Percent of normal precipitation for global land-based stations in May 2024 compared to a base line of 1961 to 1990. Places that received more precipitation than average are colored green; places that received less precipitation than average are colored brown. Gray areas represent missing data. Image by NOAA Climate.gov, based on data from NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information.
For information on 2024’s year-to-date temperature ranking, notable climate events, and separate statistics for Earth’s land and ocean areas see the full May 2024 monthly report from NOAA NCEI.
Satellite summary of global precipitation patterns
Headlines
The Niรฑo 3.4 Index [the primary dataset for tracking theย El Niรฑo-Southern Oscillationย climate pattern] decreased during the month to a near neutral value indicatingย continued transition from El Niรฑoย and this is reflected in observed anomaly patterns [depatures from average].
Tropical cyclones were active in both the North and South Indian Ocean and helped to produce the observed patterns.
North America was mainly wet in the east and dry in the west, with Mexico continuing in drought and parts of the southwest U.S. moving toward drier conditions.
Global precipitation remains high with this May setting the record high for this month of the year.
Colorado tribes want to offer online sports betting. But their tax status, and other issues, has some people worried that allowing the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain tribes to offer remote wagering on professional sports might siphon valuable revenue away from Colorado water projects.
The Colorado Department of Revenue declined to comment on the specifics of the dispute, while tribal representatives say they are frustrated with the stateโs refusal to allow them to offer it.
In November, a proposition referred to the ballot by lawmakers in House Bill 1436, will ask voters to allow the state to keep more of the revenue generated by sports gaming. Taxes collected on those bets, which were authorized in 2019, are projected to generate $34.2 million in tax revenue in the stateโs next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
Under the current sports gaming law, the state cannot collect revenues in excess of $29 million. If voters approve the ballot measure, that cap would be removed, potentially generating millions of dollars more for water programs.
Remote sports betting is offered by casinos in Black Hawk, Central City and Cripple Creek, but the tribes have so far not been allowed to participate because of a failure to reach an agreement with the state on how it would operate, according to Peter Ortego, a lawyer representing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, in Towaoc. Ortego said the Ute Mountain Ute have not taken a position on the new ballot measure.
Representatives for the Southern Ute Tribe in Ignacio did not respond to a request for comment.
One of the issues is taxation. Because tribes are sovereign nations, they are exempt from paying state taxes. That tax-free status is problematic from the stateโs perspective because if tribes allowed other commercial gaming companies to locate a remote sports betting kiosk on tribal land, it too would be exempt from taxation, shrinking the amount of money the state could collect for water programs including conservation, habitat restoration, stream protection and planning and storage, according to state Rep. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco.
โWhen the legislature referred the sports betting initiative to voters in 2019, a key part was the state collecting tax on the revenues and dedicating 90% of that money to water projects,โ Roberts said. โNow there is a concern that if the physical locations moved to tribal lands, we would lose most of the funding for water.โ
The Colorado Gaming Associationโs stance on the issue is not clear. The trade group did not respond to a request for comment.
Lawmakers are expected to take up the issue later this summer when a special interim committee on tribal affairs meets, Roberts said.
โI would be open to finding a middle ground. The complication is that tribal lands are not subject to state law, so lawmakers have very little ability to work in that space,โ Roberts said.
Previous attempts to break the impasse have failed. The Ute Mountain Uteโs Ortego said itโs not clear when โ or if โ the dispute will be resolved.
โWe want the opportunity to do what every other casino in the state is allowed to do,โ Ortego said. โAnd we believe we have the right to do so.โ
A bumblebee pollinates a prairie clover. (Erin Anfinson/NPS/Public domain)
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Lucas Brady Woods). Here’s an excerpt:
Conrey has been a beekeeper outside of Berthoud for more than 30 years, and she has seen honey production dwindle to just a fraction of what it was when she started. She attributes the decline to the rise in pesticide use, monoculture crops and lawns, urban sprawl, water shortages and soil health. She now has to cultivate many different bee colonies up and down the Front Range to maintain her livelihood.
โOur livelihood depends on the environment,โ Conrey said. โSo we pay attention to it, like anybody engaged in ag is paying more attention to the weather and to forecasts and extreme weather events, et cetera.โ
Now, with the Colorado primary election just a few days away, she wants to see candidates talking more about climate change, and not just because of the impacts on agriculture. She believes fixing basic environmental problemsโlike soil, vegetation and insect healthโwill help create solutions to the big issues like drought and air quality. To do that, though, she said candidates need to base their policies on scientific evidence.
โScience is what it comes down to, and trying to actually follow the science,โ Conrey said. โAnd thereโs a lot of great science out there.โ
Artistโs concept of the Earth drawn from data from multiple satellite missions and created by a team of NASA scientists and graphic artists.
Credit: NASA Images By Reto Stรถckli, Based On Data From NASA And NOAA
Click the link to read the release on the NASA website (Abbey A. Donaldson):
NASA joined more than 20 federal agencies in releasing its updated Climate Adaptation Plan Thursday, helping expand the Biden-Harris Administrationโs efforts to make federal operations increasingly resilient to the impacts of climate change for the benefit of all.
The updated plans advance the administrationโs National Climate Resilience Framework, which helps align climate resilience investments across the public and private sectors through common principles and opportunities.
โThanks to the leadership of the Biden-Harris Administration, we are strengthening climate resilience to ensure humanity is well-prepared for the effects of climate change,โ said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. โNASAโs decades of Earth observation are key to building climate resiliency and sustainability across the country and the world.โ
NASA serves as a global leader in Earth science, providing researchers with crucial data from its satellites and other assets, as well as other observations and research on the climate system. The agency also works to apply that knowledge and inform the public about climate change. NASA will continue to prioritize these efforts and maintain an open information policy that makes its science data, software, and research freely available to all.
Climate variability and change also have potential impacts on NASAโs ability to fulfill its mission, requiring proactive planning and action from the agency. To ensure coastal flooding, extreme weather events, and other climate change impacts do not stop the agencyโs work, NASA is improving its climate hazard analyses and developing plans to protect key resources and facilities.
โAs communities face extreme heat, natural disasters and severe weather from the impacts of climate change, President Biden is delivering record resources to build climate resilience across the country,โ said Brenda Mallory, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. โThrough his Investing in America agenda and an all-of-government approach to tackling the climate crisis, the Biden-Harris Administration is delivering more than $50 billion to help communities increase their resilience and bolster protections for those who need it most. By updating our own adaptation strategies, the federal government is leading by example to build a more resilient future for all.โ
At the beginning of his administration, President Biden tasked federal agencies with leading whole-of-government efforts to address climate change through Executive Order 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. Following the magnitude of challenges posed by the climate crisis underscored last year when the nation endured a record 28 individual billion-dollar extreme weather and climate disasters that caused more than $90 billion in aggregate damage, NASA continues to be a leader and partner in adaptation and resilience.
NASA released its initial Climate Adaptation Plan in 2021 and progress reports outlining advancements toward achieving their adaptation goals in 2022. In coordination with the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget, agencies updated their Climate Adaptation Plans for 2024 to 2027 to better integrate climate risk across their mission, operations, and asset management, including:
Combining historical data and projections to assess exposure of assets to climate-related hazards including extreme heat and precipitation, sea level rise, flooding, and wildfire.
Expanding the operational focus on managing climate risk to facilities and supply chains to include federal employees and federal lands and waters.
Broadening the mission focus to describe mainstreaming adaptation into agency policies, programs, planning, budget formulation, and external funding.
Linking climate adaptation actions with other Biden-Harris Administration priorities, including advancing environmental justice and the Presidentโsย Justice40 Initiative, strengthening engagement with Tribal Nations, supporting theย America the Beautifulย initiative, scaling upย nature-based solutions, and addressing the causes of climate change through climate mitigation.
Adoptingย common progress indicatorsย across agencies to assess the progress of agency climate adaptation efforts.
All plans from each of the more than 20 agencies and more information are available online.
There were big changes in the Drought Monitor depiction of dryness and drought this week compared to last, primarily across the contiguous U.S. east of the Mississippi River. Inundating tropical rains literally washed away the entrenched moderate to severe drought (D1 to D2) that had covered southern Florida. The opposite was the case farther north across most of the Eastern States. Rainfall has been generally below-normal across a majority of this region for the past 1 to 2 months, with subnormal rainfall dating back 3 or more months in some areas. Increasingly, above-normal temperatures have accompanied the dryness, which has added to the rate of surface moisture depletion. Temperatures have had the greatest impact on conditions in the climatologically-hotter areas across the South until late this past week, when excessive heat started to engulf the Great Lakes and Northeast. Declining streamflows and dropping soil moisture started to become obviously apparent this past week over large sections of the East, and as a result, there was an expansive increase in new D0 coverage east of the Mississippi River and north of central Florida, with only small spots in Georgia and Maine experiencing any discernable relief. Farther west, although changes were not as expansive, both south-central and north-central portions of the Plains and Rockies also saw significant areas where dry conditions developed or intensified. There were other areas of heavy rain outside southern Florida, but most of it fell on sections of the Upper Midwest that have received consistently above-normal precipitation for at least several weeks, thus bringing no changes to areas of dryness and drought. West of the Mississippi River, limited improvement was introduced in relatively small swaths in northeastern Arkansas, central and western Kansas, southern Nebraska, southwestern Montana, and a few adjacent locales…
Moderate to heavy rains soaked a sizeable part of the High Plains Region last week. Most fell on locations not experiencing antecedent dryness and therefore provided no relief, but several areas that have been entrenched in drought did record enough rainfall to consequentially improve conditions. Heavy rainfall totals of 2 to locally 4 inches were fairly common over a fairly broad swath from northeastern to southwestern Kansas, making this one of the few states to experience more relief than deterioration last week. Patches of 1-catregory improvements were introduced where heavier rains fell, continuing a general trend of decreasing dryness observed since mid-May. At that time, almost one-third of the state was covered by severe drought (D2) or worse. Four weeks later, less than 8 percent of the state is similarly dry. Farther north, heavy rains also affected parts of areas experiencing antecedent dryness in southern Nebraska. Generally 1 to 3 inches of rain eliminated moderate drought (D1) in south-central Nebraska, and whittled away some D0 in some other parts of south-central Nebraska. Moderate to heavy rains also ended D0 conditions in a few small areas in central South Dakota as well. Farther west, however, continued dry and warm weather engendered areas of deterioration in central portions of the Rockies and High Plains, as has been scattered across these areas occasionally for the past several weeks. Burgeoning 60- to 90-day precipitation shortfalls along with acute root-zone moisture and ground water deficits led to a broad expansion of moderate drought (D1) in eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska. The dry week compounded by recent heat and increasing short-term precipitation shortfalls also led to some lesser D0 and D1 expansion in other parts of Wyoming and a few areas across Colorado and the central and western portions of South Dakota…
Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 18, 2024.
Conditions were seasonably dry in this broad region, so in sharp contrast to areas farther east, very few changes were made. But one area of deterioration was in part of New Mexico, based on high wildfire danger and ongoing fires that are threatening dwellings and other structures near the town of Ruidoso. Unusually dry, hot, and windy weather combined with low fuel moisture are abetting favorable conditions for the rapid development and spread of wildfires near and south of Ruidoso, so the D1 through D3 areas in this region were expanded somewhat to the northwest. Meanwhile, improving soil moisture and some recent light to moderate precipitation โ especially at higher elevations โ prompted improvement from moderate drought (D1) to D0 in southwestern Montana and a small part of adjacent Wyoming…
D0 expansion was observed in this region as well, but mostly near and east of the Mississippi River, and not nearly to the extent seen farther north and east. New, relatively small areas of D0 were brought into south-central Tennessee and part of east-central Tennessee, with abnormal dryness expanding from the areas covered last week into somewhat larger parts of north-central Mississippi, and portions of northern and western Arkansas. In contrast, light to moderate rains (up to 1.5 inches) eased brought just enough relief to prompt 1-category improvements in parts of northeastern Arkansas, and scattered moderate rains (1 inch or more) with isolated heavy amounts (up to 3 inches) moistened parts of the northeastern fringes of the D0 region in central Texas, and some patches in eastern New Mexico and western Texas. Meanwhile, growing short-term deficits have begun to quickly reduce surface moisture levels in western Oklahoma east of the Panhandle, so this entire region has been placed in moderate drought (D1). Streamflows declined significantly this past week, with several locations reporting flows more indicative of D2 to D4 conditions if no other parameters were considered, especially over the southern half of this area. Declining streamflows and increasing short-term rainfall deficits prompted new D0 areas in parts of northern and western Arkansas where little or no rain fell last week, and similarly low streamflows were observed in parts of this region as well…
Looking Ahead
In the 24 hours after the valid period for this Drought Monitor ended (8 a.m. EDT Tuesday June 18, 2024), excessive to historically heavy rains fell on the central Oklahoma Panhandle and some adjacent locales in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Kansas. Over 7 inches of rain inundated some sites in the central Oklahoma Panhandle during the 24-hour period. Climatologically, these amounts are expected only once every few hundred years, at most, in this region. During the next five days (June 20-24, 2024), moisture from the first named tropical system in the Atlantic basin this year (Tropical Storm Alberto) is expected to stream into southern Texas, dropping 3 to locally 8 inches of rain from Webb County (north of Laredo) and San Patricio County (north of Corpus Christi) southward into Mexico. An inch or more is possible as far north as Del Rio and East Matagorda Bay. Farther north, heavy to excessive rains of 3 to 6 inches are expected to drench a swath from southeastern South Dakota through much of southern Minnesota and into part of northern Wisconsin โ an area frequently affected by heavy rains over the past several weeks โ and a smaller area over southwestern Colorado. Amounts exceeding 1.5 inches are forecast from parts of the north-central Great Plains eastward through the upper Mississippi Valley and the northern and western Great Lakes region, with similar amounts expected over much of New England and adjacent eastern New York, part of northeastern Florida and some adjacent areas, and scattered higher elevations in northern New Mexico and western Colorado. In contrast, fairly dry weather โ featuring a few tenths of an inch of precipitation at best โ is expected in the areas of dryness and drought affecting the Far West, Intermountain West, central and northern Texas, most of Oklahoma, interior portions of the lower Mississippi Valley and Southeast, the lower Ohio and Tennessee Valleys, and the mid-Atlantic Piedmont. Other locations across the contiguous United States are forecast to receive near typical amounts for a week in mid-June.
Most of the contiguous states are expected to average warmer than normal for the 5-day period, with all areas north and east of the middle and lower Mississippi Valley, the immediate Gulf and South Atlantic Coasts, and Florida forecast to average at least 2 deg. F above normal. Similar anomalies are anticipated in the central and south-central Plains, the northern half of the Rockies, the Intermountain West, and the Far West. Parts of interior California, the northern Great Basin and adjacent northern Intermountain West, south-central Great Plains, and a large swath from the middle Mississippi Valley eastward through the mid-Atlantic and adjacent regions are expected to average 6 to 10 deg. F above normal. Subnormal mean temperatures should be confined to Deep South Texas, much of the Rio Grande Valley, much of the Big Bend, part of the upper Mississippi Valley, and portions of the immediate Pacific Coast
The Climate Prediction Centerโs 6-10 day outlook (valid June 25-29, 2024) favors a continuation of above-normal temperatures over a vast majority of the contiguous states, with the greatest odds (over 80 percent) across much of the Four Corners region, and farther east over most of the Carolinas and Virginia. Enhanced chances for below-normal temperatures are restricted to part of the Pacific Northwest. Somewhat enhanced chances for abnormally high temperatures also cover most of Mainland Alaska while below-normal temperatures are favored in southeastern Alaska and across Hawaii. A large part of the contiguous states also show elevated chances for above-normal precipitation, although in most areas the shift of the odds is modest. There is a 33 to near 50 percent chance of surplus precipitation in the Pacific Northwest, most of the Four Corners region, and from the Plains eastward through the Mississippi and lower Oho Valleys, Great Lakes region, southern Appalachians, Southeast, and Florida. Odds for wetter than normal weather exceed 50 percent in much of Arizona and New Mexico. Neither abnormal wetness nor dryness is favored in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic region, northern Rockies, and Southwest while drier than normal conditions are only favored in the Great Basin and adjacent areas in the northern Intermountain West and California. Meanwhile, there are slightly increased odds for above-normal precipitation over the southeastern two-thirds to three-quarters of Alaska and throughout Hawaii.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 18, 2024.
This morningโs (June 18, 2024) National Interagency Fire Center map showing starts in southern California within the last 24 hours (yellow ringed flames).
Wildfire season has hit the West and itโs already a doozy, with several fires popping up in the last few days across California, most centered in the Los Angeles area. Arizona has had a handful of threatening fires this season, a lightning-caused blaze was burning at El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico, and on Monday night a blaze broke out in the Rabbit Valley right on the Colorado-Utah line near Fruita. The National Interagency Fire Center reported near midnight that the latter had burned 500 acres, but other reports said it was significantly smaller.
But probably the scariest incident is the South Fork/Salt Fire in southern New Mexico. The two fires โ which seem destined to merge into one โ were first spotted on Mescalero Apache land Monday morning. By late Monday night they had erupted into a 5,252-acre and a 2,815-acre blaze, respectively, with the former advancing rapidly toward Ruidoso and forcing the evacuation of the entire village and surrounding areas.
Downtown Ruidosoโs live webcam early this morning [June 18, 2024] reveals an intact community following the nighttime chaos of a hurried evacuation.
Average to above average snowpacks this winter kept drought at bay in much of the West. But nearly all of New Mexico is experiencing some level of drought, with the southern part of the state โ including Ruidoso โ being especially dry.
The entire village of Ruidoso is considered to be a wildland/urban interface, or WUI, community as its surrounded by conifer forest. According to a Federal Emergency Management Agency case study, New Mexico and federal forestry officials deemed Ruidoso as having the stateโs highest, and the nationโs second highest, risk of catastrophic fire. The primary danger was that tree densities in the surrounding forest were more than 10 times that of a healthy Ponderosa pine ecosystem due to decades of fire suppression and a dearth of prescribed or cultural burning.
The Cree Fire in 2000 spurred the community to action, and in the ensuing years the community created and implemented a fire hazard mitigation plan. The plan, which extends to the county as a whole, was updated and renewed in March of this year. Letโs hope it works.
Western drought shifted locations over the last year, but didnโt increase much in severity, aside from in southern New Mexico. National Drought Monitor.
Existing development and the site of a proposed 3,000-home development (in the undeveloped desert on the left side). Google Earth.
6,500: The number of new homes that could be coming to the desert just west of Las Vegas if two pending developments are realized.
522 million: Estimated gallons of water those households would consume annually.
Yes, you read that right: Even as the Southwest suffers through the most severe megadrought in the last 1,200 years or so, even as officials throughout the Southwest grapple with how to live within the Colorado Riverโs shrinking limits, and even in a place where the mercury has topped out above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on 19 days so far this year, developers are looking to build a crapload of new homes. Both proposed developments are near Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.
The less controversial of the two is a 3,000-home master-planned community proposed by Olympia Companies on just over 500 acres of land on the northwest fringe of Las Vegasโs sprawl. Up until November of last year, the land was owned by the American public โ i.e. the Bureau of Land Management. Olympia purchased it for $55 million as part of the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, a 1998 law that allowed the BLM to sell off developable land on the urban fringe in exchange for protecting more sensitive lands. Theย Las Vegas Review-Journalโsย storyย gives some details about the planned trail network, but doesnโt mention water. Go figure.ย
Then thereโs the proposal at Blue Diamond Hill, an old gypsum mine that lies a bit further afield, and right next to the conservation area. Originally the developer wanted to build 5,000 homes here. Clark County pushed back, preliminarilyย approving 429 homesย in 2022. The developers took the county to court, alleging bias and a conflict of interest. Earlier this month the county agreed to pay the developer $80 million and allow it to build about 3,500 homes to settle the issue. Local advocates have beenย fighting the developmentย since its inception two decades ago, since it would bring sprawl right up to a national conservation areaโs doorstep.ย
Granted, because theyโre new homes, they will have more water use restrictions on them than older homes, in terms of how much turf they can have or the size of swimming pools. But itโs not like theyโre replacing the older, less efficient homes โ theyโre still adding to Southern Nevadaโs overall consumption of water, energy, space.
Iโm sure there are folks who believe building all these new homes will help solve the affordable housing crisis by increasing the overall supply. I doubt it. Aside from being on an industrial extraction site, the Blue Diamond Hill development will surely be rather desirable, given its location, and expensive. And while Olympia says they will have some โentry-levelโ homes, they donโt say what that means. Home prices in nearby Olympia developments are mostly over $400,000, which doesnโt exactly qualify as affordable. More likely the added supply will โ akin to adding lanes to congested freeways โ merely induce more demand rather than lower prices in any meaningful way.
But that wonโt stop politicians from using the housing crisis to push more public land into developersโ hands. Federal lawmakers are considering two such bills, including one that would make 25,000 acres of public land in Southern Nevada available for development in exchange for wilderness designations for some 2 million acres of federal land. This is being touted as a way to build more affordable housing. Yet the bill does not restrict what kind or price of housing could be developed on the land. (Read Jennifer Solisโs run-down for Nevada Current)
Nor, for that matter, does it say anything about where the water would come from.
Update: Click the link to read “Acreage burned in two Ruidoso area fires rises to 23K as rain bring flash flooding” from the Ruidoso News (Mike Smith). Here’s an excerpt:
June 19, 2024
Two large fires burning around Ruidoso continued to grow as firefighters pursued containment efforts in the air and on the ground, according to the Southwest Area Incident Fire Management Team, and heavy rains brought flooding to parts of the area. The South Fork Fire burned around 16,335 acres as of Wednesday afternoon and the Salt Fire burned over 7,000 acres, read a press release from theย agency...Zero containment was noted in the press release as mixed conifer, grass, pine and juniper are the main fuels for both fires.
โExtreme fire behavior occurred across the South Fork and Salt Fires on Tuesday with crowning and long-range spotting observed,โ stated the press release…A flash flood watch was active until Thursday morning for the Ruidoso area, according to a forecast from the National Weather Service (NWS) in Albuquerque.
The rolling hills southwest of Denver offer spectacular views of the Pike National Forest, and the land is as rugged as it is beautiful.
Tucked in among the ponderosa pines, hills and rock formations is Miller Gulch, a popular recreation area for bikers and hikers near Bailey, Colorado. To the casual observer, seeing a forest dense with trees looks healthy, but itโs actually cause for concern.
Thatโs why in 2022, the U.S. Department of Agricultureโs Forest Service and Denver Water launched a forest health project to thin 1,500 acres of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir trees in the area.
The goal was to help return the forest to its natural structure and composition. The project wrapped up in the spring of 2024.
A look at the Miller Gulch area of the Pike National Forest after thinning work was completed. The spacing between the trees leads to a healthier forest that is less prone to large, catastrophic wildfires. Photo credit: Denver Water.
โWhile small fires are beneficial to the forest, large wildfires can be devastating,โ said Ryan Kolling, a Forest Service Supervisory Forester. โThinning the forest helps reduce the risk of large wildfires and helps the trees become more resilient to disease and insect infestation.โ
Improving the health of the forest protects nearby homes and recreation trails from large fires. A healthier forest also offers better protection for an area that supplies water to Denver and several surrounding suburbs.
The Miller Gulch area before tree thinning shows the overly dense forest that is susceptible to large wildfires. Photo credit: Denver Water.
โDenverโs source water begins as the snow and rain that travels across the forests west of Denver,โ said Madelene McDonald, a watershed scientist at Denver Water.
โAs the water flows downhill into rivers and streams, the forest acts as a natural filter for what will eventually become our drinking water. Thatโs why forest health is critical to Denver Water and our customers.โ
Forest treatments
Improving the health of the forest is done through โtreatmentsโ that reduce the amount of vegetation, or โfuels,โ that could catch fire. Treatments range from using machines to remove trees and thin the forest to using prescribed fires to burn away debris on the forest floor.
Before any treatments began in the Miller Gulch area, the Forest Service conducted an analysis of the area and created a โprescriptionโ that outlined which trees should be removed and which ones would stay. The agency partnered with the nonprofit Stewardship West to streamline the process and complete the work.
The treatment work involved a multistep process to thin the forest.
The first step involved removing selected trees with a large feller-buncher cutting machine equipped with two saws and a large โclaw.โ
After the trees were cut down, a machine called a โskidderโ dragged them to a collection area, where another machine called a โdangle-head processorโ removed the branches.
The last step involved a bulldozer-like machine called a โmasticatorโ that works like a lawnmower, chopping up any remaining debris and spreading it across the ground.ย
A cutting machine, known as a feller-buncher, saws the bottom of a tree, lifts it and sets it aside on the ground for removal. Photo credit: Denver Water.
A โskidderโ grabs the downed trees and drags them to a collection area. Photo credit: Denver Water.
A dangle-head processor removes branches from the downed trees and stacks the trees in piles. Photo credit: Denver Water.
A mastication machine drives around the area where trees have been removed like a lawnmower. The machineโs blades chop up debris and spread it across the forest floor. Photo credit: Denver Water.
After the treatment is complete, the forest will have openings and meadows between groups of trees, so if one tree is hit by lightning and catches fire, it will be harder for flames to jump to other trees and spread.
The area in the foreground shows the treated areas of Miller Gulch. There is more space between the trees and the forest is less dense compared to the untreated areas in the background. Photo credit: Stewardship West.
โThe forest land recovers quickly after treatments. As an example, in areas around here where weโve done treatments in the past, there are now grasses, new trees and wildflowers already coming back,โ Kolling said.
โThinning also helps stimulate new growth and gives the forest more diversity in terms of the age of trees as older ones are removed and new ones take root.โ
Putting debris to good use
A key part of forest management is to make sure the removed trees are put to beneficial use.
In the Miller Gulch area, the cut trees were separated into large and small piles. The larger trees are taken to sawmills in Colorado where theyโre turned into materials such as two-by-four boards and wood pallets.
Some tree piles are left on-site for the public to cut into smaller pieces for use as their own firewood. (A permit is required.)
Large trees on the left are taken to sawmills and turned into various wood products. The smaller branches and trees on the right are turned into firewood and mulch to be sold in the community. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The smaller trees and branches are used for firewood or turned into mulch and sold in the community. Other debris is scattered across the forest in areas where work was done to help the land recover.
โWeโve worked hard over the years to make sure weโre getting added benefit from our forest treatments, so these projects help the community in many ways,โ Kolling said.
โThe Buffalo Creek, Hayman and Hi Meadow fires were all high-intensity fires that burned on the Pike National Forest, which is in our South Platte watershed,โ McDonald said.
โWhen these types of wildfires occur, the exposed landscape can experience significant erosion that degrades our water quality and fills up our reservoirs with sediment.โ
Downed trees and debris from the 1996 Buffalo Creek fire ended up in Strontia Springs Reservoir after a flood hit the burn scar. Denver Water is trying to prevent future disasters from happening by investing in forest health to prevent major wildfires. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water has prioritized treatment in the Miller Gulch area because of its proximity to the North Fork of the South Platte River, which flows into Strontia Springs Reservoir. The reservoir is where 80% of the utilityโs water passes through before heading to water treatment facilities.
โItโs very important to reduce the wildfire risk above Strontia Springs,โ McDonald said.
โWeโve seen several big fires here in the past three decades that have caused significant problems to our water treatment operations and water delivery infrastructure.โ
Federal help
The Pike National Forest is located in the Colorado Front Range Landscape, an area of 3.6 million acres recently identified in the Forest Serviceโs Wildfire Crisis Strategy as one of 21 landscapes at high risk for large wildfires. This is due to the areaโs fire history, current vegetation conditions, number of homes and importance to the water supply for people across metro Denver.
The Wildfire Crisis Strategy is a 10-year plan developed by the Forest Service to dramatically increase the pace, scale and scope of forest health treatments across the Western U.S. The plan addresses wildfire risks to critical infrastructure, protecting communities and making forests more resilient.
The original From Forests to Faucets plan for Miller Gulch called for treating 419 acres. However, since the project was already in progress, it was selected for additional federal funding in 2022 and received $3.3 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. This additional funding allowed for the treatment of an additional 1,102 acres.
A section of Miller Gulch in 2023 shows how quickly the land recovers after treatment as grasses and wildflowers grow back. Photo credit: Denver Water.
โFor years, Denver Water and the Forest Service have leveraged resources through the From Forests to Faucets partnership. And with support from the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, we are able to continue this proven approach and essentially triple the number of acres treated in Miller Gulch,โ McDonald said.
โAll of the work expands our efforts to reduce the wildfire risk in the area and helps protect our water supplies.โ
Connecting landscapes
The Miller Gulch project is one of many forest health efforts that in recent years have been done in the Upper South Platte River Basin on the Pike National Forest. May of those projects are in the area of Bailey, Buffalo Creek and the Colorado Trail.
A prescribed fire along the Colorado Trail near Buffalo Creek in June 2023 is an example of other fuel reduction treatments in the Pike National Forest. Photo credit: Andrew Slack, Colorado Forest Restoration Institute.
โThe goal is to connect the dots of forest treatments across the landscape,โ Kolling said.
โWe try to combine our treatment efforts with our partners and work with natural features like roads and rivers. This creates fuel breaks which will help us bring large-scale fires down to fighting size if one breaks out.โ
Stewardship Agreements and partnerships
The Miller Gulch project is a prime example of what partnerships can accomplish by using Stewardship Agreements.
In 1999, Congress created the Stewardship Agreement tool, which gave the Forest Service the authority to work with partners collaboratively across shared landscapes. The goal is to accomplish impactful work and achieve mutually beneficial goals for the national forests.
For Miller Gulch, the Forest Service partnered with Stewardship West to speed up the treatment process and achieve shared forest health goals. Stewardship West is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to improving forest health across the Western U.S.
โWe are a boots-on-the-ground, action-focused organization with a mission of engineering heathy and resilient forests,โ said Kevin Zeman, president and CEO of Stewardship West.
โThe Forest Service gives us the treatment plan and we do the coordination and implementation to make the project happen. This has allowed us to treat 1,500 acres in just 2.5 years, which is really unheard of in terms of land management.”
Ryan Kolling (right), a Forest Service supervisory forester, meets with Stewardship Westโs Jennifer Baker (left) and Kevin Zeman to discuss the forest treatments in Miller Gulch. Photo credit: Denver Water.
As a neighboring water provider with shared wildfire risks, Aurora Water joined forces with Denver Water and the Forest Service in 2022 to help fund the Miller Gulch project. Aurora Water works with Denver Water and also uses Strontia Springs Reservoir to deliver water to its customers.
Denver Waterโs collection system spans more than 4,000 square miles of forest land, so working with other agencies is critical, according to McDonald.
โWe rely on our regional, state and federal partners to help protect our watersheds,โ McDonald said.
โIt really is a team effort, and the Miller Gulch project is a great example of how we can ensure a reliable water supply and improve the forest health at the same time.โ
Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge, located in far Northern California, harbors what remains of a once vast, shallow lake. On a recent April morning, I toured the area with John Vradenburg, supervisory fish and wildlife biologist for the Klamath Basin Refuges. A few months earlier, birds had all but abandoned Tule Lake. Now they were back in the thousands: clumps of eared grebes; dipping swallows; black-necked stilts with their impossibly spindly legs.
As we drove along the edge of the refugeโs largest wetland โ evocatively called โSump 1Aโ โ pairs of Canada geese swam away from shore, followed by fluffy goslings. Vradenburg stopped the truck to rescue one that was trapped behind a headgate. He gently tossed the ball of fluff into the water, where it made a beeline for its two siblings.
A few yards later Vradenburg stopped again to point out a pair of western grebes. Facing each other, they took turns dipping their needle-like bills into the water, then shook them off. They were getting ready to dance, side by side, across the water โ part of their spectacular courtship ritual.
โItโs just so good to see birds moving around in here again,โ he said.
A Transformed Ecosystem
The Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges are a complex of six refuges straddling the Oregon-California border โ remnants of vast wetlands that once expanded and contracted with the seasons, breathing an almost unfathomable abundance of life into the dry region. A century or so ago, flocks of geese and swans darkened the sky. There were masses of white pelicans; hordes of grebes, ducks, and ibises; eagles and hawks in profusion. On Lower Klamath Lake, which sprawled nearly 100,000 acres, boats conveyed tourists from the Klamath River to the lakeโs southern tip.
In typical early 20th century fashion, the Bureau of Reclamation remade the basin into a network of dikes, canals, drains, sumps and pumps called the Klamath Reclamation Project. Both Lower Klamath Lake and Tule Lake were drained to feed new farms established by homesteaders, including veterans returning from both World Wars.
To preserve what remained of the shrinking habitat, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 established the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. At nearly 47,000 acres, it was the nationโs first wildlife refuge dedicated to waterfowl. The 39,000-acre Tule Lake refuge was established in 1928 to protect what was left of the drained expanse.
Though a fraction of their former splendor, these wetlands still serve as a vital stopover for the millions of birds that use the Pacific Flyway every year.
The region has always experienced periodic drought, but the past 20 years have been drier than usual, culminating in several years of extreme to exceptional drought. Between 2019 and 2022, the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges received essentially no water. Wetlands like Sump 1A turned to cracked expanses of dry mud. The birds disappeared.
Now, thanks to two decent water years in a row and a surge of funding for restoration projects across the Klamath Basin, a new optimism about reconnecting this broken ecosystem has emerged.
Reconnecting the Pieces
On March 24 members of the Tulelake Irrigation District gathered in front of a blocky concrete building for an unlikely ceremony: the revving up of โD plant,โ a series of pumps that route water from Tule Lake to the Lower Klamath refuge via a 6,000-foot tunnel. The plant used to run nearly continuously, moving some 80,000 acre-feet of water per year, but it had been silent since 2020. (One acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons.)
Ironically, this ecosystem now needs D Plant, says Brad Kirby, manager of the Tulelake Irrigation District. In this remade basin, the Lower Klamath refuge is cut off from the Klamath River; D Plant functions like a heart, powering an artificial artery that delivers lifeblood to the refuge. This water also helps recharge the aquifer and eventually drains back to the Klamath River underground.
Typically, irrigators want to conserve every drop. Encouraging the โflow throughโ of water among farmland, wetlands, and the river is a โnew goal, counter to when I first started, when our goal was to minimize drainage,โ says Kirby.
The Klamath Refuge system and farmers of the Klamath Project have long been intertwined. Farmland surrounds the refuges; in addition, 21,000 acres within the refuges are leased for agriculture.
Even though the refuges hold a senior water right โ an older right with higher priority โ they are the last to receive water.
First priority goes to three endangered species. The Bureau of Reclamation must manage flows in the Klamath River to protect coho salmon and levels in Upper Klamath Lake to ensure the survival of cโwaam and koptu โ sucker fish that are of critical importance to the Klamath Tribes.
Next the agency must fulfill contracts with irrigators. The refuges largely depend on drain water from the irrigation districts โ and thatโs in good years.
The Klamath Basin has a fraught history, with Tribes, irrigators, and wildlife advocates fighting over scarce and precious resources. The recent drought showed everyone โ refuge staff, irrigators, tribes, hunters โ the unthinkable: the โEverglades of the Westโ transformed into a desert. This vision scared stakeholders to the table to hammer out solutions that benefit the landscape as a whole, and, they hope, everyone.
โItโs the first time โ at least since Iโve seen here โ where you see everyone interested in what everyone else has going on, and everyone participating in a proactive, collaborative way,โ says Vradenburg. โYou hear a lot about co-benefits.โ Wetlands absorb and slowly release water, filter out pollutants, recharge groundwater, and provide habitat for birds and fish.
โThe thing thatโs different from the historic Klamath Basin to today is the connectivity,โ says Vradenburg. โCan we look at the infrastructure that we have in this highly modified system and bring that connectivity back?โ
Across the basin working groups are looking at ways to restore wetlands and โre-wet the sponge.โ Ducks Unlimited, which helped secure funding to run D Plant, is working with area irrigation districts to improve water conveyance and management. The nonprofit has secured funding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to install new pumping stations to deliver agricultural drain water to the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge. Money from that same pot will go to improve management of the wetlands โ or โsumpsโ โ on Tule Lake refuge.
The current infrastructure โis not set up to handle this new paradigm of less water,โ says Amelia Raquel, a regional biologist at Ducks Unlimited.
Itโs not just the quantity of wet ground thatโs important โ itโs the timing. Prolonged drying can be devastating, allowing invasive species to take root and even causing land to sink, or subside. But managing wetlands so they go dry for shorter periods โresets the whole health of that wetland,โ says Raquel. โThis allows the seedbank in wetland soils to germinate, starts succession [and] brings in invertebrates food for waterfowl and fish.โ
The Klamath Drainage District has proposed modifying one of the main diversions that delivers irrigation water from the Klamath River so that it first enters a large wetland in the Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge. This would provide important habitat for ducks and other waterfowl, especially during spring and summer molting and breeding seasons. It would also benefit fish, including salmon that will have access to the Upper Basin once dams on the Klamath River are removed this year.
โThe reason we started thinking about this is we had a dry refuge,โ says Scott White, general manager of the Klamath Drainage District. Birds need habitat in spring. โIf theyโre not going to the refuge, then theyโre out in the fields as the little baby plants are starting to grow, munching away. They just wreak havoc on a crop.โ
The district is also looking at using some of their private farmlands as floodplain habitat, similar to the way rice fields in Californiaโs Central Valley function.
This project is one part of a new memorandum of understanding signed between the Klamath Water Users Association, Klamath Tribes, Yurok Tribe, and Karuk Tribe. In it the parties agreed to work together on projects that support their common goals, and the Department of Interior pledged to help secure funding.
Some of the old tension remains. Irrigators are disappointed with the Bureau of Reclamationโs latest water allocation, announced in April; they feel they should have received more water on the heels of such a wet winter. Clayton Dumont, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, is also worried about the allocation. He supports projects that restore wetlands and functionality of the ecosystem, but he also wants to make sure none of these projects further compromise cโwaam and koptu in Upper Klamath Lake.
โWeโre not interested in having the refuges fill at the expense of suckers in the upper basin,โ he says.
And the shadow of the next drought is never far.
A Resilient Landscape
The refuge wetlands are still recovering from being dry for so long. At Tule Lake submerged aquatic vegetation is starting to return โ a good sign, says Vradenburg. โThatโs a really a big driver for a lot of our waterbird communities, especially diving ducks and grebes, those birds that like to nest on top of the water.โ
On our way back to refuge headquarters, we stopped to watch a small flock of ibis pick through the mud, their glossy backs flashing green and rust. Then we stopped yet again to listen to the insistent murmur of hundreds, maybe thousands, of white-fronted geese. While the Canada geese are already rearing families, these birds still have to make it all the way to their breeding grounds in Alaska.
Itโs a different landscape from just two years ago. During the drought going to work every day was heartbreak, says Vradenburg. โThe refuge staff was so beaten down. Now people are grabbing keys to a work vehicle just so they can see the birds flying at sunrise.โ
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 16, 2024
Boulder and other Front Range communities get some real blasts. But unlike so much else with climate change, theyโre not getting worse. Why?
It was a big, long blow. Wind whooshed, whipped and wailed through Boulder County for much of Aprilโs first weekend. Pearl Street and other business districts went dark after Xcel Energy cut power midway through that Saturday afternoon with only a few hours of advance notice. Xcel has a public relations black eye that will last many months and maybe years, with other repercussions yet to be determined.
โAn impressive April windstorm,โ wrote Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist, on his blog a few days later. At the foot of the Flatirons, gusts at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab were measured at more than 95 miles per hour. Ditto for a recording station along Highway 93 at Rocky Flats.
It was the worst April windstorm in at least the last 25 years, Schumacher wrote. These down-slope wind events, sometimes called mountain waves, usually occur from September to June. This one, though, had an intensity more typical of those during December and January, the peak months for winds along the Front Range.
Those who had never experienced a big Boulder blow before might have wondered what was going on. Could this be a ramification of the warming climate?
Itโs a basic tenet of climate change theory that we will see more extremes in weather. Droughts will last longer and go deeper; hurricanes will grow more intense and rain โ when it comes โ will trend toward deluges. Already, evidence has arrived to support these predictions.
But the wind storms that have always racked the northern Front Range have actually diminished in severity and frequency since the 1990s. Research conducted by meteorologists at two national agencies based in Boulder has found that the good old days were windier and wilder yet.
โWhat I can say is that over the past 30 years, wind storms have become less frequent in the corridor from Golden to Boulder and Lyons, and their magnitudes have not been as strong,โ says Paul Schlatter, science and operations officer at the National Weather Service in Boulder.
Thirty years ago, he explains, the Boulder area averaged 8.5 days a year of at least one gust hitting 75 mph. That has declined to 5.5 days per year.
โThat is just a fascinating drop,โ Schlatter says.
A dearth of records
Scientists have ideas about whatโs happening. NCAR scientists are producing two research papers under the title of โEarth, Wind and Fire: Are Boulderโs Hurricane-Force Winds Changing?โ
Making their work somewhat easier would be longer-term records. Precipitation is relatively easy to measure and across a broad area, says Schumacher. Temperature also presents a lesser challenge: โEven if you donโt have thermometers everywhere all the time, you can pretty robustly piece together data from where you do have thermometers to generate a good climate record,โ he says.
With wind, itโs different.
โYou need a lot more measurements to get a good sense of whatโs happening with wind than with temperature, and we didnโt really have that until recent years,โ Schumacher says. โWe have had much denser networks of weather stations since the mid-1990s.โ
Measurements of wind gusts began at the National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesa Lab upon completion of the building in 1967,. Even so, records were not preserved until beginning in the 1990s. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
The best, long-term records in the Boulder area began only in 1967, when an anemometer was installed atop NCARโs then brand-new four-story laboratory at the foot of the Flatirons. Even there, the record is marginal. For several decades, the results were not saved: Official records have only been kept since 1996.
Pre-1990s, wind measurements were recorded at NCAR on strip charts. Typically, after a big wind event, a reporter from the Boulder Daily Camera would call to get a measurement, after which the charts were routinely discarded by the researchers.
When a team of scientists decided years later that a longer record would be useful, they turned to the Daily Camera archives to locate the maximum wind gusts of the โ60s, โ70s and โ80s. Itโs a little bit like a chef going to a fast-food restaurant for tips on recipes.
A windy history
Anecdotal evidence of severe windstorms abounds. A slate-roof tower on Old Main, the first building on CU Boulderโs campus, was toppled by wind shortly after its construction, according to the 1999 book Boulder County: An Illustrated History. (The architect designed a sturdier brick structure with a lighter roof that opened two years later.)
In November 1869, Boulder County News reported that a large frame building being constructed on Pearl Street had been leveled. In what was likely the same 1869 wind storm, Golden had several roofs blown off and two houses destroyed.
Farther up Clear Creek, Georgetown experienced even worse. โAn awful and destructive windstorm, with savage violence came plunging down the mountains about four oโclock this morning and continued to rage with unabated violence during most of the day,โ said the Georgetown Miner. One small girl was killed when the timbers of a house fell, while others had legs and arms broken and dislocated.
A century later, an IBM employee who was a volunteer firefighter at the Cherryvale department was blown off a firetruck and to his death in a January 1969 wind event. The Daily Camera reported that the stormโs extreme gusts of up to 130 mph resulted in loss of electricity to 30% of the cityโs 10,000 homes.
Maximum gusts of 115 mph were recorded later in the year, then again in January and February of 1970. In January 1972, an even stronger gust was recorded: 142 mph. One decade after that, a windstorm damaged an estimated 40% of the structures in Boulder. Two gusts of 137 mph were recorded, and many more of 120 mph.
Amid the mayhem of the late โ60s and early โ70s, Gerald Meehl began hanging out at NCAR as an undergraduate student assistant. Today, heโs a senior scientist there.
Meehl can remember windier times. The January 1982 windstorm stands out in his mind.
โI drove around the morning after that windstorm and took photos,โ he says. โThe damage was unbelievable. I mean, houses were blown apart, roofs were blown off. There was a lot of structural damage. Many trees were blown over, power lines blown down all along 30th Street, the poles snapped off and blocked traffic. It was a mess.โ
Gusts during a 1982 storm that is vividly remembered even now were powerful enough to blow down telephone and other lines in Boulder. Photo/Thomas Schlatter
Peter Pollock, who later became a planning director in Boulder, arrived in 1978, commuting to a job at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. โI got a good feel for Boulder winds early,โ he remembers. Driving Highway 93 across Rocky Flats was notoriously treacherous.
One evening, the wind sent an element of a chimney crashing through the picture window of his Boulder apartment, spewing glass across the carpet.
New record spurs research
NCARโs current research was spurred by a report in February 2016. A new anemometer at Wolf Creek Pass, in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, recorded a wind speed of 148 mph. That dubious superlative bested the 147 mph measurement at NCARโs Mesa Lab in 1972. (A wind speed of 201 mph was recorded by temporary equipment on Longs Peak in 1981, but for unclear reasons, it is described as an unofficial record).
โThat got us thinking: We just donโt seem to see those kinds of windstorms anymoreโ in Boulder, says Meehl. โAnd it turns out we were right.โ
One possibility is that building codes have been beefed up, resulting in less damage than 50 years ago. Trees have become bigger, which may be blunting the blow.
โBut the climate change piece is the interesting one,โ says Meehl. โAnd it looks like the winds definitely have become weaker. If you look at anemometer reports of those up and down the Front Range, they donโt provide a continuous record before the โ90s. But they do show a decrease in the number of strong wind events just from those in Jefferson, Boulder and Larimer counties.โ
Coloradoโs dry, relatively warm downslope mountain winds are called foehn winds, and they occur on the lee (downwind) side of mountain ranges in the Alps, New Zealand and many other places in the world. In North America, we call them Chinooks, after the Indigenous people who lived near the Pacific Ocean along the lower Columbia River.
โAnywhere you have a north-south oriented mountain range where the prevailing wind is from the west,โ says Meehl, โyouโre going to get these down-slope winds.โ
Gerald Meehl
A general rule is that the steeper the slopes, the stronger the potential winds. Boulder lies closer to the high peaks than any other part of the Great Plains in Colorado. From North Arapaho Peak and others of the Indian Peaks, elevations drop 8,000 feet in just 18.5 miles.
How can the warming climate explain the lessened severity and frequency of Boulderโs winds? Winds higher up in the atmosphere have shifted. A layer of warmer air that used to sit at 15,000 to 20,000 feet has gone even higher. This cap of warm air is rising, like a window being opened. That leaves a wider gap: a raised window results in less of a hurry for the wind to come across the mountains and down the slopes to wreak havoc in Boulder.
Climate change has also made wind shear greater. Wind shear is the sudden change in wind speed, wind direction or both over a short distance in height above the ground. The strong winds in the atmosphere at 15,000 to 18,000 feet altitude have become stronger, while those closer to the Earthโs surface have not. Any increase in wind shear at that height above the Rocky Mountains west of Boulder means the formation of mountain waves โ and thus strong downslope winds โ are less likely to occur.
A mountain wave is essentially just like a wave of water, flowing over the top of a giant boulder. The water rises up over the boulder and accelerates quickly on the downstream side, forming a wave that breaks on top of itself. The atmosphere does the same thing: the Rocky Mountains are the boulder, or obstacle in the flow, and Boulder is where the wave of air crashes to the surface. Thatโs why the wind in Lafayette or Longmont โ being farther from the mountains โ is generally less strong.
Strong wind shear in the 15,000- to 18,000-foot layer prevents the mountain wave from ever forming, allowing the energy from the wind flowing over the Rockies to harmlessly dissipate in the middle and upper atmosphere, rather than the populated cities in the lee of the Rockies.
If this sounds complex, thatโs because it is. Meehl says NCAR researchers continuine modeling work in an attempt to pin down more precisely the changes that would explain lesser winds.
Bottom line, says Schlatter of the National Weather Service, is that if the temperature inversions formed by the warm layer in the atmosphere arenโt as strong or located at the right altitudes, the conditions will be less favorable for the downslope winds that afflict Boulder. Increasing wind shear in the same area of the atmosphere also is likely reducing the frequency and severity of those high-wind events.
In terms of wind speeds, those that produced the Marshall Fire of December 2021 were stronger than those of the April 6-7 storm. But the duration of this yearโs winds โ about 30 h0ours โ was truly impressive, says Schlatter.
Also unusual about this most recent bluster was the geographic spread of high winds. The strongest were, as usual, in and along the Front Range foothills. Anemometers at NCARโs Mesa Lab and one along Highway 93 west of Arvada near the entrance to Coal Creek Canyon recorded gusts of above 95 mph. But the Fort Collins area had gusts of above 90 mph. And Sterling and Akron had gusts of more than 70 mph. Often, the Great Plains get wind when the Front Range does not but are spared the strong blasts.
Earth, wind and fire
In literature, wind has been described in many ways: as a cleansing force, as something of change. You talk to many people in Boulder County, though, and they describe something else.
โIt jostles the inner workings of your being so much that staying present to your most basic needs is a challenge,โ says Robert Castellino, a photographer who now lives in Lafayette. He was a resident of Boulder during the โ82 windstorm, and his recollections are powerful.
โYou wanna duck, cover and run all at the same time,โ he says. There is โnothing like the terror of 60-foot cottonwoods snapping on Boulder Creek nor the blowdown of telephone poles from Iris to Baseline on 30th.โ
Terry Minger, who has spent most of the last 60 years in Boulder save for a decade as the town manager of Vail, admits to getting depressed by the relentless winds.
โSnowstorms, or other types of things, you kind of come to terms with them,โ he says. โWind takes the oxygen out of the room, dries everything out. It causes you to be a little bit on edge, a little grumpy.โ
The Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District (UGRWCD) will conduct its annual meeting on Monday, June 24, 2024 at 4:00 PM at the UGRWCD Offices, 210 W. Spencer Ave., Suite A, Gunnison, CO 81230 and via Zoom video/teleconferencing.
a Shows the surficial geology categories of the HRW by color classes in surficial geology legend, b shows the WIP probability gradient shown by yellow-blue shading indicated in WIP legend, c shows the predicted 1โm SOC stock across the HRW with purple-to-yellow shading that continues in inset maps showing fine scale SOC patterns overlain by estimated SOC shown by brown-teal shading from the harmonized National Wetland Condition Assessment and Soil Survey Geographic Database (NWCA-SSURGO) dataset in ref. 11 and additional current wetland extent from the National Wetland Inventory (NWI). We added a semi-transparent hill shade layer to highlight terrain and removed the river surface water shown in light blue for the final prediction map.
Inland wetlands are critical carbon reservoirs storing 30% of global soil organic carbon (SOC) within 6% of the land surface. However, forested regions contain SOC-rich wetlands that are not included in current maps, which we refer to as โcryptic carbonโ. Here, to demonstrate the magnitude and distribution of cryptic carbon, we measure and map SOC stocks as a function of a continuous, upland-to-wetland gradient across the Hoh River Watershed (HRW) in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., comprising 68,145โha. Total catchment SOC at 30โcm depth (5.0 TgC) is between estimates from global SOC maps (GSOC: 3.9 TgC; SoilGrids: 7.8 TgC). For wetland SOC, our 1โm stock estimates are substantially higher (Mean: 259 MgC haโ1; Total: 1.7 TgC) compared to current wetland-specific SOC maps derived from a combination of U.S. national datasets (Mean: 184 MgC haโ1; Total: 0.3 TgC). We show that total unmapped or cryptic carbon is 1.5 TgC and when added to current estimates, increases the estimated wetland SOC stock to 1.8 TgC or by 482%, which highlights the vast stores of SOC that are not mapped and contained in unprotected and vulnerable wetlands.
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Lia Chien):
May 31, 2024
The U.S. Department of the Interior and Bureau of Reclamation will send $242 million to five projects in Western states to improve water storage and clean drinking water supply, the bureau said Thursday.
The money, part of the presidentโs domestic infrastructure and manufacturing agenda and funded through the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, is expected to develop 1.6 million acre-feet of water storage, supporting 6.4 million people per year. Projects in Colorado, Arizona, Washington state and California will receive funding.
The Arkansas Valley Conduit, a major pipeline project in Colorado that has stalled for decades, is set to receive $90 million. Once completed, it will bring clean water to 50,000 people in 39 communities across the southeastern portion of the state, according to a release from the Bureau of Reclamation.
John F. Kennedy at Commemoration of Fryingpan Arkansas Project in Pueblo, circa 1962.
Finishing the project has been a long time coming. President John F. Kennedy signed a law in 1962 to authorize construction of the pipeline, but work on the project has stalled over the past six decades due to lack of funding.
This yearโs spending comes after almost $250 million in previous appropriations from the infrastructure law and other laws. The project overall is estimated to cost over $600 million, according to Colorado Public Radio.
Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat from Colorado, said he is excited to see the project move along.
Arkansas Valley Conduit map via the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Chris Woodka) June 2021.
โWe broke ground on the Arkansas Valley Conduit to finally deliver clean drinking water to Southeast Colorado. Now, more Bipartisan Infrastructure Law investments like this one will speed up the timeline,โ Hickenlooper said in a written statement Friday.
Washington state Cle Elum Pool Raise Project will receive $1 million to increase water capacity an additional 14,600 acre-feet. Cle Elum Lake is on the Cle Elum River, a tributary of the Yakima River that provides essential, high quality drinking water to the city of Cle Elum.
A feasibility study to address water storage solutions in Arizonaโs Horseshoe and Bartlett reservoirs is also receiving $8.5 million. The reservoirs provide drinking water to the greater Phoenix area. Over many years, sediment build-up in the Horseshoe Reservoir has reduced water storage capacity.
Climate change affects water supply
Investments in conservation projects like these will also help provide water storage and safe drinking water as Western states feel the effects of climate change, like drought, more frequently, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a research and advocacy group.
Rep. Raรบl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said water infrastructure projects like these are critical as the West faces climate change.
Grijalva credited the bipartisan infrastructure law and Democratsโ 2022 energy, taxes and health policy law known as the Inflation Reduction Act with helping to boost federal spending on Western water projects.
โThe more than $15 billion for western water projects and programs that Democrats passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Law is a gamechanger in our fight to secure clean drinking water, build our resilience to climate change, and restore critical rivers and watersheds,โ said Grijalva in a statement.
Grijalva added that more investments are needed, especially to protect the most vulnerable populations from the effects of water shortages.
โWhile these investments will deliver much-needed relief to communities in Arizona and all over the West, much more must be done, especially for those underserved and Indigenous communities that are being disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis and are too often left behind,โ he said.
Southwestern states, including Arizona, are expected to face more intense droughts as climate change intensifies, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. In the summer of 2021, drought conditions across the West were at their highest levels since 2000, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Drought conditions worsened in 2022.
Washington state officials declared a droughtย emergencyย this April as they expect high temperatures and water shortages this summer.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said it plans to export 4,500 acre-feet of water from the Mono Basin during the current runoff year, the same amount that was diverted the previous year, and enough to supply about 18,000 households for a year. Under the current rules, the city could take much more โ up to 16,000 acre-feet this year. But environmental advocates had recently urged Mayor Karen Bass not to increase water diversions to help preserve recent gains and begin to boost the long-depleted lake toward healthier levels. They praised the decision by city leaders as an important step.
โItโs a historic decision in the history of Mono Lake,โ said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. โI think itโs the first major environmental accomplishment for water in the Bass administration.โ
DWP officials detailed their expected water diversions from the region of the Eastern Sierra in anย annual planย for the runoff year, which began in April. Environmentalists said itโs the first time in 30 years that city officials have announced plans to take less water than the maximum amount allowed under a 1994 decision by the State Water Resources Control Board. However, DWP said in the plan that it will review water conditions in November, and at that point could still decide to export additional water if deemed necessary, up to the limit of 16,000 acre-feet.
Mono Lake, located in the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, east of Yosemite National Park. Paoha Island in the middle of the lake. By Ron Reiring – Mono Lake, CAUploaded by X-Weinzar, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11269094
A Los Angeles Department of Water and Power diversion dam on Lee Vining Creek, one of places where the city blocks flows to Mono Lake and shunts water 300 miles south through an aqueduct. Credit: Bob BerwynA grove of tufa towers along the south shore of Mono Lake, California, where long-term drought, global warming and water diversions threaten an ancient ecosystem. Credit: Bob BerwynTufa columns, Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra, California. By Vezoy (talkย ยท contribs) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30004462
Click the link to read the release on the NRCS website (Melvin J. Baker, Summer Begay, Petra Popiel):
May 31, 2024ย – Southern Ute Indian Reservation – A historic partnership is forging between the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Through the USDA or NRCS Agency’s Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the entities have jointly entered an alternative funding arrangement (AFA) to improve rangeland resiliency and health on Tribal lands. This project is funded through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).ย
“The Southern Ute Indian Tribe is the first Tribe in the nation to enter into an AFA through CSP. We’re proud of what that means for future relations between NRCS and the Tribe. We also get to play a role and join them as they expand their natural resource conservation journey,” said Clint Evans, NRCS State Conservationist in Colorado.
CSP, a Farm Bill program, builds upon existing conservation efforts while strengthening agricultural operations. “The Southern Ute Indian Tribeโs forward thinking and resource conservation focused mindset made them the perfect candidate for a CSP AFA,โ said Liz With, NRCS Assistant State Conservationist for Partnerships in Colorado. “They already implement top tier rangeland management and monitoring practices, and this agreement will assist in maintaining that high standard while also helping to more widely adopt and implement a strategic invasive noxious weed treatment plan over the next five years. That treatment will target species from Colorado noxious species list to improve rangeland health and resiliency in face of the increasing drought conditions.”
“This partnership will assist with improving our land, it will also honor the legacy of stewardship entrusted to us by our ancestors. By working together, we can ensure these rangelands remain healthy and productive for generations to come, all while setting a strong example of Tribal leadership in conservationโ, said Chairman Melvin J. Baker of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe.
The scope and magnitude of this historic project is also noteworthy. The Southern Ute Indian Tribe has agreed to enroll all rangeland acres managed by its Department of Natural Resources, totaling approximately 125,000 acres. Conservation practices implemented will help improve and favor deep rooted, native perennial plants that can help sequester more carbon and build soil health. This partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for the Tribe, NRCS, producers, and the environment as a whole.
“This partnership and project will lead to additional opportunities with the Southern Ute Tribe,” said Astor Boozer, NRCS Regional Conservationist for the West. “We will have future opportunities to address other resource concerns together, the NRCS will learn from the Tribe about indigenous and other traditional ecological practices. We are excited for this great opportunity.”
For more information about the Natural Resources Conservation Service, its programs, benefits, and opportunities, please visit www.co.nrcs.usda.gov. For more information about this partnership, please contact the Southern Ute Department of Natural Resources at 970-563-2912.
A gas exploration company with Florida ties is pursuing plans to pull groundwater out of existing coalbed methane wells in southern Wyoming, then pipe it into the lower reaches of the water-stressed Colorado River Basin.
The project was formally initiated in December, when the State Engineerโs Office received 21 groundwater test well applications from Mark Dolar of Dolar Energy, LLC. The test wells are all located on Bureau of Land Management property south of Rawlins in the Atlantic Rim gas field.
Two test well applications have since been rescinded by Dolar to comply with the state of Wyomingโs sage grouse and big game migration policies, according to an email from State Engineer Brandon Gebhart.
A project review letter from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department summarizes what the project proponent seeks to do with the water.
โIf the water is of sufficient quality, the applicant hopes to transport groundwater to Colorado via a pipeline,โ states a letter signed by Habitat Protection Supervisor Will Schultz.
But Sen. Larry Hicks (R-Baggs), whoโs on staff with the Little Snake River Conservation District, has met with Dolar and believes thatโs one of several uses of the water being considered if the plans move forward. Exchanges within Wyoming, he said, could also be an outcome.
โThe simple fact is the marketโs much more lucrative now than it was 20 years ago,โ Hicks told WyoFile. โHe doesnโt have to send it to Colorado.โ
Sen. Larry Hicks (R-Baggs) during the Wyoming Legislatureโs 2024 budget session. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Hicks used that rough historic benchmark because there have been repeated efforts since Atlantic Rim field drilling started in the mid-2000s to make use of the water surfaced during gas production. Currently, he said, the produced water is injected back into the ground โ which takes energy and money โ and it doesnโt make sense given the currently dismal economics of natural gas.
โThe water is probably, at this point in time, as valuable or more valuable than the natural gas,โ Hicks said. โItโs just a matter of figuring out how you utilize that water, and whether thereโs a sufficient enough quantity to justify a lot of expenditures.โ
Energy companies in the past ultimately determined that using Atlantic Rim formation water didnโt pencil out, even though itโs considered pretty high quality. And theyโve tried, even building out infrastructure.
A historic endeavor
Steve Degenfelder, then a land manager for Atlantic Rim driller Double Eagle Petroleum, recalled that his former employer secured permits to surface discharge a limited volume of untreated water via a pipeline and separately desalinate other volumes. Neither worked out long-term.
โWe did discharge some into Muddy Creek, but very little,โ Degenfelder said. โWe just got a lot of resistance from the environmental community and BLM.
Gas drilling infrastructure in the Atlantic Rim field in 2015. (Ken Driese)
Groundwater in the Atlantic Rim area is both abundant and filled by snowmelt coming off the west slope of the Sierra Madre Range, Degenfelder said. During the heyday of the Atlantic Rim fieldโs development, the two largest drilling companies were producing roughly 100,000 barrels of byproduct water daily โ the equivalent of a small stream that flows continuously carrying nearly 7 cubic feet per second. Oftentimes water encountered during the drilling process has a lot of organic matter like oil, but in this region, itโs pretty pristine, he said.
โThereโs a great deal of water to be had and itโs class three water [in Wyoming regulation],โ Degenfelder said, โso itโs very good for livestock and wildlife to consume.โ
But itโs also too salty for the most likely use: irrigation. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality has standards, and the Atlantic Rim water generally doesnโt cut it.
โThe sodium is too high,โ Hicks said. โ[DEQ] was concerned that when you irrigate with high-sodium water, you poison the soil. It turns white.โ
White crusts of natural salts along a tributary to Muddy Creek. (Carleton Bern/U.S. Geological Survey)
Already, there are issues with too much salt in Atlantic Rim waterways, and disturbing the soil in the region through industrial activity might have increased salinity levels at times. Salt concentrations in the main drainage in the area โ Muddy Creek โ increased by between 33% and 71% in the years 2009-2012 compared to 2005-2008, according to a 2015 U.S. Geological Survey study. But the sharp uptick in salinity also doesnโt perfectly align with the height of the drilling boom, the Earth Island Journal reported at the time.
Itโs unclear how Dolar Energy would deal with water thatโs too salty for irrigation.
Hicksโ understanding is that Dolar Energy seeks to โcherry pickโ the highest-quality water from the test wells and potentially market that only.
Whatโs the plan this time?
Mark Dolar did not respond to multiple WyoFile requests for an interview. His companyโs website includes little information, though it does feature a short podcast that describes his interest in natural gas resources in the Atlantic Rim field. A map included on the website shows that heโs also done business in the Pinedale area, three parts of Utah plus Coloradoโs Piceance Basin.
Dolarโs bid to put Wyoming water in a pipeline and send it to Colorado has been attempted before on a much larger scale.
Conceptual route for the Flaming Gorge Pipeline — Graphic via Earth Justice
More than a decade ago Fort Collins, Colorado residentย Aaron Million pushed a failed proposalย to tap Flaming Gorge Reservoir and pipe the water across southern Wyoming and the Continental Divide to the Colorado Front Range. Although itโs been shot down repeatedly, a fourth iteration of the project wasย still on the table as of 2022, and the dream of the largest privately funded water project in the history of the West is still not dead, according to aย recent feature storyย in the progressive magazine Mother Jones.ย
Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Utah side near the dam in September 2021. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)
Degenfelder has met Dolar before but was unaware of his recent proposal. โI wonder what those guys can sell Wyoming water to Colorado for?โ he asked.
The Atlantic Rim and Muddy Creek drain into the Little Snake River Basin, a tributary of the Green River thatโs part of the overallocated Colorado River Basin. Amid long-term drought, itโs an era of depleted reservoirs and cuts to water allocations in the region โ which may be mandatory in Wyomingโs portion of the basin by 2025.
Given the shortages, Hicksโ sense is that the value of water in the Colorado River Basin has increased โastronomicallyโ and that thereโd be a market for the Atlantic Rim water. Still, he said, there are many factors that could prevent the plan from coming to fruition, one of them being the economics of tapping less than two dozen abandoned wells.
โIs there enough water there of sufficient quality that it doesnโt have to be treated?โ Hicks asked.
Hurdles and hurdles
Hicks sees another hurdle: Itโs unclear whether water taken out of Atlantic Rim-area aquifers and surface discharged is subject to interstate water agreements.
โIf he produces all of that [water] and they say, โThatโs connected to the surface water,โ Wyomingโs only entitled to 14% of that under the Upper Colorado River Compact,โ the state senator said.
Groundwater is subject to the Colorado River Compact โto the extent it is Colorado River System water as that term is used in the compact,โ Gebhart, the state engineer, explained in an email.
โHowever, the seven states which are subject to the compact have never mutually determined to what extent groundwater constitutes Colorado River System water,โ Gebhart wrote. โThe ability to use groundwater within Wyoming is only subject to our individual state laws.โ
Gas drilling infrastructure in the Atlantic Rim field in 2015. (Ken Driese)
Constitutionally, the groundwater is owned by the state of Wyoming. If Dolar Energy proceeds with its plans, the company intends to file applications for the โpoints of useโ of the Atlantic Rim groundwater, Gebhart said.
Permitting for activities and disturbances to federal land is another potential obstacle.
The State Engineerโs Office sent Dolar Energyโs 21 groundwater test well applications to the Bureau of Land Management on Feb. 15, according to the state engineer. At that time, the state office shared concerns about who would be responsible for the currently plugged and abandoned coalbed methane wells if they werenโt going to be used after being reentered.
The BLMโs Wyoming office hasnโt taken any action because Dolar Energy hasnโt submitted anything, said Brad Purdy, deputy state director for communications. All of the leases for the old wells have been terminated, he said.
โIf the company is interested in doing commercial H2O wells off of those CBM wells, we have to get some applications,โ Purdy said. โWe donโt have any right-of-way applications, we have no [applications to drill] to reenter a plugged well. The proponent has a lot of stuff they need to submit before we can run NEPA and even begin to analyze this.โ
Wildlife managersโ concerns are another potential impediment to Dolar Energyโs plans.
Coalbed methane gas pads litter the Atlantic Rim field in the Muddy Creek drainage in south-central Wyoming. (Google Maps screenshot)
The Wyoming Game and Fish Departmentโs review letter shows that 19 of the 21 applied-for test wells (two were later rescinded) are located within the designated Baggs Mule Deer Migration Corridor. Of those, six wells are located on ground thatโs both โstopoverโ and โhigh useโ habitat. One well each fell solely within high use and stopover areas, while the remainder would be located within โlowโ or โmediumโ use areas.
โThe proposed well sites were recently plugged and the pads reclaimed,โ Game and Fishโs letter states. โWe are concerned that disturbance at these well sites, specifically within the high use area and stopovers within high use areas, will impede or reverse the reclamation process while also negatively impacting migrating mule deer.โ
โLastly, it should also be noted that a water pipeline in the Baggs area will likely traverse sensitive and vital wildlife habitats, much like these exploratory wells,โ the letter noted.
For a second straight year the Colorado Department of Agriculture is looking to distribute grants up to $500,000 for projects that demonstrate and research the use of solar generation on agriculture land. The grants are part of the stateโs Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration program which came into existence through legislation sponsored by state Sen. Cleave Simpson of Alamosa.
The grant program is particularly relevant to the San Luis Valley, where the reduction in groundwater irrigation has led to thousands of farming acres retired. Generating more renewable solar is part of the Valleyโs strategy to find alternative uses for a growing number of retired fields that now dot the landscape.
โThe first year of these grants was a tremendous success. Awardees have explored groundbreaking methods to effectively develop energy on the same land that is used to grow food and fiber,โ said Cindy Lair, Deputy Director of the Conservation Services Division. โWe canโt wait to see the new, innovative proposals that will be submitted for this next round of funding.โ
Up to $500,000 is available for projects that study the potential, benefits, and tradeoffs of agrivoltaics in Colorado.
Applicants can find the Grant Guidelines as well as instructions for submitting an application on the ADCRO website, at ag.colorado.gov/adcro. The maximum grant award is $249,000 for a single project application. Eligible project types include construction or expansion of agrivoltaics systems and demonstration projects, outreach and communication efforts focused on agrivoltaics benefits or obstacles, and research projects that focus on understanding the benefits, incremental costs, and tradeoffs of agrivoltaics systems.
Applications should be submitted via email to Rosalie.Skovron@state.co.us by July 21, 2024.
ADCRO staff will host a webinar on the application process on June 18. Anyone interested in applying for the grant can participate. A recording will be available on the CDA YouTube channel.
In the Fiscal Year 2023-24, seven different projects received grant funding to showcase diverse ways of generating electricity from solar arrays on Colorado farms and ranches. One of the projects, completed by Longboard Power, included installing solar wind breaks on a farm and monitoring soil benefits and energy output. Another, through the Colorado Cattlemenโs Agricultural Land Trust, is creating template conservation easement language that would allow for solar power generation while maintaining ag production and applying conservation values.
The other five projects were by Namaste Solar, Colorado State University, American Farmland Trust, Sandbox Solar, and Summit Cellars.
Webinar Information
Date and Time: Tuesday, June 18, 2024 from 1:00 p.m. โ 2:00 p.m. MDT
Description: This grant encourages innovative projects, including demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects, and outreach campaigns to further agrivoltaics and Coloradoโs agricultural economy. CDA staff will explain the application process for the grant and answer questions.
Colorado acepta solicitudes para la subvenciรณn de Investigaciรณn y Demostraciรณn de Agrivoltaicos
Por segundo aรฑo consecutivo, el Departamento de Agricultura de Colorado busca distribuir subvenciones de hasta $500,000 para proyectos que demuestren e investiguen el uso de generaciรณn solar en tierras agrรญcolas. Las subvenciones son parte del programa estatal de Investigaciรณn y Demostraciรณn de Agrivoltaicos, que se creรณ a travรฉs de una legislaciรณn patrocinada por el senador estatal Cleave Simpson de Alamosa.
El programa de subvenciones es particularmente relevante para el Valle de San Luis, donde la reducciรณn del riego con agua subterrรกnea ha llevado a retirar miles de acres de tierras de cultivo. Generar mรกs energรญa solar renovable es parte de la estrategia del Valle para encontrar usos alternativos para un nรบmero creciente de campos retirados que ahora salpican el paisaje.
โEl primer aรฑo de estas subvenciones fue un รฉxito tremendo. Los beneficiarios exploraron mรฉtodos innovadores para desarrollar eficazmente la energรญa en la misma tierra que se utiliza para cultivar alimentos y fibras,โ declarรณ Cindy Lair, Subdirectora de la Divisiรณn de Servicios de Conservaciรณn. โTenemos muchas esperanzas de ver propuestas nuevas e innovadoras que se puedan presentar en esta prรณxima ronda de financiamiento.โ
Se dispone de hasta $500,000 para proyectos que estudien el potencial, los beneficios y las soluciones intermedias y compensatorias de la agrovoltaica en Colorado.
Los solicitantes pueden encontrar las directrices para la concesiรณn de subvenciones, y las instrucciones para postularse, en la pรกgina de internet de ADCRO ag.colorado.gov/adcro. El mรกximo de subvenciรณn para una solicitud es $249,000 para un solo proyecto. Los proyectos elegibles incluyen la construcciรณn o ampliaciรณn de sistemas agrovoltaicos; proyectos de demostraciรณn; esfuerzos de divulgaciรณn y comunicaciรณn centrados en los beneficios u obstรกculos de la agrovoltaica, y proyectos de investigaciรณn centrados en comprender los beneficios, costos incrementales y las soluciones intermedias y compensatorias de los sistemas agrovoltaicos.
Las solicitudes deben enviarse al correo electrรณnico Rosalie.Skovron@state.co.us antes del 21 de julio de 2024.
ADCRO organizarรก una junta virtual para ver el proceso y los detalles de solicitud el 18 de junio. Cualquier persona interesada en postularse para la subvenciรณn puede participar. La grabaciรณn quedarรก disponible en el canal de YouTube de CDA.
En el ejercicio fiscal 2023-24, siete proyectos diferentes recibieron subvenciones para mostrar diversas formas de generar electricidad a partir de paneles solares en granjas y ranchos de Colorado. Uno de los proyectos, realizado por Longboard Power, incluรญa instalar un cortavientos solar en una granja y monitorear los beneficios para el suelo y la producciรณn de energรญa. Otro, a travรฉs del Fondo de Tierras Agrรญcolas de los Ganaderos de Colorado, estรก creando un modelo de servidumbre de conservaciรณn que permitirรญa generar energรญa solar mientras siga la producciรณn agrรญcola y aplicando los valores de conservaciรณn.
Los otros cinco proyectos son de Namaste Solar, Colorado State University, American Farmland Trust, Sandbox Solar y Summit Cellars.
Informaciรณn sobre el webinario
Fecha y hora: martes, 18 de junio de 2024 de 1:00 a 2:00 p. m. (zona horaria MDT)
Enlace de inscripciรณn: regรญstrese para la reuniรณn del 18 de junio o visite ag.colorado.gov/ADCRODescripciรณn: esta subvenciรณn fomenta proyectos innovadores como demostraciones de agrovoltaica, proyectos de investigaciรณn y campaรฑas de divulgaciรณn para impulsar la agrovoltaica y la economรญa agrรญcola de Colorado. CDA explicarรก el proceso de solicitud de la subvenciรณn y responderรก preguntas en esta junta virtual.
In late August, Steve Rubin, a fish biologist with the United States Geological Survey, will dive into the frigid, briny water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, roughly a mile from the mouth of the Elwha River. It will be Rubinโs 12th dive at the site since the Elwha Dam was breached in 2011, sending a centuryโs worth of accumulated sediment surging downstream.
The megatons of sediment that were released by the damโs removal were expected to help rebuild the twists and turns of the Elwha River. But some feared that they might end up suffocating the coastal ecosystems near the delta.
During Rubinโs first post-removal dive, he documented kelp, algae, invertebrates and fish. The changes he saw were striking: Where there had been dense kelp forests, there was now bare ocean floor. The water was opaque with suspended sediment. At some dive sites near the delta, he could hardly see his outstretched hand. โItโs hard to describe. In some of our sites there was nothing โ literally zero individuals of some of these kelp and algae species,โ Rubin said.
Evolution of the shoreline around the Elwha River mouth before, during and after dam removal, from 2011 to 2017. Two large dams were removed from the Elwha River between 2011 and 2014, which released more than 20 million tons of sediment downstream. These images show the effects of new sediment depositing around the river mouth and being reworked by waves and currents.
Warrick and others/Scientific Reports
The kelp density near the river mouth decreased 77% in just a year, a worrisome development that the Seattle Times described as a โkelp Armageddon.โ The removal of the Glines Canyon Dam, 8 miles upriver of the Elwha River and 14 miles from the delta, started in 2013, releasing even more sediment. Kelp continued to decline in 2013, decreasing by 95% since before dam removal.
That wasnโt the whole story, though. When Rubin returned in 2015, he saw that, in many of his survey sites, the kelp had started to rebound. In 2018, studies revealed that the density of kelp in these sites resembled pre-removal levels. Researchers believe that the initial die-off was due to suspended sediment blotting out much of the sunlight that kelp needs to grow. Once that sediment settled or washed away, the kelp recovered.
USGS divers Steve Rubin and Reg Reisenbichler lay out a survey transect. Rubin, a fish biologist with the United States Geological Survey, has dove the Strait of Juan de Fuca 11 times since the Elwha Dam was breached in 2011.
Ian Miller/USGS
More than a decade after the Elwha Damโs removal, researchers are finally getting a fuller picture of its impact on coastal ecosystems. When the dams were breached, the coastline near the riverโs mouth was completely remodeled. Sediment built stretches of sandy beaches and a series of swirling sand bars that peek above the waterโs surface. These beaches and bars have allowed water to pool, forming a series of brackish lagoons. Plants and animals quickly colonized the new ecosystem. โIt was like seeing a geologic event in a human timeframe,โ said Anne Shaffer, executive director and lead scientist of the Coastal Watersheds Institute and affiliate professor at Western Washington University.
Though some of the early arrivals were invasive plants, like dunegrass, yearly surveys reveal that the beaches are now dominated by native plants. The increased turbidity of the water initially decimated invertebrate species, including insects and crabs. But preliminary research led by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe shows that since around 2018, invertebrate populations have rebounded, and the species diversity continues to increase.
In late 2023, Rubin, Miller and their team reported the results of their 11 years of SCUBA surveys in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. At some of their survey sites along the delta, there have been lasting changes: The sediment released when the dam came down still covers the coarse, rocky seafloor. โAs long as theyโre buried, itโs a different kind of substrate with different species,โ Rubin said.
But while such sites canโt support kelp, other species are finding a home. The Pacific sand lance, a silver, sword-shaped fish that buries into soft sediment and is a key food source for salmon, was not seen in these areas before dam removal. โNow, you dive there, and you can barely swing a cat without hitting a sand lance,โ said Miller. Geoducks and Dungeness crabs have also settled into the sandy depths.
The Elwha shoreline has clearly changed, but it is also undeniably healthier as a whole, said Shaffer, noting that restoration is a long process that takes decades. The removal has reversed the erosion of beaches near the riverโs mouth, and the riverโs undamming has transformed them into โa beautiful deltaic habitat. Itโs gorgeous,โ she said. And the salmon have also likely benefited from more than just fish passage in the river: Thereโs been a noticeable increase in the number of surf smelt spawning on the deltaโs beaches, Shaffer said.
A rainbow sea star and urchins seen during Elwha River Delta surveys in 2023. Preliminary research led by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe shows that since around 2018, invertebrate populations have rebounded, and the species diversity continues to increase. Photo credit: USGS
Rubin and Miller also noted that dam removal might not be responsible for all the changes seen in the delta since the dams came down. Around 2014, for example, sea star wasting disease decimated the regionโs starburst-like sunflower sea stars, while a heat wave starting in 2014 disrupted dozens of marine species, including kelp.
Right now, other researchers are preparing to study the removal of four dams from the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California. As with the Elwha removals, some locals worry that the sediment will harm the coastal ecosystem near the delta. But scientists donโt expect trouble: Since the Klamath flows into the open ocean, where the currents are strong and fast, the sediment is likely to wash away quickly. As the sediment moves south along the coast, however, it may help to rebuild and bolster beaches eroded by sea-level rise, making them more resistant to flooding.
This summerโs survey of the Elwha River Delta will be the last of its kind, as the projectโs funding is set to expire. The delta is still changing and remodeling, so how its newly established communities will evolve in the long run remains uncertain. Even the most persistent sediment deposits may erode in the coming years, decades or centuries. โThe key takeaway is if you remove a dam, you can change the marine ecosystem,โ Miller said.
Shaffer noted that the Elwha River offers an important lesson for future dam removal projects: Conserving and restoring nearshore habitats should not be an afterthought. โThe nearshore is a critical zone for fish like salmon and forage fish,โ she said. โInclude your nearshore (in restoration planning); donโt overlook it. When you restore it, things come back quickly.โ
As the Colorado River declines, one fundamental question hangs over the Southwestโs most important waterway: can its people and industries slash their water use, thus aligning their water demands with a shrinking supply?
The answer so far โ with important caveats โ is a clear but qualified โyes.โ
The latest evidence: the three lower basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada whittled their take from the river last year. Their combined consumption of just under 5.8 million acre-feet is the lowest annual total since 1983. That represents a decline of 13 percent compared to 2022, when Lake Mead, the basinโs largest reservoir hit a record low and a simmering crisis morphed into a full-blown emergency.
The 2023 water consumption numbers are detailed in a Bureau of Reclamation report published last month. Reclamation is the federal agency that oversees the basin.
The report comes as the seven basin states โ including Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the upper basin โ plus the basinโs tribes and the federal government are negotiating how the river should be managed in the future. The centerpiece of those talks is how to reduce demand.
Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, told Circle of Blue that the drop in water consumption last year is an indicator that longer-term reductions are possible.
โI think it is a good precursor to getting used to living with less water as the river is expected to shrink,โ Buschatzke said.
The report provides headline numbers, but it does not explain why demand fell. Water agencies in the basin point to at least three factors that contributed to the drop.
One is the availability of other water sources. Californiaโs Colorado River consumption was just 3.7 million acre-feet last year, the lowest since 1949, according to Bill Hasencamp, the manager of Colorado River resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a big regional wholesaler.
Met, as the district is known, is Californiaโs largest municipal user of Colorado River water, and it reduced its take from the river by 40 percent last year. It was able to do so, in part, because of a robust snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains. That meant more water was available from the State Water Project, a canal system that exports water from Northern California to purveyors like Met hundreds of miles away.
โWhen you have a good year from the State Water Project, we can back off on our Colorado use,โ Hasencamp explained. โSo that has this โyo-yo effectโ for our demands on an annual basis. Sometimes more, sometimes less.โ
For Met, the unreliability of these distant sources is a second factor, Hasencamp said. Met and other agencies are attempting to source more water locally, through reuse, desalination, or cleaning up groundwater basins contaminated with industrial chemicals. Met is in the design stage of the countryโs largest water recycling facility, a roughly $8 billion project that will eventually provide water for 1.5 million people.
The move away from distant sources is already evident. Hasencamp said that Metโs imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River combined is down by more than half in the last two decades.
The third and most essential factor is conservation. Some reductions have occurred organically as outdated and wasteful appliances and toilets have been replaced with newer, more efficient models, as residents have swapped grass lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping, and as subdivisions have supplanted irrigated farmland, the largest water user in the basin.
Much of the recent conservation, however, has taken a different form. Some of the cuts were voluntary and compensated with cash payments. But most were mandated by rules put in place in 2007 and then expanded in 2019 under the basinโs drought contingency plan, or DCP. For instance, Arizonaโs voluntary and mandatory conservation, compared with the volume of water it is legally entitled to consume from the river, was nearly 1 million acre-feet last year.
Conservation got an extra boost in 2022, when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. That law provided $4 billion for drought response in the Colorado River and other western states. In effect, it enabled payments to farmers and cities to conserve water. Arizona, California, and Nevada worked out a deal last year that their water users would be paid not to use 2.3 million acre-feet over the next three years, through 2026.
Payments are an appealing carrot when forced to cut demand rapidly. What happens when that funding runs out? Current operating rules for the basin will expire at the end of 2026, and future conservation is not likely to be so generously compensated.
โClearly the Inflation Reduction Act conservation money was a critical piece of achieving the additional conservation beyond our required DCP and 2007 guidelines shortages in Arizona,โ Buschatzke said. โAnd there is a question about how or if you can maintain that post-2026.โ
Cuts in water demand last year have stabilized โ but not rescued โ the basinโs reservoirs. Lake Powell is 38 percent full, and Lake Mead just 34 percent. There are still sharp disagreements between states, farmers, cities, and tribes about the distribution and severity of future water cuts. The conservation success in 2023 provided a rosy view of possibility. But take off the glasses, and the outlook is a bit fuzzier.
Dr. Jessica Ray, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, explains what PFAS are, how scientists are trying to remove them from the environment, and what you can do to reduce the impact of PFAS on your own health.https://player.vimeo.com/video/946246279 Dr. Jessica Ray discusses PFAS in our water supply.
The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, which have been edited for brevity and clarity.
What are PFAS, and how are they used?
Jessica Ray: PFAS are a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals originally manufactured and heavily used in the 1950s. They were the active ingredient in fire suppressant foams that were used at military bases on aircraft fires.
Since then, theyโve been used in many applications and consumer products โ shampoos, dental floss, nail polish. Theyโve been used in waxy coatings found in food containers. They have also been applied as nonstick coatings; for example, in cookware. Theyโve been used in outerwear to help with rain protection.
Why are PFAS called โforever chemicalsโ?
Jessica Ray: It is difficult for PFAS to degrade naturally in the environment or even during processes like water treatment.
How do PFAS move through the environment?
Jessica Ray: Unfortunately, PFAS like to stick to solid surfaces like soils. They can dissolve in water and enter the Earthโs atmosphere. And because PFAS can permeate air, water and soil, humans and animals can be exposed to them in a multitude of ways.
Jessica Ray: You can do a number of things. If youโre cooking, you could purchase and use stainless steel or cast iron cookware, very tried and true cookware that should not contain PFAS.
Jessica Ray: A handful of companies are selling essentially a version of a Brita water filter that are targeted for PFAS. Generally though, just using something like a Brita or Pur water filter at home should help reduce exposure to not only PFAS, but other contaminants that might persist even in drinking water thatโs distributed to your tap at home.
What about your research on removing PFAS from water?
Jessica Ray: My research group is exploring two different approaches for treating PFAS in water. One approach is to remove or separate PFAS from water. The other is to destroy PFAS in water.
For the separation approaches, weโre looking at existing water treatment processes used in drinking water and wastewater treatment, and then trying to modify those processes to selectively target PFAS in water apart from other contaminants that might be in the water.
How is your group trying to improve PFAS filtration?
Jessica Ray: If you are filtering your water at home using a filtration cartridge, then that can help to remove a wide variety of contaminants. These contaminants can include heavy metals or other dissolved contaminants in water.
But often, PFAS in drinking water sources tend to exist in very, very low concentrations, while other contaminants exist at much higher ones. Filters only have so many adsorption sites available where contaminants are bound. And so there is a strong likelihood the adsorption sites will be occupied before the PFAS can be removed from the water.
One approach that weโve been using is to develop new adsorbents that help target PFAS. My group has been developing this material for the last couple of years. And weโve been talking to people who can help commercialize this technology so consumers can apply these kinds of point-of-use treatments to help protect them from PFAS. Itโs hard to say exactly how long it will be until the treatments will be commercially available โ maybe in one or two years.
Are there alternatives to PFAS that are safer to use?
Jessica Ray: Researchers are looking into whatโs called green chemistry โ designing chemicals that behave similarly to PFAS but arenโt as toxic and will break down in the environment. So there is hope for the future.
SciLine is a free service based at the nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.
Forgotten in all of the noise around the Colorado River right now is this moment of hope โ water again flowing in the Colorado River Delta.
Under the 2017 agreement between the United States and Mexico known as Minute 323, we have 210,000 acre feet of water set aside for environmental flows through 2026 โ one third provided by the United States, one third by Mexico, and one third by environmental NGOs โ in the long-dry river channel through the Colorado River Delta.
Audubonโs Jennifer Pittโs mention of the flow came during the last panel of last weekโs Getches-Wilkinson Center annual Colorado River conference at the University of Colorado Law School. Managing the pulse flow to maximize environmental benefit requires, ironically, the same sort of engineering that on a much larger scale dried the delta river channel in the first place โ routing water through an irrigation system to deliver it at the point of maximum environmental benefit, feeding a strip of riparian vegetation. Thatโs how we do environmental flows now.
It made me smile, remembering the joy of watching the pulse flow a decade ago, an event that was a pivot point in my life. It was a reminder that, amid sturm und drang of the current Colorado River, good stuff is possible.
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Co-sponsored by the Water and Tribes Initiative, the conference again moved the role of the Colorado River Basinโs 30 sovereign Tribal Nations into the foreground, in particular celebrating the new water settlement among the Navajo, Hopi, Southern San Juan Paiute tribes, the state of Arizona, and the federal government. Itโs a sweeping agreement that could, if it can cross the next hurdles before it, ensure water supplies for what one a member of my brain trust once described as the place of greatest water poverty in the nation.
โWe refused to be in the shadows any longer,โ Hopi Chairman Tim Nuvangyaoma said during a Friday morning session.
Lorelei Cloud, vice chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council and a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, talked about the importance of normalizing tribal voices at the decision making table, which should have been obvious a century ago, but is increasingly a no-brainer today.
As the Colorado River community debates where and how cuts should be made to bring water use into line with a climate change-shrunken supply, โFirst peoples of this land should be the last to be cut,โ Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said.
STILL IN THE SHADOWS
The shadowy ongoing discussions among the seven U.S. basin states got a brief airing in a panel of six of the seven statesโ principals โ the governorsโ representatives in the ongoing negotiations. They appear as stuck as theyโve been since Decemberโs CRWUA fireworks and the competing proposals of March.
I am sympathetic to the difficult position these people are in โ political demands from the home crowd to fight for their water colliding with the reality that the water the homers want is simply not there in the quantity they would like. The result was a litany of โpraise us for the conservation weโve already doneโ without much clarity beyond everyoneโs public negotiating positions: the Lower Basinโs โWe own the structural deficit and if deeper cuts are needed they need to be shared,โ and the Upper Basinโs โWe already suffer cuts, itโs on the Lower Basin to cut deeper if needed.โ
On its face thatโs a conflict being readied for the Supreme Court, and Iโve begun to think seriously about what such a path might look like in practice. Everyone says they want to avoid this, yet seem powerless to prevent it. A friend noted the seeming powerlessness being voiced by the state officials, helpless to keep the bus theyโre driving out of the ditch.
Theyโre like Howard the Duck, โTrapped in a world they never made.โ
AI image. Credit: Sibley’s Rivers
BACK OUT OF THE SHADOWS: A C-SPAN FOR COLORADO RIVER BASIN WATER MANAGEMENT TALKS?
My favorite question of the day came from an audience member asking whether there should be some sort of a C-SPAN-like public forum so we could all watch the discussions now conducted behind closed doors. There was a time not that long ago that I would have seen that as a terrible idea. The people involved need a safe space to explore the sort of compromises that would get them crucified back home if they did it in public, I used to think.
But given the current logjam in the statesโ discussions, which seems to leave us at increasing risk of potentially disastrous litigation, Iโm not so sure that the safe space is serving us particularly well. While the Basin Statesโ discussion remains opaque and unproductive, in a way that increasingly doesnโt seem to be serving me as a โstakeholderโ whose communityโs water depends on the river, a bunch of parallel processes happening in far more public ways โ see for example the discussion of tribal issues above, and the work on restoring environmental flows in the delta โ seem increasingly to be where the useful action is.
John Berggren, from Western Resource Advocates, made this point in a talk about Colorado River process, quoting here from a chapter he and I and some other folks wrote for the book Cornerstone:
Along the C-SPAN lines, Berggren noted the work of the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, which has been super C-SPAN-like in the way it has created a framework for a big messy public discussion in Arizona about the important questions.
The flaw in the current process is made clear by basin statesโ impasse.
Berggren warmed my heart with this quote from Reuel Olson, whose 1926 doctoral thesis was the first detailed academic look at the Colorado River Compact:
(Fun aside: Comparing notes after his talk, both John and I seem to have bought our copies of Olsonโs book from the same Salt Lake City used bookstore.)
A century after Olson said that, we seem to have the same impasse. Tough negotiations by the various states trying to protect their own interests leaves out all kinds of equities, all kinds of values โ including mine.
To paraphrase Californiaโs J.B. Hamby, all water users in the basin can reduce their use. Iโm sure Hamby wasnโt paraphrasing me when he said that, but he could have been. Hereโs how I put it in the concluding chapter of my book Water is For Fighting Over:
A sign in Norwood opposing a proposed solar installation nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
June 12, 2024
Does it make sense to kill 3,500 Joshua trees to clear the way to power 180,000 homes with carbon-free energy from the sun? Thatโs a question Iโve been pondering as I peruse the public comments on the Biden administrationโs Western Solar Plan and in the wake of a debate thatโs erupted over the social-media-waves regarding this very question.
The kerfuffle was sparked late last month after the Los Angeles Timesโ Melody Petersen reported that renewable energy developer Avantus had begun clearing thousands of the iconic desert trees to make way for the 530-megawatt Aratina solar-plus-storage project on a swath of the Mojave Desert in southern California. Even worse: They were apparently shredding the trees onsite or using other measures to hide the apparent act of agave-cide (Joshua trees arenโt trees at all, but members of the agave family). This stirred up a lot of anger and concern, naturally.
But the real brouhaha broke out after another LA Times journalist, Sammy Roth, wrote a column about hard clean energy choices developers and regulators must make to tackle the climate crisis, concluding: โHence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees.โ
Joshua tree in the Mojave Desert. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Now, I think Roth is one of the best Western energy journalists out there, and I admire his ability to embrace the complexity of the energy transition. He rightly points out that human-caused climate warming poses an existential threat to Joshua trees and other species, and to fight climate change weโll need to displace fossil fuel generation with cleaner energy sources, such as solar and wind. Roth is right on when he argues this will require utility-scale energy development, and when he dismisses the simplistic solution of merely putting solar panels on residential rooftops. And critics accusing him of being a pawn of corporate energy developers (or a member of the โclimate cult religionโ) are way off.
But bulldozing pristine public land and killing thousands of Joshua trees (or desert tortoises or sage grouse or pronghorn) to make way for a solar development that will purportedly save Joshua trees from going extinct? Okay, sure, if the choice were really that stark โ if it was a desert-flora version of the trolley problem: where a bystander must decide whether to direct a runaway streetcar onto a track where it would kill several people, or onto another where it would kill just one person โ then maybe that argument would fly. Thatโs not quite the situation here, however. In the trolley problem, there are only two choices, both horrible; in the Joshua tree-solar problem there are myriad options, some better than others.
I first caught wind of the proposed Arantina project many months ago, when I stumbled across a news piece about opposition from nearby residents, who were worried about dust kicked up during construction and potential impacts to views and property values. I frequently encounter these sorts of stories with another one of my gigs compiling an energy newsletter for the Energy News Network. Nearly every utility-scale solar proposal out there runs into opposition from someone, especially those planned for relatively undisturbed public lands.
But this one stuck out because of where itโs located. First off, itโs not being built on public land, but rather 2,300 acres of private land in eastern Kern County amid a county landfill, a major highway, and a rail line. The residents worried about dust and views live in the communities of Boron and Desert Lake (a more accurate monicker would be Desert Dry Lake, but hey). To its credit, Avantus responded to the concerns by setting the project further back from the towns, where they would be less visible. Of course, this also put them a bit deeper into the desert, possibly endangering more Joshua Trees in the process and bringing up additional concerns among locals, most notably that stirring up the desert may also disperse the fungus that causes valley fever.
The towns, recently featured in the LA Times for their cheap real estate, would be within a half-mile of the solar facility, so their concerns are understandable. And yet, less than a mile in the other direction looms Rio Tintoโs massive, open-pit Borax Mine, which spans more than 13 square miles, where house-sized machinery extracts some one million tonnes of refined borates and consumes more than 300 million gallons of water annually โ in a frigginโ desert! Not only that, but right next to the mine is the Southwestโs largest liquefied-natural-gas processing plant, a potentially explosive situation, if you know what I mean.
And theyโre worried about a photovoltaic installationโs dust and harm to views and property values?
Iโm not saying the presence of the mine or the apparent lack of concern about it invalidates townspeopleโs concerns about the solar installation, nor does it justify the solar projectโs harm to Joshua trees. I just find this apparent contradiction โ one that Iโm seeing more and more often in relation to renewable energy โ curious.
Another interesting note in all of this is that in 2022 Avantus, the solar installationโs developer, purchased grazing rights on 215,000 acres of public land elsewhere in Kern County and retired them as part of the Onyx Conservation Project. The project is sort of a prelude to the BLMโs public lands rule, which opens the door to conservation leases on public lands that can be used by energy developers to mitigate, or make up for, impacts they wreak elsewhere. In theory, at least, the Onyx project will protect thousands of Joshua trees โ along with a variety of other wildlife โ which would then โoffsetโ the killing of all those other Joshua trees near Boron.
Itโs great that Avantus retired grazing in โ and eliminated a lot of impacts on โ a huge piece of the Mojave Desert. And it certainly earns the company some social capital. But Iโm not sure it mitigates the harm done to the Joshua grove near Boron. Can you really โoffsetโ a shredded plant by simply not cutting down another one that may have continued living unharmed for another century or more? Wouldnโt it be easier to put the solar installation in a place where there arenโt so many Joshua Trees?ย
A utility-scale solar installation when it was under construction near Red Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A few years ago, if a story showed up in the media about opposition to a utility-scale solar project, the pushback likely was inspired by the harm these projects โ and scraping the desert bare of flora, fauna, and topsoil โ do to relatively undisturbed public lands, wildlife, and ecosystems. In the past year or so, however, opposition to โcleanโ energy like wind and solar has not only grown, but also changed in nature and motivation.
Now it seems like almost every utility-scale solar and wind installation proposal garners pushback from somewhere, whether itโs on private or public land, previously disturbed or not. In Arizona, Idaho, and Colorado, livestock operators and state lawmakers are rising up against solar because it may impede upon public land grazing allotments. Others donโt like public land solar because it wrecks their view or gets in the way of OHV-riding or other recreational pursuits.
Last year, a company called OneEnergy proposed building a 100-megawatt utility-scale solar array on about 640 acres of private and state-owned land southwest of Norwood, Colorado, in green-leaning San Miguel County. The developers said it would create some 300 construction-phase jobs and generate millions in tax and lease revenue and clean power for thousands of homes. They also planned to make it an agrivoltaic project, meaning livestock grazing would continue underneath the solar panels. Local opposition was vociferous, however. Most critics said they supported renewable energy, just not there โ or anywhere else in their immediate vicinity. The county responded by imposing a moratorium on large-scale utility development in unincorporated areas to allow it time to develop regulations for such projects. The six-month moratorium has been extended twice, so far, and is set to end in November.
This sentiment is becoming more widespread, making for a tough row for utility-scale clean energy developers to hoe. Residents of La Plata County pushed back on a proposed commercial photovoltaic installation on private land last year. That project is also in limbo. In 2022, Delta County rejected a proposed solar array on private land because it would take the parcel out of agricultural use. It later approved the plan after the developers rejiggered the project to allow for sheep grazing among the panels. Soon thereafter, though, the county enacted its own moratorium on large-scale solar. Similar moratoria are popping up in rural, conservative counties from Washington to Idaho to Arizona โ where Mohave County banned solar installations while clearing the way for a natural gas plant expansion next to a retirement community.
Sometimes there are legitimate environmental concerns driving the opposition, even when the projects lie entirely on private land. But other times the reasoning isnโt so solid. Many lament the potential โloss of agricultural land,โ even if the parcels in question havenโt been farmed due to economics or water scarcity or just poor soil health, and their ownersโ only way of remaining in agriculture is to earn some money by leasing land to solar developers. Others bring up the age-old โproperty valueโ argument โ which sounds absurd coming from just about any corner of the West, where property values could use a bit of de-inflation. Besides, if proximity to radioactive waste and Superfund sites hasnโt devalued properties (e.g. Moab or Silverton), how can a bunch of solar panels do so?
An official of another Colorado town told me plans were scrapped to install solar panels on a piece of town land after the local pickleball mob protested, saying they needed the land for their courts. And up in Ophir โ where avalanches and extreme weather can not only shut off access, but also take out the only utility lines serving the place โ residents voted to nix a solar-powered microgrid with battery backup that would have enabled them to weather extended outages. This is the same town that voted in 2018 to work toward transitioning to 100% greenhouse gas-free electricity. And now theyโve turned down a project with state and federal funding that would have helped them meet that goal, while also giving them independence from a tenuous power grid, because it would have meant putting up some solar panels in their open space.
This is when I understand Rothโs frustration: No matter how hard the solar and wind developers try to site their projects responsibly, someone comes up with some reason โ legitimate or otherwise โ to try to kill it, thereby delaying the very necessary clean energy transition. Sometimes this means the facility just doesnโt get built; other times it can actually push the development from a reasonably suitable location to one that may be farther away from people, but where thereโs more potential for environmental harm.
Itโs not just the opposition thatโs frustrating. The industry plays a part in it, too. Quite often developers donโt try to compromise or site their projects responsibly. In fact, theyโre more likely to behave a bit like the oil and gas industry: As if theyโre entitled to put their installations wherever suits them because they are producing something we all need, consequences be damned. Thatโs because solar and wind companies, like most businesses, are generally in it to make money โ we live in a capitalist system, after all. And itโs often cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to site these things on public lands in the desert than to try to piece together a puzzle of private land parcels or brownfields.
The best way to prod a developer to site responsibly is through strong, clear regulations that guide development toward previously disturbed areas with lower conflict potential and away from culturally or ecologically significant lands at the outset. The Obama administration tried that in 2012 with its Western solar plan; now Bidenโs Bureau of Land Management is working to update and improve the plan. The agencyโs preferred alternative would leave 22 million acres of BLM lands open to development, while putting more than 200 million acres off-limits. Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San Jose State University, isnโt so impressed, summing it up like this in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece:
“The Bureau of Land Managementโs Western Solar Plan update inverts the original intent of the planning process from one that sought to avoid wildlife and cultural resource conflict to one that prioritizes transmission developer and utility interests on these publicly owned landscapes.“
Nevertheless, industry is pushing to make it even less restrictive, urging the agency to remove slope restrictions (which prohibit development on slopes over a certain steepness), to allow clean energy development in areas of critical environmental concern (I think not!), and to further streamline permitting. They invariably say the 2012 plan, which is currently in place, is too prohibitive, even though dozens of massive solar installations have been permitted and built on public lands in the 12 years since it was implemented.
No matter how the plan turns out, however, it wonโt have much bearing on projects like Aratina, since itโs on private land (which is where public lands advocates generally would like to see these installations โ Joshua trees notwithstanding.)
***
Even in Boron, the developer could have gone in a different, less-destructive direction while still bringing clean energy to the grid. The Borax mine is surrounded by waste piles, old reclaimed mining zones, and other disturbed areas that offer up plenty of solar-appropriate land. It might have been slightly more complicated to work out deals with the mining company and to level some of the piles, but building there would have sparked far less conflict and killed little if any vegetation. They could have shared dust-control duty with the mine. And I think the viewshed would be just fine.
In northwestern New Mexico, developers are building the San Juan solar project on private land near the shuttered San Juan Generating Station coal-fired plant. Itโs massive, and has impacts of its own, but is far better for everyone than the pollution-spewing power plant was.
On another project altogether, the developers of the SunZia transmission line that will carry wind power from New Mexico to the Phoenix area could have routed the line along I-10 rather than up the ecologically and culturally significant San Pedro River Valley. Yes, it may have cost a bit more, and may have spurred its own opposition (from motorists worried about their freeway viewshed?), but the bigger-picture costs would have been far less. The BLM, however, failed in its mission to site such projects where they do the least harm, and now SunZia is getting battered with legal challenges (albeit so far unsuccessful ones).
Avantus, the same company behind Aratina, is proposing the 2,000-megawatt solar plus 2,000-megawatt battery storage Buttonbush installation on private farmland in the Central Valley. Thatโs a massive amount of energy โ one of the largest such installations in the world if and when itโs completed. Somebody will probably protest it, since it will represent a loss of farmland in a major agricultural zone. Yet itโs also a place wracked by drought and climate change, where groundwater pumping has depleted aquifers and water shortages are the norm. While a solar facility still uses water for dust-control and cleaning, it generally uses far less than most crops. And besides, the landowners wouldnโt sell or lease their fields to solar folks if they felt they were most viable as farmland.
This is where the value choice is made: Is it better to lose some farmland that would be fallowed anyway? Or 3,500 to 4,200 Joshua trees?
Blanketing every home rooftop in Los Angeles with solar panels is an admirable goal, but also logistically near-impossible. Either youโd have to convince millions of homeowners to fork out the cash for their own panels โ which is now less financially rewarding since state regulators slashed net metering incentives โ or a developer or utility would have to lease rooftop space from millions of individuals. It ainโt gonna happen.
But covering every warehouse and big box store rooftop and parking lot with solar panels? Thatโs an entirely different story. Parking lots and commercial structures span some serious acreage, and just as Avantus is piecing together 132 private parcels in the Central Valley for its Buttonpush project, so could a developer work with hundreds of industrial or commercial urban landowners to cover rooftops and parking lots with installations. Yes, Iโm suggesting utility-scale, front-of-the-meter developments spread across the built landscape. Of course, behind-the-meter developments, where each landowner installs their own array, works, too, but it doesnโt play as well into the vertically integrated utility, centralized power model that currently dominates.
The federal, state, and local governments need to fashion strong regulations and incentives to help guide developers to make the right choices. And the environmental groups that push back on utility-scale development on public lands must also present โ and fight for โ more suitable, and realistic, siting options. This means urging regulators to compensate rooftop and community solar at retail rates or higher, but it also means rejecting knee-jerk opposition to utility-scale solar based on frivolous or ideological concerns.
I like to think Iโm an optimist in these matters, and it is heartening to see places like Silverton and Rico continue to work on establishing solar-powered microgrids (Silverton may put their solar panels on a mill tailings disposal pile), to see community solar taking off in New Mexico, and to see solar installations directly replacing coal facilities, as is also happening in New Mexico. But then I read about Wyoming and Utah lawmakers interfering in markets to keep coal plants running, and about the huge strain data centersโ and AIโs electricity demands are going to put on the grid, and I get discouraged. We can build all the solar and wind we want, but until we can slow capitalismโs never-ending hunger, its incessant need to continue to grow and to consume, we wonโt solve the crises we face.
Iโll leave you on a slightly brighter note with some numbers I gathered a while back for a dataviz piece in High Country News. And after that, Iโd love to hear your thoughts in the comment section about all of these issues!
44,800 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar canopies covered Los Angeles Countyโs 18.6 million parking spaces.
15,400 megawatts:Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered all 3,495 miles of Californiaโs aqueducts and canals.
21,363: Number of big-box stores in the Western U.S.
31,035,098 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed to cover all those storesโ rooftops, enough to power 3 million homes.
1,155 megawatts: Estimated generating capacity if solar panels covered all 370 miles of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, as LA officials propose.
37,500 Gigawatthours per year: Energyoutput of solar canopies if all of Phoenix, Arizonaโs 12.2 million parking spots were covered.
139: Number of desert tortoises relocated to make way for the Yellow Pine Solar Project in southern Nevada in 2021. Within a few weeks, 30 of them were killed, possibly by badgers.
4,200: Estimated number of Joshua trees that will be destroyed or moved when solar industry giant Avantus develops its Aratina project near Boron, California.
215,000 acres: Grazing leases bought and retired in the Mojave Desert in California by Avantus to protect wildlife habitat and Joshua trees. The Onyx Conservation project is a partnership with federal and state land management agencies to โoffsetโ the impacts of the companyโs developments elsewhere in the region.
1.3 million: Estimated number of Joshua trees destroyed by the 2020 Dome Fire, thought to be exacerbated by climate change, in the Mojave National Preserve in California.
14,905,215 megawatt-hours: Estimated total annual energy output if solar arrays were installed on all of Californiaโs 10,260 big-box store rooftops.
16,477,306 megwatt-hours: Total energy output of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in 2020.
2,602 megawatts: Potential generating capacity if solar panels covered every rooftop on Arizonaโs 2,288 big-box stores.
(Thatโs an incomplete list! Iโd love to see readers use the comments to identify all the seasonal climate extremes over the past year that are consistent with the typical influence of El Niรฑo.)
Thatโs a lot of climate upheaval. Is ENSO going to give us some time to idle in neutral (a state in between the warmer and cooler extremes of the El Niรฑo-La Niรฑa cycle) and catch our breaths? Not much, apparently. The tropical Pacificโs climate pendulum appears to be swinging back toward its other extreme: La Niรฑa. In the Pacific, La Niรฑa brings cooler-than-average temperatures in the central-eastern part of the basin, stronger winds both near the surface and at high altitudes, and heavier rain than normal over Indonesia and the rest of the Maritime Continent. The forecasting team thinks thereโs a 65 percent chance that La Niรฑa will arrive by July-September.
For each upcoming 3-month season, NOAA forecasts the chances of El Niรฑo (red bars), La Niรฑa (blue bars), or neutral conditions (gray bars) in the tropical Pacific. Neutral is overwhelmingly favored for the May-July period (labeled MJJ on the graph), but the chances for La Niรฑa increase rapidly as soon as the June-August (JJA) period. By late summer (July-August-September, JAS), odds of La Niรฑa are 65 percent. NOAA graph by Michelle LโHeureux.
That timing means thereโs a pretty good chance La Niรฑa will be around to influence the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. (1) Even if the transition occurs more slowly, the odds of La Niรฑa being in place by Northern Hemisphere winter are still 85 percent, which is similar to the NOAA forecast in previous months. Given those odds, itโs probably a good idea to refresh your memory of the typical impacts of La Niรฑa on U.S. temperature and precipitation.
The slow pokey ocean
Emily explained in our April update that the atmospheric part of El Niรฑoโweak-to-absent east-to-west trade winds across the tropical Pacific, dryness over Indonesia, strong convection and rainfall east of the International Datelineโhad more or less shut down by early April. But surface water temperatures in the central-eastern tropical Pacific were still more than a degree Celsius (nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the long-term average (long-term = 1991-2020), and some parts of the tropics still appeared to be experiencing El Niรฑoโs typical side effects. Forecasters concluded it was too soon to issue El Niรฑoโs curtain call.
Without the atmosphere reinforcing those warm anomalies (anomaly means โdifference from averageโ), however, surface temperatures cooled off significantly through April and May. Weโre already seeing stronger easterly (from the east) trade winds, which have cooled the overheated surface waters. You can see it happening in the animation below.
This animation shows weekly sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean compared to average from March 18-June 9, 2024. Orange and red areas were warmer than average; blue areas were cooler than average. Warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the key ENSO-monitoring region of the tropical Pacific (outlined with black box) have started to be replaced by cooler-than-average watersโa sign that La Niรฑa may be brewing. NOAA Climate.gov animation, based on Coral Reef Watch Data and maps from NOAA View. View the full-size version in its own browser window.
The most recent weekly and monthly observations from the key ENSO-monitoring region (dubbedย โNiรฑo 3.4โ) show surface temperatures are close to average, and now cooler, deeper waters have begun surfacing. Now that both the atmosphere and the ocean have shifted away from El Niรฑo, the event is truly over. Beneath the surface of the eastern pacific, a pool of cool water has been lurking for several months in standby mode, ready to re-supply the surface and intensify the cool anomaly required to create and maintain La Niรฑa.ย
Water temperatures in the top 300 meters (1,000 feet) of the tropical Pacific Ocean compared to the 1991โ2020 average in FebruaryโApril 2024. NOAA Climate.gov animation, based on data from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
Historically, does big El Niรฑo=big La Niรฑa?
Of course, one of the most common questions we receive from readers is how strong do we expect the predicted La Niรฑa to be? As far as model forecasts go, itโs too soon to put much stock in the forecasts: weโre just barely out of the notorious spring predictability barrier. The spread of possible outcomes is still pretty wide.
So, how about historical events? Does coming off a relatively strong El Niรฑo like the recent one mean the developing La Niรฑa will also be strong? Thatโs the question I posed to the team via email earlier this week. In true scientist fashion, Michelle answered me with a plot (2), which I have translated below.
Since 1950, there have been 10 cases in which the ENSO climate pattern flipped from El Niรฑo to La Niรฑa with no neutral winter in between. Each line on this graph shows the evolution of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niรฑo-3.4 region of the tropical Pacific (the key ENSO-monitoring region) through the switch. Many, but not all, of the strongest El Niรฑos (red lines) evolved into strong La Niรฑas. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on analysis by Michelle L’Heureux.
First things first, letโs acknowledge that there have only been 10 times in the historical record where ENSO flipped from El Niรฑo into La Niรฑa within a year. Thatโs not enough examples to draw any solid conclusions from. Still, itโs interesting to look at what we have and speculate as to what it might mean, so thatโs all I am doing here.
Each line on the graph above represents a year in which the tropical Pacific shifted from El Niรฑo to La Niรฑa with no neutral winter in between. The lines are colored based on the strength of the El Niรฑo: red for strong events (peak Niรฑo 3.4-region sea surface temperature anomalies above 1.5 หC, or 2.7 หF), orange for moderate events (peak anomaly between 1 and 1.5 หC, or 1.8-2.7 หF), and pink for weak events (peak anomaly less than 1 หC, or 1.8 หF).
The relationship between the strength of the El Niรฑo and the strength of the subsequent La Niรฑa is kinda messy. Itโs unlikely, but not impossible, for weak and moderate El Niรฑos to lead to a strong La Niรฑa (Niรฑo 3.4 temperature anomaly of more than 1.5 หC below average). Only one of the pink and orange lines gets below that threshold. Meanwhile, 4 of the 6 strong El Niรฑos do evolve into strong La Niรฑas. But before we put too much stock in that pattern, we should note that the strongest El Niรฑo of all (top red line at the left hand side of the graph) wound up developing into the weakest La Niรฑa (3). Soโฆyeah. Itโs complicated.
Strong events not required for strong impacts
The likely strength of the upcoming La Niรฑa will become clearer the closer we get, and youโll hear more about that in coming posts. Of course, itโs also important to remember that the strength of a given El Niรฑo or La Niรฑa isnโt a good predictor of the strength of the temperature or precipitation impacts in a particular place. Stronger events do make it more likely that places prone to be influenced by El Niรฑo or La Niรฑa will experience some level of their typical impacts, but they donโt necessarily lead to stronger impacts. In other words, even a moderate or weak La Niรฑa can have a strong impact on a given place. So itโs important to pay attention to what we already know, which is that odds are very high (85% chance) that this winter will feature La Niรฑa. If youโd like to know more about what a La Niรฑa winter might mean for your part of the world, here are some great places to start.
Later this month, weโll have a guest post about how La Niรฑa influenced NOAAโs 2024 seasonal hurricane outlooks from lead forecaster Matt Rosencrans of NOAAโs Climate Prediction Center. In the meantime, you can readย a vintage post from our early daysย and aย more recent oneย with some additional detail.)ย
Scientists use the wordย plotย to refer to any data visualization, whether map or graph.
This analysis defines strength based on how temperatures in the Niรฑo 3.4-region compare to the long-term average in that area. By this definition, that top line is occupied by the 2015-16 El Niรฑo. But as we haveย blogged about before, when it comes to ENSO impacts, what may matter more is how warm temperatures in that area are relative to the rest of the tropical oceans. Relative to the tropics-wide average, the warm anomaly associated with the 2015-16 event might not have been large enough to really count as record strong,ย which might explain why the La Niรฑa that followed it was also not very strong.ย
Leslie Hagenstein stands in front of the New Fork River on Mar. 27, 2024. Through the federally-funded System Conservation Pilot Program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing her fields out to grow hay. CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett and Alex Hager):
May 30, 2024
This story was reported and produced collaboratively with Northern Colorado-based public radio stationย KUNC,ย as a part of KUNCโs ongoing coverage of the Colorado River supported by the Walton Family Foundation. Additional editing resources and other support for this story came from The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulderโs Center for Environmental Journalism.ย
Upper Basin conservation program dogged with concerns over cost and efficacy
Wyoming native Leslie Hagenstein lives on the ranch where she grew up and remembers her grandmother and father delivering milk in glass bottles from the familyโs Mount Airy Dairy.
The cottonwood-lined property, at the foot of the Wind River Mountains south of Pinedale, is not only home to Hagenstein, her older sister and their dogs, but to bald eagles and moose. But this summer, for the second year in a row, water from Pine Creek will not turn 600 acres of grass and alfalfa a lush green.
On a blustery day in late March, Hagenstein stood in her fields, now brown and weed-choked, and explained why she cried after she chose to participate in a program that pays ranchers in the Upper Colorado River basin to leave their water in the river.
โYou have these very lush grasses, and you have a canal or a ditch thatโs full of this beautiful clear, gorgeous water that comes out of these beautiful mountains. Itโs nirvana,โ Hagenstein said. โAnd then last year, it looks like Armageddon. I mean, itโs nothing, itโs very sad, thereโs just no growth at all. Thereโs no green.โ
Wyoming rancher Leslie Hagensteinโs fields were brown and weed-choked after she didnโt water them in 2023. She made 13 times more by participating in a conservation program that pays her to leave her water in the river than she could have leasing her fields out to grow hay.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The Colorado River basin has endured decades of drier-than-normal conditions, and steady demand. That imbalance is draining its largest reservoirs, and making it nearly impossible for them to recover, putting the regionโs water security in jeopardy. Reining in demand throughout the vast western watershed has become a drumbeat among policymakers at both the state and federal level. Hagensteinโs ranch is an example of what that intentional reduction in water use looks like.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
In Sublette County, Hagenstein said itโs rare for people to make a living solely on raising livestock and growing hay anymore. In addition to ranching, she worked as a nurse practitioner for more than 40 years before retiring. And when she looked at her bank accounts, she realized she needed a better way to meet expenses if she was going to keep the ranch afloat in the future. Hagenstein said it was a no-brainer. She signed up for the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) in 2023. Through the federally funded program, she was able to make 13 times more than she would have by leasing it out to grow hay.
Since its inception as a mass experiment in water use reduction, the program has divided farmers and ranchers. Concerns over the high cost, the limited water savings, the difficulty in measuring and tracking conserved water, and the potential damage to local agricultural economies still linger. But without fully overhauling the Westโs water rights system, few tools exist to get farmers and ranchers โ the Colorado Riverโs majority users โ to conserve voluntarily.
โIโm a Wyoming native,โ Hagenstein said. โI donโt want to push our water downstream. I donโt want to disregard it. But I also have to survive in this landscape. And to survive in this landscape, you have to get creative.โ
A ditch runs dry through Leslie Hagensteinโs fields near Pinedale, Wyo. on Mar. 27, 2024. She signed up for a program that pays her to pause irrigation on her land in order to save Colorado River water. Some experts say the System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, is costly and may not be the most effective way to save Colorado River water.
CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
SCPP participation doubles in 2024
Driven by overuse, drought and climate change, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever in 2022. The nationโs second-largest reservoir provided a stark visual indicator of the Colorado Riverโs supply-demand imbalance. Those falling levels also threatened the ability to produce hydroelectric power and prompted officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to call on states for an unprecedented level of water conservation. The agency gave the seven states that use the Colorado River a tight deadline to save an additional 2 million to 4 million acre-feet of water. (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill 1 acre of land to a height of 1 foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.)
States gave the federal government no plans to save that much water in one fell swoop, instead proposing a patchwork of smaller conservation measures aimed at boosting the reservoirs and avoiding infrastructural damage.
The Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC), an agency that brings together water leaders from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, offered up the โ5-Point Plan,โ one arm of which was restarting the SCPP.
In 2023, after the federal government announced it would spend $4 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Colorado River programs, the Upper Colorado River Commission decided toย rebootย the SCPP, which was first tested from 2015 to 2018. The program pays eligible water users in the four Upper Basin states to leave their fields dry for the irrigation season and let that water flow downstream.ย
But a hasty rollout to the SCPP in 2023 meant low participation numbers. Only 64 water-saving projects were approved, and about 38,000 acre-feet of water was conserved across the four states, which cost nearly $16 million. Water users complained about not having enough time to plan for the upcoming growing season and said an initial lowball offer from the UCRC of $150 per acre-foot was insulting and came with a complicated haggling process to get a higher payment. UCRC officials said the short notice and challenges with getting the word out about the program contributed to low participation numbers in 2023.
A University of Wyoming study surveyed the regionโs growers about water conservation between November 2022 and March 2023. Eighty-eight percent of respondents in the Upper Basin were not even aware that the SCPP existed.
UCRC commissioners voted to run the program again in 2024, but said this time that projects should focus on local drought resiliency on a longer-term basis. UCRC officials tweaked the program based on lessons learned in 2023, and the 2024 program had nearly double the participation, with 109 projects and nearly 64,000 acre-feet of water expected to be conserved.
โI view the doubling of interest and participation from one year to the next as a significant success,โ said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom.
What happens to conserved water?
Despite one of its stated intentions โ protecting critical reservoir levels โ water being left in streams by SCPP-participating irrigators is not tracked to Lake Powell, the storage bucket for the Upper Basin.
In total, across 2023 and 2024, the program spent $45 million to save a little more than 1% of the Colorado River water allocated to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Although engineers have calculated how much water is saved by individual projects, known as conserved consumptive use, officials are not measuring how much of that conserved water ends up in Lake Powell. And the laws that govern water rights allow downstream users to simply take the water that an upstream user participating in the SCPP leaves in the river, potentially canceling out the attempt at banking that water.
These types of temporary, voluntary and compensated conservation programs arenโt new to the Upper Basin. In addition to the pilot program from 2015 to 2018, the state of Colorado undertook a two-year study of the idea of a demand management program by convening nine workgroups to examine the issue.
System conservation and demand management, while conceptually the same, have one big difference: A demand management program would track the water so that downstream users donโt grab it and create a special pool to store the conserved water in Lake Powell. With system conservation, the water simply becomes part of the Colorado River system, with no certainty about where it ends up.
This lack of accounting for the water has some asking whether the SCPP is accomplishing what it set out to do and whether it is worth the high cost to taxpayers.
Even if all the roughly 64,000 acre-feet from the SCPP in 2024 makes it to Lake Powell, itโs still a drop in the bucket for the reservoir; last year, 13.4 million acre-feet flowed into Lake Powell. The reservoir currently holds about 8.2 million acre-feet and has a capacity of about 25 million acre-feet.
โI still havenโt really seen evidence of total water savings or anything like that,โ said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science and director of the graduate program of hydrologic sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno. Koebele wrote her doctoral dissertation on the first iteration of the SCPP. โAs far as getting water to reservoirs, Iโm not sure that weโve seen a lot of success from the System Conservation Pilot Program so far.โ
And the program has been expensive. For the 2024 iteration of the program, UCRC officials offered a fixed price per acre-foot that applicants could take or leave โ no haggling this time. Colorado, Utah and Wyoming paid agricultural water users about $500 an acre-foot; the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry, New Mexicoโs sole participant in 2023 and 2024, received $300 an acre-foot. Projects that involved municipal or industrial water use were compensated on a case-by-case basis, and those that involved leaving water in reservoirs were paid $150 an acre-foot. The majority of projects in both years involved taking water off fields for the whole season or part of the season, known as fallowing.
The UCRC doled out nearly $29 million in payments to water users in 2024. The program paid about $45 million to participants in 2023 and 2024 combined. Some participants are using these payments to upgrade their irrigation systems, Cullom said, which helps maintain the vitality of local agriculture.
But even with this amount of money spent, Koebele said it may still not cover the costs to participants for things such as long term impacts to soil health that come with taking water off fields for a season or two. After the infusion of IRA money runs out, itโs unclear how such a program would be funded in the future.
โI also worry that we donโt have an endless supply of money to compensate users for conservation in the basin,โ Koebele said. โAnd perhaps we need to be thinking about โ rather than doing temporary conservation โ investments in longer-term conservation beyond what weโre already doing.โ
The New Fork River runs past Leslie Hagensteinโs property south of Pinedale, Wyoming. A program in the Upper Colorado River basin is paying farmers and ranchers like Hagenstein to conserve water. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Western Slope water managers critical of SCPP
Some groups have concerns with the SCPP beyond its issues with accounting for how much water ends up in Lake Powell.
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District represents 15 counties on Coloradoโs Western Slope. Their mission is to protect, conserve, use and develop the water within its boundaries, which has often meant fighting Front Range entities that want to take more from the headwaters of the Colorado River in the form of transmountain diversions. Sometimes, that means voicing concerns about conservation programs that it thinks have the potential to harm Western Slope water users.
River District officials have been vocal critics of the SCPP, pointing out the ways that it could, if not done carefully, harm certain water users and rural agricultural communities. Because of the way water left in the stream by participants in the SCPP can be picked up by the next water user in line, some of which are Front Range cities, at least two of the projects this year could result in less โ not more โ water in the Colorado River, according to comments that the River District submitted to the state of Colorado. (One of these projects dropped out in 2024.)
โWithout significant improvements, it would be hard for the River District to support additional expenditures on system conservation,โ said Peter Fleming, the districtโs general counsel.
The River District had also wanted a say in the SCPP process in 2023, going as far as creating their own checklist for deciding project approval, but UCRC officials said the commission had sole authority to approve projects.
Water users from all sectors โ including agriculture, cities and industry โ are allowed to participate in the program, but, in practice, all of the 2023 and 2024 projects in Colorado involve Western Slope agricultural water users. Thatโs partly because the price that the SCPP offered was less than the market value of water on the Front Range.
โIf youโre simply basing it on a set dollar value per acre-foot, youโre going to result in disproportionate impacts to areas of the state where the economic value of water is not as high as others,โ Fleming said. โYouโre going to end up with all the water coming from the Western Slope. โฆ You shouldnโt create sacrificial lambs.โ
This alfalfa field near Carbondale is irrigated with water from the Crystal River. All of the projects in a conservation program that pays water users in the Upper Colorado River basin to cut back involve Western Slope agriculture.
CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Upper Basin facing increased pressure
The Upper Basinโs conservation program is playing out against the backdrop of watershedwide negotiations with the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) about how to share the river after the current guidelines governing river operations expire in 2026.
After failing to come to an agreement, the Upper and Lower basins submitted competing proposals to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Lower Basin officials committed to a baseline of 1.5 million acre-feet in cuts, plus more when conditions warrant. They also called for the Upper Basin to share in those additional cuts when reservoirs dip below a certain level.
Upper Basin officials have balked at the notion that their water users should share in any cuts, saying they already suffer shortages in dry years. The source of the problem, they say, is overuse by the Lower Basin.
Plus, without ever having violated the 1922 Colorado River Compact by using more than the 7.5 million acre-feet allotted to them, they say thereโs no way to enforce mandatory cuts on the Upper Basin.
But under increased pressure from the Lower Basin, and facing a drier future as climate change continues to rob the Colorado River of flows, Upper Basin water managers have made one small concession. In their proposal, they have offered to continue โparallel activitiesโ like the SCPP, but said these programs will be separate from any post-2026 agreement with the Lower Basin. The congressional authorization for the SCPP expires at the end of 2024, and itโs unclear whether water managers will implement a program in 2025 or beyond.
Inherent in the Upper Basinโs stance is a contradiction: Why maintain that both the source of the problem and responsibility for a solution rest with the Lower Basin, but then agree to do the SCPP or a conservation program like it?
โI think that theyโre basically saying that the Lower Basin needs to get their act together before we actually really need to come to the table in a realistic way,โ said Drew Bennett, a University of Wyoming professor of private-lands stewardship. โI think they feel like, โWe donโt actually really need to do anything.โ That the SCPP is actually above and beyond what they need to be doing. Is that reality? I donโt know. But I think thatโs sort of the message theyโre trying to send in negotiations.โ
Docks and buoys, once floating atop dozens of feet of water, sit stranded on the sand at Lake Powellโs Bullfrog Marina on April 9, 2023. Record-low levels at the reservoir helped spur water officials to reboot the System Conservation Pilot Program.
CREDIT: ALEX HAGER/KUNC
Grower attitudes key to program success
Some experts say the programโs real value is not getting water into depleted reservoirs. It is testing out a potential tool to help farmers and ranchers adapt to a future with less water. They frame it as an experiment that provides crucial information and lessons on how an Upper Basin conservation program could be scaled up. It also continues to ease water users into the concept of using less should a more permanent water conservation program come to pass.
โThis program kind of, I think, helps grease the skids for that process that gets people comfortable for how it operates,โ said Alex Funk, who worked for the Colorado Water Conservation Board in 2019 and helped to guide the stateโs demand management study with regard to agricultural impacts. โJust seeing the doubling of the amount of acre-feet conserved under the second year and then the interest shows that, yeah, I think there could be some longevity to the program. โฆ I think one has to be optimistic because I donโt see how the Upper Basin navigates a post-2026 future without such a program.โ
Funk now works as senior counsel and director of water resources at the nonprofit Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The group receives funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also funds a portion of Colorado River coverage from KUNC and The Water Desk.
Cullom, executive director of the agency that runs the SCPP, pushed back on the idea that it is intended to help correct the supply/demand imbalance on the river, which he said is the fault of the Lower Basin.
โThe intent of the program is to develop new tools for the upper division water users to adapt to a drier future,โ he said. โWeโre trying to develop tools that benefit the local communities and producers and water users in the four upper division states through drought resiliency, new tools, the ability to explore crop switching and irrigation efficiencies.โ
Of all the challenges in setting up a program such as this โ funding, pricing, calculating water saved, getting the word out โ the biggest may be the attitudes of water users themselves, some of whom have a deep-seated mistrust of the federal government. Like Hagenstein, all of the water users that Aspen Journalism and KUNC interviewed for this story said financial reasons were the biggest driver behind their participation in the SCPP.
Bennettโs research also explained some of the reasons why growers may be hesitant to enroll in conservation programs such as the SCPP. It found that farmers and ranchers trusted local organizations to administer conservation programs significantly more than state or federal ones.
If demand management strategies were deployed, 74% of survey respondents said theyโd prefer to have a local agency manage the program, as opposed to a state or federal agency. Only about 14% of growers said there is a high level of trust between water users and water management agencies in their states. The same percentage said their stateโs planning process was adequate for dealing with water supply issues.
These findings point to a stumbling block that the UCRC and other agencies must overcome if they hope to create a longer-term conservation program.
Hagenstein, the Wyoming rancher, has experienced those attitudes firsthand. She has been on the receiving end of insults and name-calling because of her participation in the SCPP.
But Hagenstein says the SCPP has allowed her to have money in her pocket to continue ranching long term.
โI didnโt anticipate it would be so beneficial,โ she said. โIt bought us time to stay in ranching is the long and the short of it. So, Iโm most grateful for the abundance that the federal government offered us. โฆ You know, some would call it a golden goose.โ
The downstream face of Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell, Americaโs second-largest water reservoir. Water is released from the reservoir through a hydropower generation system at the base of the dam. Photo by Brian Richter
As the drought-strapped Colorado River struggled to feed water into Lake Powell to keep its massive storage system and power turbines from crashing in 2021 and 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, its operator, was scrambling to bring in extra water from Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa reservoirs.
Since the return of healthier flows in 2023, water levels in Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa have been restored, as required under a 2019 Colorado River Basin drought response plan.
But the subsequent shifting of water in 2023 to balance the contents of lakes Powell and Mead, required under a set of operating guidelines approved in 2007, resulted in an accidental release of 40,000 acre-feet of water that will not be restored to the Upper Basin because it is within the margin of error associated with such balancing releases, according to Alex Pivarnik, supervisory hydrologist with Reclamationโs Upper Colorado Basin Region.
โUnder the 2007 Interim Guidelines, this was the first time Reclamation balanced the contents between lakes Powell and Mead in near real-time, working against quickly changing hydrology over the course of just a few months. Getting it within 0.5% is pretty remarkable, given the circumstances,โ Pivarnik said via email, referring to the hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water that was being moved at the time relative to the size of the mistake.
Though 40,000 acre-feet of water isnโt much on the massive Colorado River, it is enough to serve some 80,000 houses for one to two years, to irrigate 20,000 acres of corn on the Eastern Plains or to keep the taps flowing in the Grand Junction-area for two years.
โSome people might wonder whatโs the harm,โ said Mark Ritterbush, water services manager for Grand Junction. The city is one of three water providers in the Grand Valley, some of whom also rely on the Colorado River. โBut does it matter? Absolutely. It is all one water.โ
Map credit: AGU
The seven-state Colorado River Basin is divided into an upper and lower section, with the Upper Basin covering Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming and the Lower Basin comprising Arizona, California and Nevada.
Flaming Gorge Reservoir July 2020. Photo credit: Utah DWR
Blue Mesa Reservoir. MichaelKirsh / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)Navajo Dam. Photo credit: ReclamationThe Colorado River is impounded behind the Glen Canyon Dam in Lake powell. Photo credit: Dave Showalter
The Upper Basin is home to four major reservoirs. Flaming Gorge, on the Utah-Wyoming border, Coloradoโs Blue Mesa, New Mexicoโs Navajo, and Lake Powell. They serve as liquid bank accounts, ensuring the Upper Basin states can meet their legal obligations to deliver water to states in the Lower Basin, where Lake Mead serves a similar function.
Looking ahead, Upper Basin states say the way the reservoirs are managed during drought emergencies needs to change to protect against such mistakes and to better protect Upper Basin water supplies.
โReclamation missed its operating target for releases by 40,000 acre-feet. Everyone should recognize that this is a shortcoming of the 2007 guidelines,โ said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which oversees the Colorado River for the Upper Basin states.
โItโs almost impossible to hit perfect. But this is a function of trying to balance contents [of Powell and Mead],โ Cullom said.
Despite the drought response and a healthy water year in 2023, lakes Powell and Mead have returned to critical low levels, leaving the system vulnerable in ways similar to those that existed prior to the emergency loans from the Upper Basin states, according to the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB), whose staff presented a memo on the topic at its May meeting. The CWCB is the stateโs lead water planning agency.
As the giant river system continues to struggle to serve 40 million people, tribal communities, farmers and Mexico, tense negotiations to redo the 2007 operating guidelines, which expire in 2026, are underway.
โWith regard to future reservoir operations in the post-2026 negotiations,โ Cullom said, โI would say that the upper division states have learned a great deal from the operation of the [drought response plan], and in the event that the federal government wants to continue to have the flexibility to move the water from upper basin units to protect the operation of Lake Powell. โฆ I would expect those lessons would be reflected [in the new operating guidelines].โ
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
From left: Amelia Flores, Colorado River Indian Tribes chairwoman, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs approve the tribeโs authority to lease, exchange or store its portion of Colorado River water. Credit: Noel Lyn Smith/Inside Climate News
At a ceremony at the tribe’s waterside resort in April, [Interior Secretary Deb] Haaland, Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the agreement, which will enable the 4,300-member tribe to move forward with enacting lease agreements, river conservation and other strategies. Over the past two months, Arizona tribes have celebrated several victories in the effort to secure water rights and the resources to use the life-giving water at the heart of their communities and for tribes with the most senior water rights to have more direct control over those waters…
CRIT first pondered leasing some of its water 40 years ago, said the tribe’s former water attorney Margaret Vick. But despite having senior water rights dating back to 1865 when its reservation was established, the tribe was legally barred from leasing some of its Arizona-side allocation of 662,000 acre feet. The tribe also has rights to about 57,000 acre feet on the California side of its reservation…In May, the Tohono O’odham Nation received nearly $1.59 million for a new treatment plant to address rising arsenic levels in groundwater wells in Sells. The San Carlos Apache Tribe will replace wells impacted by E. coli contamination thanks to a $986,000 grant. Those two grants were part of more than $225 million allocation to improve water and wastewater infrastructure across Indian Country. The Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe signed onto theย Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement, which, if confirmed by Congress, will enable the three tribes to claim a share of Colorado River water.
Sprinklers irrigate a field in Hamilton County, Kansas, where some farmers have petitioned to be removed from a local groundwater management district. State lawmakers are pressuring the district to do more to conserve water in the Ogallala Aquifer. (Allison Kite/Kansas Reflector)
Click the link to read the article on the Kansas Reflector website (Allison Kite and Kevin Hardy):
June 13, 2024
After decades of local inaction, Kansas lawmakers are pushing for big changes in irrigation.
This story, the second in an occasional series about water challenges facing the American heartland, is a partnership between Kansas Reflector and Stateline. Read the first story here.
JETMORE, Kan. โ An inch or two of corn peeks out of the dirt, just enough to reveal long rows forming over the horizon.
Sprinkler engines roar as they force water from underground to pour life into dusty fields.
Thunder cracks. The wind whips up dirt as a trail of dark storms looms. The crashing hot and cold fronts would probably set off tornado sirens โ if there were any in this remote part of the state.
Itโs spring in southwest Kansas, a hub for the nationโs crop, dairy and beef industries.
Ogallala aquifer via USGS
As the familiar seasonal rhythm plays out, some farmers are bracing for major changes in how they use the long-depleting Ogallala Aquifer. The nationโs largest underground store of fresh water, the Ogallala transformed this arid region into an agricultural powerhouse.
After 50 years of studies, discussions and hand-wringing about the aquiferโs decline, the state is demanding that local groundwater managers finally enforce conservation. But in this region where water is everything, theyโll have to overcome entrenched attitudes and practices that led to decades of overpumping.
โIt scares the hell out of me,โ farmer Hugh Brownlee said at a recent public meeting in the district on the changes to come.
Last year, Kansas lawmakers passed legislation squarely targeting the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District, which spans a dozen counties. Unlike the two other Kansas districts that sit atop the crucial aquifer, this one has done little to enact formal conservation programs that could help prolong the life of the aquifer. The new law aims to force action.
The district has come under fire from legislators increasingly incensed by its substantial travel expenses, its lack of formal conservation policies and its alienation of farmers who are trying to save water. At a hearing in February on a bill meant to help farmers in one county leave the district, a Kansas House member floated the idea of doing away with the organization, also known as Groundwater Management District 3, altogether.
โMaybe thatโs something that we need to consider โ just dissolve GMD 3 so that these other boards that are doing good work are not affected,โ said state Rep. Cyndi Howerton, a Republican from Wichita.
District leaders think the criticism is unfair. But even they acknowledge that painful change is brewing. Change that will force farmers to cut back.
Clay Scott, a farmer and rancher who has served on the districtโs board for more than two decades, said most local farmers are ready to change. Thatโs partly because they donโt want to give the state a reason to impose its own restrictions, he said.
Scott said the problem of overuse has been generations in the making and canโt be reversed overnight.
โItโs going to take us time to turn this ship around,โ he said.
But critics say the organization has already had plenty of time. Decades.
โMy biggest disappointment with GMD 3 is theyโve had 50 years to build a consensus on conservation and they failed to do it,โ said Frank Mercurio, who works for a dairy with facilities across southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado.
The discussions here mirror those occurring not just across the eight Ogallala states (Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming) but also across the country. The dual threat of climate change and overpumping of groundwater threatens farming and agricultural communities coast to coast.
Outside the town of Syracuse, Kansas, Brownlee runs a small farm with dryland and irrigated fields divided by a curvy two-lane blacktop. More than 200 years ago, Mexican and American traders following the Santa Fe Trail crossed this part of the plains on ox-pulled wagons.
Brownlee, who farms part time and drives a propane truck, said he understands the shrinking water supply. But he thinks the state is to blame โ not farmers. Decades ago, Kansas officials issued more water rights than the aquifer can sustain.
The state should fix that, rather than punishing farmers with across-the-board cuts, he said.
โThey want to be able to flip the switch and just stop it,โ Brownlee said. โThatโs not going to do anybody no good.โ
Hugh Brownlee walks by a dry creek bed on his farm near Syracuse, Kansas. Farmers such as Brownlee could face irrigation cutbacks following legislation from Kansas lawmakers. (Allison Kite/Kansas Reflector)
โShould have been done 40 years agoโ
In a community center on Main Street in Lakin, Kansas, a few dozen farmers in feed and seed hats last month pulled folding chairs off a big metal rack.
Just below the stained drop ceiling panels, a tilted projector shone onto a bare beige wall the districtโs plans to comply with the new law. The first step: identifying priority areas for its conservation efforts.
An expert from the Kansas Geological Survey pointed to maps of the district. Blood red blots showed where aquifer conditions were most severe. In some parts of the district, the aquifer is already all but gone. Other areas have more than 60 years of water left even if they donโt cut back their usage.
But at this and a series of meetings across southwest Kansas, district leaders outlined plans to declare its entire territory a priority area. Some critics viewed the move as a stall tactic, but district leaders say it leaves all options available to them. The district in 2026 will have to present an action plan, which it says will reflect the huge variations in aquifer conditions.
Kansasโ chief engineer, Earl Lewis, who will evaluate the boardโs plan and future conservation efforts, said the board likely can designate the whole region a priority, though heโs not sure it meets โthe spiritโ of the law.
In the series of meetings, farmers ran through familiar questions, concerns and excuses.
What about the farms pumping the aquifer down in Oklahoma?
What about all the new dairies and feedlots coming in?
What about city drinking water wells?
Crop irrigation accounts for 85% of all water use in Kansas โ even more in western Kansas.
The group also discussed the possibility of paying growers to shut down their wells.
But one farmer said he canโt farm his sandy soil without irrigation. After the meeting, he declined to be named, saying he could get in big trouble for sharing his real feelings.
Local farmer Steve Sterling interjected at the first meeting in Garden City to say conservation planning โshould have been done 40 years ago.โ Some of his neighbors abandoned their farm when he was 12, he said. They were out of water.
Katie Durham, who manages Groundwater Management District 1 in western Kansas, drove south to attend some of the meetings in GMD 3. She said she hoped the farmers in attendance understood that change is coming under the new law.
โThis is happening,โ Durham said. โI just hope that urgency and sense of wanting to be involved and kind of taking ownership of the future on a local level โ I just hope people are understanding that.โ
McGuire, V.L., and Strauch, K.R., 2022. Data from U.S. Geological Survey.
โThis is a cultural thingโ
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Kansas created the fundamental problem that allows aquifer depletion by granting farmers the right to pump more water out of the aquifer each year than returns to it via rainfall. But the state has largely left it up to locals to find solutions to the problem.
The state charged the three groundwater management districts over the Ogallala with protecting both the agricultural economy and aquifer water. But their five-decade histories primarily have been marked by further decline of the Ogallala Aquifer. Two districts have made progress in recent years and helped farmers to slow, or even stop, the decline.
GMD 3 is different.
Burke Griggs, a water attorney who previously worked for the state, argues the southwest Kansas district isnโt doing much compared with the other two.
โThe law is the same. The regs are basically the same,โ he said. โThis is a cultural thing.โ
He argues the state should take a firmer stance in aquifer management.
โI think itโs time for a reckoning,โ Griggs said.
District officials say farmers in GMD 3 have used 13% less water in the past 10 years compared with the decade before. But itโs unclear how much of that change is intentional โ from conservation โ or a reflection of the limited water available in the declining aquifer.
Though its territory is twice the size of the other two districtsโ combined, the southwest Kansas district hasnโt accomplished as much. The other districts have offered financial assistance to farmers investing in water-efficient irrigation systems and championed large-scale restrictions on pumping.
GMD 3 has done none of that. Between 2010 and 2022, financial records show, the district spent, on average, only 13% of the money it budgeted for conservation. In most years, it didnโt spend anything on conservation.
Mark Rude, who has been the organizationโs executive director for nearly two decades, said the districtโs entire budget supports water conservation. The district takes in more than $1 million per year and spends 70% of that on salaries and benefits, according to financial documents received through a records request. The rest goes largely to office equipment, travel and other administrative costs.
โI mean, ultimately, thatโs why weโre here,โ Rude said, โand if you look at the $600,000-plus we (spend) on staff, why is the staff here?โ
This summer, the district board will consider a 38% increase in the fee it imposes on water users, which is expected to raise more than $200,000 each year. Rude said that money would primarily be used to hire two new employees to help with grant projects offering technical assistance to farmers trying to conserve water.
Between 2010 and 2022, GMD 3 spent about four times as much on travel for Rude and staff as on water conservation. On average, the GMD pays more than $20,000 each year for Rudeโs travel โ plus another $20,000 for the rest of its staff members โ compared with $10,000 for water conservation.
Last year, the district changed its financial statements, reporting fewer, broader categories. The new financial structure did not distinguish travel costs from other expenses.
Rude defends the spending by saying itโs necessary to build the partnerships and relationships needed to achieve district goals, including its aim of piping in water from out of state.
โHow else do you do it?โ Rude said. โReally, please show us: How else do you do it?โ
Mark Rude, executive director of the Southwest Kansas Groundwater Management District, addresses farmers at a community center in Lakin, Kansas, on May 20, 2024. Kansas lawmakers are requiring the district to create a new plan to help preserve the Ogallala Aquifer, which spans eight states. (Allison Kite/Kansas Reflector)
Last year, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle questioned Rude during a committee hearing on why the district wasnโt doing more to conserve groundwater.
State Rep. Lindsay Vaughn, an Overland Park Democrat, said during a legislative hearing that the district had 50 years to act but made no progress on addressing aquifer decline.
โThe issue is only becoming more urgent,โ Vaughn said, โand I am discouraged to see that there arenโt any real efforts right now to get the ball rolling and coming up with a long-term plan.โ
The districtโs lack of action also has drawn the attention of farmers who mounted a campaign to secede.
In 2022, Hamilton County farmers submitted a petition to withdraw from the groundwater district.
They characterized the organization as a bureaucratic mess with a ballooning budget that spends little on conservation, obstructs programs meant to slow groundwater decline and provides no benefits for dryland farmers who also pay assessments.
Kansas Aqueduct route via Circle of Blue
The petition criticized groundwater district leadersโ fixation on building an aqueduct across the state. The organization twice has trucked water 400 miles from the Missouri River to western Kansas in an effort to sell the idea.
In their petition, Hamilton County farmers said the project only managed to move and dump water with โno tangible benefit to anyone.โ
Richard Geven, owner of the 10,000-head Southwest Plains Dairy, was among those who signed the petition to leave.
Geven, a native of the Netherlands who has been farming here for nearly 20 years, said he sees little reason for the groundwater district. When he has issues with his wells or needs clarity on water rights, he works with state regulators.
But he pays assessments every year to the district.
โWe donโt know what the purpose is,โ he said. โWe think, โWhat are they doing? We donโt need them.โโ
Vast expanses of wheat grow in Southwest Kansas. Long an agricultural hub, the region is facing renewed pressure from state leaders seeking to preserve the quickly depleting Ogallala Aquifer. (Kevin Hardy/Stateline)
โThey will face the same choicesโ
Across most of the Ogallala states, governments have preferred to encourage voluntary conservation rather than mandating steep cutbacks, said Kevin Wagner, director of the Oklahoma Water Resource Center at Oklahoma State University.
Oklahoma allows farmers to use up to 2 feet of water each year on every acre they own. But usage is not monitored. Farmers report annual estimates of water usage.
And the state has not banned the drilling of new irrigation wells.
Researchers have closely monitored the decline of the aquifer across the Oklahoma Panhandle โ itโs dropping about half a foot per year, he said.
But thereโs no telling how much individual farmers are using or conserving.
โWhen I talk to producers in Oklahoma, thereโs a lot of feeling that Oklahoma producers are doing just as good at conserving as their neighbors in Texas and in Kansas,โ Wagner said. โAnd honestly thereโs no data out there right now.โ
Oklahoma state Rep. Carl Newton, a Republican, introduced legislation this year that would require irrigators to meter their water use.
The measure passed, but amid steep opposition from agriculture trade groups, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed it. He called it government overreach and a violation of private property rights.
Newton said he plans to reintroduce the bill, which he described as โa starting pointโ for conservation efforts.
โYouโve got to find out where your problem is to get an idea of where to go,โ he said. โThat was my whole goal.โ
Kansas started requiring irrigators to install meters and report water usage in the early 1990s.
Formal conservation efforts have been underway in other parts of the region for years.
In Nebraskaโs Republican River Basin, groundwater regulators have helped producers install soil moisture probes and more accurate meters that use telemetry to conserve. And Colorado offers a master irrigator course to help farmers grow crops more efficiently.
In Wichita County, Kansas, just beyond the bounds of GMD 3, farmers created a conservation program that launched in 2021. Called a local enhanced management area, farmers committed to cutting water use by at least 25%.
Farmer Don Smith said the program provided a chance for locals to act together before the state stepped in.
Smith, his brother and nephews together run Smith Family Farms, which grows corn, wheat and milo against a backdrop of massive wind turbines. Shiny grain bins emblazoned with the family name tower near the office, where a curious Australian shepherd keeps watch, rearing up on hind legs to peer through the door.
The farm is mostly dryland. Its irrigated fields draw upon 38 wells, connected to advanced sprinkler systems that help reduce water use. The farm also has transitioned to no-till methods, which keeps more moisture in the soil.
Smith said the farm shows that growers can save water and still make money. Lower water use does lead to lower yields, he said. But it also makes growing crops less expensive.
Smith knows the groundwater district just to his south has deeper wells and more abundant water. But the declining aquifer eventually will force changes there.
โI guess itโll be interesting to see if at some point somebody responds before the gunโs to their head,โ he said. โThey will face the same choices we all north of them have had to face.โ
In Wichita County, Smith said, test wells show the changes have slowed or even reversed aquifer decline. But even so, he doesnโt think irrigated farming will last forever. He expects the day will come when pumping small amounts of water wonโt be worth the cost.
โWe all understand that we are sucking water out of a bathtub,โ he said. โAnd the rate weโre taking it out of the bathtub exceeds the rate Mother Nature can put it back in.โ
A highly variable precipitation pattern was noted across the contiguous 48 states this past week, resulting in a significant number of changes in the Drought Monitor depiction. Another week of heavy rain June 4-11 continued to ease drought and abnormal dryness in parts of the central and southern Plains, with excessive amounts resulting in 2-category improvements in portions of central Kansas. Moderate to heavy rainfall also brought improvements to portions of the middle and upper Mississippi Valley, the Northeast, the Washington Cascades, and southernmost Florida. Meanwhile, deficient rainfall caused abnormal dryness and drought to expand or intensify in parts of southern New England, the mid-Atlantic region, the interior Southeast, the central and northern Florida Peninsula, a few scattered areas across Texas, part of the central Rockies, the northern High Plains, some sections of interior Washington and Oregon, and a small region in northeastern Alaska. Other areas were unchanged, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico…
Parts of the southern High Plains Region were hit by heavy to excessive rains, bringing widespread improvement to the entrenched dryness and drought affecting much of Kansas and eastern Colorado. The heaviest amounts soaked a swath across central Kansas, with more scattered heavy rains observed farther north in Kansas and across eastern Colorado. Between 5 and 8 inches fell on central Rice, eastern McPherson, central Marion, and much of Chase Counties in central Kansas, prompting some 2-category improvements there. D3 conditions were eliminated from the High Plains Region, and severe drought (D2) is now limited to a few several-county south and west of the band where the heaviest rains fell last week. Moderate rains (over 1.5 inch) reached into southern Nebraska as well, improving conditions in southeastern Nebraska. Farther north and west, conditions were considerably drier, and most sites recorded several tenths of an inch of rain at best. This kept conditions essentially unchanged in most areas, although some D0 expansion was introduced in north-central Colorado, western Nebraska and adjacent South Dakota, and north-central South Dakota. A dry week also allowed conditions to deteriorate in part of southwestern Colorado, with moderate drought (D1) expanding northward into west-central Colorado. There was an additional, small area of improvement in part of Laramie County in southeastern Wyoming, where a mesoscale heavy rain event (2.0 to 4.5 inches) eased D0 to D1 conditions…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 11, 2024.
Similar to western Texas, moderate to heavy precipitation also doused much of eastern New Mexico last week, inducing widespread 1-category improvement. The heaviest amounts (4.5 to locally 8.0 inches) fell on southern and west-central Guadalupe County, but most of the eastern half of the state reported at least 0.5 inch. Another area that experienced some drought relief was the higher elevations of the Cascades in Washington. During the past 30 days, 8 to 15 inches of precipitation has fallen on the peaks, with the largest totals observed in Snohomish County. Another 0.5 to 2.0 inches fell along and just east of the highest elevations last week. As a result, moderate drought was reduced to abnormal dryness there. However, across the northern tier of the region to the south and east of the Washington Cascades, persistently below-normal precipitation in many areas led to the expansion of abnormal dryness (D0) and moderate drought (D1) in a few areas, in particular the north-central Oregon Cascades, part of interior southeastern Oregon, part of the central and eastern Washington plains, and a broad area of northern and central Montana from east of the Rockies to near North Dakota. Soil moisture and some streamflows have begun to reflect the past few weeks of subnormal rainfall across portions of central and eastern Montana…
Widespread dryness and drought continued to cover western Oklahoma, the western Texas Panhandle, and most other areas across southern and western Texas. Rainfall totals were generally unremarkable across western Oklahoma, keeping D0 to D2 conditions generally unchanged, save for a couple of small patches near the central part of the state. In contrast, rainfall was highly variable in the areas of Texas that have been affected by dryness and drought (D0 to D3) recently, leading to sizeable areas that felt both deterioration and improvement. Most of the dry areas in the Texas Panhandle received at least moderate rain last week (1.5 inches or more), with several patches soaked by 3 to 5 inches of rain. As a result, improvement was introduced in many locations across this region. Farther south, moderate to locally heavy rains were observed in portions of the southern Edwards Plateau and southward through parts of Bandera, Medina, and Bexar Counties. Totals of 1-2 inches were fairly common in this region, although a few swaths received more, up to 4 inches at a few isolated locations. Improvement was also introduced in significant parts of this region, although less broadly than farther north since heavier totals were not as widespread. In sharp contrast, dry and hot weather across Deep South Texas and western parts of the Edwards Plateau led to broad-scale deterioration in these regions. Agricultural interests in the western Edwards Plateau report slowed planting due to quickly depleting surface moisture, resulting in blowing sand and dirt with little or no soil moisture. Over the past 90 days, a broad area from the southern Big Bend southward along the Rio Grande Valley into Maverick County recorded only 10 to 50 percent of normal rainfall, with similar amounts reported across portions of the western Edwards Plateau. The remainder of the South region is nearly free of notable dryness. Moderate drought is restricted to a couple of patches in northeastern Arkansas, with abnormal dryness covering the remainder of northeastern Arkansas and a large part of northern Mississippi. Moderate rains brought limited improvement to portions of northeastern Arkansas this past week, but only light rains fell across northern Mississippi, increasing short-term moisture deficits and prompting an increase in D0 coverage. Northwestern Mississippi has recorded near or just over one-half of normal rainfall since mid-April…
Looking Ahead
During the next five days (June 13-17, 2024), tropical moisture is expected to interact with mid-level low pressure across southern Florida, resulting in heavy rain. Flood watches are currently in effect, and 3 to 5 inches of rain are expected before precipitation tapers off later in the period. Tropical moisture from the Gulf of Mexico may also push into the central Gulf Coast region, bringing 1.5 to 2.5 inches of rain to the Louisiana Bayou and southern Mississippi. Farther north, thunderstorms along a frontal boundary are expected to drop 1.5 to 3.5 inches of rain on parts of the northeastern Great Plains and Upper Mississippi Valley. Moderate precipitation is expected in other parts of the northern Great Plains, upper and middle Mississippi Valley, western Great Lakes region, eastern New England, northern Florida Peninsula, southern lower Mississippi Valley, and higher elevations of the northern Rockies and Cascades. Meanwhile, the summerโs first extended period of excessive heat is forecast to develop toward the end of the period in the central Great Plains, expanding eastward across the middle and upper Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, the mid-Atlantic region, and the Northeast by the end of the period. Highs well into the 90s should be widespread by the end of the period, and warm nighttime lows are expected, providing little relief. Subnormal temperatures are forecast to be limited to the Pacific Northwest.
The Climate Prediction Centerโs 6-10 day outlook (valid June 18-22, 2024) favors above-normal temperatures from the southern Rockies and most of the Plains eastward to the Atlantic Ocean, with the most prohibitive odds (over 80 percent) across the Northeast and New England away from the immediate Atlantic Coast. There is a good chance that excessive heat will continue through at least part of the period across central and northern parts of the U.S. from the Mississippi Valley eastward. Farther west, subnormal temperatures are favored in many areas, but only slightly, with odds remaining below 40 percent (climatological odds are 33 percent). Below-normal precipitation is favored across the mid-Atlantic region, the Carolinas, the upper Southeast, and the Ohio Valley, as well as southeastern Alaska. However, odds tilt toward above-normal precipitation over a larger area encompassing the Gulf Coast region, the northern and southern Great Plains, the High Plains, the Great Lakes Region, the southern Rockies, the northern tier of the contiguous U.S. from the northern Rockies to the Pacific Coast, northeastern Alaska, and Hawaii. The best chances for surplus rainfall (50 to 70 percent) cover southern Texas.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending June 11, 2024.
Click the link to read the release on the AGU website (Liza Lester and Maheshwari Neelam):
May 21, 2024
Sudden onset of drying is a rising problem, particularly acute in South America and southern Africa. but in high mountain regions of central asia, climate change has instead brought more moisture
Sudden, severe dry spells known as flash droughts are rising in intensity around the world, with a notable exception in mountainous Central Asia, where flash drought extent is shrinking, according to new research. Heat and changes to precipitation patterns caused by a warming climate are driving these trends, the study found.
Flash droughts arrive suddenly, within weeks, hitting communities that are often not prepared and causing lasting impact. They are an emerging concern for water and food security. The new study is the first to apply a systematic, quantitative approach to the global incidence of flash drought, mapping hotspots and regions of rapid increases in recent decades.
โFor many parts of the world, we saw flash droughts extending over larger areas, for longer time, with faster onset speed,โ said Maheshwari Neelam, a climate scientist at NASAโs Marshall Space Flight Center and the Universities Space Research Association. She is the lead author of the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGUโs journal for high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
The study defined and tracked three critical measures of drought severity: speed of onset, duration and geographic extent. It analyzed 40 years of NASAโs MERRA-2 climate data, from 1980 to 2019, drawn from weather observations, satellite imagery and modeled root-zone soil moisture, with the aim of improving prediction and disaster preparedness.
โFor example, in watersheds in South America, onset is getting faster by about 0.12 days per year, so over a decade they are developing a day earlier. Extent is increasing by 1 to 3% per year,โ Neelam said. โThe metrics can be used by early warning systems to incorporate rates of change in flash drought characteristics in risk assessment and disaster preparedness.โ
South America and southern Africa are hotspots vulnerability (brown), where flash droughts are setting in faster, staying longer and affecting wider areas. Other regions are experiencing rising trends in one or two of these flash drought dimensions. Credit: Neelim and Hain (2024) Geophysical Research Letters https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL109657 CC BY.
South America, particularly southern Brazil and the Amazon, is experiencing strong intensification in all three dimensions of flash drought, aligning with deforestation patterns in the region, high temperatures and less rain. Congo, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Lesotho, and Madagascar are also hotspots. High temperatures were found to be more important than declining precipitation in the African watersheds.
Land cover is also important to flash drought vulnerability. Savanna and grasslands are more susceptible to flash droughts than other ecotypes, particularly in humid and semi-humid climates, the study found.
In Central Asian watersheds, centered on high mountains, including the Himalaya Karakoram, Tianshan and Hindu Kush, flash drought extent shrank over the study period, bucking the worldwide trend. Climate-driven changes in precipitation, melting snowpack and a shift from snow to rain in the mountains have kept soils moist. These changes can cause an increase in flash floods, which have been observed in the region, Neelam said.
Neelam emphasized the importance of understanding landscapesโ response to disasters on a watershed scale for assessing water budgets and water management, transcending geopolitical boundaries.
โNatural hazards have no political values,โ Neelam said. โThis is why we looked at watersheds and not countries.โ
[…]
This study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, an open-access AGU journal. Neither the study nor this press release is under embargo. View and download a pdf of the study here.
Should drought be considered an extreme dry period based on the entire record of available data? Or, should drought be considered a low in precipitation variability within the context of a present, contemporary climate? The two most common reference periods are the full period of record (all observed data or as much as possible) and a 30-year reference climatology. However, climate non stationarity may render the “all-data” approach an inaccurate or obsolete comparison unless a trend is factored in. The aim of this review is to explore the literature for approaches to addressing these issues. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has recommended a 30-year reference period for most climatological applications since 1935, but for drought assessments and drought indices the modus operandi has been to use as much data as possible. However, in the literature, the โall dataโ approach has been challenged by evident impacts from climate change-induced non-stationarity. Over the past several years, as potential errors in drought assessments became more apparent due to a stationarity assumption when applying drought indices, several studies have adopted shorter reference periods, with 30-years being the most common. Furthermore, several recent papers have recommended using short reference periods with more frequent data updates for drought assessments to be representative of a contemporary climate. Additionally, at least 18 non-stationary drought indices have been proposed in efforts to retain long datasets and account for non-stationarity in the climate system.
With another hot summer looming, Mexico is behind on its water deliveries to the United States, leading to water cutbacks in South Texas. A little-known federal agency has hit a roadblock in its efforts to get Mexico to comply.
NOTE: According to Robert Salmon Mexico is not behind in deliveries. He is a former Commissioner of the International Boudary Waters Commission and was speaking at last week’s Getches-Wilkinson/Water and Tribes Initiative Colorado River Conference in Boulder, Colorado.
This story was reported with a grant from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
EL PASOโMaria-Elena Giner faced a room full of farmers, irrigation managers and residents in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas on April 2.
The local agricultural community was reeling. Reservoirs on the Rio Grande were near record lows and the state had already warned that water cutbacks would be necessary. The last sugar mill in the region closed in February, citing the lack of water.
But Mexico still wasnโt sending water to the U.S. from its Rio Grande tributaries, as a 1944 treaty requires the country to do in five-year intervals.
โWe havenโt gotten any rains or significant inflows,โ said Giner, the commissioner of the International Boundary and Water Commission. โItโs not looking good.โ
The IBWC, based in El Paso, implements the boundary and water treaties between the two countries. Ginerโs team had spent 2023 working to reach an agreement with Mexico to ensure more reliable water deliveries on the Rio Grande. In December, she was confident the U.S. and Mexico would sign a new agreement, known as a minute. But at the final hour Mexico declined to sign.
The impasse left farmers and communities in the Rio Grande Valley facing down another hot summer with limited water supplies. The state of Texas and members of Congress joined the supplications to Mexico: Start sending the water you owe. But with the political opposition in Mexico calling for the water treaty to be renegotiatedโand presidential elections approaching in JuneโMexican officials waited.
Immigration, trade and drug trafficking dominate much of the U.S. diplomatic agenda with Mexico. But in recent months water has become a more urgent topic, rising to the โupper echelons of the Department of State,โ in Ginerโs words. The 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico governs water distribution on both the Rio Grande and Colorado River. Drought, climate change and politics are increasing tensions over treaty compliance.
As of May 20, United States ownership of water at the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs was at 20.1 percent of normal conservation capacity. South Texas farmers and municipalities are figuring out how to make do with less this summer.
Texas Republican Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and members of both parties in the House are pushing for the State Department to withhold funds for Mexico.
Giner, who herself grew up between the two countries in Ciudad Juรกrez and El Paso, remains convinced the neighboring nations can work out their differences over an 80-year-old treaty to manage shared rivers.
โ[This minute is] the tool that we have at the IBWC,โ Giner said during the April meeting. โMexico is a sovereign country. And our tool is influence.โ
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Rio Grande Valley Farmers Fear More Losses
The Rio Grande starts its 1,900-mile journey to the Gulf of Mexico high in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. But the water that flows through the Texas Rio Grande Valley mostly originates in tributaries in Mexico. The most important is the Rio Conchos that flows from the Sierra Tarahumara through the agricultural heart of Chihuahua before joining the Rio Grande at Presidio, Texas.
The 1944 water treaty commits the U.S. to send Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year. On the Rio Grande, Mexico is expected to send an average of 350,000 acre-feet of water from the Mexican tributaries each year over a five-year cycle for a total of 1.75 million acre-feet. This water flows to the Falcon and Amistad Reservoirs, which store water for the farms and communities of the Rio Grande Valley and the downstream Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leรณn.
The last five-year cycle ended in conflict in 2020, with farmers in Chihuahua protesting water deliveries to the U.S. In a last-minute deal, known as minute 325, Mexico agreed to transfer water stored at the international reservoirs to the U.S. to end the cycle without a deficit.
The current cycle ends on October 25, 2025. Well into the fourth year, Mexico has sent less than 400,000 acre feet of water. At this rate it is unlikely that Mexico can meet its obligations.The main reservoirs on the Rio Conchos are at low levels, with La Boquilla at 28 percent capacity and Francisco Madero at 25.8 percent, as of May 16. The entire state of Chihuahua is currently in a drought.
With irregular water deliveries hampering agricultural production, the last sugar mill in Texas, the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers, closed for good in February.
โI just donโt see a means by which sufficient water could be delivered right now in time to save the agricultural production for this year,โ said Carlos Rubinstein, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality Rio Grande watermaster and consultant. โSo the water is going to have to come from Mother Nature this year, which is a bad spot to be in.โ
Towns and cities in the Rio Grande Valley that rely on the river for their water could also face shortages this year. Municipalities may be forced to buy additional water or speed up plans to develop alternative water supplies, like desalination.
The Delta Lake Irrigation District diverts water to municipalities including Raymondville and Lyford. Water for these communities is conveyed through irrigation canals; if there is no irrigation water the municipal water canโt move through the canals.
โWeโre at a point where within the next 60 days if we donโt get substantial rainfall or Mexico releases some waterโฆ I donโt know what my municipalities that I deliver water to are going to have to do,โ said general manager Troy Allen in early May.
โWeโve already lost the sugar industry in the Rio Grande Valley,โ Allen said. He worries the citrus industry will be next. โThatโs my big fear.โ
Negotiations Advance Then Falter in 2023
State and federal officials tried to avoid this.
Minute 325, signed by the U.S. and Mexico in October 2020, set the goal of signing a new minute by December 2023 to increase โreliability and predictabilityโ in Rio Grande water deliveries.
The Rio Grande Minute Working Group formed in 2022 with representatives from IBWC, the TCEQ, the Department of State, Mexicoโs IBWC, known as CILA, and Mexicoโs National Water Commission, known as CONAGUA.
In Mexico, water is federal property. But once that same water is delivered to the U.S. in the international reservoirs, it falls under the purview of the state of Texas. TCEQโs Rio Grande Watermaster then manages deliveries to irrigation districts and other users. While IBWC handles direct negotiations with Mexico, the agency must work closely with TCEQ.
Giner wrote to TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka, a member of the working group, in January 2023. She wrote in an email, provided by TCEQ in a records request, that she looked forward to โachieving a minute signing that will lead to predictability and reliability in the Rio Grande.โ
TCEQ has urged IWBC to do more, and political tensions on the border have bled into the water dispute. โIBWC must hold Mexico accountable,โ wrote the director of the agencyโs Office of Water at the end of January 2023.
In late June 2023, IBWC took issue when Texas Governor Gregg Abbott ordered floating buoys designed to stop migrants to be installed in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. IBWC denounced the move, saying they were not consulted and the buoys could violate treaty agreements. Tensions with Mexico flared; Mexicoโs top diplomatย lodged a complaintย with the U.S. government, warning the buoys violated the 1944 treaty and were possibly in Mexican territory. The U.S. Department of Justice later sued Texas. (That case is now in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.ย
On July 18, 2023 IBWC foreign affairs officer Sally Spener notified TCEQ that Mexican officials had postponed a meeting because of the incident, according to emails obtained by Inside Climate News.
โWe were able to continue our negotiations through all of that last year,โ Spener said in a May 2024 interview, referring to the buoy controversy. โBut it was a distraction.โ
Spener said by the second half of 2023, the working group put โconcepts on paperโ and drafted a minute laying out what the two countries agreed on.
On December 5, the IBWC presented details of the draft minute to stakeholders in the Rio Grande Valley. Irrigation districts and farmers in the valley donโt always agree with the federal governmentโs approach to working with Mexico, so their buy-in was important. Commissioner Giner explained how key points in the minute would resolve long-standing disagreements about the treaty.
Some irrigation districts and politicians in Chihuahua argue that Mexico should only allocate โwild water,โ or water that overflows the countryโs domestic dams, to fulfill the treaty. The draft minute would reinforce the importance of Mexico releasing water from its domestic reservoirs, settling that debate.
Mexicoโs San Juan and Alamo Rivers have previously been used to supplement the five tributaries named in the treaty. The draft minute affirmed that, when the U.S. agrees, Mexico could allot water from these rivers to meet its obligations.
The draft also included a new โprojectsโ working group that would focus on increasing water conservation in the drought-impacted watershed. A separate โenvironmentโ working group would focus on the Big Bend and increasing water flow in an area that runs dry much of the year.
โThere was some of it that we didnโt agree with, but it was a start,โ said Troy Allen of the Delta Lake Irrigation District of the draft minute. โ[Commissioner Giner] is very transparent and I think she is really trying her best to help us out.โ
IBWC was poised to sign the minute in December. Suddenly Mexican federal officials backtracked, saying they needed to โundertake additional domestic consultations,โ according to Spener. Until those consultations were complete, Mexico wouldnโt sign the minute.
Not everyone in Mexico wanted the new agreement. The heart of that opposition lies in Chihuahua.
Mexican Opposition Politicians Protest Water Deliveries
Mexican presidential candidate Xรณchitl Gรกlvez took the stage in Camargo, Chihuahua, on April 14. She spoke just a few miles from La Boquilla, where Mexican farmers protested water deliveries to the United States in 2020.
Those same farmers were out in force for Gรกlvez, who is backed by Mexicoโs three main opposition parties, the PAN, PRI and PRD. Her opponent from the MORENA party, Claudia Sheinbaum, is the successor to incumbent president Andrรฉs Manuel Lรณpez Obrador.
In 2020, Lรณpez Obrador sent the National Guard to the La Boquilla reservoir in anticipation of opening the floodgates to send water north. Protesters pushed out the National Guard and a protester was killed in the confrontations.ย
The Boquilla Dam in Boquilla, Chihuahua is photographed with a drone in September 2023. The dam was built at the beginning of the twentieth century. A view of the La Boquilla Dam along the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, Mexico. Credit: Omar Ornelas
Gรกlvez opened her speech this spring discussing water. โWe are in the worst drought in many years,โ she said, before launching into criticisms of MORENAโs agricultural policies.
โThe treaty payment to the United States in 2025 has to be renegotiated,โ she said to cheers. โI promise I will defend the water of Chihuahua.โ
Chihuahua governor Marรญa Eugenia Campos Galvรกn also opposes water deliveries. Representing the PAN, Campos Galvรกn is one of the few opposition governors in Mexico. For her, defending the water of Chihuahua means challenging the federal officials who send water to the United States.
Chihuahua Congressman Salvador Alcรกntar, also of the PAN, was instrumental in the 2020 protests. He is steadfast that the water stored at the reservoirs along the Rio Conchos should not be sent to the United States.
โWe are in an extreme drought in Mexico. Right now it will be difficult to comply with the commitments in the treaty,โ he said in an interview in Spanish. โNo one is obligated to give what they donโt have.โ
Texas and IBWC officials acknowledge that Mexicoโs upcoming presidential election on June 2 cast a shadow over the minute negotiations. Sheinbaum is heavily favored to win. But the federal government is not expected to take action on the treaty or water deliveries in the interim.
โWe continue to push for the minute,โ said IBWCโs Spener. โAnd even without the minute [Mexico] can make water deliveries.โ
CONAGUA, which manages water allocations on the Rio Conchos, did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News.
Bad Weather and Bad Politics
Mexico alone doesnโt shoulder the blame for water shortages this year. A prolonged drought and climate change are pummeling the Rio Grande watershed and Mexican tributaries alike. Extreme heat is already taking a toll on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley. These trends are only expected to continue.
Temperatures throughout the Rio Grande basin are projected to increase by four to 10 degrees Fahrenheit this century, according to theย Bureau of Reclamation. Higher temperatures decrease snow accumulation and snow melt. More water evaporates from reservoirs as temperatures warm.
The Rio Grande meanders through a balmy former wetland in Cameron County, Texas, as it nears the Gulf of Mexico, pictured in July 2022. Credit: Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
Drought and rising temperatures are also impacting the Conchos basin in Mexico. Annual runoff in the Conchos basin could decline by up to 25 percent by 2050 because of changes in precipitation and higher temperatures, according to the 2015 Mexico Water Vulnerability Atlas. A study in the Journal of Climate this year projected that Chihuahua is likely to โexperience strong drying during the spring and summer monthsโ this century.
Texas politicians are pressuring the Biden administration to take more decisive action to help the stateโs farmers. On May 10, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, along with eight representatives, including Republicans Monica De La Cruz and Tony Gonzales and Democrats Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar, sent a letter urging the both the House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittees on State and Foreign Operations to withhold designated funds from Mexico until the country โmeets its obligations to resolve the ongoing water dispute.โ
Lรณpez Obrador spoke to the treaty on May 15 during his daily press conference. He said Mexico does not have a date to make a decision. โWe support this compact,โ he said. โWe agree it shouldnโt be modified and we have a very good relationship [with the United States]. But as the weather gets hot and there are elections coming up, all these issues come to light.โ
The Department of State referred questions about the treaty negotiations to IBWC.
Spener of the IBWC said they continue to encourage Mexico to deliver water. The minute working group held its most recent meeting in April in El Paso.
TCEQ Commissioner Bobby Janecka wrote to Commissioner Giner on April 26, concerned that Mexico continued to allocate water to its irrigation districts without planning how to send water to Texas. He also opposed Mexico arguing that extraordinary drought prevented the country from complying with the treaty. โWe are deeply concerned about these claims,โ he wrote.
Irrigation districts in the Rio Grande Valley worry about trade-offs when the U.S. agrees to alternative measuresโbeyond the five tributaries named in the treatyโfor Mexico to deliver the water it owes. Anthony Stambaugh, general manager of the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2., said Mexico โneeds to be caught up first,โ before the U.S. offers more concessions.
When the treaty clock runs out on October 25, 2025, both the U.S. and Mexico will have entered new presidential administrations. The incoming U.S. president will also appoint the IBWC commissioner. The tone of binational negotiations could change dramatically.
Mexicans go to the polls on June 2. Water issues, from Chihuahua to Mexico City, have taken on greater importance during the campaign. Water shortages are spreading to more neighborhoods in Mexico City as supplies dip. Frontrunner Sheinbaum is largely expected to continue her predecessorโs policies if elected. She has committed to making water management a priority and would consider a revision of the National Water Law. Meanwhile, her opponent Gรกlvez has said, if elected, she would modernize agriculture to make more efficient use of water.
Six months later, the United States will hold its presidential election. Water and the 1944 treaty are hardly top campaign issues north of the border. But, if elected, Republican candidate Donald Trump would likely take a more confrontational approach in his dealings with Mexico. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has invested heavily in water conservation in Western states, including in the Colorado River Basin and the Rio Grande. These investments, through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, would likely continue if Biden is re-elected.
In the Rio Grande Valley, the immediate concern is how to get through a dry, hot summer with less water to go around. As water supplies dwindleโand the political divide widensโthe immediate needs to secure water will take precedent.
Carlos Rubinstein, the former TCEQ watermaster, said resolving the root issues of water supplies on the Rio Grande requires continuous work, not just during the bad years.
โItโs bad weather and itโs bad politics,โ he said. โSo thatโs a really tough place to be.โ
This story was produced by Inside Climate News, in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent initiative of the University of Colorado Boulderโs Center for Environmental Journalism.
Southwestern Colorado is left with 6% of its peak snowpack earlier than usual this season in part because of a rare, sudden and large melt in late April.
Snow that gathers in Coloradoโs mountains is a key water source for the state, and a fast, early spring runoff can mean less water for farmers, ranchers, ecosystems and others in late summer. While the snow in northern Colorado is just starting to melt, southern river basins saw their largest, early snowpack drop-off this season, compared to historical data.
For Ken Curtis, the only reason irrigators in Dolores and Montezuma counties havenโt been short on water for their farms and ranches is because the areaโs reservoir, McPhee Reservoir, had water supplies left over from the above-average year in 2023.
โBecause of the carryover, the impacts arenโt quite that crazy bad,โ said Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District. โIf we hadnโt had that carryover, it would have been a terrible year.โ
A terrible year like 2021, he added, when many irrigators who depend on water from McPhee only received 10% of their normal water supply.
The snowpack in the southwestern San Miguel-Dolores-Animas-San Juan combined basin peaked at about 18 inches April 2, then plummeted by 8 inches during the last half of April. It was the largest 14-day loss of snowpack before the end of April in this basin since the start of data collection in the 1980s, according to the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University.
The basin still held onto 1.1 inches of snow-water equivalent, the amount of liquid water in snow, as of Wednesday. Typically, the snowpack is about twice as high in late May, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
โThe Rio Grande and the southwest basins, the snow is pretty much gone, and itโs going to be gone within days to a week at this point,โ said Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist and CSU professor.
The Upper Rio Grande Basin, which spans the central-southern part of the state including the San Luis Valley, had 0.1 inch of snow-water equivalent as of Wednesday, much less than its norm for late May, which is about 1.5 inches.
Eastern and northern basins, like the South Platte Basin which includes parts of Denver, have held onto their snowpack for slightly longer than usual. These basins have above-average snowpack for late May,ย ranging from 119% to 162%ย of the historic norm, as of Wednesday [May 29, 2024].
The April decline in the southwest was caused by warm and dry conditions and sublimation, when snow and ice change into water vapor in the atmosphere without first melting into liquid water. Dust that darkens snow and speeds snowmelt also played a role, Schumacher said.
The spring runoff is a little faster than usual in the southern basins, but itโs within the realm of normal, said Brian Domonkos, snow survey supervisor for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which manages snow-measurement stations around the state.
โWhat weโre seeing right now is not something that I would be alarmed about,โ Domonkos said.
Spring snowfall, storms and cooler temperatures have slowed the speed of snowmelt in some areas as well, he said.
In Durango, the Animas Riverโs flows were around 2,000 cubic feet per second Wednesday, lower than the late-May norm of 2,990 cfs.
When it comes to recreation, the lower flows might actually be a boon, said Ashleigh Tucker, who is planning a river sports event, Animas River Days, scheduled for June 1 and 2. Some races require participants to pass through hanging gates, moving both upstream and downstream through a whitewater park, she said.
โIf the waterโs super high, it makes it a lot harder to do. So as far as our events go, itโs a good level,โ she said. โBut thereโs not much snow left, so that means we wonโt really have much left for the rest of the year, which is kind of a bummer.โ
She doesnโt expect the riverโs slightly lower flows to impact attendance either: Only years with really low flows, about 1,000 cfs, have discouraged people from floating the Animas, she said.
Warm and dry conditions are likely to continue through June, then weather watchers will turn their gaze to the sky in July to watch for the monsoon season.
In the meantime, Curtis is watching inflow forecasts for McPhee Reservoir. The runoff has been lower than average so far, even after an average snowpack season, he said.
That means there might not be as much water left to carry over into 2025.
โThe monsoons will have the next impact,โ he said. โIf you see everyone going on fire restrictions, you know the monsoons havenโt shown up.โ
17% of the Lower 48 is short/very short; a 2% increase since last week. The East Coast saw a mix of improvement & degradation, with quick drying soils in ME, VT, & MA. In the West, all but CO & CA dried since last week.
Westerners have begun looking at their homes differently these days. Are those trees too close? Should I move all that firewood stacked up next to the deck?
Meanwhile, in California, some fire insurers have lost so much money theyโve pulled out of the state. Overall, fire insurance is becoming as expensive and unpredictable as the natural disastersโnot just wildfires but also hail and windstormsโthat are driving up rate increases. In some places, increases are as much as 1,000% for houses and condos nestled close to trees.
In Colorado, Tiffany Lockwood said she was dropped twice by fire insurance carriers over the 10 years sheโs lived in Evergreen, a heavily forested exurb of Denver.
A former Florida resident, Lockwood, 59, only has one way out in case of a wildfireโand even then sheโll have little warning. โWhen I lived in Florida,โ she said, โwe knew four days ahead when a hurricane was coming. Here we get 40 minutes.โ
Lockwood thinks insurance companies are running scared and giving impossible directives. One insurer asked her to remove all the shrubs and trees within 30 feet of the house. But the plan meant taking down a lot of her neighborโs trees, too.
Evergreenโs attraction is that residents live amidst towering conifer trees. But red zones on fire maps are being expanded all over Colorado after several recent large forest fires and the wind-driven Marshall grassfire outside of Boulder, in December 2021. It destroyed more than 1,000 suburban homes and was the stateโs most expensive fire yet. Formerly โsafeโ places are now described as at-risk.
Jeff Geslin lives in high and dry La Plata County, in southwestern Colorado, surrounded by 35 acres of piรฑon and juniper trees. He and his wife Lorna are used to remediation plans, he said, and when their insurance increases, โI just pay it, no questions asked.โ
But they were shocked when their condo association in Summit County, governing their second home, lost its insurance policy.
โIt might be because weโre close to Forest Service land,โ Geslin said, โwhich must be more risk.โ Geslin was assessed $6,772 extra for the new policy the Homeowners Association managed to findโan increase of 1,000%.
Colorado State Senator Dylan Roberts is working on legislation to insure larger structures. โIโve gotten calls about insurance for the last year if not two years,โ he said. โThe single-family upset has quieted down, but the big thing I hear about is HOA and condo buildings.โ
The state already has what is called the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan in place for smaller buildings when insurance companies refuse to underwrite traditional coverage. Itโs backed by private insurers and administered by an appointed board of insurance professionals.
โWe hope to insure no one,โ said FAIR Plan board member Carole Walker. Sheโs the executive director of an insurance trade group covering, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
โThis is insurance of last resort,โ she said, โas we donโt want to compete with private insurers. Theyโre struggling after 10 straight years of unprofitability in property insurance.โ
The FAIR Plan board, which plans to sell policies late next year, hired industry veteran Kelly Campbell as executive director this May. It will offer bare-bones coverage with high deductibles and low maximum amounts. The plan would offer coverage of $5 million per commercial structure and $750,000 per house.
โEverything has escalated,โ said Walker. โColorado is in that perfect storm of catastrophes. The number of claims and the cost to pay those claims is at a record pace. Add in the escalating number of events like hail and wildfire, and itโs the hardest insurance market in a generation.โ
Walker says Colorado established a resiliency code board via state law in 2023, with a mandate of hardening structures with fire-resistant siding, metal roofs and landscaping. โWe need confidence back in the marketplace,โ she said about the board. โUltimately, this is a life-safety issue because wildfire knows no boundaries. Youโre dependent on your neighbor.โ
David Marston. Photo credit: Writers on the Range
Kevin Parks, a State Farm insurer in Western Colorado, has some advice for Western homeowners: โWiden your driveway and road to 20 feet, install a turnaround big enough for fire vehicles, remove shrubs and trees close to your house, and add a perimeter of gravel all around your structure. Finally, hope you live where two roads lead to your house.โ
In this new age of longer and meaner fire seasons, Parks added, โThe fire is comingโnow itโs a question of being ready.โ
Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.
In recent years, Michigan has spent tens of millions of dollars to limit residentsโ exposure to the harmful โforever chemicalsโ called PFAS. And some cities there have spent millions of their own to filter contaminated drinking water or connect to new, less-polluted sources.
โWeโve made significant investments to get up to speed,โ said Abigail Hendershott, executive director of the Michigan PFAS Action Response Team, which serves as a coordinating group for the stateโs testing, cleanup and public education efforts. โThereโs still a good chunk of the country that hasnโt taken on anything.โ
Thatโs about to change.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued new standards last month for PFAS levels in drinking water, giving water systems three years to conduct testing, and another two years to install treatment systems if contaminants are detected. State officials and utilities say itโs going to be difficult and costly to meet the requirements.
โThis is going to take a lot more investment at the state level,โ said Alan Roberson, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, a group that convenes leaders in state health and environmental agencies. โIt creates a big workload for everybody.โ
PFAS chemicals are widespread, found in a host of everyday products and industrial uses, and they donโt break down naturally, meaning they stay in human bodies and the environment indefinitely. Exposure has been shown to increase the risk of cancer, decrease fertility, cause metabolic disorders and damage the immune system.
To date, 11 states have set limits for PFAS, or perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, in drinking water. Several others have pending rules or levels that require public notice. While the federal rule builds on those efforts, it also sets limits that are stricter than the state-issued rules.
โWe really have looked to the states as leaders in setting standards and doing some of the foundational science,โ said Zach Schafer, director of policy and special projects for the EPAโs Office of Water. โThe state agencies are the ones who will be playing the point role [in implementing the national rule].โ
Schafer said the agency estimates that 6% to 10% of water systems nationwide will need to take steps to reduce PFAS contamination, at a cost averaging $1.5 billion per year over an 80-year span.
Public health advocates say the EPAโs rule is an important step to ensure all Americans have access to safe water. They say state actions show that such efforts can work.
But some state regulators and water suppliers โ even in states that already have their own rules โ say the strict thresholds and timelines imposed by the feds will be difficult for many utilities to achieve. While the Biden administration has dedicated billions in funding to help clean up water supplies, experts say the costs will far exceed the available money.
โIt’s going to have a significant impact nationally on water rates and affordability of water,โ said Chris Moody, regulatory technical manager with the American Water Works Association, a group that includes more than 4,000 utilities.
Anย estimate, conducted on behalf of the association, pegs the national cost of cleaning up contaminated water at nearly $4 billion each year. The report found that some households could face thousands of dollars in increased rates to cover the costs of treatment.
โThereโs a lot of concernโ
New Jersey in 2018 became the first state to issue standards for PFAS in drinking water. While the stateโs regulations given New Jersey a head start, officials say they still have a difficult task ahead to meet the stricter thresholds.
โWhen we bring in the EPA number, the number of noncompliant systems goes up dramatically,โ said Shawn LaTourette, the stateโs commissioner of environmental protection. โThereโs a lot of concern about cost and implementation.โ
LaTourette said state leaders are working to analyze which water systems may fall out of compliance when the federal thresholds take effect. And heโs calling on lawmakers to provide more money to communities that canโt afford the upgrades.
In Washington state, utilities have begun testing for PFAS under state standards passed by regulators in 2021. Officials say that roughly 2% of the water systems tested so far arenโt in compliance, but that number would jump to 10% when factoring in the stricter federal limits. State leaders say theyโll be able to grandfather in the data theyโve been collecting to meet EPAโs testing requirements.
The agency may ask state lawmakers for a โsubstantialโ increase in staffing to implement the new rules, said Mike Means, capacity development and policy manager with the Washington State Department of Health.
Michigan has had its drinking water standards for PFAS since 2020. Hendershott said state officials are well prepared to incorporate the EPAโs thresholds. But the strict new limits could quadruple the number of water systems that fall out of compliance.
Sarah Doll, national director of Safer States, an alliance of environmental health groups focused on toxic chemicals, said state efforts were key to bringing about the federal rule.
โThey created the urgency for the feds to bring these standards,โ she said. โStates that already have regulatory standards absolutely are in a better position.โ
โItโs very expensiveโ
While many states have not enacted their own standards, some have conducted testing or taken other steps to address residentsโ exposure.
Missouri has been testing water systems for PFAS for more than a decade and created maps to notify residents of potential exposure. Of the 400 systems itโs sampled, 11 may have trouble complying with the EPA rule, said Eric Medlock, an environmental specialist with the state Department of Natural Resources. The agency aims to bring on a chemist and laboratory equipment to conduct more testing in-house.
Medlock expressed concern that the federal limits are so strict that theyโre near the threshold of what can be detected.
โWhen you get down to these really low detection levels that are right at the regulatory limit, that poses a problem,โ he said. โWe’re going to have to enforce and regulate what EPA proposed. It is going to be an issue.โ
Medlock and others noted that states will face longer-term issues with the storage of the waste products filtered from the water, which carry their own PFAS contamination risk.
The infrastructure bill passed by Congress in 2021 includes $5 billion over five years to help communities treat PFAS and other emerging contaminants.
More funding for cleanup may come from state lawsuits filed against chemical manufacturers. Thirty attorneys general have filed litigation against polluters, and Minnesota settled its case against 3M Company for $850 million. But leaders say such settlements arenโt a predictable funding source.
In addition to the upfront cost of installing treatment systems, utilities face ongoing expenses, such as replacing filters and disposing of waste, that are less likely to benefit from federal grants and loans. Meanwhile, some water system leaders say the federal compliance timelines may not be long enough.
โIt takes time to design and build a major capital project,โ said Erica Brown, chief policy and strategy officer for the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, a policy group that advocates for public water utilities. โItโs not one of those things that you say, โYou have to do this, and next year,โ and you can just turn it on.โ
And some officials fear the drinking water limits could lead to more state regulations on wastewater plants and other entities whose discharges may affect drinking water sources.
โIt seems like it’s going to be problematic, because [treatment] is very expensive,โ said Sharon Green, manager of legislative and regulatory programs with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, an agency whose members operate 11 wastewater treatment plants.
Both state regulators and regulated utilities say state leaders need a broader approach to the PFAS problem than just treating the water that comes out of the tap. Officials need to stop pollution at the source, regulate industrial operations and limit products that contain the chemicals.
โIf we keep it out of the river in the first place, โฆ [the utility] doesnโt have to spend millions of dollars for treatment,โ said Jean Zhuang, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, an advocacy group focused on the South.
While Southern states have not adopted drinking water standards for PFAS, Zhuang said South Carolinaโs requirement that polluters disclose their discharges of PFAS is a good model to begin cutting off contamination sources.
As states face down the expenses of fixing the PFAS problem, some advocates also want them to remember the public health costs of inaction.
โPeople will ultimately be consuming less of these chemicals and getting sick less often,โ said Melanie Benesh, vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, a public health advocacy nonprofit.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.
For the last couple of decades, water managers in southern Nevada have promoted a plethora of conservation measures, from fixing leaks in the vast system of pipes snaking beneath Las Vegas to encouraging reduced-flow faucets to banning ornamental turf. Golf courses are irrigated with treated wastewater, and water-gulping swamp coolers are discouraged. All this has helped Nevada stay within tight limits on how much it can draw from the Colorado River, bringing per capita consumption down to just over 100 gallons per day โ about one-fourth of what it was in 1991.
But the sacrifices arenโt shared equally. A few miles off the Las Vegas Strip, for example, on the far edge of a golf course and residential development, sits a cluster of red-tile-roofed buildings. With its athletic club, tennis court, pool, lawns and grandiose structures, you might mistake it for a small private college or exclusive resort. In fact, this complex is a single-family residence that belonged to the Sultan of Brunei until November of last year, when a company associated with tech-company founder Jeffrey Berns paid $25 million for it. The home, if you can call it that, is also Las Vegasโ largest water user, guzzling 13 million gallons in 2022 โ more than 300 times what the average resident consumes. Run down the list of the Las Vegas Valley Water Districtโs top 100 users, and youโll see more of the same: While most residents are increasingly thrifty with their water, a select few โ often associated with multimilliondollar homes โ are binging on the stuff.
Call it water inequality, or the growing disparity in water consumption across the Colorado River Basin. Agriculture uses far more water than cities, and some crops are thirstier than others; Scottsdaleโs per capita consumption is nine times that of Tucsonโs; Californiaโs Imperial Irrigation District pulls about 10 times more water from the river than all of Nevada; and the Sultan of Bruneiโs Las Vegas estate sucks up 35,000 gallons each day. Meanwhile, nearly one-third of the Navajo Nationโs households lack running water altogether, and residents there use as little as 10 gallons daily.
This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline โWater inequality on the Colorado River.โ
Rebecca Mitchell, John Entsminger, Estevan Lopez, Gene Shawcroft, JB Hamby, Tom Buschatzke at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative Conference June 6, 2024. Photo credit: Rebecca Mitchell
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
June 7, 2024
An unprecedented public appearance by six of the seven commissioners who are negotiating the future of the Colorado River revealed how divided they are on solutions, and just as importantly, where they agree. The commissioners and state representatives spoke at Thursday’s 2024 Getches-Wilkinson conference on the Colorado River at University of Colorado Boulder’s law school.ย The commissioners showed up together at a critical junctureย โ they are in the thick of the talks to come up with an agreement that would manage allocations and ensure that America’s two largest reservoirs, both located in the Southwest, don’t fall below critical water levels.ย ย In addition, the negotiations are geared toward protecting the health of the river, which 40 million residents across several states rely on for drinking water.ย That agreement is supposed to be in place starting in 2027.
One of their more striking differences is in just what defines the health of the Colorado River system. The proposal submitted to the Bureau of Reclamation in March by the Lower Basin states wants to judge that health based on seven reservoirs in the system. In addition to Lake Powell and Lake Mead, that also includes Flaming Gorge in Utah, Blue Mesa in Colorado, and Navajo, which straddles the Colorado-New Mexico borders. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah want that health judged only on the two largest reservoirs โ Powell and Mead, both directly on the Colorado River.ย
Climate change is a real bummer for mountain streams โ it depletes the groundwater that feed creeks and rivers and makes them dirtier, besides. Thatโs the grim conclusion one reaches after reading two recently published papers. Letโs take them one at a time:
The Colorado River region is in the grips of the most severe, multi-decadal drought in over a millennium. The most obvious signs of this are declining streamflows across the region. But these declines, the authors of the paper point out, โcannot be explained solely by lower precipitation.โ In 2021, for example, the Upper Colorado River Basin received about 80% of the normal snowfall. But the riverโs unregulated flow into Lake Powell was just 30% of normal โ indicating that some of that snow was going missing somewhere along the line.
Some of the vanishing act can be attributed to sublimation, or the direct conversion of snow to water vapor, skipping the in-between liquid state (so the snow evaporates into the atmosphere rather than into streams). Climate change-exacerbated warming temperatures and dust-on-snow (and the resulting decrease in albedo) can increase sublimation. But researchers suspected something else was also at play here, namely changes in groundwater storage.
Scientists have long assumed that groundwater didnโt play a significant role in streamflows in mountainous regions because the geology didnโt support large underground storage. But newer research suggests that networks of fractures in crystalline and metamorphic rock can store more water at greater depths than previously believed. Perhaps that was what was stealing the water?
The researchers focused their investigation on the drainage of the East River, a stream that flows from the mountains above Crested Butte, Colorado, and on whose banks the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory sits. They used a high-resolution hydrological model that maps whatโs going on 400 meters underground.
The East River Valley, northwest of the historic town of Gothic, home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. The mountain with the pointed peak in the distance is Mount Crested Butte. Photo credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington
They found that, normally, groundwater storage can help stabilize streamflows during fluctuations between wet and dry years. Big snow recharges the aquifer, and the aquifer bolsters stream flows during droughts. But modeling shows that after just one extremely dry year, the groundwater storage does not recover, even after subsequent wet years. Higher temperatures, meanwhile, increase vegetationโs evapotranspiration โ or consumption of groundwater โ which further diminishes groundwater storage recharge. Wintertime snowmelt actually increases groundwater recharge during the winter and early spring, but in doing so, steals water that would otherwise go to streamflow.
So, yeah, not only does global warming diminish the snowpack, it also depletes groundwater storage, which ultimately leads to reduced Colorado River flows and more tension and conflict over how to divide up what little water โ that could be contaminated with metals (see below) โ remains. Iโd recommend reading the whole paper, since my summary really doesnโt do it justice. It has interesting insights into how mountain hydrology works. Hereโs a diagram from the paper giving a good overview of the phenomenon:
As if that wasnโt bad enough, now we learn that those depleted streams are also getting dirtier. That is, concentrations of potentially toxic metals are increasing in mountain streams. And, yes, itโs thanks to human-caused climate change (though the metal-loading itself isnโt necessarily human-caused).
Itโs important to note that this paper focuses on acid rock drainage as opposed to acid mine drainage. Both phenomena work the same: Water and oxygen react with sulfide minerals, usually pyrite, to form sulfuric acid. The acid then dissolves other minerals and โloadsโ the water with those metals, such as lead, copper, aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc โ each of which can harm aquatic life in high concentrations. Acid rock drainage is the more overarching term, but generally refers to this reaction occurring naturally. Acid mine drainage is when mining catalyzes or exacerbates the phenomenon by introducing subterranean minerals to oxygen and water.
Cement Creek and an iron fen above Silverton, Colorado. Cement Creek is affected by both natural acid rock drainage and human-caused acid mine drainage. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
An analysis of 40 years of water chemistry from 22 mineralized watersheds across Colorado found that sulfate, zinc, and copper concentrations were increasing by about 2% per year average โ and have nearly doubled over the last 30 years. Some of this may be due to declining streamflows, which carry less water to dilute the metals. But the researchers found that load โ or the amount of metals in the water โ is also increasing, and is on average โat least an equal contributorโ as the dilution effect. They also found that loads began climbing more dramatically beginning in 2000, when the current mega-drought kicked in.
And there appears to be a correlation between the mean annual air temperature, or MAAT, and the acid mine drainage load and concentration. This led researchers to theorize that warming temperatures are melting previously frozen ground, opening up new pathways for oxygenated groundwater flow (in the same way that mining does), which in turn leads to more formation of acid rock drainage. Similarly, declining groundwater storage could lower water tables, exposing more subterranean sulfides and minerals to oxygen, thus increasing groundwater acidity and metal loading.
The authors conclude: โOur correlation analysis therefore points to accelerating sulfide weathering rates from melting of frozen ground as perhaps the most important driving mechanism for observed regional increases in concentration and load at acidic sites.โ
๐ Reading Room ๐ง
In my teens and early twenties, I made a nearly annual springtime pilgrimage from Durango or Santa Fe to the Tucson area for some sunshine and desert time. One of my favorite things to do while there was to hike up Mt. Wrightson. The trailhead is at around 5,000 feet in elevation in the lush, jungle-like Madera Canyon, itself a stark contrast to the blazing cacti and scrub-smattered lowlands nearby. The well-worn trail takes you through a variety of eco-zones before topping out on the 9,456-foot summit where, inevitably, there would be snow. And, yes, I know that itโs weird to hike back to the high country climate while on an escape from the same, but itโs different when at the end of the day Iโd be sitting in an open air cafe under a brilliant bougainvillea.
Wrightson is in the Santa Rita Mountains, one of dozens of Madrean Sky Islands, or wildly biodiverse mountain ranges in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. The Arizona Republicโs Brandon Loomis has a good and heartbreaking story about how the Sky Islands are threatened by climate change, development, and a new mining boom โ especially to extract so-called โgreen metalsโ such as manganese, which is used in electric vehicle batteries.
โ๏ธ Mining Monitor โ๏ธ
Defunct uranium mines and waste rock above the San Miguel River near the former townsite of Uravan in western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Maybe uraniumโs too hot to handle? In March we reported that Sassy Gold was set to acquire 345 uranium mining claims on 8,206 acres in La Sal Creek, the Lisbon Valley, the Uravan Mineral Belt, and on the San Rafael Swell from Kimmerle Mining and its associated firm, Three Step Partnership, both of Moab. Now Sassy is retracting its offer, saying it โidentified a number of material political, environmental and technical risks associated with the propertiesโ that โfundamentally altered the value of the proposed transaction.โ You donโt say?
***
Congress continues to push legislation that would โreformโ the 1872 General Mining Law. Good news, right? Wrong. These lawmakers โ which include both Democrats and Republicans from mining-heavy states โ are looking to codify an older interpretation of the law allowing mining companies to dump waste rock or mill tailings on federal mining claims that are not valid, i.e. they donโt contain minerals of proven value. The bill passed the House and is now working its way through the Senate. Inside Climate News has more on that.
Meanwhile, efforts to actuallyreform the 152-year-old law to make it less of a giveaway to corporations appear to be at a standstill.
Six of the seven state representatives who will shape the next chapter of Colorado River rules speak on a panel at the University of Colorado, Boulder on Jun. 6, 2024. Those leaders say they need more time to bridge deep-seated disagreements over how to write new management rules for a shrinking Colorado River. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
June 7, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The future of the Colorado River is in the hands of seven people. They rarely appear together in public. This week, they did just that โ speaking on stage at a water law conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The solution to the Colorado Riverโs supply-demand imbalance will be complicated. Their message in Boulder was simple: These things take time.
โWeโre 30 months out,โ said John Entsminger, Nevadaโs top water negotiator. โWeโre very much in the second or third inning of this baseball game that weโre playing here.โ
The audience was mostly comprised of the people who will feel the impact of their decisions most sharply โ leaders from some of the 30 Native American tribes that use Colorado River water, nonprofit groups that advocate for the plants and animals living along its banks, and managers of cities and farms that depend on its flows.
The conference comes in the middle of a tense time for the Southwestโs most important river. The fate of the water supply will have an impact on kitchen faucets in major cities like Denver, Los Angeles and Phoenix, as well as sprawling farm fields which grow produce that gets consumed across the nation.
The current rules for managing the river expire in 2026, and state negotiators are under pressure to agree on a set of replacement guidelines before then. The Biden Administration wants those states to find compromise before the November election, but negotiators hinted that they may take longer than that.
In March, they found themselves divided into two groups, along lines that have split Colorado River states since the early 20th century. Those two camps โ the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada โ submitted two competing proposals for managing the river.
The current water level of Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam July 2023. Photo credit: Reclamation
Since then, theyโve been meeting behind closed doors and say theyโre working towards compromise. Details from those meetings have been scant, but negotiators do not appear to be finding much common ground, and are instead divided over major ideological differences about who should reduce their demand on the river.
โI wouldn’t call it a breakdown, but I do think that there was kind of a hiatus,โ said Estevan Lรณpez, the water negotiator from New Mexico. โIt’s indicative of just how difficult these issues are and how passionate people are about protecting their state’s interests.โ
Lรณpez and his peers stressed their commitment to reaching agreement eventually, but did not explain exactly how they plan to bridge major divisions in their ideas about water-sharing.
The states do seem to agree on one thing: they all say theyโd prefer to avoid this issue going to court. But when asked by the panelโs moderator whether they would commit to avoid taking Colorado River negotiations to the supreme court, none of the state representatives said yes.
Nevadaโs Entsminger said the threat of legal action, and the threat of the federal government stepping in and making a decision because the states canโt agree, are actually motivators to work towards compromise. He said the โfederal anvilโ hanging over negotiators has long been a part of negotiations.
New federal funding
When asked what success looks like on the Colorado River, the federal governmentโs top Western water official said this.
โSuccess is continuing the tradition of this basin.โ
Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, said she sees success as โcontinuing dialogue,โ expressing optimism that the regionโs leaders will find some agreement about managing the Colorado Riverโs next chapter.
But the โtradition of the basin,โ is marked by disagreement and century-old rivalries.
When it comes to Western water, the federal government pretty much does what the states tell it. Reclamation, the federal agency which manages the Westโs dams and reservoirs, ultimately puts new water rules into law, but depends on the states to help write them.
States, throughout the messy recent history of Western water management, have had trouble navigating the region out of crisis. Climate change has depleted the Colorado Riverโs water supplies, and the states that depend on it have struggled to cut back on demand.
Previous agreements to limit water demand have staved off catastrophe, but ultimately kicked the can down the road and set up the regionโs current crisis.
But there is one thing the federal government can do. Spend.
And spend they have. The Biden Administration has earmarked billions of dollars for water projects in communities around the Western U.S. On the first morning of the conference in Boulder, they allocated a big chunk of infrastructure spending for even more water conservation.
Touton and her colleagues announced that $700 million from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would go to water saving in the Colorado Riverโs Lower Basin. The agency said that money will go toward โinnovative projects like water distribution structures, advanced metering infrastructure, farm efficiency improvements, canal lining, turf removal, groundwater banking, desalination, recycling water and water purification.โ
Thatโs a continuation of existing work. The federal government has already spent a big portion of the $4 billion of IRA money that was allocated for Colorado River projects. Perhaps most notably, sending payouts to farmers and ranchers that offered to pause growing in exchange for a federal check.
This latest $700 million spend may do some of the same. The agency said it could save more than 700,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead. That amount is fairly substantial โ smaller than the 3 million acre-foot in water conservation proposed in a $1.2 billion deal struck in 2023, but larger than a 100,000 acre-foot conservation deal with the California farm district that uses more water than any other city or farm district in the Southwest.
The Biden Administrationโs big spending on Colorado River water conservation has been a key part of buying time for water negotiators, helping to prop up water levels at major reservoirs and create space for talks about longer-term solutions. However, the spending pattern has raised some anxieties about the precedent it might set for the riverโs long-term future.
Basically, this kind of funding might not come around again soon.
On the other hand, it could be a means of giving new momentum to a variety of projects that each represent a small piece of the puzzle that is a sustainable future for the Colorado River.
As one state negotiator put it, the Colorado River crisis wonโt be solved by a silver bullet, but instead โsilver buckshot.โ
That buckshot approach is already underway. Hundreds of millions of dollars are currently at work to save water โ from programs that pay farmers in rural Wyoming to pause growing and leave their water in the river to massive purification facilities that can help the Los Angeles area keep using more of the water it already has.
Tribes still calling for more representation
Tribes have long been left onthe sidelines of talks about sharing water from the Colorado River. In Boulder, tribal leaders celebrated recent moves to bring Native voices into negotiations, but made it clear that there is still work to be done.
After more than a century of exclusion, tribes are still asking for more representation. Leaders say that a seat at the table for tribes is especially important at this juncture in Colorado River negotiations.
โWeโre not participants,โ said Dwight Lomayesva, Vice Chairman of Colorado River Indian Tribes. โOur engagement is secondhand at best.โ
Some tribal leaders pointed to new government coordination efforts over the past few years as signs of progress. Lorelei Cloud, vice-chairwoman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, pointed to a new agreement between the six tribes and the four states that make up the Colorado Riverโs Upper Basin.
She said leaders in water management need to build on that work.
โI’m asking everybody in here to normalize tribal voices being at the decision making table,โ Cloud said. โLetting us make those decisions that affect our people.โ
Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers
One state negotiator raised the question of whose responsibility it is, exactly, to make sure tribal input shapes the next set of guidelines for the Colorado River.
JB Hamby, the water negotiator for California, said his state had made progress with including tribal leaders, but said the federal government is on the hook for making sure tribal voices are included.
โEverybody’s comments get evaluated equally,โ he said. โAnd ultimately, that’s a Reclamation/Interior decision about how that goes.โ
States split into two groups to submit proposals. At least one major tribe, the Gila River Indian Community, has said publicly that it does not support the proposal put forth by Arizona, the state in which its land resides. The two competing state proposals were joined by a letter from tribal groups. A majority of tribes that use Colorado River water added their signatures to the memo, outlining common values theyโd like to see represented in post-2026 river management.
Some tribal leaders said Indigenous people arenโt just being excluded, but there are active efforts to keep them from having an influence on the next chapter of water-sharing rules.
โThere are whisper campaigns from some of you trying to undermine tribal positions and efforts to try to pit tribes against one another,โ said Stephen Roe Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community. โThe old divide and conquer strategy.โ
Lewis said those campaigns are not public, but thanked Jordan D. Joaquin, president of the Quechan Indian Tribe, for calling out those efforts at a recent meeting.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
โDuring Westward expansion we were conquered by the divide and conquer strategy,โ Lewis said. โWe can’t let that happen again here in the midst of what we’re dealing with in regards to water policy.โ
Lewis said those tactics wonโt work, because โat the end of the day, all the basin tribes have a common bond, a historic bond, a sacred bond that trumps the artificial constructs that non-Indians have and still use to carve upโ the Colorado River.
Reservoir operators in the Colorado River basin upstream of Grand Junction are looking to coordinate water releases in coming days to help bolster the riverโs peak runoff volumes to aid imperiled fish. The coordinated peak-flow releases would be the first that have occurred since 2020. Annual conditions such as winter snowpack accumulations, current reservoir storage levels and the pace of spring runoff help determine what years coordinated releases occur. The releases are intended to help federally endangered or threatened fish in a 15-mile stretch of the Colorado River between irrigation water diversion points in the Palisade area and the riverโs confluence with the Gunnison River. Those fish include the razorback sucker, Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub and bonytail. The goal of the releases is to intensify peak spring runoff levels in the river in order to help clean fine sediment out of gravel beds that serve as spawning habitat for the fish. Such flows also can improve habitat for insects and other macroinvertebrates that fish feed on…
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to see peak runoff reach 16,700 cfs during a year like this one under coordinated releases. But during an online meeting of water officials Tuesday as they look to coordinate operations, David Graf, an instream flow coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, said reservoir releases that extend peak flows in the 15,000-15,500 cfs range a little longer also would be beneficial…The Bureau of Reclamation also has been making extra water releases to boost peak flows in the lower Gunnison River in recent days, again in hopes of benefiting imperiled fish. Those flow increases are expected to largely wind down before the Colorado River flows ramp up, meaning there shouldnโt be a threat of flooding downstream of the confluence. Reservoir operators and water users in some years also try to boost flows in the 15-mile reach during particularly low flows later in the summer, and around early April after irrigation diversions have begun but before the river levels increase from spring runoff.
Snow-dusted Gore Range in Colorado, photographed from the air.
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Robert Tann). Here’s an excerpt:
May 28, 2024
Early predictions point towards a dryer, warmer than normal summer. But a lot can still change โ and how much of an influence La Nina will be is hard to say.
Early predictions show the state could be in for a hot and dry summer.ย A three-month outlook from the Climate Prediction Centerย issued on May 16 shows Colorado has a chance of seeing above-normal temperature and below-normal precipitation from June to August.ย Specifically, northeast Colorado has a 33% to 50% of higher-than-normal temperatures while southwestern Colorado has as much as a 60% to 70% chance. Northwest and southeast areas, as well as central Colorado, have between a 50% and 60% chance for higher temperatures.ย Practically all of the state has a 40% to 50% chance of seeing below-normal precipitation, according to the projections…
La Nina tends to have the strongest influence on summer weather in areas east of the Rocky Mountains, particularly the midwest. Any impact in Colorado tends to be concentrated around the eastern plains, with La Nina potentially bringing warmer, dryer weather, Johnson added.
Click the link to access the report on the American River website. Here’s the introduction:
Introduction One year ago, the Supreme Court issued its sweeping decision in the case Sackett v. EPA, which invalidated federal Clean Water Act protections for most streams and wetlands in the United States. Since then, the fight for clean water protections has been at the state level. This report outlines the state of clean water protections one year out from the Sackett decision and why federal protections for our critical waters is vital in the face of worsening climate change and other threats.
In the year since the Supreme Court ruling, two states passed or introduced legislation to create new permitting programs to fill the gap in federal protections and eight states passed or introduced stronger laws and policies to strengthen state protections. Two states passed legislation weakening state-level protections, while efforts to weaken state protections failed in four other states.
The snow that piled up in Denver Waterโs collection system brought good numbers and big surprises this spring.
The numbers were strong: A peak at 100% of average in the South Platte River Basin and a peak at 124% in the Colorado River Basin.
The Continental Divide, shown here in Grand County, was buried in a wealth of snow this year (2024). Photo credit: Denver Water.
Those figures translate to a good snow year and a strong water supply for the warm months ahead.
The bigger surprise was how late into spring the snow stacked up.
In the portion of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water collects its water, peak didnโt hit until May 15 โ three weeks after the typical April 24 high point for snowpack.
Such a late peak is good news for water supplies.
Can you sing the summer watering rules? The Splashstreet Boys, with “I Water That Way.”
It means higher streamflows in the warmer months and reduces wildfire risk, among many other benefits. It often means a boost for recreation, too, with more water available for rafting season and elevated reservoirs deeper into the summer.
โMost importantly, it means water availability coincides with water demand,โ said Nathan Elder, Denver Waterโs manager of supply. โWe donโt see big water demands from our customers in April and May, so if the snowpack peaks later and runs off later in June and July, it keeps our reservoirs stable, sustaining our savings account, so to speak.โ
This year, May packed a big punch, delivering a whopping 10% of the snowpack in the Colorado River Basin portion of Denver Waterโs system.
“That volume of May snowfall is rare,โ Elder said. โWe typically see snowpack losses in May and this year it gained.”
A good snowpack and a late runoff often boosts recreation on and downstream of storage reservoirs, like Dillon Reservoir above, during the summer months. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The season produced another quirk: snowpack peaked April 10 in Denver Waterโs South Platte system, creating a 35-day stretch between peaks in the two basins.
That kind of gap has only occurred once in 44 years of data. That was in 1983, when the peaks were separated by 36 days (April 15/May 21).
Know before you go: Check denverwater.org/Recreation for updates and information about recreation on Denver Water reservoirs.
โThis gap makes for a big deviation from the norm, which typically sees both basins hit peak within a couple of days of each other, in late April,โ Elder said. โItโs another sign of how variable snowfall patterns can be in Colorado.โ
Even so, both basins came in with strong snowpack numbers, bringing Denver Water a second straight year of healthy water supply.
The wealth of snow also means Denver Water will need to spill water from some of its reservoirs, an uncommon situation. The utility prefers to keep water in storage if it can, but a big runoff can force it to release water downstream to make room for more snowmelt coming off the high country.
In some years, a big snowpack can lead to Denver Water spilling some water from its storage reservoirs, like Strontia Springs in Waterton Canyon, to make way for the spring runoff. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Strontia Springs, located about 6 miles up Waterton Canyon southwest of Denver, along with Cheesman Reservoir further up the South Platte, began spilling in mid-May.
The healthy winter also means average reservoir storage was at 88% in early May.
That translates to a big splash of additional water โ 35,000 acre-feet, greater than the capacity of Chatfield Reservoir south of Denver โ above what is typically stored in Denver Waterโs reservoirs at this point in the year.
Finally, a cool and wet spring have helped reduce customer demand for water. That, in turn, helps keep water in reservoirs and streams for later use.
โOur customers continue to watch the weather and be smart with their irrigation practices,โ Elder said. โThey play a big part in the water supply picture.โ
![[CALIFORNIA-J-0025] Tule Lake farms](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50376853913_f03ac52008_b.jpg)
