Despite overall drier conditions compared to last year, several basins in the CBRFC area are either nearing or at normal SWE levels for this time of year.
#Colorado fines Suncor $10.5 million for air pollution violations — Denver7.com #KeepItInTheGround #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the Denver7.com website (Robert Garrison). Here’s an excerpt:
February 5, 2024
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment slapped Suncor Refinery with a $10.5 million fine for air pollution violations from July 2019 through June 2021, the agency announced Monday. The Commerce City refinery must also double the number of air pollution monitors compared to the refinery’s original fenceline monitoring plan, according to the CDPHE’s largest enforcement package against a single facility. Of the $10.5 million Suncor has to pay the state, only $2.5 million of that is related to penalties it accumulated in the time period specified above and includes:
- Exceeding sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides emissions limits.
- Exceeding hydrogen sulfide concentration limits.
- Exceeding opacity and visible emissions standards.
- Failing to meet certain operating parameters.
- Violations due to causes other than power disruptions.
No less than $8 million will go toward projects Suncor must complete, the CDPHE said in a news release.
Nearly finalized New #BlueRiver agreement to provide more water for #ColoradoSprings — The Colorado Springs Gazette
Click the link to read the article on The Colorado Springs Gazette website (Breanna Jent). Here’s an excerpt:
February 4, 2024
If approved by all seven subject parties, the agreement will settle about nine years of debate and allow Colorado Springs Utilities to expand its Montgomery Reservoir in Park County, between Alma and Hoosier Pass, to increase Colorado Springs’ water supply, officials with the city-owned utility told its board of directors in mid-January.
“The agreement gives more certainty in our Blue River water supply. For the general customer, it brings more reliability for how we go forward and what our future looks like” as Colorado Springs continues to grow, said Abby Ortega, Colorado Springs Utilities’ general manager of infrastructure resources and planning…
The deal too will advance plans to build a new water reservoir at the southern base of Quandary Peak for use by Summit County and the town of Breckenridge. All six Western Slope entities have approved the agreement — Breckenridge, Summit County, the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Ute Water Conservancy District, the Orchard Mesa Irrigation District and the Grand Valley Water Users Association. The Colorado Springs City Council, which acts as the Utilities Board of Directors, will vote on the proposal Feb. 13.
🥵 #Aridification Watch 🐫 — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk) #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
February 2, 2024
A study published just last month in Science Advances finds that the last couple of decades were dry. And they were hot. Yeah, I know: We don’t need no propellor-head scientists to tell us that! And yet. The findings, while not exactly surprising, are super interesting, because they provide additional confirmation that the current megadrought (or the most recent phase of ongoing aridification, if you prefer) is intensified by human-caused climate warming.
The paper takes a look at the increasing prevalence and severity of “hot droughts,” which is when rainfall deficits and high temperatures combine to deleterious effect — as much of the Western United States has suffered through lately. Research has shown that the current drought is among the most severe of the last 1,200 years, but the relationship between temperature and severity of past droughts has been less clear.
This study, “Increasing prevalence of hot drought across western North America since the 16th century,” dives more deeply into that relationship by looking at tree rings and paleo-climate reconstructions.
The last time the Southwest experienced anything close to the current drought was back in the late 1500s, when it was as rain- and snow-starved as it is now. But there was a big difference: It wasn’t nearly as hot then as it has been now.
The phenomena are summed up in this graphic below, which I must admit I had to peer at for a while before I understood it. But once I grasped what was going on (and that the lower the Palmer Drought Severity Index, the drier it is, which seems counterintuitive to me), it popped out pretty clearly: We live in unprecedented hot, dry times.
The authors note that the decades spanning the modern megadrought “exhibit the strongest negative relationships between summer maximum temperatures and soil moisture” compared to any other historical period. The heat amplifies evapotranspiration, which further dries out areas that are already suffering from a lack of rain or snow, but also can create drought conditions even when precipitation is especially scant. That can be seen in the Colorado River, where about one-third of the decline in flows can be attributed to unprecedented high temperatures. The authors go on to write: “… multidecadal drying exacerbated by high temperatures may further alter surface energy balance in ways that lead to additional warming.” Ughh. [ed. emphasis mine]
Oh, and about that 2000-2022 megadrought? I’m starting to get the bad feeling that the prolonged dry spell didn’t end in 2023, but just took a little break, and has come roaring back at us. Sure, January brought a few big storms to the West’s mountains, boosting snowpack substantially in some areas. The river basins in Utah’s Wasatch Front, for example, are mostly at or above median snowpack levels. But the snow remains thinner than the 1991-2020 normal in much of the West.
That includes the Upper Colorado River Basin.
And in the Animas-Dolores Basin in southwestern Colorado. According to this, the combined basin is actually in worse shape than it was in early February 2021.:
And zooming in on Columbus Basin in the La Plata Mountains, we find that this year’s snowpack is about even with this date in 2021. Better than ^^, but still …
I know I always say this, but I’ll say it again: Don’t panic. Yet. Even as I write this a good-sized storm is walloping southwestern Colorado and these lines are likely to shoot upward in coming days. And we’re still in early days as far as the strongest expected effects of El Niño, so we may be in for a whopper of a spring still.
#Snowpack news February 5, 2024
Why atmospheric rivers matter, plus a #snowpack update — The Water Desk (@TheWaterDesk) #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on The Water Desk website (Mitch Tobin):
The term “atmospheric river” (AR) has become common in weather stories and media coverage, but the name for these age-old events is a relative newcomer in meteorological glossaries.
Coined by scientists in the 1990s, the term’s popularity has soared in recent years as researchers, forecasters, journalists, and others have publicized the outsized role of atmospheric rivers in producing rain, snow, wind, and severe weather in the American West (and other places).
The West Coast is now facing the first of two ARs that promise to deliver much-needed snow to the Sierra Nevada but also threaten to cause havoc. The animated map below shows the expected liquid precipitation from January 31 to February 7.
Here in Colorado, some of that Pacific moisture is expected to give our snowpack a welcome boost after a warm, dry spell that made it feel like spring in late January and had me hiking through mud in a t-shirt. (See the end of this post for an update on the West’s snowpack, which remains underwhelming in many areas.)
Below is a quick primer on ARs, why they matter, and what the future might hold for ARs as the climate warms.
What are atmospheric rivers?
These plumes of moisture are sometimes likened to “rivers in the sky” because they transport so much water vapor from the tropics toward higher latitudes. In data visualizations, like the one below, they can resemble a fire hose dousing the West Coast.
An AR is “a long, narrow, and transient corridor of strong horizontal water vapor transport that is typically associated with a low-level jet stream ahead of the cold front of an extratropical cyclone,” according to the American Meteorological Society’s Glossary of Meteorology.
When ARs are forced upward by mountains or other forces, the water vapor cools, condenses, and precipitates, as shown in the graphic below. This NOAA figure says the amount of water vapor in a strong AR “is roughly equivalent to 7.5-15 times the average flow of water at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”
One type of AR has come to be known as the “Pineapple Express” because it taps moisture around Hawaii. The January 4 images below from the NASA Earth Observatory illustrate the connection: the top graphic depicts a measure of water vapor in the atmosphere and the bottom shows the view from a satellite.
ARs are critical for the West’s water and snowpack
Whether you compare ARs to the Amazon or the Mississippi, there’s no doubt they exude wetness, so they can have far-reaching effects on the West’s water resources, for better or worse.
On average, a few AR events contribute 30% to 50% of the annual precipitation in West Coast states, according to NOAA. A 2019 paper in Geophysical Research Letters concluded that AR storm days are responsible for about one-quarter of the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and one-third of the snowpack in the Cascades of Oregon and Washington.
Even the Rocky Mountains benefit from ARs. A 2021 study in Geophysical Research Letters estimated that the snow produced by ARs accounts for 31% of the peak snow water equivalent in the Upper Colorado River Basin, where the majority of the river’s flow originates.
“Atmospheric river” is a relatively new term
ARs have been a big deal for eons—an average of about 11 are present on Earth at any time—but it wasn’t until the 21st century that the term entered into general circulation. The two graphics below, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, show the term’s growing use in news stories and peer-reviewed journal articles.
I took a peek at Google Ngram, which analyzes the text in books, and also found a sharp rise in the term’s use.
Some experts think the analogy to a terrestrial river is inappropriate, and some think the term is “duplicative of preexisting concepts, such as the warm conveyor belt,” according to this article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Nevertheless, “atmospheric river” has jumped from peer-reviewed journals to water cooler conversations, not unlike “polar vortex,” “bomb cyclone,” and “heat dome.”
AR Scale rates severity with five categories
Just as hurricanes are classified by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, and tornadoes are categorized by the Enhanced Fujita Scale, ARs have their own rating scale.
The AR Scale is based on two factors: the duration of the event and its “maximum vertically integrated water vapor transport,” a measure of its water content and the speed at which it’s moving. As shown in the graphic below, there are five categories, with the bottom two described as primarily beneficial.
One way to summarize AR forecasts is shown below in a set of maps from CW3E, which describe conditions along three locations—coastal, foothills, and inland—from January 30 to February 6.
The forecast shows the southern Oregon coast is expected to reach Category 5, the most severe level, while other areas along the Pacific Ocean will reach Categories 3 and 4. Farther inland, conditions are expected to be less extreme, but at higher elevations, it’ll definitely be dumping.
ARs can end droughts but also cause major flooding
As noted by the AR Scale, these events can be both helpful and hazardous. On the positive side, ARs can be effective drought busters. A 2013 study in the Journal of Hydrometeorology concluded that about one-third of persistent droughts in California have been erased by AR storms, with 60% to 74% of droughts in the Pacific Northwest ending this way.
On the negative side of the ledger, ARs have been responsible for some of the worst floods on the West Coast, including nearly 90% of California’s flood damage. Even this week’s weather prompted some internet rumors that California would be subject to a “megaflood” of biblical proportions, according to this Los Angeles Times story, which noted that experts don’t think this is “the big one.”
One doomsday scenario, known as “ARkStorm,” is a 1,000-year event featuring wave after wave of ARs flooding large portions of California, displacing up to 10 million people, and causing a $1 trillion disaster. For more on this potential nightmare, check out “The Trillion-Gallon Question,” a 2023 story by Christopher Cox in The New York Times Magazine about the potential fragility of California’s water infrastructure.
And let’s not forget about the wind. “Atmospheric rivers are among the most damaging storm types in the middle latitudes, especially with regard to the hazardous wind they produce,” according to NASA. Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that ARs were to blame for up to half of the most destructive windstorms over the last two decades. In a 2017 study in Nature Geoscience, scientists concluded:
“Landfalling atmospheric rivers are associated with about 40–75% of extreme wind and precipitation events over 40% of the world’s coastlines. Atmospheric rivers are associated with a doubling or more of the typical wind speed compared to all storm conditions, and a 50–100% increase in the wind and precipitation values for extreme events.”
Climate change will intensify ARs
As the planet continues warming, scientists expect ARs to strengthen. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, so climate change is projected to boost the intensity of downpours. NASA scientists predict that by the end of the 21st century, climate change will make ARs about 25% wider and longer while increasing the global frequency of AR conditions, such as heavy rain and strong winds, by around 50%.
A 2021 paper focused on the West concluded that for every 1◦C of additional warming, annual average flood damages will rise by about $1 billion. Because warming is causing the snow level to rise, atmospheric rivers are more likely to drop rain, so they may not be as helpful to the snowpack, and when rain falls on snow, that can cause huge problems with flooding and debris flows.
The odds of an ARkStorm have doubled due to climate change and “runoff in the future extreme storm scenario is 200 to 400% greater than historical values in the Sierra Nevada because of increased precipitation rates and decreased snow fraction,” according to a 2022 paper in Science Advances.
For a great overview of climate change and ARs, see this recent Washington Post storyfrom Kasha Patel. And check out this fascinating piece from Ian James at The Los Angeles Times to learn how scientists are using a hurricane-reconnaissance jet to study ARs.
Update: snowpack and snow drought
Many parts of the West could use some moisture, as shown by all the yellow, orange, and red in the January 31 map below of the region’s snowpack, but the green and blue colors depict basins where conditions are near or above normal.
In its January 26 update, “Snow Drought in Much of the Intermountain West Region Despite El Niño,” the National Integrated Drought Information System reported that snow water equivalent was 85.1% of the median in the Upper Colorado River Basin and 68.5% in the lower basin.
In California, the ARs will provide a big boost to the Sierra snowpack, which has been significantly below average all season. As shown below, the statewide snowpack on January 31 was just 50% of normal and only 31% of the April 1 average.
In summary, the West’s snowpack this winter has been lackluster in many areas, though some basins are actually above normal, and the near term looks wet. The January 31 map below shows the 7-day forecast for liquid precipitation, so expect to see a lot of those snowpack numbers jump!
2024 #COleg: Bill limiting nonfunctional turf planting clears #Colorado Senate — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #ActOnClimate #conservation #cwcac2024
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
Minor pushback to proposed limits on new water-thirsty grasses in areas that get little or no foot traffic
This story was produced as a collaboration between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism — two nonprofit news organizations covering Colorado’s water. It follows a five-part series that examined the intersection of water and urban landscapes in Colorado.
Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million to programs across the state for removal of turf in urban areas classified as nonfunctional. By that, legislators mean Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty-grass species that were meant to be seen but rarely, if ever, otherwise used.
Now, they are taking the next step. The Colorado Senate on Tuesday voted in favor of a bill, Senate Bill 24-005, that would prevent thirsty turf species from being planted in certain places that rarely, if ever, get foot traffic, except perhaps to be mowed.
Those places include alongside roads and streets or in medians, as well as in the expansive areas surrounding offices or other commercial buildings, in front of government buildings, and in entryways and common areas managed by homeowners associations.
The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.
“If we don’t have to start watering that turf in the first place, we never have to replace it in the future,” state Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, a co-sponsor, said in making the case for the proposed new state standard.
Roberts stressed that the prohibition would not apply to individual homes or retroactively to established turf. “It applies to new development or redevelopment. It does not apply to residential homes,” he said. “This is about industrial, commercial and government property across the state.”
Kentucky bluegrass and other grass species imported from wetter climatic zones typically use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate. The bill, however, does allow hybrids that use less water as well as the indigenous grass species.
Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified to provide greater clarity about what constitutes functional versus nonfunctional turf, while giving towns, cities and counties greater flexibility in deciding which is which within their jurisdictions. If the bill becomes law, local jurisdictions will have until Jan. 1, 2026, to incorporate the new statewide standard into their landscaping code and development review processes.
After being approved on a third reading by the Senate by a 28-5 vote on Wednesday morning, the measure now moves to the House.
Advocates do not argue that limits on expansion of what the bill calls nonfunctional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use.
“One more tool in the toolbox,” Roberts said.
State Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, said if the standard had been adopted 20 to 30 years ago, perhaps 10,000 acre-feet of water could have been saved annually.
“As a percentage, it is minimal,” he conceded. “It’s closing the gaps in small increments as best you can as opposed to large sweeping change.”
The backdrop for this is more frequent drought and rising temperatures since 2002, what Simpson called the aridification of the West. The climatic shift is forcing harder choices.
“We are all trying to figure out how to live and work in this space,” Simpson said.
In a Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee meeting Jan. 25, Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s south slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the past 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.
“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and do everything I can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” Simpson said in the committee hearing. The bill passed the committee on a 4-1 vote.
Developing water for growing cities — particularly along the Front Range but even in headwaters communities — has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21st century, drier.
The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration in 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.
Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water, as was noted by state Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver. At Tuesday’s Senate hearing, he chided Roberts, Simpson and other legislative sponsors for not addressing efficiency in agriculture.
Hansen, who grew up in a farm town in Kansas near the Colorado border, applauded the bill but questioned why the interim committee hadn’t come up with legislation to improve efficiency of agricultural water use. He cited the use-it-or-lose-it provision of Colorado water law that he suggested discouraged farmers and ranchers from innovating to conserve water.
“I feel the interim water committee let us down by not bringing forth anything that advances conservation on what is by far the largest category of use, almost 90%,” he said. “I want to know what is next on that front.”
Hansen got strong pushback. Simpson responded that agriculture in the San Luis Valley has already been forced to change. To comply with the Rio Grande Compact, his district is trying to figure out how to take 10,000 to 20,000 acres out of agricultural production. On his own farm, he said, water deliveries that traditionally lasted until mid-July have ended as early as May 20. “I have to figure out a way to grow crops that are less water-consumptive, more efficient and ultimately take irrigated acreage out of production,” Simpson said.
State Sen. Byron Pelton, R-Sterling, also took the occasion to cite incremental gains in irrigation efficiency and the loss of production in the Republican River basin. There, roughly 25,000 acres need to be taken out of production for Colorado to meet interstate compact requirements.
As had been the case several days before at the bill’s legislative committee hearing, most of the limited opposition in the Senate was against the notion that cutting water used for landscaping is a statewide concern. It’s a familiar argument — a preference for local control — used in many contexts.
A representative of the Colorado Municipal League (CML), a consortium of 270 towns and cities, told the Senate committee that the proposal constituted state overreach in a one-size-fits-all approach.
Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs. “We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said.
In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.
No representatives from any towns or cities showed up to oppose the bill. But representatives of three local jurisdictions, including Vail-based Eagle River Water and Sanitation District and the water provider for unincorporated Pueblo West, testified that the bill filled a need.
Denver is behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly the turf covering 6,000 acres. Utility representatives have said they don’t want to become frugal with water devoted to existing landscapes only to see water used lavishly in new development.
Andrew Hill, government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.
“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas [where] I think a consensus exists,” Hill said at the committee hearing.
Local governments can go further, and many have already. Thirty-eight local governments and water providers in Colorado offer turf-replacement programs. Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf while another nine plan to do so.
Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan area, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, taking aim at water devoted to new homes’ front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River basin that it has been trying to develop for the past 40 years.
In the full Senate debate, Republican leaders argued for incentives, such as the expanded buy-back program for turf removal, instead of a statewide thou-shalt-not approach.
The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf-removal programs. Key legislators have already indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.
But is this the answer? Such programs are “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places, the policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates said in the committee hearing last week.
The policy manager, Lindsay Rogers, said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”
The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of nonfunctional versus functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.
On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might find buffalo grass and other indigenous grasses more conserving of water but less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in fall.
Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.
For more from Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, visit their websites at https://bigpivots.com and at https://aspenjournalism.org.
Ask the Expert: A Q&A on Agricultural Wetlands and Water Quality with Dr. Joseph Prenger — USDA
Click the link to read the interview on the USDA website (Elizabeth Creech):
Dr. Joseph (Joe) Prenger is the Wetlands Lead for the Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP), an effort led by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to quantify the effects of voluntary conservation across the nation’s working lands. In this Ask the Expert, Dr. Prenger answers questions about new CEAP findings on the capacity of wetlands to capture and store nutrients from cropland fields, associated water quality benefits, and NRCS resources to support wetlands on private and Tribal lands.
Let’s start with the basics: What are wetlands, and how do they improve local water quality?
Wetlands occur where water covers or is present near the soil’s surface, either seasonally or year-round. Wetlands in agricultural settings may capture and store sediment and nutrients from the surrounding environment, reduce flooding, contribute to climate change mitigation by serving as a carbon sink, increase biodiversity, and provide wildlife habitat.
This nutrient capture and storage component is key for local water quality. We know nutrients, namely nitrogen and phosphorus, support healthy, productive crops. When nutrients are lost from cropland fields and enter local waterbodies, however, they may contribute to harmful algal blooms and hypoxic or low oxygen zones, and compromise water quality.
A recent CEAP report highlighted an increase in both nitrogen and phosphorus lost from cropland fields over a ten-year period. Based on these findings, NRCS is focusing on efforts to help farmers and other land managers save money and protect water quality with SMART Nutrient Management.
Supporting farmers in making targeted, site-specific decisions to effectively manage nutrients is critical. It’s very difficult to achieve 100% crop uptake and 0% nutrient loss, though, even with strong planning. We need SMART Nutrient Management to reduce the amount of nutrients lost from cropland fields, plus a way to capture and store those nutrients that are lost before they reach local waterbodies. Wetlands in agricultural landscapes have the potential to serve this second function, particularly when restored or constructed with this goal in mind.
You recently published findings on increasing the water quality benefits of agricultural wetlands. What are the key takeaways for farmers?
We published a new Conservation Insight on this topic in January 2023. Findings pull from a literature review of studies reporting field measurements for prairie-pothole wetlands found throughout parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In short:
- Nitrogen retention by these wetlands ranged from 15% to 100%, and phosphorus retention ranged from 0% to 100%.
- These are large ranges. An individual wetland’s effectiveness in capturing and storing nutrients depended largely on upland management practices.
- Accumulation of sediment from agricultural fields, for instance, may eventually lead to infilling of wetlands and associated reductions in water storage capacity. A buffer between cultivated cropland and the adjacent wetland – such as a grass filter strip – may reduce this sedimentation and deliver significant improvements to water storage and nutrient capture.
Here is the bottom line for farmers: When strategically integrated in operation-wide conservation planning, wetlands can offer a suite of benefits. The key is to plan them as part of an overall strategy that carefully manages the contributing areas to reduce contaminant loading and preserve wetland functions. Wetlands can significantly reduce nutrient loss to waterways, supporting water quality goals both locally and in terminal waterbodies like the Great Lakes or Gulf of Mexico. In addition, wetlands can help reduce flooding and recharge groundwater supplies, serve as a carbon sink, increase biodiversity, and provide wildlife habitat.
Does USDA support farmers and other land managers in wetlands conservation efforts?
Absolutely, yes. Through NRCS, USDA offers financial assistance and one-on-one technical support for farmers and other land managers interested in wetlands conservation. Specifically:
- The Wetland Reserve Easements (WRE) component of the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) is available to help private and Tribal landowners protect, restore, and enhance wetlands that have been previously degraded due to agricultural uses.
- NRCS supports land managers in implementing voluntary practices to conserve natural resources and strengthen working lands. This includes practices – such as filter strips – that capture nutrients and sediments prior to entering streams and wetlands, thus improving the potential for wetlands to store water and recycle nutrients over the long term. Filter strips are also a climate-smart mitigation activity, with the potential to increase soil carbon and sequester carbon in perennial biomass while improving water quality.
I encourage anyone interested in wetlands conservation across their working lands to contact the NRCS office at their local USDA Service Center.
Where can I learn more about CEAP assessments?
Through CEAP, USDA quantifies and reports on trends in conservation practices, and associated outcomes, over time. You may learn more about CEAP assessments by visiting our new webpage – nrcs.usda.gov/ceap. Our Wetlands Assessments webpage provides information on the effects of conservation efforts related to agricultural wetlands, including additional publications.
Dr. Joseph (Joe) Prenger is the CEAP Wetlands Lead for the NRCS Resource Inventory and Assessment Division. He can be reached at joseph.prenger@usda.gov.
Dam break in Connecticut spotlights growing threat — @AmericanRivers #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Amy Souers Kober and Andrew Fisk):
January 10, 2024
Unsafe dams are “ticking time bombs” putting communities at risk
A partial dam break on Connecticut’s Yantic River is threatening a downstream community with potentially life-threatening flooding. Authorities have issued a flash flood warning and are evacuating the area. The dam is rated as a high hazard potential by the state’s dam safety office.
The incident is an example of the growing threat of dam failures to communities nationwide, as infrastructure is aging and climate change is fueling more severe flooding.
Andrew Fisk, Northeast Regional Director for American Rivers, made the following statement:
“Dam failures can be disastrous and put lives at risk. This is a wake-up call. Increasingly frequent and severe flooding is straining infrastructure in the Northeast and nationwide. In order to protect communities, we must improve the safety and performance of dams.”
“Tens of thousands of dams across our country are old and obsolete. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s dams a D grade in its report card on the nation’s infrastructure. One of the most cost-effective ways to deal with outdated, unsafe dams is to remove them.”
“We support the efforts of the community and the Connecticut Dam Safety Program to manage this emergency. American Rivers has advocated in past years to strengthen the dam safety program and get them the resources they need to keep Connecticut’s dams safe.”
“Congress must act to reauthorize the National Dam Safety Program which supports state dam safety agencies. The program’s authorization expired on September 30, leaving thousands of high-risk dams across the country vulnerable to failure. Aging dams are ticking time bombs. We must help communities invest in necessary repairs and, where appropriate, dam removal and river restoration.”
In a warmer #climate, snow levels rise and snow pack decreases by a HUGE amount. Why? — @WeatherProf
Understanding and Predicting Our Precious Western #Colorado Water Supply — Colorado Climate Center #ActOnClimate #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the post on the Colorado Climate Center website (Goble, P. E., and R. S. Schumacher, 2023: On the Sources of Water Supply Forecast Error in Western Colorado. J. Hydrometeor., 24, 2321–2332, https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-23-0004.1.):
January 31, 2024
The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the desert southwestern United States. Its water is used by a population of over 40 million people, is an important source of hydropower, and is the source of irrigation for a portion of the United States that produces a wide variety of specialty crops. Our beautiful state is home to some of its most productive tributaries. The Colorado Headwaters, Gunnison, San Juan, and Yampa River Basins, all in western Colorado, combine to produce over 50% of the Colorado River’s average annual discharge.
What makes these river basins so productive? Primarily it is snowpack accumulating throughout the cold season (November-April), which melts in the spring and feeds our thirsty lakes, streams, and reservoirs, including trans-basin diversions all the way from Denver to Los Angeles. Some of the Colorado River’s water comes from groundwater and summertime precipitation (an estimated 10-15% according to the Colorado River wiki), but the river is primarily a snow-fed river.
In recent years and decades the Colorado River system has become strained. A combination of climate change, climate variability, and population growth has lead to water demand outpacing water supply along the river system. When this happens curtailments are inevitable; agricultural producers, municipal water managers, hydropower producers, and other water users need to know how much water will be available for the season ahead so they can plan accordingly. To answer this question, water users turn to water supply forecasters, like the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC), and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), for answers. April 1st water supply forecasts are crucial to water managers. April 1st is near peak snowpack season, and important benchmark date to those planning for the coming runoff season
April 1st water supply forecasts, such as those produced by CBRFC and NRCS, are fundamentally built around physical and statistical relationships between high elevation precipitation and snowpack measurements in the winter/spring (primarily from the Snowpack Telemetry Network), and gaged streamflow measurements in the spring/summer. After all, the Colorado river is a snow-fed river. This process typically works very well, but 2020 and 2021 yielded much lower than normal runoff despite near normal snowpack at the beginning of April. This rang alarm bells throughout the basin, and raised questions about the role of antecedent soil moisture conditions in the following season’s runoff. Theoretically, if soils are dry at the start of winter due to warm summers and dry autumns, this should reduce runoff in the coming season. As winters snow melts, the water would have to replenish dry soils before filling lakes, streams and reservoirs. 2020 and 2021 were also impacted by dry conditions in western Colorado in April and May. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information April 2021 in particular was the driest April on record for western Colorado.
Both antecedent soil moisture conditions and weather conditions following peak snowpack season negatively impacted western Colorado’s water supply forecast skill in 2020 and 2021. Soil moisture negatively impacted forecasts because it was lower than normal, and not included in all water supply forecast models (it is parametrized in CBRFC’s forecasts). Future weather impacted these forecasts because April and May precipitation were low, and weather forecasting skill is low beyond 7-10 days, so future weather cannot effectively be built into a water supply forecast. Knowing which one of these factors impacted water supply forecasts more is a paramount question because the answer dictates the best pathway for improving forecasts going forward, and how difficult that path will be. Water supply forecast errors from missing or inadequate soil moisture data can be remedied with soil moisture models and observations. Water supply forecast errors stemming from currently unpredictable future weather will persist in the absence of research that adds skill to long-term weather forecasts and seasonal climate outlooks.
With funding from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) the Colorado Climate Center conducted a study to evaluate the role of both soil moisture/groundwater, and future weather after the date of a water supply forecast in predicting spring runoff. To do this, we created hindcasts of April–August streamflows using SNOTEL snowpack and precipitation data from 1981–2021, inputting modeled soil moisture and groundwater data to predict streamflow. In this case, “hindcast” refers to a prediction of streamflow in a previous subset of years using a statistical model that was trained based on a separate subset of years. In this way, we mimicked an actual water supply forecasting environment without including the known answer into the model. Special attention was paid to hindcasts made using October-March data (See the AMS article for a more detailed explanation of the methods).
This study found that, on average, basin soil moisture and groundwater data from across the western Colorado did not contribute significantly to the skill of hindcasts. Future weather explained most of the error in water supply hindcasts made both on and before April 1st (plot 1). 2020 and 2021 were exceptional years. Both 2020 and 2021 were preceded by a hot, dry summer and a dry fall in western Colorado. As a result, hindcasts made with soil moisture and groundwater data were more skillful than those made without (tables 1 and 2).
The long-term issues plaguing the Colorado River system aren’t going anywhere. Climate change, climate variability, and population growth will continue to challenge the status quo operations of this resource. The results of this study are important because they demonstrate that there is a clear ceiling on how skillful we can expect water supply forecasts to be for our precious rivers in western Colorado. Marginal improvements may be possible though more thorough and accurate incorporation of soil moisture data in water supply forecasts. However, April 1st water supply forecasts will continue to face a wide array of uncertainty unless the accuracy of sub-seasonal-to-seasonal forecasts can be greatly improved.
Ignoring Indigenous rights is making the green transition more expensive — @Grist #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Anita Hofschneider):
February 2, 2024
“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities.”
In December, a federal judge found that Enel Green Power, an Italian energy corporation operating an 84-turbine wind farm on the Osage Reservation for nearly a decade, had trespassed on Native land. The ruling was a clear victory for the Osage Nation and the company estimated that complying with the order to tear down the turbines would cost nearly $260 million.
Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, even if projects that threaten Native land and cultural resources ultimately proceed, they may come with years-long delays that tack on millions of dollars. As more companies look to build wind and solar farms or mine minerals for renewable energy, failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty could make the clean energy transition a lot more expensive and much further away.
“I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought, and that they’ve previously exercised, over all this infrastructure that’s on their land,” said Pilar Thomas, an attorney, member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona and former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. “They want to make sure that they’re getting their fair share.”
Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a wake-up call.
“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities,” he said.
According to Tallman, investors don’t like uncertainty. He said a lot of infrastructure funders are very conservative and won’t back a project unless they are confident it will succeed, which includes getting the buy-in of affected Indigenous Nations. There’s no upper limit to how much the project could cost if investors don’t get it right.
One analysis from researchers at First Peoples Worldwide at the University of Colorado at Boulder estimated that resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline drove the project cost upwards of $7.5 billion. That includes more than $4.3 billion in divestment from banks backing the project and nearly $1.4 billion in additional operating costs, not to mention millions spent to hire law enforcement.
Marion Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, said the costs are so high that some renewable energy projects never even get off the ground, citing the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound that was opposed by members of the Wampanoag Tribe.
And it’s not just a U.S. trend; Indigenous peoples around the world are fighting to enforce their rights, especially the right to free, prior and informed consent to projects on their land–a concept enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the U.S. hasn’t codified that into law, and compliance globally is spotty.
“Renewable energies are actually not that good in respecting Indigenous rights,” said Genevieve Rose from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have this feeling that because they bring up something good, something green, that they are automatically a good thing.”
But her colleague David Berger said there’s more awareness and resistance from Indigenous peoples, and companies are being forced to factor in those costs. He pointed to Norway, where the state-owned company that developed an illegal wind farm has agreed to pay Indigenous Sámi people about $675,000 every yearfor the next 25 years for violating their rights. “What’s good is you have that legal structure so communities can push back,” Berger said.
Wesley Furlong, an Anchorage-based senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said more tribes are filing lawsuits in the U.S., partly because the legal landscape is changing. For example, the National Historic Preservation Act, a federal law managing the preservation of historic resources, has been around since 1966, but it was only in 1999 that the federal government codified regulations related to communicating with tribes about projects that affect them, and the rules weren’t fully in effect until 2004. Some tribes are just now learning about their rights.
Another reason for the increase in lawsuits is because some tribal nations have more resources to fund litigation. “Indian gaming has been a game-changer for tribes to be able to raise revenue and hire attorneys,” Furlong said.
That combination of more legal tools, more financial resources and more education about Native rights, Furlong said, has led to more tribes getting involved in energy developments on their traditional and ancestral territories, including lands with historic connections and are not owned by a tribe. And he only expects that to continue: Most of the U.S. reserves of lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel — metals key to the clean energy transition — are within 35 miles of Federal Indian Reservations, according to a study by the investment firm MSCI.
That’s something renewable energy developers need to be aware of, said Thomas. “I am a staunch believer that if you are within spitting distance of a tribe that you should be engaged in outreach to the tribe,” she said.
Not every project is going to get buy-in, she adds, but she encourages companies to have patience and continue to reach out to tribes even if they don’t respond. Furlong from the Native American Rights Fund said project proponents may erroneously assume that tribes will always be opposed, forgetting that tribal governments want what’s in the best interest of their citizens
Bottom line, it’s much less costly for companies to invest in tribal consultations and get them right from the get-go, says Daniel Cardenas, the head of the National Tribal Energy Association and a member of the Pit River Tribe who has consulted with tribes and companies regarding fossil fuel projects. “The cost of engagement is almost nothing compared to the cost of what they’re going to have to pay [if they don’t do it right],” he said of developers.
Werkheiser has seen some progress, with some banks, insurance companies and energy developers adopting Indigenous peoples policies to guide their investments and some companies undergoing voluntary certifications to show their projects are ethical and respectful of Indigenous rights. “Financial institutions are recognizing that this is a real business risk and they’re building it into the cost of capital for these companies,” she said.
But overall, change is slow, she said.
“For the most part, the renewable energy developers are repeating the mistakes that fossil fuels developers have made over the years,” she said. “They’re not engaging with tribes early as potential partners and information sources during their planning process, and they are basically deferring their own relationship with tribes to the federal government.”
That’s a mistake, said David Kane, a consultant who leads WindHorse Strategic Initiatives. Energy companies often mistakenly perceive tribal chairs as though they are the equivalent of small-town mayors, rather than recognizing them as heads of state. [ed. emphasis mine]
Because of that, he says companies often disrespect tribes from the beginning by sending lower-level representatives to liaise with them, and many companies may never even step foot on a reservation or go before tribal councils. Developers often complain that it takes a long time to build relationships with tribal members but Kane says it’s better to do so before projects get underway.
“There’s still a lot of mistrust of white men and with good reason,” he said. And the energy industry, including renewables, he said, is still predominantly white and male.
Another challenge is that sometimes companies assume what will work with one tribe will work with another, said Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association.
“There’s 574 tribes, and each one operates differently and independently,” he said. “So if you know one tribe, you just know one tribe.”
He thinks tribal nations should be seen as partners, even sponsoring partners, with shared equity in the developments. There’s growing interest: Over the past two decades, tribal nations have pursued hundreds of clean energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act recently increasing funding for such projects.
But in the meantime, costly litigation continues. Last week in the U.S., four tribal nations sued a developer to prevent a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from going into operation. And in Oklahoma, the Osage Nation is now seeking damages from Enel. A judge still needs to decide how much that will cost the company.
A freight train of thoughts about the #ColoradoRiver: Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator on the Colorado River, demands the lower-basin states take meaningful action on correcting the ‘structural deficit’ — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #cwcac2024 #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
February 2, 2024
Becky Mitchell speaks crisply and with a bass-drum firmness. Her speeches are like freight trains, orderly processions full of weight, one thought pounding after another.
Her full-time job since July 2023, as Colorado’s lead negotiator in Colorado River matters, gives her weighty material that matches her rhetorical style. Before that, she informally held the same role as the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
The Colorado River has been riven with rising drama in the last 20 years. The seven basin states – but particularly Arizona and California – have reluctantly, slowly conceded reforms necessary to the occasion. The federal government, the referee for the river and operator of the two giant dams, Hoover and Glen Canyon, was slow to force the hard decisions.
“It is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River,” she told members of the Colorado Water Congress at the group’s annual conference on Jan. 30. “It’s time to adapt to the river that we have, not the river we dream of.”
“We have some difficult roads ahead of us as we work to find a sustainable solution for the basin,” she said in wrapping up her 15-minute speech. “What we must do would’ve been easier 10 years ago. It would’ve been easier 5 years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.”
Following is a lightly abridged version of the speech:
Change is coming. I can’t emphasize enough how much the post-2026 negotiations matter whether you are in the upper basin, lower basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 tribal nations. We all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management. We also all deserve a future where we can live within the means of the river and without the risk of overuse or misuse driving us into crisis.
For the past two decades, the upper basin has been caught between the impacts of climate change and lower-basin overuse. I acknowledge that the lower basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the compact and hydrology can allow whatever it is called. We cannot and will not agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature is providing. The basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable. Those who are fearful of change or who benefit from status quo will find fault in the plain facts that I share with you here today. You will find fault in the tone with which I share them.
The good news is that change is coming. The upper division states have said for years, decades now, the lower basin needs to take responsibility for the role in emptying the reservoirs. But let me be clear why this change is needed. Dry hydrology and overuse have drained the reservoirs. Future guidelines must recognize the reality of the Colorado River Basin hydrology.
Our lower basin neighbors have recently recognized that they must address the overuse. The next step for them is to explain how will they make this commitment a reality. We look forward to seeing those details.
We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven state solution that protects Colorado and the upper basin, but we also need to be prepared for other scenarios. The upper division states have presented a concept to the lower basin states that outlines mechanisms for living within the means of the river while rebuilding and maintaining Powell and Mead and operating within the law of the river.
(Our concept) is essentially a water budget that honors the law and Mother Nature. The Colorado River Compact is our foundation. Solutions need to respect the law of the river and recognize the reality of hydrology across the entire basin. Those solutions must also be real and verifiable. Aspirational goals do not provide the clarity that is required to provide predictability across the basin.
We cannot and will not agree to balancing like the ’07 guidelines, a concept that was used to justify sending water downstream. The water should be used to rebuild storage. We’re focused on fair, legal and sustainable outcomes for the entire basin. Out of respect for the sovereignty of those lower basin states and the role of the Secretary of the Interior as the water master in the lower basin states, we have not weighed in on how they should apportion the reductions amongst themselves. That is for the lower basin (states) to work out.
We have heard our downstream neighbors say, if we figure out the structural deficit, will you meet us in the middle on climate change? That’s one heck of a hypothetical. If the lower basin overuse is addressed, we’d be looking at a very different situation than what we see today. In fact, if the lower basin had accounted for evaporation and transit losses through the ’07 guidelines, the reservoirs would likely be healthy now.
We are the ones who’ve been doing the work on climate change. We absolutely have been doing our part. What I’ve heard from across Colorado is we are willing to help. We are willing to be a part of the solution, but we cannot solve a problem alone.
We (already) take involuntary and uncompensated reductions when Mother Nature doesn’t provide water. Users in the upper basin have taken an average of 1.3 million acre-feet in shortages annually over the last several years. We make do with less in our communities, our workforce, our economies, and our food production. The lower basin must recognize and acknowledge the annual shortages that occur in the upper division states and then acknowledge — thank you — that the operation of the reservoirs must absolutely respond to hydrology. In addition, we must also acknowledge that the upper basin has not developed into our 7.5 million acre-foot apportionment and that undeveloped tribal water rights are flowing downstream.
Overuse must end, and the compact must remain our foundation. It will not be easy. As we move into a future that is more responsive to hydrology, I acknowledge that we all must acknowledge there will be hardship and pain, while also acknowledging that this hardship and pain has existed in the upper basin for decades. Because we haven’t been shielded from climate change impacts, the upper basin states are uniquely positioned to assist our downstream neighbors in learning how to live with less.
We are collaborating in unprecedented ways in the upper basin, and this time we’re doing it at a bigger table. I’m very proud that we are working with the upper basin tribal nations in recognition of their historical ownership and their undeveloped federally reserved water rights. This collaboration has made very clear to me that is unacceptable for the upper division states to accept any limitations on future uses when upper basin tribes have limited access to clean water, agricultural production, and economic vitality.
I remember the speech I gave in the summer of 2022. The reservoirs were crashing. The federal government had laid out an ultimatum: Figure out how to conserve 2 to 4 million acre feet or we’ll figure it out for you. The lower basin was unwilling and unable to reach an agreement about cuts to their uses. I remember many long meetings and long hours that my team and I put into discussions with our fellow upper division states. We worked out the five-point plan. This was a turning point for Colorado. The decision was a difficult one for me. It was not fun.
By implementing this plan, we have positioned ourselves as leaders in the basin, the ones willing to come to the table to do our part. Colorado cannot and will not accept status quo. We cannot or will not be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued unsustainable use.
For example, we pushed the Bureau of Reclamation to modify how the upper basin is represented in Colorado River Basin modeling. Our advocacy means that today the updated models better reflect the reality in the upper basin, a reality that will be represented in the post 2026 tools. Reclamation models now show what shortages look like here.
This team has also worked to make Colorado more resilient. Over the past year, the CWCB has spearheaded a turf removal program to make our municipalities more resilient for future water shortages.
Division of water resources has continued to strictly administer water rights, including painful cuts to water use to respond to Mother Nature.
My fellow commissioners and the upper Colorado River Commissioners revamped the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program, or SCPP, to allow water users to voluntarily forego their water uses in exchange for compensation, thereby helping to put water in the river to mitigate drought in the upper division states.
The drought task force critically examined the Colorado River issues and not only applauded the good work of the state, but recommended additional resources to augment our existing work.
The river team is also working to transition our guiding principles from paper to practice. You are all familiar with the irrefutable truths. It’s one thing to say these are our principles. It’s another thing to then apply them to the basin-states negotiations. That is a difficult task. I’ve seen some of these principles gain traction throughout the entire Colorado River basin. Federal government has acknowledged the need for managing the reservoirs sustainably. The lower basin has acknowledged the need to address their overuse. The environmental community recognizes that healthy storage at our nation’s two largest reservoirs must be the first step in protecting Colorado’s rive and the, Colorado River’s ecosystems. Gradually, I’m hearing interest from DC to the Imperial Valley, recognizing that the status quo does not work anymore.
It is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River. We must all live within the means of the river if we hope to sustain it. I want Lake Powell and Lake Mead to serve the purposes they were designed to serve. To provide for sustainable development of our compact apportionments in the Colorado River Basin and to provide water security in dry years. A sustainable system means we have to rebuild storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead and protect upstream storage for releases only in the most dire circumstances. This means that the worldview around water must change, particularly in the lower basin. We must manage demand to rebuild the storage that provides certainty of supply. In all years, we all must adapt to the available water supply.
We have an opportunity now to collaboratively determine how to adapt to the river that we have, not the river we dream of. The lower basin states have said many good things that signal that they are open to collaboration.
We believe them when they say they will own the structural deficit, when they say they will live within the means of the river, when they say they will support the tribes and that they support the environment. I take them at their word. We assume that they are serious about these commitments, and we expect open and transparent accounting of all lower basin uses of main stem tributaries so that we can trust but verify their actions. We hope that the lower basin will come around to support the framework for management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead that is sustainable for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River.
What we must do would’ve been easier 10 years ago. It would’ve been easier five years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.
SCOTUS sets March 20 date to hear #Texas vs #NewMexico oral arguments on #RioGrande — Source NM
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
The nation’s highest court will hear federal objections to a deal between Texas and New Mexico in their dispute over Rio Grande water in oral arguments scheduled for a midweek date on March 20.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up the case last week, as the lawsuit crawls into a decade since its filing.
Justices will evaluate arguments from the federal government taking exception to a compromise planagreed to by Texas, New Mexico and Colorado to settle the case. The three states are parties in the lawsuit and agreed to the compromise in January 2023. [ed. emphasis mine]
The New Mexico Office of the State Engineer said there would be no need to adjust its budget request before the New Mexico State Legislature because of the oral arguments in D.C. State Engineer Mike Hamman said in a written statement that the office is looking forward to the oral argument in March.
“We are confident that the Supreme Court will accept the states’ proposed settlement, which will allow us to move forward towards securing a stable water future for all users in the lower Rio Grande,” said Hamman.
Budget asks
Also on Monday morning, the New Mexico House of Representatives released its state budget proposal for the next fiscal year. In the proposed budget, the House Appropriations and Finance committee extended $2 million given last year to the New Mexico Department of Justice for Rio Grande litigation and notes another $6.4 million on interstate water litigation will carry forward from last year.
In the Office of the State Engineer, $8.9 million is set aside for litigation and adjudication of water rights within streams around the state and underground basins.
Separately, the agency will transfer $2.5 million to the litigation and adjudication programs of the state engineer. While not all adjudication and litigation is specific to the supreme court’s Rio Grande case, that in all, totals to nearly $20 million between both agencies.
How we got here
Formally called Original No. 141 Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, the case has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
The 2014 filing by the state of Texas centers on allegations that New Mexico groundwater pumping downstream of Elephant Butte Reservoir took Rio Grande water allocated to Texas.
Texas said New Mexico’s pumping violated the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, a legal agreement between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas to split the river’s water.
While 80% of the river’s water is used for agriculture, it’s a major source of drinking water for cities such as El Paso and Albuquerque, and for wildlife. Las Cruces sits below Elephant Butte Reservoir and receives all its drinking water from groundwater.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the federal government to intervene in the case. Attorneys for federal agencies said New Mexico groundwater pumping threatened federal abilities to deliver water to tribes, regional irrigation districts and Mexico under a federal treaty.
The case pressed on to trial in 2021 and was split into two parts. A six-week virtual portion of the trialwas held in the fall, and a second in-person technical portion was pushed back after months of negotiations by parties took up much of 2022.
Just before the trial was set to resume, the three states announced an agreement which would resolve issues between Texas and New Mexico. It includes measuring water deliveries at the state line, new conditions for over- and under-deliveries of Rio Grande water and incorporating drought baselines and groundwater pumping into the formulas for how much water is available.
Attorneys for the federal government objected, arguing that the agreement was made without their consent.
U.S. 8th Circuit Judge Michael Melloy recommended last year that the Supreme Court accept the deal over objections from the federal government, calling it “fair and reasonable” in his 123-page report. He said disputes over federal operations in Southern New Mexico could be resolved in other courts.
In December, the federal government submitted a filing objecting to Melloy’s recommendation. In the filing, attorneys said the settlement “imposes obligations on the United States without its consent.” Attorneys further argued that the deal should be thrown out because it is “contrary to the Compact”.
It’s expected that only attorneys for the states and the federal government will have time to speak during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March. If that happens, groups unable to present arguments would include farming associations, irrigation districts, the city of Las Cruces and New Mexico State University, which appear as amici curae or “friends of the court.”
Opinions from the Supreme Court are typically issued by late June, occasionally early July, during their session.
A Future With Certainty: #ColoradoRiver Commissioner Rebecca Mitchell Speaks on Tough Road Ahead for Post-2026 Negotiations — #Colorado Department of Natural Resources #cwcac2024 #COriver #aridification
From email from the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
February 1, 2024
Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner, spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Colorado Water Congress’s Annual Convention in Aurora, CO this week. She shared an update on the state’s negotiation positioning, and the reality of difficult roads ahead, as the states and Tribal Nations work to find sustainable solutions for 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River in the arid southwest.
“Change is coming to the Colorado River and because it is, I can’t emphasize enough how much the Post-2026 negotiations matter,” Commissioner Mitchell said in her speech. “Whether you are in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 Tribal Nations, we all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply, without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management.”
The current guidelines, called the ‘07 Guidelines, manage Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These expire in 2026, and the states that share the river are in the process of negotiating new guidelines for how Lake Powell and Lake Mead will operate post-2026. Powell and Mead hit their lowest levels on record in recent years, partly because states in the Lower Basin continue to use more water than what flows into these reservoirs. Commissioner Mitchell said that the ‘07 Guidelines cannot simply be extended.
“I want to recognize that the Lower Basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the Compact and hydrology can allow,” Commissioner Mitchell said. “Whatever you call it, we cannot– and will not– agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature is providing. The Basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable.”
“History shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven-state solution that protects Colorado and the Upper Basin. But we also need to be prepared for other scenarios,” Commissioner Mitchell said.
“Our Colorado River team is a force. I cannot thank the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Division of Water Resources, and the Attorney General’s teams enough. Also, I greatly appreciate the support of Governor Polis, who has been engaged and helpful as we enter these critical negotiations,” Commissioner Mitchell said. “Together, we have shown the federal government and the Lower Basin that Colorado cannot and will not accept the status quo or be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued, unsustainable use in the Lower Basin.”
Click the link to read Commissioner Mitchell’s full speech from the 2024 Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention on the Colorado Department of Natural Resources website:
Rebecca Mitchell, Colorado’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner
Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention Speech
Jan. 31, 2024Change is coming – and because it is, I can’t emphasize enough how much the Post-2026 negotiations matter.
Whether you are in the Upper Basin, Lower Basin, Mexico, or a member of one of the 30 Tribal Nations, we all deserve a future with certainty and security in our water supply without that being jeopardized by constant crisis management. We all deserve a future where we can live within the means of the river, without the risk of overuse or misuse driving us into crisis.
For the past two decades, the Upper Basin has been caught between the impacts of climate change and Lower Basin overuse, along with the increasing risk that our thirsty neighbors will look upstream for more water.
I want to recognize that the Lower Basin does not like the term overuse. My intent is not to offend, but rather to be clear and honest about uses that exceed what the Compact and hydrology can allow. Whatever you call it, we cannot – and will not – agree to guidelines that perpetuate management of our water resources that do not acknowledge what Mother Nature can provide.
The Basin cannot continue to use water at a rate that is unsustainable.
Those who are fearful of change, or who benefit from the status quo, will find fault with the plain facts I share here with you and will find fault with the tone in which I share them, as an excuse for their inaction. We must move forward together to face the future with honesty and courage. You, Colorado, and all people in the Basin deserve nothing less than honesty and courage.
The good news? Change is coming. The Upper Division States have said for decades that the Lower Basin needs to take responsibility for its role in emptying the reservoirs.
Let’s be clear about why this change is needed. The ‘07 Guidelines cannot be extended. Under the ‘07 Guidelines, dry hydrology and overuse by the Lower Basin have drained the reservoirs. Future guidelines must recognize the reality of Colorado River Basin hydrology.
Our Lower Basin neighbors recognize that they must address their overuse, what they call the “structural deficit.” I applaud that first step of acknowledging their responsibility. The next step is for them to explain how they will make this commitment a reality that we can rely on. We look forward to seeing those details.
The history of the Basin shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We will continue to do everything we can to get to a seven-state solution that protects Colorado and the Upper Basin.
But we also need to be prepared for other scenarios.
The Upper Division States have presented a concept to the Lower Basin States that outlines mechanisms for living within the means of the river while rebuilding and maintaining Powell and Mead, and operating within the Law of the River – essentially a water budget that honors the law and Mother Nature.
The Colorado River Compact is our foundation. Solutions need to respect the Law of the River and recognize the reality of the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin. Solutions must also be real and verifiable. Aspirational goals do not provide the clarity that is required to provide predictability to the Basin.
We cannot and will not agree to continue “balancing” under the ‘07 Guidelines, a concept used to justify sending water downstream to fuel Lower Basin overuse. That water should be used to rebuild storage.
We’re focused on fair, legal, and sustainable outcomes for the entire Basin.
Out of respect for the sovereignty of the Lower Basin States, and the role of the Secretary of the Interior as Water Master of the Lower Basin, we have not weighed in on how they should apportion reductions among themselves. That is for the Lower Basin to work out. We’ve rolled up our sleeves in a good-faith effort to balance the demands with supplies, and the need to have water available in dry years to keep the system from crashing.
We have heard our downstream neighbors say, “If we figure out the structural deficit, will you meet us in the middle on climate change?”
First off – that’s one heck of a hypothetical. If Lower Basin overuse is addressed, we would be looking at a very different situation than what we see today. In fact, if the Lower Basin had accounted for evaporation and transit losses throughout the ‘07 Guidelines, the reservoirs would likely be healthy.
But at this time, we’re the only ones who’ve been doing anything about climate change. We’ve shown that we are willing to do our part, that we have been doing our part. I have heard across Colorado that we’re willing to help – but we cannot solve the problem alone.
We take involuntary and uncompensated reductions when Mother Nature does not provide. Water users in the Upper Basin have taken an average of 1.3 million acre-feet in shortages annually over the last several years. In other words, we have used 1.3 million acre-feet less than what we may have used if our water users’ demands were fulfilled.
When we make do with less water, we also make do with less in our communities, our workforce, our economies, and our food production. The Lower Basin must recognize and acknowledge the annual shortages that occur in the Upper Division States, and then acknowledge that the operation of reservoirs must respond to hydrology.In addition, we must acknowledge that the Upper Basin has not developed into our 7.5 million acre-foot apportionment and that undeveloped Tribal water rights are flowing downstream.
Regardless of what the future agreement looks like, the sideboards are set: we can no longer operate without regard for Mother Nature, overuse must end, and the Compact must remain our foundation.
It won’t be easy. As we move to a future that is more responsive to hydrology, I acknowledge that there will be hardship and pain in the Lower Basin – while also acknowledging that this hardship and pain has existed in the Upper Basin for decades, because we haven’t been shielded from climate change impacts.
The Upper Basin is uniquely positioned to assist our downstream neighbors in learning to live with less.
Seventy-five years ago, my predecessor agreed to the 1948 Upper Colorado River Compact, which established the Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC) as a forum for “interstate comity.” That sentiment has never been truer in the Upper Basin than today. The Upper Division States are strongly united, and we’re stronger because of the common interests shared across Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
We are collaborating in unprecedented ways in the Upper Basin, and this time we’re doing it at a bigger table. I’m very proud that we are working with the Upper Basin Tribal Nations in recognition of their historical ownership and their undeveloped federally reserved water rights. This collaboration has made it very clear to me that it is unacceptable for the Upper Division States to accept any limitations on future uses when the Upper Basin Tribes have limited access to clean water, agricultural production, and economic vitality.
What we can do and what we will do is operate responsibly, and initiate programs and policies that promote sustainable uses across the Upper Basin.
I would like to take a moment to reflect on how far we have come as a state, and as the Upper Basin, over the last couple of years. I remember the speech I gave to you all in the summer of 2022. The reservoirs were crashing. The federal government had laid out an ultimatum: “Figure out how to conserve 2 to 4 million acre-feet, or we’ll figure it out for you.” The Lower Basin was unwilling and unable to reach an agreement about cuts to their uses.
When it became clear that a Basin agreement was impossible, I remember the many long meetings and long hours that my team and I put into discussions with our fellow Upper Division States. And we worked our way to the Five Point Plan.
That Five Point Plan was a turning point for Colorado. You all know that decision was a difficult one for me. But by implementing this plan, we positioned ourselves as leaders in the Basin as the ones willing to come to the table to do our part.
A few short months later, the General Assembly passed a bill that funded the creation of several new full-time employees. If you’ve ever worked in state government, you’ll know that getting one new employee is a massive success – imagine then how significant it is to secure nearly 20 positions dedicated to Colorado River issues.
Our Colorado River team is a force. I cannot thank the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the Division of Water Resources, and the Attorney General’s teams enough. Together, we have shown the federal government and the Lower Basin that Colorado cannot and will not accept the status quo or be bullied into a future that drains the reservoirs for continued, unsustainable use in the Lower Basin.
For example, we pushed the Bureau of Reclamation to modify how the Upper Basin is represented in Colorado River Basin modeling. Our advocacy means that today, the updated models better reflect the reality in the Upper Basin — a reality that will be represented in post-2026 tools. Reclamation models now show what shortages look like here. The models also show how shortage cuts into our water needs.
This team has also worked to make Colorado more resilient. Over the past year, the CWCB has spearheaded a turf removal program to make our municipalities more resilient to future water shortages; DWR strictly administered water rights – including painful cuts to water use – to respond to Mother Nature; Me and my fellow Upper Colorado River Commissioners revamped the 2024 System Conservation Pilot Program – or SCPP – to allow water users to voluntarily forgo their water uses in exchange for compensation, thereby helping to put water in the river to mitigate drought in the Upper Division States; and the Drought Task Force critically examined Colorado River issues, and not only applauded the good work of the state, but recommended additional resources to augment our existing work.
The Colorado River team is also working to transition our guiding principles from paper to practice. You are all familiar with the irrefutable truths. It’s one thing to say, “These are our principles.” It’s another thing to then apply them in Basin State negotiations.
I’ve seen some of the principles gain traction throughout the entire Colorado River Basin. The federal government has acknowledged the need for managing the reservoirs sustainably. The Lower Basin has acknowledged the need to address their overuse. The environmental community recognizes that healthy storage at our nation’s two largest reservoirs must be the first step in protecting the Colorado River’s ecosystems.
Gradually, I’m hearing diverse interests, from D.C. to the Imperial Valley, recognize that the status quo doesn’t work anymore, that it is time for a fundamental change in how we manage the Colorado River, and that we must all live within the means of the River if we hope to sustain it.
I want Lake Powell and Lake Mead to serve the purposes they were designed to serve: to provide for sustainable development of our compact apportionments in the Colorado River Basin, and to provide water security in dry years.
A sustainable system means we have to rebuild storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and protect upstream storage for releases only in the most dire circumstances. This means that the worldview around water must change – particularly in the Lower Basin. We must manage demand to rebuild the storage that provides certainty of supply in all years. We all must adapt to the available water supply.
We hope our Lower Basin partners will meet us in this moment. We have an opportunity to collaboratively determine how to adapt to the river that we have, not the river that we dream of.
The Lower Basin states have said some good things that signal they are open to collaboration. We believe them when they say that they will “own the structural deficit,” when they say they will “live within the means of the River,” that they “support the Tribes,” and that they “support the environment.”
I take them at their word. We assume they are serious about these commitments, and we expect open and transparent accounting of all Lower Basin uses– mainstem and tributaries– so that we can trust but verify their actions.
We hope that the Lower Basin will come around to support a sustainable framework for the management of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River. We are bound together by this River, by the Compact we signed 100 years ago, and by our shared interest in a vibrant American southwest.
Utilizing unprecedented federal funds, I believe that we can reach an agreement that protects all who rely on this critical resource – and we should do this post haste: 40 million people are counting on us.
I want to acknowledge my counterparts in both the Upper and Lower Basins, along with the leadership of the Bureau of Reclamation, and the fact that we have some difficult roads ahead of us as we work to find a sustainable solution for the Basin. What we must do would have been easier ten years or even five years ago. Tomorrow will be difficult, but we must have the courage to try.
The history of the Basin shows that collaborative efforts by the Basin States can provide superior solutions. We all know we must prepare for other scenarios. But for now, I promise you that we are focused on finding that collaborative solution.My request is that Colorado stay unified at this critical time in the negotiations. I commit to making space and time to have the difficult discussions we need to have within Colorado about these important issues. But the most important task – right now – is to find success in the negotiations with the other Basin States.
Success depends on all of us staying together with a common goal of protecting the resources of Colorado for all who depend upon them – including the Tribal Nations, agricultural users, cities, and the environment.
Thank you.
#Drought News February 1, 2024: Most of the High Plains region was dry this week, with only portions of central #Colorado, far southwest #Kansas, and northern #NorthDakota recording normal to above-normal precipitation. The entire West was near to above normal for temperatures
Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.
Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
This Week’s Drought Summary
The synoptic pattern over the last week favored continued precipitation over the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest and very widespread and heavy precipitation in the South and Southeast and into the Midwest. Some areas of east Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi recorded over 8 inches of rain for the week. Dryness dominated the central to high Plains and most of the rest of the West as well as the Atlantic Coast into south Florida. After a very strong cold snap in previous weeks, temperatures this week were warmer than normal over much of the U.S., with the upper Midwest having the greatest departures of 15-20 degrees above normal in Minnesota and northern Wisconsin. Across the plains of Wyoming and Montana and into the northern Rocky Mountains, there is building concern over the lack of snow this current water year and snow drought concerns are also prevalent in portions of the High Plains and upper Midwest…
High Plains
Most of the region was dry this week, with only portions of central Colorado, far southwest Kansas, and northern North Dakota recording normal to above-normal precipitation. Temperatures were near normal over much of Kansas and central Nebraska and were 5-10 degrees above normal for most of the rest of the region. Most of the region did not see any changes to the drought status this week. Moderate drought was introduced over portions of western South Dakota and central Wyoming due to the ongoing dry winter and lack of snow. Abnormally dry conditions were improved in central Colorado based on the short-term improvements being observed there…
West
Areas along the coast and inland and into the Southwest recorded above-normal precipitation this week while much of the central to northern Rocky Mountains were dry. The entire West was near to above normal for temperatures with the greatest departures over Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Idaho, where some areas were 10-15 degrees above normal for the week. This same area has been impacted by snow drought this current water year and there are developing concerns about water availability heading into the spring and summer as we approach February. Severe drought was introduced into more of southern and central Montana and into northwest Wyoming. Abnormally dry conditions were expanded in southern Utah and introduced into eastern California and western Nevada. Moderate drought expanded in northeast Oregon into Idaho and in southern Oregon in the Klamath Valley. Elsewhere in Oregon and Washington, improvements were made to moderate and severe drought in western Oregon and Washington while some areas of abnormally dry conditions were contracted. Areas of southern Arizona and southern New Mexico had improvements where extreme drought was removed from much of southern Arizona and reduced in southern New Mexico with additional improvements to moderate and severe drought…
South
Temperatures were cooler than normal over central Oklahoma into northern Texas where departures were 1-3 degrees below normal. Most of the rest of the region was near normal to 3-6 degrees above normal, with the greatest departures over Mississippi where it was 9-12 degrees above normal. A very wet week for the region. Some areas of east Texas and into Arkansas recorded over 800% of normal precipitation for the week and almost all areas were 200-400% of normal precipitation. Widespread improvements to the overall drought status were made this week over most of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana and east Texas where a full category improvement in drought intensity status was made. Some areas were investigated for multiple categories of improvement but with some of the long-term issues still showing up, most improvements were limited to a single reduction in intensity this week. Southern Oklahoma and north Texas had targeted improvements to the severe and moderate drought as well as the abnormally dry conditions. Portions of west Texas continued to be dry and may need to see drought intensification if the pattern doesn’t change…
Looking Ahead
Over the next 5-7 days, an active pattern is anticipated to remain over the South and Southeast with another week of widespread precipitation from east Texas to the Carolinas. Some precipitation is anticipated over the central Plains while a wetter pattern is anticipated over most of the West, with the greatest precipitation along the California coast. Temperatures during this period are anticipated to be below normal over California, Nevada, and into Utah and Arizona while warmer-than-normal temperatures are expected to impact the Plains, Midwest and portions of the South. The greatest departures of above-normal temperatures are anticipated in the upper Midwest and northern Plains with departures of 20-25 degrees above normal.
The 6–10 day outlooks show above-normal chances for warmer-than-normal temperatures over much of the country east of the Rocky Mountains with the greatest probability over the Great Lakes region and upper Midwest. The best chances for cooler-than-normal temperatures will be over the West and Florida with the best chances of below-normal temperatures over much of California. Much of the western half of the U.S. will have high probabilities of above-normal precipitation with the greatest chances over the Southwest. The best chances of below-normal precipitation will be in upper New England and through much of the Mid-Atlantic and into the Southeast. The highest probability of below-normal precipitation will be over Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Interview: #Colorado’s new youth advisor to the EPA says #ClimateChange isn’t just a future issue – it’s having an impact on the present — Colorado Public Radio #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the transcript on the Colorado Public Radio website (Carl Bilek, Joe Wertz, and Ryan Warner). Here’s an excerpt:
January 29, 2024
A college freshman from Denver will chair the Environmental Protection Agency’s first National Environmental Youth Advisory Council. 18-year-old Gabriel Nagel graduated from Denver East High School and now attends Stanford University. He said young people can make a difference in addressing issues like climate change if they just get involved.
“They need to start speaking up to leaders in their community, whether that be their school district, even just their high school working to make local change. That could be really impactful,” said Nagel.
From the EPA’s National Environmental Youth Advisory Council webpage:
Gabriel Nagel is an accomplished youth climate justice activist and community organizer. He is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Light CO2, which launched a carbon footprint tracking app, curated a collection of youth-written articles, and planted 10,000+ trees. Gabriel is also the founder and co-leader of the DPS Students for Climate Action team, which developed an environmental justice policy passed across 200 schools, impacting 92,000 students. The policy is one of the first among all US school districts to address social and climate justice. He serves on Denver’s Sustainability Advisory Council, which manages a $40 million budget, and as the United Nations Association’s Climate Action Ambassador, where he is drafting the first UN Youth Declaration of Human Rights. In addition to being featured on NPR twice, he spoke at NYC Climate Week and met with Vice-President Kamala Harris to discuss climate anxiety. He is honored with the President’s Environmental Youth Award.
#Colorado Water Conservation Board Approves Funding for Continued Shoshone Preservation Efforts #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the release on the Colorado Water Conservation Board website:
January 29, 2024—The Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) has voted to recommend $20 million in funding to the Colorado River District as part of the annual Water Projects Bill contributing to a larger funding effort to secure Shoshone permanence and foster water security on the Colorado River.
“The CWCB Board considered this funding application very carefully. This is a significant step towards maintaining historic flows on the Colorado River,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “As an agency, we will continue to do our due diligence in this process, with the hope that these efforts can benefit the environment and give West Slope water users more certainty.”
The decision follows a special workshop held on January 25, and a final vote during CWCB’s January Board Meeting. On December 19, 2023, the Colorado River Water Conservation District and Public Service Company signed an agreement that would allow the River District to purchase the water rights associated with the Shoshone power plant. The River District is also planning to seek funds from the Bureau of Reclamation and others.
In the coming months to years, CWCB will work with the River District to negotiate an instream flow agreement. If approved, the two entities would then seek a change in water right decree through Colorado Water Court. The CWCB’s Instream Flow Program secures instream flow water rights to protect streamflow to preserve the natural environment of streams and lakes where fish and other species live. The integrity of this long-standing program depends on a thorough review, so it’s critical CWCB staff follow public processes.
“We also greatly appreciate the hard work and dedication of CWCB staff in this effort and their positive recommendation of funding to the Board,” said Andy Mueller, Colorado River District General Manager. “We consider the state an integral partner in protecting Shoshone’s flows in perpetuity, and the $20 million funding milestone brings this generational investment in Colorado water security one step closer to the finish line.”
“If completed, Shoshone water right preservation would help maintain flows on the Colorado River, and support the system as a whole,” said Dan Gibbs, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Securing this water right and negotiating an instream flow use agreement could mean supporting healthy agriculture, providing clean drinking water, fostering healthy environments, and more. We look forward to working with the Colorado River District and Xcel Energy as this process enters the next phases of evaluation and approval.”
#NewMexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham unveils 50-year water action plan — Source NM
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
January 31, 2024
Even as New Mexico water supplies are predicted to decline by more than 25% over the next five decades, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she always views the glass as half-full, in the Tuesday presentation of a long-awaited report addressing the state’s water needs for the next 50 years.
Or really: “45 years, since it took us five years to write it,” the governor quipped.
Over the next 50 years, due to human-driven climate change, scientists say New Mexico will be hotter, drier and lead to less water. Hotter weather shrinks the snowbanks, parches the soils and shrivels the rivers. Less available water in rivers puts more pressure on New Mexico aquifers and reduces the chances to refill them. Climate change also turns up the heat on wildfires, which decimate watersheds, and will deepen droughts and worsen flooding.
Without action, New Mexico will have a shortage of 750,000 acre feet of water in that time period, according to the document.
The 23-page document proposes using water conservation, new water supplies and protections for watersheds to address the shortfall. It breaks down further into 11 subsections with points to develop public education campaigns, improve infrastructure, modernize wastewater treatment plants and protect and restore watersheds.
“It conserves water and it reduces waste,” Lujan Grisham said. “If it’s leaking, and it’s evaporating, we don’t know where it is, and if we’re not protecting it and if it gets polluted.”
During an hour-long press conference before the document was made public, Lujan Grisham advocated again for a plan to invest half a billion dollars to develop a market in desalination and oil wastewater treatment technology.
Lujan Grisham described the quantities of brackish water (salty water) in deep underground aquifers to be as vast as an “ocean.”
“We should not be using our fresh drinking water in a number of industries,” she said. “Because we don’t need to make that choice between your safe drinking water and your business. We have the chance here to do both. And that’s exactly the path we’re on.”
Lujan Grisham said that treated produced and brackish water would not be used for drinking water or agricultural sources, but only in manufacturing and industrial uses, at this time.
It’s unclear how much brackish water would be available to support the governor’s goals, said State Geologist J. Michael Timmons, because the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources has not received full funding for an aquifer mapping project. An executive budget request asked for $9 million dollars for aquifer mapping.
“There are probably vast amounts of water, we need to better understand the quantity and quality of that water,” Timmons said. “It leads to the details of how accessible it is, to draw it through the rock formations. There’s a lot of work to be done on our part as a state agency, and others, to better understand those resources.”
At the press conference, Lujan Grisham was joined by the governors from Sandia and Santa Clara Pueblos, the New Mexico Environment Department secretary, the Clovis mayor and several lawmakers.
Some water advocates celebrated the priorities in the plan upon first review. Allyson Siwik, the executive director of Gila Resources Information Project, said she was pleased to see watershed pollution protections, restoration projects, stormwater management and drinking water infrastructure included.
Others said the plan did not address the issues facing New Mexico’s water crisis, including Melissa Troutman, a climate and energy advocate for WildEarth Guardians.
“The governor’s water plan ignores critical water threats in New Mexico, such as daily oil and gas spills that go unpenalized,” Troutman said in a written statement. “And her Strategic Water Supply incentivizes water-intensive industrial development like hydrogen, manufacturing, and fossil fuels that are inappropriate for any arid bioregion.”
How did we get here?
Lujan Grisham has been calling for a 50-year water plan since 2019. While lawmakers declined to fund the plan in prior years, New Mexico In Depth reported lawmakers provided $250,000 annually for the 50-year water plan and granted $500,000 in a one-time appropriation to the Office of the State Engineer in 2023.
A draft of the 50-year water plan circulated in 2022. What was presented today, “evolved” from that draft, said the governor’s spokesperson Maddy Hayden.
“The Action Plan released today evolved from the draft 50-Year Water Plan shared with the public and Water Task Force members in 2022 and reflects the Governor’s priority actions to provide water security for future New Mexicans,” Hayden wrote.
Hayden continued to say that the plan “complements many ongoing state agency programs” and that the implementation will have community involvement.
The 50-year plan is separate from the state water plans, which must be reviewed every five years.
The action plan is based on input from state agencies, a 29-member task force, two working groups which focused on tribal water and acequias, and a 192-page report analyzing the science of climate change impacts based on peer-reviewed research in New Mexico.
It bears little resemblance to those other reports.
The New Mexico Water Policy and Infrastructure Taskforce led by state environmental agencies, but also with lawmakers, conservation nonprofits, local water districts, tribal governments and more, issued a 90-page report that included detailed recommendations for funding more data collection. The group outlined dollar amounts for future legislation and staffing levels to sustain these water plans.
The 50-year action plan asks for recurring funding of $1.25 million per year for aquifer mapping and any additional funds would provide more than 100 monitoring wells in the next 12 years.
The other funding request in the plan asks for $500 million in 2024 and 2025 for the Strategic Water Supply Project. The “Return on Investment” for that project, according to the document, would be 100,000 acre feet of new water by 2028. By 2035, the report says, 50,000 feet to treat brackish water would be available for “recharging freshwater aquifers,” or used for “communities, farms, aquatic ecosystems and interstate compact compliance.”
The report assigns deadlines for actions in the next few years, but does not indicate how much the goals cost to accomplish.
In one section, the report says in order to address contaminated groundwater across hundreds of sites – including legacy uranium sites, petroleum releases and other polluted spots, New Mexico will “develop a dashboard of all known contaminated groundwater sites, including the status and estimated cost of cleanup for each site.”
It would then, “launch a state program to pay for the remediation of 100 neglected sites with no responsible party,” by 2025.
#California is in a ‘snow drought.’ Why this week’s atmospheric rivers won’t be enough to end it — The Los Angeles Times #snowpack #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on The Los Angeles Times website (Ian James). Here’s an excerpt:
January 31, 2024
Storms that are moving in from the Pacific are forecast to bring more snow to the mountains starting this week, along with torrential rains in other parts of the state. But most of California’s storms this year have been shaped by warm conditions, bringing more rain and less snow — a trend that experts say is influenced by the current El Niño conditions on top of rising temperatures driven by human-caused climate change. [ed. emphasis mine] After conducting the state’s second seasonal snow survey Tuesday [January 30, 2024], De Guzman noted that most of the storms this year have been warmer, bringing more rain and less snow.
“That rain-snow transition line has been creeping up further and further compared to years past,” De Guzman told reporters. “With a warming climate, we can expect that to be the new norm, where we would tend to see more rainfall where you would have typically seen snow.”
[…]
After California began the year with a dismal snowpack that measured just 25% of average, the amount of snow in the Sierra Nevada has grown but remains small for this time of year. As of Tuesday, sensors across the Sierra Nevada showed the snowpack stood at 52% of average for the date, with two months left until the snow usually reaches its peak accumulation around April 1. De Guzman and other officials measured 29 inches of snow at Phillips Station, near South Lake Tahoe. Last year at this time they had stood on more than 7 feet of snow — one of the largest snowpacks on record, which came during a colder winter. California has traditionally relied on the Sierra snowpack for about 30% of the state’s water supplies on average. But scientific research has found that in recent decades, average snowlines have been creeping higher with rising temperatures as more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow. And scientists say the current strong El Niño conditions have brought warmer temperatures, further tilting conditions toward more rain this year.
“Historically El Niño winters weren’t that much warmer than other winters in California, but now they are. That’s climate change,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a webinar.
What explains the sold-out water conferences? — Allen Best (@BigPivots)
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
The Colorado Water Congress is sold out again, this time a month in advance. How much do the #ColoradoRiver problems explain this surge?
Members of the Colorado Water Congress this week will gather for three days at a hotel along Colfax Avenue in Aurora to hash through dozens of topics. There will be sessions about wildfire and water, the views of Gen Z water professionals and, of course, a report from Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s chief negotiator on Colorado River issues.
Not registered to attend? It’s too late. The conference was sold out in late December, the registrations capped at 650. It sold out last year, too. In prior years, the maximum attendance was around 500. Other water conferences in Colorado and beyond have also seen an uptick in attendance.
What’s going on? Conference organizers in some cases attribute the increased attendance to the Colorado River crisis. More broadly, though, they attribute the swelling registrations to other triggers. Most important is the desire of people to get together in the flesh once again after the social isolation forced by the covid epidemic.
“It might be a little bit of a mix,” says Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s largest organization of water professionals. “I don’t think it’s being driven by a specific water issue.”
There is interest in the Colorado River, obviously, given how much of Colorado depends upon the troubled river, both for agriculture and for its supplies for urban cities. About half of water for Front Range cities comes from the Colorado River and its headwaters.
Also stirring interest, said Kemper, are other topics, such as the question of whether Nebraska will be able to develop its share of the South Platte River within Colorado.
Mostly the increased attendance of the last two years has been driven by the desire of people to see faces, not computer screens.
Attendance at conferences organized by the American Water Works Association seem to confirm Kemper’s observation that the uptick has more to do with Covid recovery than to any specific water concerns.
Greg Kail, director of communications for the Colorado-based organization, the nation’s largest for water professionals, reports that numbers have grown at all conferences across North America, not just those in places close to the Colorado River.
“We would attribute those upticks primarily to Covid recovery, people wanting to get together in person,” he says.
Where the Colorado River tensions really do seem to drive greater attendance is at an annual meeting in Las Vegas. There, the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference is held each December at Caesar’s Palace or some other hotel along The Strip. In some years past, even as the Colorado River situation continued to deteriorate, enough conference chairs remained vacant to seat the entire population of a small town from the river’s headwaters.
Then, in 2022, attendance surged. Water levels in the river’s two giant reservoirs, Mead and Powell, had dropped precipitously, posing difficult questions whether too little water would remain to generate electricity, something that had not occurred since the two reservoirs filled in respectively the 1930s and 1960s. The Bureau of Reclamation adopted a more urgent stance. National media devoted space, ink and time.
Whereas the average attendance in prior years had been 1,100, registration in 2022 swelled to 1,374. In December 2023, the 1,700 cap at a larger conference venue was also reached.
“A lot is happening on the Colorado River right now and will continue through 2026, and I attribute the increased attendance in large part to that,” said Crystal Thompson, communications manager for the Central Arizona Project, who handles press relations of the annual conference.
Thompson expects that increased attendance will be the new norm during at least the next several years.
Citizen Scientists Document a Recovering #ColoradoRiver: The Returning Rapids Project charts a resurgent waterway and its surrounding ecosystems — Smithsonian Magazine #COriver #aridification
January 25, 2024
Click the link to read the article on the Smithsonian Magazine website (Margaret Osborne):
Sitting around a fire at a campsite along the Colorado River in Utah, boater Mike DeHoff flips through old photos of the area. Scientists from the United States Geological Survey circle around him and peer interestedly over his shoulder. He points to an old picture of the North Wash boat ramp, where the group is camped. The ramp was built about 20 years ago as a temporary take out for boaters running Cataract Canyon, a popular section for whitewater rafting, flowing through Canyonlands National Park upstream of Lake Powell. But in the past few decades, the ramp has deteriorated rapidly as water levels receded in the lake and the river here cut away at the land.
DeHoff, a welder based in Moab, Utah, runs the Returning Rapids Project, which documents annual changes in a section of the Colorado river called Cataract Canyon. The project brings external scientists out to survey species, measure sediment changes in the riverbed and examine the geology of newly exposed rock formations. The team presents this information, along with their own observations, to various organizations across the region and to the public. DeHoff and his team do this work, in part, to help provide important information before officials make crucial water management decisions regarding the river.
DeHoff is helping coordinate this March sediment survey with the USGS’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, in a portion of the river that was once part of Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. In the past few decades, drought, climate change and the overuse of water have caused the lake level to drop, spurring a crisis for the millions of people who rely on it for water and hydropower. But as the lake receded, DeHoff began noticing something unexpected: The river upstream flourished.
DeHoff started seeing changes in Cataract Canyon in 2002—about when the region’s drought started. Lower water levels led rapids to form. Cottonwoods and seep willows sprouted in areas that were once underwater. As Lake Powell shrunk, the river cut through the layers of sediment left behind—dams halt the flow of rivers and stop sediment from moving freely. Yet, despite these rapid changes, DeHoff saw little scientific research or public attention focused on this section of the river. Instead, he says, efforts went downstream to the Grand Canyon, on the other side of the lake.
A brief history
Before engineers dammed the river, Cataract Canyon was notorious for its massive, churning rapids—earning it the nickname “The Graveyard of the Colorado.” In 1964, Glen Canyon Dam was built near what’s now Page, Arizona, to supply power to areas of the West and to form the Lake Powell reservoir. In the United States, the Lake Powell reservoir is second in size only to Lake Mead, which is located 360 river miles downstream.
Seventeen years after the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built, the reservoir hit full capacity—or “full pool”—and stretched 186 miles long. It inundated a stretch of river called Glen Canyon, which is sometimes referred to as “America’s lost national park.” The canyon was once home to a variety of plant and animal species as well as unique rock spires, arches, slot canyons and more than 3,000 ancient ruins. Just upstream of Glen Canyon, 65 percent of Cataract Canyon was also flooded, and many of its fearsome rapids disappeared.
The dam has also trapped millions of tons of sediment behind it in Lake Powell, which deprives the Grand Canyon downstream of sand and silt. The sediment holds critical nutrients for life and can form and replenish beach habitats that are important for plants and animals—and campsites for the 27,000 yearly Grand Canyon boaters.
A dwindling supply of water
The West is in the middle of its worst mega-drought in 1,200 years. In just the past few decades, Lake Powell has dropped more than 100 feet. This past March, when the USGS was completing its sediment survey, the reservoir sat at about 22 percent of full pool, just 30 feet above the amount needed to continue producing power.
States, tribes, legislators, the public and other stakeholders are all competing for the dwindling water in the Colorado River, which was originally divided up in the 1923 Colorado River Compact. This agreement among the federal government and Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming was based on science that overestimated the amount of water that would be available in the years to come. And it left Native American tribes and Mexico out of the deal altogether. Over the years, subsequent agreements, court decisions and decrees have been added to the 100-year-old document to determine how water is split up. But at the end of 2026, some of these guidelines governing the system will expire and need to be renegotiated. Experts say deep cuts will need to be made to water usage. It may even mean drilling bypass tubes around the dam, which would essentially drain Lake Powell—one of the solutions the Bureau of Reclamation proposed last year.
The research facilitated by the Returning Rapids Project could help give officials a more holistic view of how their decisions will affect the entire river system. “Everybody knows that there’s going to have to be big decisions made about how we manage the Colorado River,” DeHoff says. “The way we’re using the river, and how we’re storing its water, is outdated.”
Environmentalists have proposed decommissioning Glen Canyon dam for decades to restore the health of the river and help conserve water. Some proponents, including the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, advocate to “Fill Lake Mead First,” a proposal that would combine the water from both reservoirs into Lake Mead. The proposal includes the construction of diversion tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam, allowing the river to flow freely through it and restoring Glen Canyon to its picturesque glory. According to a study commissioned by the institute, filling Lake Mead first would save about 300,000 acre-feet of water per year that would have otherwise been lost to ground seepage or evaporation in Lake Powell—about the amount allocated yearly to the state of Nevada. But a 2016 study from Utah State University has put this number closer to 50,000 acre-feet.
Record-breaking snowfall last winter in Utah has caused water levels to rise again. Lake Powell is now around 35 percent full. But scientists caution the drought is not over, and the precipitation is just a temporary fix to the region’s longstanding water shortage.
How the project formed
The shop DeHoff founded, Eddyline Welding in Moab, welds boats, frames and equipment for river runners. Private, commercial, USGS and National Park Service boaters gather there to swap stories and information.
Around 2017 or 2018, Peter Lefebvre, a longtime raft guide, began chatting with DeHoff about his observations in Cataract Canyon. “It was like, ‘Oh, so have you seen this rock sticking out of the river over here?’” Lefebvre says. The two formed the Returning Rapids Project with another local, Bego Gerhart. They wanted to investigate when the rapids would return to Cataract Canyon as Lake Powell receded. So far, they’ve documented the return of 11 rapids.
DeHoff and his partner, Meg Flynn, who’s the assistant director of the local library, have spent hours finding archival photos of the river upstream from Lake Powell. Project members pinpoint where the photos were taken and return to the same spots via raft, by motorboat or on foot to snap images, often at the same time of day and year, to compare the river and the landscape.
“It’s a treasure hunt,” Flynn says. “It’s super fun to figure out.”
The project soon grew, and in 2019, the Glen Canyon Institute, which advocates for a free-flowing river through the dam, took the Returning Rapids Project under its wing, allowing it to receive donations. The project now has four core part-time investigators: DeHoff, Flynn, Lefebvre and Chris Benson, a geologist, pilot and former raft guide. They’ve also recently involved some younger members in research and boat operations.
“All these government offices and agencies were kind of all doing their own thing and not really paying attention to this,” Benson says. “With all this change, all this worry about levels and drought, people weren’t really studying this.”
But scientists have now published multiple papers based on data collected with the help of the Returning Rapids Project.
Returning Rapids has also given presentations to various groups, including the Utah Geological Association, the Utah State University Center for Colorado River Studies, the Colorado Plateau River Guides and classes of university students. They’ve shared their findings with National Park superintendents, decision makers at the Bureau of Reclamation and Utah raft guides. In Moab, they’ve spoken at local events and even given a talk for visiting high school students from California.
The team’s observations, historical research and photo matching are published in yearly field binders for the public to read. Commercial river guides sometimes share the binders with passengers on their trips.
“It’s gone from having a conversation in the welding shop to being a part of meetings of every superintendent who has anything to do with the Colorado River with the National Park Service,” DeHoff says. “And trying to help them think about it, which is nuts.”
In the field
Back at the campsite, the USGS researchers listen as DeHoff chats more about the history of the area. In the morning, the scientists set up equipment and board research vessels, which will collect data on sediment in the riverbank that they can compare to previous surveys.
One boat carries a sonar device with 512 beams to map the floor of the river and a lidar instrument, which uses lasers to scan the riverbank. The team spends the day motoring up and down a section of the river—“mowing the lawn” they call it—near the Dirty Devil confluence. On two computer screens, raw data appears as textured images of the riverbed. “This mossy-colored, brown-looking texture is indicative of sand,” researcher Katie Chapman says, pointing to the screen.
Between 2020 and May 2022, USGS geomorphologist Paul Grams saw the river scour the riverbed 36 feet deeper, and the water is now encountering resistant bedrock. In this section, the river is flowing along a different path than its historical channel. Grams says a waterfall or rapid could form here if the water level continued to drop, which would change how sediment moves in the river and shift the river dynamics and ecosystems upstream. A waterfall could also act as a barrier for migrating fish and affect infrastructure decisions, such as where to build a boat ramp.
As the USGS group mows the lawn, Returning Rapids motors around the river to match photos and measure river depth using a fish-finder device.
In a follow-up survey in the early summer, Grams documented an even more dramatic scouring—about 33 feet in just six months—thanks to the season’s high water flows.
Making a big scientific impact
A few months before this trip, back in the library in Moab, DeHoff pulled out an 11-foot-long map of the Colorado River and laid it flat on the table in front of him. He pointed out areas that have changed over the years. “We’ve seen all kinds of like native flora and fauna come in and repopulate the areas where the river has restored itself,” he said.
Ecologist Seth Arens of the University of Colorado’s Western Water Assessment, who organized the first Returning Rapids science trip in 2019, says the region is a fascinating natural laboratory. Arens was inspired to research the Lake Powell area because of conversations with DeHoff on a private trip. He’s been conducting plant surveys in side canyons and says he’s the first to research the terrestrial landscape that was once underwater, an area that’s about 100,000 acres.
So far, Arens has documented shrubs, cottonwood trees, native grasses, wildflowers, early signs of cryptobiotic soil crusts and unique vertical ecosystems called hanging gardens—all of which have appeared in the last few years. He says this knowledge could be useful for understanding how landscapes change in arid regions as reservoirs dry and dams are removed.
Arens makes it clear he is not advocating for the removal of Glen Canyon Dam, but he says his research should be taken into account when officials make their decisions around future water management. Though he hasn’t published his data yet, he says he’s submitted comments to the Bureau of Reclamation. If Lake Powell refills, it will come at a cost, he adds.
“There will be ecological resources that are again submerged and lost,” he says. “I think it’s fair for that information to be part of that decision-making process.”
Cari Johnson, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Utah, has also been on several Returning Rapids science trips. She says the Returning Rapids Project has made her research on sediments safer and more efficient. The group has helped her get permits, work with management agencies and provided practical knowledge about boating.
“I wouldn’t be able to do any of the science that I have done so far without [DeHoff],” she says. “He has been incredibly effective at getting smart people all together.”
The stratosphere is talking down to the troposphere, but will it listen? — NOAA
January 30, 2024
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Amy Butler and Laura Ciasto):
With the occurrence of a major disruption to the polar vortex (or sudden stratospheric warming) on January 16 2023 [footnote 1], one of the first questions everyone asks is “How can a disruption way up in the Arctic stratosphere affect the winds and weather far below in the troposphere?”.
A stratospheric traffic accident
Scientists have a pretty good understanding of how a reversal of the winds ~19 miles above the Arctic influences the winds at lower altitudes, at least down to about the tropopause (the altitude where the troposphere transitions to the stratosphere, ~6-8 miles above earth’s surface at the poles). As we mentioned in this post, huge planetary-scale waves in the atmosphere can travel into the stratosphere, but only when the stratospheric winds are blowing west-to-east, as is generally the case during winter.
Imagine cars on a highway that suddenly find the road blocked by a giant concrete wall (since we’re imagining, let’s say they are driverless cars, so no humans are injured in this analogy). The first car crashes into the roadblock and stops; but the next car runs into that car, slightly further back from the roadblock, and so on and so forth until you have a massive traffic collision that extends for miles.
Analogously, a major sudden stratospheric warming can cause a similar chain reaction throughout the depth of the stratosphere. By definition, when one of these events occurs, the winds ~19 miles altitude reverse direction and now flow east-to-west. Winds that are blowing east-to-west essentially act as a roadblock to large atmospheric waves. So the next big wave that tries to travel into the stratosphere after a major warming will hit this roadblock, and the wave will break, slowing or reversing the winds just below the initial wind reversal. Then we rinse and repeat: the next wave will hit the roadblock of east-to-west winds slightly lower than before, slowing the winds at the next level down, until wind changes way up in the mid-stratosphere work their way all the way down to the bottom of the stratosphere.
The breaking waves also accelerate the transport of stratospheric air that sinks over the pole, which causes the air to warm and to build up atmospheric mass or pressure. If we look at a “paint drip” plot averaged over all observed major sudden stratospheric warming events, above the tropopause we can see a rapid increase in atmospheric thickness over the polar cap that occurs shortly after the disruption at 10 hPa (~19 miles). This increase in atmospheric thickness descends to the lower stratosphere over a period of days to a couple of weeks.
While the polar vortex in the middle stratosphere tends to spring back into shape quickly after a major warming, any effects that reach the lower stratosphere can stay there for many weeks. We will explain the reasons for this in another post, but this persistence is a key element to why the stratosphere is such an important player for predictability on timescales of weeks to months.
Competing graffiti artists
Once the wind reversal in the middle stratosphere works its way down to the tropopause, our understanding of the physical mechanism for how it affects our weather becomes much foggier (weather nerd joke alert!). One thing that’s clear though is that below the tropopause, the increased atmospheric thickness over the pole becomes intermittent (they look like drips of paint, hence the name of the plots). These “drips” correspond to enhanced high pressure over the Arctic which can nudge the tropospheric jet stream southward, and they are not consistent in timing or magnitude from one major stratospheric warming to another.
This pattern suggests that, while the stratosphere exerts a predictable downward influence on the atmosphere, often for many weeks after a major warming, it’s not the only graffiti artist in town. The troposphere adds its own paint on top of what the stratosphere laid down; its processes and weather patterns can either enhance or destroy the stratosphere’s contribution of increased atmospheric thickness over the pole. For some major warmings, this means that we see almost no “paint drips” after the event [footnote 2].
There are additional characteristics of the coupling from the lower stratosphere to the surface that scientists don’t fully understand, such as why the polar atmospheric thickness increases more near the surface compared to the middle troposphere. It seems likely that atmospheric waves in the troposphere help to reinforce the wind changes coming from above, but even this additional reinforcement isn’t enough to fully explain the amplification of the signal at the surface that we observe.
What is the atmospheric graffiti art looking like now?
While we can get a clear overall picture of how the stratosphere influences the troposphere by averaging over many major sudden warmings, individual sudden warming events are often unique, because the troposphere is adding its own paint strokes and sprays to the stratosphere’s work of art. As we mentioned in the last post, the stratosphere and troposphere were coupled through most of mid-January, but this appears more related to the minor warming around January 5th and to the somewhat unusual nature of the major warming on January 16th when the stratospheric polar vortex was disrupted from the troposphere upwards.
Since the major warming, the stratosphere’s mark on the atmosphere has been covered up by whatever masterpiece the troposphere has in mind. The negative anomalies in polar atmospheric thickness in the troposphere that have stuck around since ~Jan 20th tend to keep the tropospheric jet stream shifted poleward, promoting warmer than normal temperatures across North America and parts of Europe. However, forecasts suggest that the paint colors added by the major warming will re-emerge as we head into February, perhaps bringing colder than normal temperatures over these regions back into the picture.
Meanwhile in the middle stratosphere, the polar vortex winds have already recovered after the major disruption, back to near average wind speeds. The vortex looks to strengthen somewhat in early February, but after that there is large uncertainty about what the stratosphere will throw on the atmospheric canvas next.
Footnotes
[1] This is the date the reversal occurred according to NASA’s GEOS FP assimilation system, but the exact date can depend on which “reanalysis” product is used; see for example: https://csl.noaa.gov/groups/csl8/sswcompendium/majorevents.html
Reanalysis products take multiple observational sources like satellite and balloon measurements and assimilate them into a model to create a product that is both temporally and spatially complete at each grid space of the model, and is constrained by observations. These products are widely used to study the stratosphere, though they can have significant biases; for an extensive evaluation of stratospheric reanalyses, see here: https://s-rip.github.io/report/structure.html
[2] It’s been found that only about ⅔ of observed major sudden stratospheric warmings have an apparent downward influence on the surface. The other ⅓ of major warmings likely either (a) weren’t strong enough disruptions to reach the lower stratosphere, which is key to having an influence on the troposphere, or (b) had an effect but the troposphere was creating stronger anomalies in the opposite direction. Notably, if we look at computer model simulations of thousands of major warmings, the “paint drip” plots cease to look drippy, suggesting that the “drippiness” is largely arising from all the variations caused by weather in the troposphere.
Reference
Baldwin, M. P., Ayarzagüena, B., Birner, T., Butchart, N., Butler, A. H., Charlton-Perez, A. J., et al. (2021). Sudden stratospheric warmings. Reviews of Geophysics, 59, e2020RG000708.https://doi.org/10.1029/2020RG000708
What is an atmospheric river? A hydrologist explains the good and bad of these flood-prone storms and how they’re changing — The Conversation
Qian Cao, University of California, San Diego
A series of atmospheric rivers is bringing the threat of heavy downpours, flooding, mudslides and avalanches to the Pacific Northwest and California this week. While these storms are dreaded for the damage they can cause, they are also essential to the region’s water supply, particularly in California, as Qian Cao, a hydrologist at the University of California, San Diego, explains.
What are atmospheric rivers?
An atmospheric river is a narrow corridor or filament of concentrated water vapor transported in the atmosphere. It’s like a river in the sky that can be 1,000 miles long. On average, atmospheric rivers have about twice the regular flow of the Amazon River.
When atmospheric rivers run up against mountains or run into local atmospheric dynamics and are forced to ascend, the moisture they carry cools and condenses, so they can produce intense rainfall or snowfall. https://www.youtube.com/embed/w3rtYM0HtIM?wmode=transparent&start=0 A satellite view of atmospheric rivers.
Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world, most commonly in the mid-latitudes. They form when large-scale weather patterns align to create narrow channels, or filaments, of intense moisture transport. These start over warm water, typically tropical oceans, and are guided toward the coast by low-level jet streams ahead of cold fronts of extratropical cyclones.
Along the U.S. West Coast, the Pacific Ocean serves as the reservoir of moisture for the storm, and the mountain ranges act as barriers, which is why the western sides of the coastal ranges and Sierra Nevada see so much rain and snow.
Why are back-to-back atmospheric rivers a high flood risk?
Consecutive atmospheric rivers, known as AR families, can cause significant flooding.
The first heavy downpours saturate the ground. As consecutive storms arrive, their precipitation falls on soil that can’t absorb more water. That contributes to more runoff. Rivers and streams fill up. In the meantime, there may be snowmelt due to warm temperatures, further adding to the runoff and flood risk.
California experienced a historic run of nine consecutive atmospheric rivers in the span of three weeks in December 2022 and January 2023. The storms helped bring most reservoirs back to historical averages in 2023 after several drought years, but they also produced damaging floods and debris flows.
The cause of AR families is an active area of research. Compared with single atmospheric river events, AR families tend to be associated with lower atmospheric pressure heights across the North Pacific, higher pressure heights over the subtropics, a stronger and more zonally elongated jet stream and warmer tropical air temperatures.
Large-scale weather patterns and climate phenomena such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO, also play an important role in the generation of AR families. An active MJO shift occurred during the early 2023 events, tilting the odds toward increased atmospheric river activity over California.
A recent study by scientists at Stanford and the University of Florida found that storms within AR families cause three to four times more economic damage when the storms arrive back to back than they would have caused by themselves.
How important are atmospheric rivers to the West Coast’s water supply?
I’m a research hydrologist, so I focus on hydrological impacts of atmospheric rivers. Although they can lead to flood hazards, atmospheric rivers are also essential to the Western water supply. Atmospheric rivers have been responsible for ending more than a third of the region’s major droughts, including the severe California drought of 2012-16.
Atmospheric rivers provide an average of 30% to 50% of the West Coast’s annual precipitation.
They also contribute to the snowpack, which provides a significant portion of California’s year-round water supply.
In an average year, one to two extreme atmospheric rivers with snow will be the dominant contributors to the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Together, atmospheric rivers will contribute about 30% to 40% of an average season’s total snow accumulation there.
That’s why my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, work on improving atmospheric river forecasts and predictions. Water managers need to be able to regulate reservoirs and figure out how much water they can save for the dry season while still leaving room in the reservoirs to manage flood risk from future storms.
How is global warming affecting atmospheric rivers?
As global temperatures rise in the future, we can expect more intense atmospheric rivers, leading to an increase in heavy and extreme precipitation events.
My research also shows that more atmospheric rivers are likely to occur concurrently during already wet conditions. So, the chance of extreme flooding also increases. Another study, by scientists from the University of Washington, suggests that there will be a seasonal shift to more atmospheric rivers earlier in the rainy season.
There will likely also be more year-to-year variability in the total annual precipitation, particularly in California, as a study by my colleagues at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes projects.
Qian Cao, Hydrologist, Center For Western Weather and Water Extremes, University of California, San Diego
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
2024 #COleg: Clipping thirsty grasses at the margins in #Colorado — Allen Best (@BigPivots)
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 30, 2024
Relatively minor pushback in Colorado Senate to proposed limits to new water-thirsty grasses in urban areas that get little or no foot traffic
Colorado legislators in 2022 passed a bill that delivered $2 million for programs across the state for removal of thirsty turf classified as non-functional, meaning that the grass is mainly ornamental, to be seen but not otherwise used.
This morning [January 30, 2024] the Colorado Senate will review a bill that, if approved, will extend the concept.
“This bill is about not putting (in) that non-functional turf in the first place,” explained Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, in introducing SB24-005 to the Senate Agriculture and Water Committee last Thursday. “If you don’t put it in the first place, you don’t have to replace it.”
The committee approved the bill, titled “Prohibit Landscaping Practices for Water Conservation,” in a 4-1 vote.
The Colorado Municipal League registered opposition, but tellingly, no representatives of towns or cities showed up to argue against the bill. Instead, support was expressed by representatives of several local jurisdictions, including the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, the second largest water provider on the Western Slope, as well as the special district that provides water for Pueblo West.
The bill takes aim at Kentucky bluegrass and other species imported from wetter climatic zones that are planted along streets and in medians, amid parking lots, in front of government buildings as well as the expanses you often see around office parks and many business and industrial areas. The imported species can use far more water than buffalo grass and other species indigenous to Colorado’s more arid climate.
Residential property is unaffected. Worried about a public backlash, legislators amended the bill to make that exemption doubly clear.
The bill also bars use of plastic turf in lieu of organic vegetation for landscaping.
Originally reviewed by an interim legislative committee in October, the bill was subsequently modified based on input of stakeholders. Functional and non-functional turf were clarified. The bill was also modified to give cities and counties flexibility to determine areas of “community, civic and recreational” turf grasses, in effect letting them decide what is functional in some instances. The revised bill language also made it clear that installing native species of grass or those hybridized species that use less water would be OK. The revised bill also give municipalities and counties until Jan. 1, 2026, to review and revise their landscaping code and development review processes.
Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, a co-sponsor, called the bill a “natural extension” of the turf-buy-back bill from 2022. He said he was surprised at the reaction in Alamosa to that funding. The water district he manages began getting inquiries about how to participate. “It kind of inspired me that there’s more room for improvement here in this space,” he told committee members.
Simpson also said he was motivated to help prevent water grabs by Front Range cities from the San Luis Valley, what locals sometimes call Colorado’s South Slope. Three separate attempts have been made in the last 35 years to divert water from the San Luis Valley, a place already being forced to trim irrigated agriculture as necessary to meet requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.
“That’s largely my motivation to be part of this conversation and doing everything we can to reduce that pressure on my rural constituents and our way of life,” said Simpson.
Nobody argues that the limits on expansion of what the bill calls non-functional turf will solve Colorado’s water problems. Municipalities use only 7% of the state’s water, and outdoor use constitutes roughly half of municipal use. Agriculture uses nearly 90% of the state’s water.
But developing water for growing cities, particularly along the Front Range but even in the headwaters’ communities, has become problematic as the climate has veered hotter and, in most years of the 21stcentury, drier.
The result, as was detailed in a five-part collaboration during 2023 between Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, has been a growing consensus about the need to be more strategic and sparing about use of water in urban landscapes.
See also:
Part V: Colorado River crisis looms over state’s landscape decisions
Part IV: Why these homeowners tore out their turf
Part III: How bluegrass lawns became the default for urban landscapes
Part II: Enough water for lawns at the headwaters of the Colorado River?
Part I: Colorado squeezing water from urban landscapes
Disagreements remain about whether the state should create a state-wide standard, as is proposed in this legislation, or whether local governments should figure out their own solutions.
It’s a familiar arguing point in Colorado, but rarely are the divisions neat and simple. That’s also true in this case. Colorado Springs, the state’s second largest city, has a robust program for urban landscape transformation but was hesitant about the bill’s approach, wanting to ensure local flexibility.
Denver is fully behind the bill. Denver Water, which provides water to 1.6 million people, including the city’s 720,000 residents as well as many suburban jurisdictions, has committed to reducing the water devoted to urban turf in coming years by 30%, or roughly 6,000 acres. It says it doesn’t want to become parsimonious with its water only to see water used lavishly in new settlements.
Andrew Hill, the government affairs manager for Denver Water, called the bill a “moderate approach” in creating a new waterwise landscaping standard, one in which imported grasses are not the default.
“It makes real changes statewide, but it’s narrow enough to only apply to areas (where) I think a consensus exists,” said Hill at the committee hearing.
Local governments can go further, and many have already. Colorado has 38 turf replacement programs, and Western Resource Advocates found last fall that 17 of the jurisdictions already limit new turf and another 9 plan to do so.
Aurora and Castle Rock, late-blooming municipalities in the metropolitan areas, have adopted among the most muscular regulations in Colorado, even taking aim at water devoted to front yards. Both expect to continue growing in population, and together they plan to pursue importations of water currently used for farming along the South Platte River in northeastern Colorado. Aurora also still owns water rights in the Eagle River that it has been trying to develop for the last 40 years.
The Colorado Municipal League, a consortium of 270 towns and cities, insists that the proposal represents state overreach of one-size-fits-all policies for local landscapes. Heather Stauffer, CML’s legislative advocacy manager, cited the regulations of Aurora, Greeley, and Aspen as examples of approaches created to meet specific and local needs.
“We would advocate that the state put more money into funds that address turf removal programs that have been very successful among municipalities across the state,” Stauffer said. In 2023, Boulder-based Resource Central completed 604 lawn-replacement projects along the Front Range. With aid of state funding, it plans to expand its turf-removal and popular Garden In A Box programs to the Western Slope this year.
The Colorado River Drought Task Force recommended legislators allocate $5 million annually for turf removal programs. Some legislators have indicated they plan to introduce legislation to do just that.
Witnesses at the committee hearing repeatedly echoed what Roberts said in introducing the bill. Paying for turf removal is “inefficient and not cost-effective” if water-thirsty grass species continue to be planted in questionable places said Lindsay Rogers, policy manager for municipal conservation at Western Resource Advocates, which helped shape the bill.
Rogers said passing the bill would build the momentum to “help ensure that Coloradans live within our water means and particularly in the context of a growing state and worsening drought conditions.”
The Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, which represents 400 Colorado landscape and supplier companies, testified in support of the bill but hinted at future discussions as the bill goes through legislative sausage-making. Along with sod growers, they quibble over the dichotomous phrasing of “non-functional vs functional turf. They prefer the words recreational and utility.
On the flip side of these changes, some home gardeners might well find buffalo and other indigenous grasses, if more conserving of water, less appealing. Buffalo grass, for example, greens up a month or so later in spring and browns up a month earlier in autumn.
Water in urban landscapes is also on the agenda for three programs this week at the annual meeting of the Colorado Water Congress, the state’s preeminent organization for water providers. Included may be a report from a task force appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last February that met repeatedly through 2023 to talk about ways to reduce expansion of water to urban landscapes.
Aspinall Unit Forecast for Operations January 30, 2024 #GunnisonRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Changing #Climate Behind Sharp Drop in #Snowpack Since 1980s: Study finds steepest drops in areas of the Northern Hemisphere reliant on snow for water — NOAA #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Morgan Kelly):
January 24, 2024
Scientific data from ground observations, satellites, and climate models have not agreed on whether climate change is consistently chipping away at the snowpacks that accumulate in high-elevation mountains and provide water when they melt in spring. This complicates efforts to manage the water scarcity that would result for many population centers.
A new Dartmouth study cuts through the uncertainty in these observations and provides evidence that seasonal snowpacks throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere have indeed shrunk significantly over the past 40 years due to human-driven climate change. The sharpest global warming-related reductions in snowpack—between 10% to 20% per decade—are in the Southwestern and Northeastern United States, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. The study was funded in part by NIDISthrough the NOAA Climate Program Office Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, & Projections (MAPP) program.
Dartmouth researchers Alexander Gottlieb and Justin Mankin report in the journal Nature that the extent and speed of this loss potentially puts the hundreds of millions of people in North America, Europe, and Asia who depend on snow for their water on the precipice of a crisis that continued warming will amplify.
“We were most concerned with how warming is affecting the amount of water stored in snow. The loss of that reservoir is the most immediate and potent risk that climate change poses to society in terms of diminishing snowfall and accumulation,” said Gottlieb.
“Our work identifies the watersheds that have experienced historical snow loss and those that will be most vulnerable to rapid snowpack declines with further warming,” Gottlieb said. “The train has left the station for regions such as the Southwestern and Northeastern United States. By the end of the 21st century, we expect these places to be close to snow-free by the end of March. We’re on that path and not particularly well adapted when it comes to water scarcity.”
Water security is only one dimension of snow loss, said Mankin, an associate professor of geography and the paper’s senior author.
The Hudson, Susquehanna, Delaware, Connecticut, and Merrimack watersheds in the Northeastern U.S., where water scarcity is not as dire, experienced among the steepest declines in snowpack. But these heavy losses threaten economies in states such as Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire that depend on winter recreation, Mankin syid—even machine-made snow has a temperature threshold, one that many areas are fast approaching.
“The recreational implications are emblematic of the ways in which global warming disproportionately affects the most vulnerable communities,” he said. “Ski resorts at lower elevations and latitudes have already been contending with year-on-year snow loss. This will just accelerate, making the business model inviable.”
“We’ll likely see further consolidation of skiing into large, well-resourced resorts at the expense of small and medium-sized ski areas that have such crucial local economic and cultural values. It will be a loss that will ripple through communities,” Mankin said.
In the study, Gottlieb and Mankin focused on how global warming’s influence on temperature and precipitation drove changes in snowpack in 169 river basins across the Northern Hemisphere from 1981 through 2020. The loss of snowpacks potentially means less meltwater in spring for rivers, streams, and soils downstream when ecosystems and people demand water.
Gottlieb and Mankin programmed a machine learning model to examine thousands of observations and climate-model experiments that captured snowpack, temperature, precipitation, and runoff data for Northern Hemisphere watersheds.
The researchers identified the uncertainties that the models and observations shared so they could hone in on what scientists previously missed when gauging the effect of climate change on snow. A 2021 study by Gottlieb and Mankin similarly leveraged uncertainties in how scientists measure snow depth and define snow drought to improve predictions of water availability.
“Snow observations are tricky at the regional scales most relevant for assessing water security,” Mankin said. “Snow is very sensitive to within-winter variations in temperature and precipitation, and the risks from snow loss are not the same in New England as in the Southwest, or for a village in the Alps as in high-mountain Asia.”
Gottlieb and Mankin found that 80% of the Northern Hemisphere’s snowpacks—which are in its far-northern and high-elevation reaches—experienced minimal losses. Snowpacks actually expanded in vast swaths of Alaska, Canada, and Central Asia as climate change increased the precipitation that falls as snow in these frigid regions.
But it is the remaining 20% of the snowpack that exists around—and provides water for—many of the hemisphere’s major population centers that has diminished. Since 1981, documented declines in snowpack for these regions have been largely inconsistent due to the uncertainty in observations and naturally occurring variations in climate.
But Gottlieb and Mankin found that a steady pattern of annual declines in snow accumulation emerge quickly—and leave population centers suddenly and chronically short on new supplies of water from snowmelt.
Many snow-dependent watersheds now find themselves dangerously near a temperature threshold Gottlieb and Mankin call a “snow-loss cliff.” This means that as average winter temperatures in a watershed increase beyond 17 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius), snow loss accelerates even with only modest increases in local average temperatures.
Many highly populated watersheds that rely on snow for water supply are going to see accelerating losses over the next few decades, Mankin said.
“It means that water managers who rely on snowmelt can’t wait for all the observations to agree on snow loss before they prepare for permanent changes to water supplies. By then, it’s too late,” he said. “Once a basin has fallen off that cliff, it’s no longer about managing a short-term emergency until the next big snow. Instead, they will be adapting to permanent changes to water availability.”
Get renewables right and get it going — Pete Kolbenschlag #ActOnClimate
From email from Pete Kolbenschlag:
In a world of often competing needs, sometimes it’s harder to find a common path forward than to simply plow one’s own. And when a project to be hurried along is for some greater good, then to steam through the process may seem warranted. This sometimes seems the case for calls to streamline clean energy development or to limit community input into new infrastructure. But shortcuts can make for long delays – and many an ambitious project runs into obstacles by not adequately involving impacted members of the public, who nonetheless will be heard.
So the Sentinel is correct to call for clarity on utility-sized solar as it has in a recent editorial. Which was also on the mark noting that more solar is welcomed. The opportunity is here now to secure investments in a cleaner energy future. But that does mean that we have to get it right.
Still, we shouldn’t delay. The need is real. How we power our lives and communities is quickly shifting and western Colorado should lead the way. It isn’t either/or. Siting of energy facilities and how they are integrated with the environment, farms, businesses and neighborhoods should always be a top concern. We must not repeat mistakes from our fossil fuel past when ecosystems and some communities were treated as sacrifice zones in the name of necessity. But we absolutely must transform our energy system and how we power our lives and economy.
Last February, my organization – the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance – issued its report on climate change in the Gunnison River Basin. Then 2023 happened. Last year is being widely reported as the hottest ever recorded as concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere – notably CO2 – hit levels likely not seen for millions of years. Meanwhile extreme weather and other climate disruptions continued to reset expectations about scope, onset and frequency.
Sure, there are still hold-outs who believe climate science is fiction and others who want hard to believe that some yet-unproven technology will allow the burning of methane-gas, oil and coal long into the future. But the economic, political and fact-based reality is that to a growing number of nations, decision-makers and institutions a rapid shift to clean energy is both necessary and inevitable. The data are clear: we must act with urgency and at scale if we are to address climate change.
That doesn’t skip over the need to meet community needs and issues. Federal legislation has made new funding available to help speed the deployment of more renewables. And the Colorado legislature is considering legislation, and could do more, to help direct where and how this renewable build out occurs. Still, local governments, like county commissioners, should not wait.
Taking effort to incentivize renewable projects that integrate with and benefit the communities where they are located is key. Not only for fairness but also to smooth development at the pace and scope required. The co-location of facilities, solar with agriculture for instance, or on rooftops and over parking lots, can help to mitigate some of the burden new development can place on others. Opportunities like workforce development programs, consumer cost savings, community-ownership are other outcomes that can and should be encouraged to make clean energy a win for the community as a whole, as well as for the climate.
One example is the agrivoltaics project the Colorado Farm and Food Alliance has been helping to steer in Delta County, that seeks to develop a community-rooted model for solar that pairs with and even benefits agriculture, putting more clean power on the grid while returning the cost-savings from production to its farm-based member-subscribers.
That is one place strong local leadership can help, in Mesa County and elsewhere, to guide where and how such projects are located. And state legislation can create stronger incentives to put more meaningful and community-centered benefits in renewable project design and power generation. For instance, by encouraging utilities, both investor-owned and rural cooperatives, to accept more community-solar on their systems, or making it easier to put solar production cost-savings directly on a consumer’s utility bill, as examples.
But we need to act now. With federal funding from recent laws, a growing recognition of the challenge at hand, and a willingness to lead we can develop a new energy economy that supports western Colorado communities and livelihoods. We need a thoughtful but strong and steady approach that meets and matches community needs and promptly puts more renewable energy to work powering Colorado.
Puckett Land Co. drops bid for Thompson Creek reservoir water rights — @AspenJournalism #CrystalRiver #RoaringForkRiver #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Journalism website (Heather Sackett):
January 29, 2024
A company with ties to oil shale development in western Colorado has dropped its attempt to maintain water rights for a proposed reservoir on Thompson Creek.
Puckett Land Co. on Jan. 26 filed a motion to dismiss its diligence application for conditional water rights that date to 1966 and are associated with the construction of a 23,983-acre-foot reservoir on Thompson Creek, a tributary of the Crystal River just south of Carbondale. Later that day, a water court judge signed off on the motion, meaning the water rights have now been abandoned.
The Greenwood Village-based company holds interests in 17,500 acres of land in Garfield and Rio Blanco counties, according to its water court filing. Attorney for Puckett Megan Christensen said the decision to voluntarily cancel these water rights was for business purposes. In its November filing, known as a diligence application, Puckett had said that current economic conditions are adverse to oil shale production.
“Puckett has a portfolio of water rights and in looking at them, they made the decision that this one wasn’t worth maintaining anymore, so they decided to just go ahead and dismiss it,” Christensen said in an interview with Aspen Journalism.
The proposed reservoir site had been on BLM land in Pitkin County within the boundaries of an area that the U.S. Forest Service and BLM are proposing to withdraw from eligibility for new oil and gas leases. The proposed Thompson Divide withdrawal area is comprised of 224,713-acres in Garfield, Gunnison and Pitkin counties that generally straddles the ridge of mountains running from south of Glenwood Springs to the northern edge of the West Elk Wilderness, south of McClure Pass.
Carbondale conservation group Wilderness Workshop supports the withdrawal area and celebrated Puckett dropping the water rights as a win for the Crystal River.
“This is great news for the Thompson Divide, the Crystal River, and our local ecosystem and communities,” Will Roush, executive director of Wilderness Workshop, said in a prepared statement. “Puckett’s intention to cancel their conditional water rights demonstrates just how speculative conditional water rights associated with oil shale development are. Other holders of similar rights ought to follow Puckett’s lead.”
Proposed Thompson Creek reservoir
Conditional water rights
Puckett is among the companies with an interest in western Colorado oil shale development, who have water rights dating to the 1950s and ‘60s, which were amassed in anticipation of a boom. A report produced by conservation group Western Resource Advocates in 2009 found that there were conditional water rights associated with oil shale development for 27 reservoirs with 736,770 acre-feet of water in the mainstem of the Colorado River basin.
Companies have been able to hang onto these conditional water rights in some cases for over 50 years without using them because Colorado water law allows a would-be water user to reserve their place in the priority system based on when they applied for the right — not when they put water to use — while they work toward developing the water. Under the cornerstone of water law known as prior appropriation, older waters rights get first use of the river.
To maintain a conditional right, an applicant must every six years file what’s known as a diligence application with the water court, proving that they still have a need for the water, that they have taken substantial steps toward putting the water to use and that they “can and will” eventually use the water. They must essentially prove they are not speculating and hoarding water rights they won’t soon use.
But the bar for proving diligence is low. Judges are hesitant to abandon these conditional water rights, even if they have been languishing without being used for decades.
Before Puckett dropped its diligence application, John Cyran, senior staff attorney for Western Resource Advocates’ Healthy Rivers Program, said holding onto conditional rights like these raised speculation concerns.
“The water is being held without a plan to use it, which violates a central tenet in western water law,” Cyran said in an email. “Water shortages are affecting Colorado’s communities, fish and wildlife. We cannot afford to let companies profit off these shortages by holding onto unused conditional water rights.”
Crystal River Ranch was the only entity to file a statement of opposition to Puckett’s application. The deadline to file a statement of opposition is Jan. 31.
Crystal River Ranch also expressed concern that the over-50-year-old water rights had never been used and said that over the five decades Puckett had not shown it would develop them.
“During that period, the applicant has failed to obtain the necessary federal, state and local permits required to develop this reservoir,” the statement of opposition reads. “Therefore, this subject conditional water right must be canceled and abandoned.”
The Thompson Creek water rights had been part of a proposed “integrated system” that includes conditional water rights for two proposed small reservoirs, and a pump and pipeline on Starkey Gulch, a tributary of Parachute Creek. The application did not specifically mention work regarding the Thompson Creek reservoir site in its list of diligence activities and Puckett had said that diligence on any part of the system constitutes diligence with respect to the entire system. It is unclear how the Thompson Creek reservoir would have operated with these other parts of the system, but Christensen alluded to the reservoir being conceived of as additional back-up supply.
Christensen said the water rights applications for the Starkey Gulch components are still going forward because those water rights are closer to Puckett’s landholdings. These diligence applications were filed on Nov. 30 and so far no entities have filed statements of opposition.
In the last two weeks, #snowpack gains were 137 percent of average at our West Slope stations and 99 percent of average at our East Slope stations — @Northern_Water
January 29, 2024
The West Slope stations are now at 96 percent and East Slope stations are at 93 percent of median snowpack for this date.
Liberal, #Kansas: 2024 Ogallala Aquifer Summit “Building Trust, Mobilizing Collaboration” — Irrigation Innovation Consortium March 18-19, 2024
Click the link for all the inside skinny and to register on the Irrigation Innovation Consortium website:
About: This highly interactive event convenes water management leaders and others from across the Ogallala region to learn about and from each other’s work to slow aquifer decline and support ecosystem and community resilience.
When? Please plan to attend both days :
- Monday, March 18 1 pm-5 pm CDT & evening social 6:30-8:30 pm
- Tuesday, March 19 8 am-4 pm CDT
#Snowpack news January 29, 2024
Memo: West Fork Dam ‘does not align well’ with federal policy — @WyoFile #LittleSnakeRiver #YampaRiver
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
January 25, 2024
Wyoming’s plan to construct the West Fork Dam in the Medicine Bow National Forest “does not align well” with federal policy and management plans, a forest official wrote in a 2022 brief intended for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.
The Medicine Bow environmental policy analyst who evaluated the state’s plan for the 264-foot high dam also said the proposal might not meet a U.S. Forest Service public-interest standard necessary for a land swap that would enable dam construction.
The critical assessment was penned as Medicine Bow staff prepared a briefing paper on Wyoming’s plan to construct the dam and its 130-acre reservoir in Carbon County to serve fewer than 100 irrigators who want more late-season water. Forest officials sought staffers’ input on the proposed development above the Little Snake River.
Medicine Bow officials were preparing the late-2022 briefing for regional and Washington D.C. officials, unnamed VIPs and Secretary Vilsack, according to documents obtained by WyoFile through a records request.
In an internal Medicine Bow email, forest environmental policy analyst Matt Schweich asked that the briefing paper state that “[t]he Forest is concerned that the State’s current preferred concept does not align well with Forest Service policy and the Forest plan, that it may not be in the public interest, and is likely to be highly controversial with the public.”
Ninety-six percent of comments on the plan opposed the project, a WyoFile tally of submissions showed. Criticism ranged from the project’s environmental impacts to Wyoming’s rosy analysis of public benefits and the state’s willingness to fund the bulk of the project for the benefit of private irrigators.
An ongoing environmental review necessary to advance the Wyoming project will determine whether the dam plan meets federal policies and the Medicine Bow management plan. A federal-state land exchange necessary for construction must be found to be in the public interest. An environmental impact statement and associated reviews of the proposal have been delayed once, and their completion date remains uncertain.
A Medicine Bow spokesman said Schweich’s opinion does not reflect the official position of the agency, which will only be revealed through the environmental impact statement.
Last puzzle piece
The Forest Service, U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are working to complete the EIS in a process largely obscured from public view. The emails, however, provide another peek into the thinking of Forest Service specialists regarding the merits of the controversial project.
In another internal discussion previously reported by WyoFile, a Medicine Bow hydrologist expressed worry that the dam proposal wasn’t being thoroughly vetted. Medicine Bow spokesman Aaron Voos dismissed that worry last year, characterizing the criticism as healthy agency discussion.
Schweich added his newly revealed assessment of the dam plan in a Sept. 26, 2022 email exchange as Medicine Bow staffers were preparing a “Hot topic” report for leadership, including Vilsack. Fully four years before that, Wyoming water developers had settled on the size of the dam, the capacity and size of the reservoir and the site of the complex. Wyoming has not deviated significantly from those plans.
A month before Schweich wrote his 2022 assessment, Wyoming had provided the last piece of the puzzle, telling Medicine Bow officials the state would seek 1,762 acres of forest land in an exchange that would enable construction of the dam and reservoir. Jenifer Scoggin, director of the Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments, provided that land-swap information to Medicine Bow officials in August 2022,according to a letter she wrote later that year.
Medicine Bow officials appeared to have known the size of the dam and reservoir, their location and the federal acreage Wyoming sought when the officials asked Schweich for his assessment.
A month after Schweich responded, Wyoming submitted its formal proposal to the Medicine Bow for a land exchange and dam construction.
Regardless how well-informed Schweich was when he made his 2022 assessment, spokesman Voos said it was unclear at that time exactly what the state intended.
“[T]he internal, draft email of Hot Topics updates [to which Schweich contributed] is prior to receipt of any formal land exchange proposal from the State,” Voos wrote WyoFile. “At the time, multiple informal discussions were taking place surrounding conceptual ideas.
“Since it was unclear what the State’s future use of any current National Forest System land might have been at that time,” Voos wrote, “then yes, there was the possibility for misalignment with our policy and Plan.”
WyoFile obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. Although the environmental impact statement is being written largely out of public view, the public had an opportunity to weigh in on the issue before the analysis began. People will be able to comment on the review when it is completed.
With the World Stumbling Past 1.5 Degrees of Warming, Scientists Warn #Climate Shocks Could Trigger Unrest and Authoritarian Backlash — Inside Climate News #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):
January 28, 2024
Most of the public seems unaware that global temperatures will soon push past the target to which the U.N. hoped to limit warming, but researchers see social and psychological crises brewing.
As Earth’s annual average temperature pushes against the 1.5 degree Celsius limit beyond which climatologists expect the impacts of global warming to intensify, social scientists warn that humanity may be about to sleepwalk into a dangerous new era in human history. Research shows the increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlashes.
Established by the 2015 Paris Agreement and affirmed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 1.5 degree mark has been a cliff edge that climate action has endeavored to avoid, but the latest analyses of global temperature data showed 2023 teetering on that red line.
One major dataset suggested that the threshold was already crossed in 2023, and most projections say 2024 will be even warmer. Current global climate policies have the world on a path to heat by about 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would threaten modern human civilization within the lifespan of children born today.
Paris negotiators were intentionally vague about the endeavor to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put the goal in the context of 30-year global averages. Earlier this month, the Berkeley Earth annual climate report showed Earth’s average temperature in 2023 at 1.54 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, marking the first step past the target.
But it’s barely registering with people who are being bombarded with inaccurate climate propaganda and distracted by the rising cost of living and regional wars, said Reinhard Steurer, a climate researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.
“The real danger is that there are so many other crises around us that there is no effort left for the climate crisis,” he said. “We will find all kinds of reasons not to put more effort into climate protection, because we are overburdened with other things like inflation and wars all around us.”
Steurer said he doesn’t expect any official announcement from major climate institutions until long after the 1.5 degree threshold is actually crossed, when some years will probably already be edging toward 2 degrees Celsius. “I think most scientists recognize that 1.5 is gone,” he said.
“We’ll be doing this for a very long time,” he added, “not accepting facts, pretending that we are doing a good job, pretending that it’s not going to be that bad.”
In retrospect, using the 1.5 degree temperature rise as the key metric of whether climate action was working may have been a bad idea, he said.
“It’s language nobody really understands, unfortunately, outside of science,” he said. ”You always have to explain that 1.5 means a climate we can adapt to and manage the consequences, 2 degrees of heating is really dangerous, and 3 means collapse of civilization.”
Absent any formal notification of breaching the 1.5 goal, he hopes more scientists talk publicly about worst-case outcomes.
“It would really make a difference if scientists talked more about societal collapse and how to prepare for that because it would signal, now it’s getting real,” he said. “It’s much more tangible than 1.5 degrees.”
Instead, recent public climate discourse was dominated by feel-good announcements about how COP28 kept the 1.5 goal alive, he added.
“This is classic performative politics,” he said. “If the fossil fuel industry can celebrate the outcome of the COP, that’s not a good sign.” [ed. emphasis mine]
Like many social scientists, Steurer is worried that the increasingly severe climate shocks that warming greater than 1.5 degrees brings will reverberate politically as people reach for easy answers.
“That is usually denial, in particular when it comes to right-wing parties,” he said. “That’s the easiest answer you can find.”
“Global warming will be catastrophic sooner or later, but for now, denial works,” he said. “And that’s all that matters for the next election.”
‘Fear, Terror and Anxiety’
Social policy researcher Paul Hoggett, professor emeritus at the University of the West of England in Bristol, said the scientific roots of 1.5-degree target date back to research in the early 2000s that culminated in a University of Exeter climate conference at which scientists first spelled out the risks of triggering irreversible climate tipping points above that level of warming.
“I think it’s still seen very much as that key marker of where we move from something which is incremental, perhaps to something which ceases to be incremental,” he said. “But there’s a second reality, which is the reality of politics and policymaking.”
The first reality is “profoundly disturbing,” but in the political world, 1.5 is a symbolic maker, he said.
“It’s more rhetorical. it’s a narrative of 1.5,” he said, noting the disconnect of science and policy. “You almost just shrug your shoulders. As the first reality worsens, the political and cultural response becomes more perverse.”
A major announcement about breaching the 1.5 mark in today’s political and social climate could be met with extreme denial in a political climate marked by “a remorseless rise of authoritarian forms of nationalism,” he said. “Even an announcement from the Pope himself would be taken as just another sign of a global elite trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
An increasing number of right-wing narratives simply see this as a set of lies, he added.
“I think this is a huge issue that is going to become more and more important in the coming years,” he said. “We’re going backwards to where we were 20 years ago, when there was a real attempt to portray climate science as misinformation,” he said. “More and more right wing commentators will portray what comes out of the IPCC, for example, as just a pack of lies.”
The IPCC’s reports represent a basic tenet of modernity—the idea that there is no problem for which a solution cannot be found, he said.
“However, over the last 100 years, this assumption has periodically been put to the test and has been found wanting,” Hoggett wrote in a 2023 paper. The climate crisis is one of those situations with no obvious solution, he wrote.
In a new book, Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition, Hoggett says the climate emergency is one of the big drivers of authoritarian nationalism, which plays on the terror and anxiety the crisis inspires.
“Those are crucial political and individual emotions,” he said. “And it’s those things that drive this non-rational refusal to see what’s in front of your eyes.”
“At times of such huge uncertainty, a veritable plague of toxic public feelings can be unleashed, which provide the effective underpinning for political movements such as populism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism,” he said.
“When climate reality starts to get tough, you secure your borders, you secure your own sources of food and energy, and you keep out the rest of them. That’s the politics of the armed lifeboat.”
The Emotional Climate
“I don’t think people like facing things they can’t affect,” said psychotherapist Rebecca Weston, co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America. “And in trauma, people do everything that they possibly can to stop feeling what is unbearable to feel.”
That may be one reason why the imminent breaching of the 1.5 degree limit may not stir the public, she said.
“We protect ourselves from fear, we protect ourselves from deep grief on behalf of future generations and we protect ourselves from guilt and shame. And I think that the fossil fuel industry knows that,” she said. “We can be told something over and over and over again, but if we have an identity and a sense of ourselves tied up in something else, we will almost always refer to that, even if it’s at the cost of pretending that something that is true is not true.”
Such deep disavowal is part of an elaborate psychological system for coping with the unbearable. “It’s not something we can just snap our fingers and get ourselves out of,” she said.
People who point out the importance of the 1.5-degree warming limit are resented because they are intruding on peoples’ psychological safety, she said, and they become pariahs. “The way societies enforce this emotionally is really very striking,” she added.
But how people will react to passing the 1.5 target is hard to predict, Weston said.
“I do think it revolves around the question of agency and the question of meaning in one’s life,” she said. “And I think that’s competing with so many other things that are going on in the world at the same time, not coincidentally, like the political crises that are happening globally, the shift to the far right in Europe, the shift to the far right in the U.S. and the shift in Argentina.”
Those are not unrelated, she said, because a lack of agency produces a yearning for false, exclusionary solutions and authoritarianism.
“If there’s going to be something that keeps me up at night, it’s not the 1.5. It’s the political implications of that feeling of helplessness,” she said. “People will do an awful lot to avoid feeling helpless. That can mean they deny the problem in the first place. Or it could mean that they blame people who are easier targets, and there is plenty of that to witness happening in the world. Or it can be utter and total despair, and a turning inward and into a defeatist place.”
She said reaching the 1.5 limit will sharpen questions about addressing the problem politically and socially.
“I don’t think most people who are really tracking climate change believe it’s a question of technology or science,” she said. “The people who are in the know, know deeply that these are political and social and emotional questions. And my sense is that it will deepen a sense of cynicism and rage, and intensify the polarization.”
Unimpressed by Science
Watching the global temperature surging past the 1.5 degree mark without much reaction from the public reinforces the idea that the focus on the physical science of climate change in recent decades came at the expense of studying how people and communities will be affected and react to global warming, said sociologist and author Dana Fisher, a professor in the School of International Service at American University and director of its Center for Environment, Community, and Equity.
“It’s a fool’s errand to continue down that road right now,” she said. “It’s been an abysmal ratio of funds that are going to understand the social conflict that’s going to come from climate shocks, the climate migration and the ways that social processes will have to shift. None of that has been done.”
Passing the 1.5 degree threshold will “add fuel to the fire of the vanguard of the climate movement,” she said. “Groups that are calling for systemic change, that are railing against incremental policy making and against business as usual are going to be empowered by this information, and we’re going to see those people get more involved and be more confrontational.”
And based on the historical record, a rise in climate activism is likely to trigger a backlash, a dangerous chain reaction that she outlined in her new book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.
“When you see a big cycle of activism growing, you get a rise in counter-movements, particularly as activism becomes more confrontational, even if it’s nonviolent, like we saw during the Civil Rights period,” she said. “And it will lead to clashes.”
Looking at the historic record, she said, shows that repressive crackdowns on civil disobedience is often where the violence starts. There are signs that pattern will repeat, with police raids and even pre-emptive arrests of climate activists in Germany, and similar repressive measures in the United Kingdom and other countries.
“I think that’s an important story to talk about, that people are going to push back against climate action just as much as they’re going to push for it,” she said. “There are those that are going to feel like they’re losing privileged access to resources and funding and subsidies.”
A government dealing effectively with climate change would try to deal with that by making sure there were no clear winners and losers, she said, but the climate shocks that come with passing the 1.5 degree mark will worsen and intensify social tensions.
“There will be more places where you can’t go outside during certain times of the year because of either smoke from fires, or extreme heat, or flooding, or all the other things that we know are coming,” she said. “That’s just going to empower more people to get off their couches and become activists.”
‘A Life or Death Task For Humanity’
Public ignorance of the planet’s passing the 1.5 degree mark depends on “how long the powers-that-be can get away with throwing up smokescreens and pretending that they are doing something significant,” said famed climate researcher James Hansen, who recently co-authored a papershowing that warming is accelerating at a pace that will result in 2 degrees of warming within a couple of decades.
“As long as they can maintain the 1.5C fiction, they can claim that they are doing their job,” he said. “They will keep faking it as long as the scientific community lets them get away with it.”
But even once the realization of passing 1.5 is widespread, it might not change the social and political responses much, said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and activist in California.
“Not enough people care,” he said. “I’ve been a climate activist since 2006. I’ve tried so many things, I’ve had so many conversations, and I still don’t know what it will take for people to care. Maybe they never will.” [ed. emphasis mine]
2024 #COleg: After the Supreme Court gutted federal protections for half of #Colorado’s waters, can state leaders fill the gap?: Wetlands, seasonal streams no longer have federal protection from pollution, prompting legislation — The #Denver Post #WOTUS
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
When the Cameron Peak wildfire ripped across northern Colorado in 2020, it left hundreds of thousands of acres charred and dusty — except for a series of beaver ponds tucked inside Poudre Canyon. The wetlands survived the state’s largest recorded wildfire and acted as a buffer as the flames raged through the canyon. And after the flames were extinguished, they served as a sponge to absorb floodwaters sped by the lack of vegetation, minimizing flood damage downstream. But a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year left wetlands like the ones in Poudre Canyon — as well as thousands of miles of seasonal streams critical to the state’s water system — without protection under federal law. The court’s majority limited the coverage of the Clean Water Act, leaving protection gaps for more than half of Colorado’s waters that lawmakers, conservationists, developers and state water quality officials are rushing to fill…Colorado, like many states, relied on the federal government’s permitting process to regulate when people could dig up waterways or wetlands and fill them in — activities known as dredging and filling. Although Colorado has its own Water Quality Control Act that makes it illegal to pollute waters, there is now no process to vet proposed dredge and fill projects, or to issue permits allowing those projects to legally proceed…
Colorado House Speaker Julie McCluskie is crafting a bill this legislative session to give the CDPHE the authority to fill that gap. But key questions remain about how far lawmakers and state officials are willing to go in replacing federal protections…
In May, the high court’s justices ruled 5-4 that wetlands not connected on the surface to another body of federally protected water do not qualify for protection themselves under the Clean Water Act. The law also doesn’t protect wetlands connected to rivers or lakes via groundwater below the surface, the court found, and it doesn’t protect streams that flow seasonally or only after precipitation falls. The ruling left the protection of the newly exempt waters to the states, many of which do not have robust water protection laws…
The Department of Public Health and Environment in July enacted an emergency rule to provide some oversight over dredge and fill activities in waters that lost federal protection…The state policy states that the department will not punish people who dredge or fill in waters if the person notifies the CDPHE, the impacted area is small and the activities comply broadly with the federal law that existed before the Supreme Court decision. The goal, said Nicole Rowan, director of CDPHE’s Water Quality Control Division, is to give developers and others a way to proceed with projects without fearing legal trouble because of ambiguity in the law.
National Academy of Sciences honors geosciences professor Ellen E. Wohl for advancements in river science — Colorado State University #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the release on the Colorado State University website (Jayme DeLoss):
Colorado State University Geosciences Professor Ellen Wohl is so at home in rivers and streams that if you manage to catch her in her office on campus, she might be listening to stream sounds while she works.
The prolific field scientist and University Distinguished Professor has studied rivers and watersheds from ephemeral desert channels to torrents in the tropics on every continent except Antarctica. Today, the National Academy of Sciences announced that it will honor Wohl with the G.K. Warren Prize for her expansive research and advancements in river and watershed sciences.
“Her work has dramatically influenced and guided river management and restoration worldwide,” the academy said in its announcement. “Wohl is the author of an extensive number of publications and books, introducing broad audiences to river science, and is an extraordinary mentor and role model for women in science.”
Wohl is what’s known as a fluvial geomorphologist, or a scientist who studies river processes and physical characteristics. She was drawn to CSU by its legacy of water research and its location, where she would have quick access to mountain streams.
“We have such a great community of people to work with at CSU who are focused on all different aspects of water,” Wohl said. “If I have a question about water chemistry, fish, macro-invertebrates, riparian plants, whatever, there’s somebody I can talk to on campus.”
Respect for rivers
Wohl said that she couldn’t resist studying rivers and called them a delightful environment in which to work. They are also critically important, she added.
“Our survival absolutely depends on them. Particularly in Colorado,” Wohl said. “All our drinking water in the West, certainly in Fort Collins, comes from surface water. That’s not going to change.”
Her recent research examines how rivers respond to wildfire. After a fire, excess water and sediment rush down denuded slopes, causing flash floods, debris flows and sedimentation in drinking water reservoirs. Wohl’s goal is to improve river resilience for all the living things that rely on the water.
“What can we do that will make these systems better able to recover after fire and that will have downstream impacts on the communities that drink that water?”
Wohl said the answer lies in understanding the complexities, or as she calls it “messiness,” of river networks. Many U.S. rivers have been simplified to single channels that flush everything downstream very effectively. Her work has found that restoring some of the historic messiness, including floodplains, branching channels, fallen trees in the water and beaver activity, enhances river resilience.
Slowing downstream transport also gives microbes that live in the floodplain and underneath streams time to clean the water. Microbes and plants can break down excess nitrate, which is a serious issue along the Front Range, Wohl said.
Nitrate from agricultural fertilizer, feedlots and burning fossil fuels is transported in the atmosphere and falls as rain, snow or dry deposition on the eastern side of the Continental Divide, ending up in surface water. Consuming excess nitrate in drinking water is detrimental to human health. Excess nitrate in reservoirs also can lead to algae blooms that can be toxic to people and other organisms. Additionally, algae blooms can deplete oxygen in the water, causing fish kills.
“It’s a great concern for water quality managers to try and do what we can to reduce nitrate levels,” Wohl said.
Dry outlook
Wohl said Colorado’s future holds “more rainfall, but generally less water” due to continued warming and drying of the climate and human consumption. Snowpack, which supplies water to communities and feeds river ecosystems, will decline, along with river flows throughout the state.
“The good news is we have some wiggle room because we waste an awful lot of water, so we can conserve a lot more than we use,” she said. “But there’s a limit to how much you can conserve.”
The 1922 Colorado River Compact, which was renegotiated 100 years later to account for declining flow and a rapidly growing population, was based on a limited record of stream measurements taken during anomalously wet years, Wohl said, so the river’s water was overallocated from the start. Fluvial geomorphologists can extend the streamflow record and estimate long-term water supply by looking at geologic indicators – information that could help with future allocations.
Benefiting those downstream
Across the diverse environments in which Wohl has worked, the common thread is that they were all shaped by flowing water, the same force that has shaped a career she thoroughly enjoys.
“In addition to going to all the amazing natural places, by far one of the highlights of my career is working with really motivated, enthusiastic, capable people,” Wohl said.
The National Academy of Sciences will present Wohl with the G.K. Warren Prize April 28 during the NAS 161st Annual Meeting. The prize is awarded once every five years.
Wohl plans to use the $20,000 prize to establish a graduate student research fellowship through the Geological Society of America, in honor of her Ph.D. advisor Victor R. Baker.
Wohl’s award was among 20 announced today by the National Academy of Sciences that recognize extraordinary scientific achievements. View the full list of recipients in the NAS press release.
Save the Poudre is suing to stop NISP project that would provide water to 15 communities — The #FortCollins Coloradoan #PoudreRiver #SouthPlatte #River
Click the link to read the article on the Fort Collins Coloradoan website (Rebecca Powell). Here’s an excerpt:
Environmental group Save The Poudre has filed a lawsuit to try and stop the Northern Integrated Supply Project from going forward to construct two reservoirs and supply water to 15 communities…In the lawsuit, filed Thursday, Save The Poudre says the diversion of water from the Poudre River would cause severe damage to the river, including its aquatic life, the Poudre River Whitewater Park in Fort Collins and the riparian corridor…The lawsuit also alleges that in approving the permit, the Army Corps violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act because it didn’t adequately consider alternatives and didn’t choose the least environmentally damaging alternative, respectively…
NISP would divert water from the Poudre and South Platte rivers to store in two new reservoirs: Glade Reservoir north of Fort Collins and the smaller Galeton Reservoir east of Ault. Communities that would be served by the project include the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District and others in Weld and Boulder counties.
Aridity Could Dry Up Southwestern Mine Proposals — @InsideClimate News
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Wyatt Myskow):
Critical minerals for the clean energy transition are abundant in the Southwest, but the dozens of mines proposed to access them will require vast sums of water, something in short supply in the desert.
One by one, leaders from across Arizona gave speeches touting the importance of water conservation at Phoenix City Hall as they celebrated the announcement of voluntary agreements to preserve the declining Colorado River in November.
When Tao Etpison took the mic, his speech echoed those who went before him. Water is the lifeblood of existence, and users of the Colorado River Basin were one step closer to preserving the system that has helped life in the Southwest flourish. Then he brought up the elephant in the room: Arizona’s groundwater protection was lacking, and mining companies were looking to take advantage.
“The two largest foreign-based multinational mining companies in the world intend to construct the massive Resolution Copper Mine near Superior,” said Etpison, the vice chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe. “This mine will use, at a minimum, 775,000 acre feet of groundwater, and once the groundwater is gone, it’s gone. How can this be in the best interests of Arizona?”
The question is one the state and the Southwest must answer. Mine claims for the elements critical to the clean energy transition are piling up from Arizona to Nevada to Utah. Lithium is needed for the batteries to store wind and solar energy and power electric vehicles. Copper provides the wiring to send electricity where it will be needed to satisfy exploding demand. But water stands in the way of the transition, with drought playing into nearly every proposed renewable energy development, from solar to hydropower, as the Southwest debates what to do with every drop it has left as the region undergoes aridification due to climate change and decades of overconsumption.
Mining opponents argue the proposals could impact endangered species, tribal rights, air quality and, of course, water—both its quantity and its quality. Across the Southwest, the story of 2023 was how water users, from farmers in the Colorado River Basin to fast-growing cities in the Phoenix metropolitan area, needed to use less water, forcing changes to residential development and agricultural practices. But left out of that conversation, natural resource experts and environmentalists say, is the water used by mining operations and the amount that would be consumed by new mines.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe has fought for years to stop Resolution’s proposed mine. It would be built on top of Oak Flat, a sacred site to the Apache and other Indigenous communities, and a habitat of rare species like the endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus, which lives only in the Tonto National Forest near the town of Superior. The fate of the mine now rests with the U.S. District Court in Arizona after the grassroots group Apache Stronghold filed a lawsuit to stop it, arguing its development would violate Native people’s religious rights.
But for communities located near the mine and across the Phoenix metropolitan area, the water it would consume is just as big of an issue.
Throughout the mine’s lifespan, Resolution estimates it would use 775,000 acre feet of water—enough for at least 1.5 million Arizona households over roughly 40 years. And experts say the mine would likely need far more.
“By pumping billions of gallons of groundwater from the East Salt River Valley, this project would make Arizona’s goal for stewardship of its scarce groundwater resources unreachable,” one report commissioned by the San Carlos Apache Tribe reads. In one hydrologist’s testimony to Congress, water consumption was estimated to be 50,000 acre feet a year—about 35,000 more than the company has proposed drawing from the aquifer.
The Resolution copper mine isn’t the only water-intensive mining operation being proposed. Many of what the industry describes as “critical minerals,” like lithium and copper, are found throughout the Southwest, leading to a flurry of mining claims on the region’s federally managed public lands.
“Water is going to be scarcer in the Southwest but the mining industry is basically immune from all these issues,” said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney at the Western Mining Action Project, which has represented tribes and environmental groups in mining-related lawsuits, including the case over Oak Flat.
‘The Lords of Yesterday’
To understand mining in the U.S., you have to start with the Mining Law of 1872.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law as a way to continue the country’s development westward, allowing anyone to mine on federal lands for free. To do this, all one needs to do is plant four stakes into the ground where they think there are minerals and file a claim. Unlike other industries that make use of public lands—such as the oil and gas industry—no royalties are paid for the minerals extracted from the lands owned by American taxpayers.
Flynn referred to mining as the last of the “Lords of Yesterday”—a term coined by Charles Wilkinson, a long-time environmental law professor at the University of Colorado who died earlier this year—referring to the industries like oil and gas drilling, ranching and logging that were given carte blanche by the federal government to develop the West after the Civil War and push Indigenous populations off the land. All of those industry regulations have changed, Flynn said, except mining.
That’s led mining to be viewed as the top use of public lands by regulators who give it more weight than conservation or recreational activities, he said.
“You don’t have to actually demonstrate that there are any minerals in a mining claim, you don’t have to provide any evidence that there is a mineral there at all,” said John Hadder, the executive director of Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Nevada that monitors mining claims. “You can just be suspicious—and there’s a lot of suspicion going around.”
Most of Nevada is completely reliant on groundwater, an increasingly scarce resource. Without water, companies hunting critical minerals can’t mine, Hadder said, so they look to acquire water rights from other users, typically by buying up farms and ranches, changing the economics and demographics of a community. When the mines are developed, they can impact local streams, groundwater levels and the quality of the water as toxins seep into aquifers and surface supplies over the years. Now, with the clean energy transition gaining traction, there’s a new mining boom, prompting increasing concerns over how local ecosystems will be impacted. In Nevada alone, there are more than 20,000 mining claims related to lithium, the biggest of which are, of course, drawing controversy.
Water’s Role in Mine Fights
In northern Nevada, companies have proposed two massive lithium mines—Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge—in groundwater basins that are already over appropriated. Both have drawn heavy scrutiny, the former for being proposed on a sacred site for local Indigenous tribes that is also range for area ranchers and endangered sage grouse, and the latter for threatening an endangered wildflower found nowhere else in the world.
Now, Canada-based Rover Metals is looking to drill a lithium exploration project near the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, a wetland habitat in Nevada near the California border that supports a dozen endangered and threatened species and is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, which environmentalists call “the Galapagos of the desert.”
“Nevadans almost more than any other state have had to wrestle with the availability or lack thereof of water for development for its entire history,” said Mason Voehl, the executive director of the Amargosa Conservancy, an environmental group that has helped lead the push to protect the refuge. “This is sort of compounding that already really complex challenge.”
New Mexico’s Middle #RioGrande: forest of cottonwoods, forest of pecans — John Fleck (InkStain.net)
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (John Fleck):
This Rio Grande crossing, just south of Belen, 30-plus miles downstream from Albuquerque, has changed dramatically since Jack Delano took the picture above in spring 1943.
THE BOSQUE
I’ve stared at Delano’s picture often, because of the story it tells – a broad open river valley. It’s nothing like that today.
I pieced together some dirt roads and ditchbanks to visit the site on this morning’s bike ride. I had hopes of duplicating Delano’s picture, but the train traffic made standing in the middle of the tracks seem ill-advised. The picture to the right, facing the river looking east, should give you a feel. The Rio Grande here is now flanked by a magnificent cottonwood gallery forest, with low stands of coyote willow and salt cedar and some other stuff. We call it “the bosque.”
Looking at the picture last night as I was doing the map work to figure a sane bike route to get to the bridge, the date clicked: Spring 1943. In thinking about the modern relationship between human communities and the Rio Grande, 1941-42 is a dividing line – the last big flood years, the floods that drove the major changes in river management that created an ecological niche that the cottonwoods exploited in the second half of the twentieth century with full-throated glee.
Delano’s picture can be misleading. It wasn’t all treeless like that. The 1917-18 Rio Grande drainage survey, which is our best “before” snapshot of the valley, shows clumps of cottonwoods up and down the river. Following the 1941-42 floods, the federal Middle Rio Grande Project reengineered the main river channel with a series of sediment traps on the banks that were intended to push the river into a narrower central channel. In the process, they created ideal seed bed habitat for the cottonwoods to fill in the empty spaces.
The result is a linear cottonwood gallery forest more than 150 miles long. I’ve always called it “continuous,” but I just scanned the whole length using satellite imagery and found two short gaps. So “nearly continuous,” to add precision.
The bosque is often treated as one of the Middle Valley’s great natural treasures, and I don’t disagree. But “natural” may not be quite the right word.
PECANS
Next stop: one of the most interesting climate change adaptation experiments underway in Middle Valley agriculture.
Past the railroad bridge, I found a ditch crossing and peeled away from the river toward the sand hills to the east, winding through the small farms of Jarales that make this stretch of the valley a lovely exemplar of the “ribbons of green” we talk about in the new book. Nearly all the farms were less than 10 acres – non-commercial, “custom and culture” agriculture, mostly alfalfa or other forage crops, lots of horses. Dodging the one busy highway the best I could, I veered into a neighborhood and under the interstate, where the road kicked up to a geomorphic bench in the sand hills maybe 30 feet in elevation above the nearby valley floor.
The pecans are in the distance in the picture to the right, though you can’t really see them. I was on relatively unfamiliar ground, and was cautious in my interpretation of the “No Trespassing” signs on the ditchbank road. It’s land that was once scrubland just like the land in the foreground. Now it’s irrigated with water from the ditch in the picture, to the tune of more than 1,000 acre feet per year. (We don’t know exactly. We don’t meter this use of water here.) There was a lot of controversy nearly 20 years ago when the land was brought into production. Critics (included regular Inkstain commenter Bill Turner, who was on the MRGCD board at the time) argued it wasn’t entitled to irrigation water from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s ditches. I’m not going to relitigate that argument here. Those objecting to serving the land with MRGCD irrigation water lost. Now the land is home to a fascinating experiment in climate change adaptation.
With a warming climate, the optimal range for pecans has moved north. (UNM Water Resources Program grad Tylee Griego took a deep dive into the pecans’ migration here.)
We have seen a century of failed efforts to foster a commercially successful crop in the valley – wheat, tomatoes, sugar beats, pinto beans, tobacco (!). Pecans are the latest, and rather than climate change making it harder to grow stuff, in this case it has made it easier. By increasing irrigated acreage in the valley. We usually think of agricultural climate change adaptation as “crop switching,” not “crop adding.” In addition to the big orchards by the river, the latest USDA CroplandCROS dataset, which uses satellite data and algorithms to identify crop types, is showing more pecans in small patches across the valley. I don’t full trust CroplandCROS – it gets a lot of pixels wrong ’round here, unfortunately. But this just means more bike rides needed to “ground truth” my blog posts. This is a part of the valley I don’t know as well, so fun ahead!
As I was riding through Jarales this morning and writing this post in my head, I was playing with the theme suggested by the two forests – each spread across a niche created by human alteration of the hydrologic system. Not sure it quite works, but I’ll leave it here.
A NOTE ON JACK DELANO
Jack Delano’s 1943 trip through New Mexico is worthy of note.
Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov in Ukraine, was one of the Farm Service Administration/Office of War Information photographers whose work dominates our visual understanding of the 1930s and early ’40s in the United States. His photographs of the AT&SF rail yard in Albuquerque, taken on the same spring 1943 trip that he took the Belen railroad bridge above, represent a remarkable documentation of a moment in time, as freight bustled through Albuquerque in service of the war effort.
We tend to think of the classic FSA photography as “documentary” work of the highest order – which it was. But it also was government propaganda – artists paid by the government to tell particular kinds of stories, and share particular kinds of messages.
Much of the classic visual vocabulary of the FSA pictures – think Dorothea Lange – is very much black and white. But with the development of Kodachrome in the 1930s, photographers of the period were beginning to shoot in color too. Most of Delano’s Albuuquerque pictures are in black and white, but his color picture of the Albuquerque rail yard, taken from the Lead Avenue orverpass circa 1943, is a classic.
Chaffee County Commissioners hear proposal for Clear Creek Reservoir expansion — The Chaffee County Times #ClearCreek #ArkansasRiver
Click the link to read the article on the Chaffee County Times website (Hannah Harn). Here’s an excerpt:
The presented concept project would be a partnership between Pueblo Water and [Colorado Springs Utilities] to enlarge the reservoir. Colorado Springs Utilities would use the enlarged space for the first 30 years, at which point Pueblo Water would get half of it. The reservoir’s dam was built in 1902 and was used by the Otero Irrigation Co. until 1955 when the reservoir was sold to Pueblo Water. Since then, [Alan] Ward said, Pueblo Water has “spent a lot of money doing various projects to upgrade the dam for improved safety.”
The purpose of the project “is to bring it up to modern dam safety standards,” Ward said. “The challenge with the dam as it is today … the dam is built on a foundation of rock and gravel, which allows a lot of water to seep through. We’ve constantly battled seepage issues over the years.”
The other reason for the enlargement is to increase water storage to “increase resiliency, reliability, and flexibility” in meeting future water needs for Pueblo Water and Colorado Springs Utilities. The current dam is 70 feet high with a capacity of 11,140 acre-feet (currently restricted at 9,100 af). The enlargement proposal would bring the dam to a height of 106 feet and 30,000 af capacity. The reservoir’s surface area would increase from 414 acres to 631 acres. The dam would be built on the downstream side of the current dam, closer to the highway. Another impact of the project…They also may be adding an upstream buttress to hold things in place in case of an earthquake…Around 30-40 acres of wetlands around the reservoir would be impacted as the reservoir backs further up the valley, as well as a few small areas at the base of the existing dam. Ward also noted the large boreal toad population in nearby ponds.
The #USGS & @BLMNational have release a report with new oil and gas surface management guidance to support successful #reclamation at existing and future well pads — USGS
Click the link to read the release on the USGS website:
The report provides specific and comprehensive reclamation guidance for surface oil and gas exploration and development.
The U. S. Geological Survey, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, recently published an oil and gas reclamation techniques and methods report that will, for the first time, give land managers and oil and gas operators specific tools to successfully reclaim disturbed lands during and after oil and gas activities.
Resource inventory, monitoring and protection of oil and gas sites are mandated by federal statutes and regulations, yet this is the first publication defining standards and guidelines for how to reclaim, monitor, and successfully reclaim disturbed oil and gas sites available at a national level.
The report also emphasizes the importance of best management practices, clear standards, effective monitoring and minimizing surface disturbance for successful land reclamation.
Initiated through an interagency agreement with the BLM, USGS and BLM drew upon existing federal reclamation policy, scientific literature review, practical field experience and expertise from various sources such as federal and state agencies, oil and gas contractors, and academia to produce the document, intended to be used for each reclamation step from start to finish.
“The BLM’s land management experience and the USGS’s best available science come together to create this powerful tool in the toolbox for federal agencies working on surface management of oil and gas to ensure environmentally responsible outcomes,” said Benjamin Gruber, BLM Acting Assistant Director for Energy, Minerals and Realty Management. “We’re proud to partner with the USGS to produce this guide that is relevant for all parts of the process—from the time a company develops its drilling application to monitoring reclamation activities after wells are plugged.”
New, comprehensive guidelines
Prior to this report, the industry relied on a set of guidelines known as the ‘Gold Book’ for practical information about oil and gas leasing and permitting, operations, bonding and reclamation planning processes. However, the Gold Book lacks the type of precise guidance often found in instructional memorandums and handbooks produced by surface management agency offices, multi-jurisdictional groups or state agencies.
To maximize the efficacy of reclamation efforts, a set of national guidance and policies specific to oil and gas monitoring and assessment were needed.
This new USGS-BLM report supplements the Gold Book and other existing guidance by providing thorough and definitive steps and metrics for reclamation surface management. The report provides these kinds of uniform monitoring protocols and standards covering standardized soil and vegetation field monitoring methods, indicators, benchmarks, appropriate designs and analyses and electronic data capture and repositories supports planning procedures, leasing, permitting processes and bond release decisions.
While it was designed to be specific to the oil and gas industry, many of the report’s concepts and practices hold the potential to benefit reclamation of other fluid minerals development and land disturbance, including wind and solar energy development.
Leveraging ecological science to achieve success
Land reclamation, in essence, is aimed at techniques that set highly disturbed or degraded ecosystems on a trajectory that benefits native plants and animals and restores functioning habitats and ecological communities similar to surrounding, naturally occurring environments. During this process, the impacts of oil and gas development are minimized.
This means a major component of land reclamation involves repopulating the landscape with locally appropriate vegetation. Therefore, the report provides useful information about repositories and data collection platforms such as the Landscape Data Commons, Esri ArcGIS Online Survey123, the Database for Inventory Monitoring and Assessment (DIMA) and LandPKS.
The report also provides guidance for developing quantitative benchmarks to determine if erosion and vegetation standards have been met, including indicators of erosion and site stability, species composition and community structure.
“This technical publication provides a solid foundation based on current ecological science. It is the product of a collaborative effort between leading ecologists and reclamation scientists at the BLM, USGS, other agencies, and private organizations,” said USGS Deputy Associate Director for Ecosystems Paul Wagner. “The report addresses the need for well-managed data collection to inform reclamation plans, operations, approval decisions, and adaptive management strategies.”
Factors such as climate change, drought, intense storms, swings in temperature and invasive species all affect seedling survival rates. Ensuring that seedlings survive is crucial for agencies and operators to meet federal requirements and achieve reclamation success.
Successful reclamation is achieved when the standards defining soil and vegetation recovery are met, and a self-sustaining, vigorous, diverse, native, or approved plant community that minimizes visual land disturbance, provides forage, stabilizes soils and prevents noxious weeds from taking hold is in place.
Who does this report support?
In conjunction with the Gold Book, this report supports the BLM — the largest surface management agency in the U.S. — with tools to monitor oil and gas reclamation and ensure environmentally responsible outcomes. BLM field office staff guide operators to create reclamation plans and to ensure that reclamation goals and expectations are clear. They inspect reclamation projects’ progress and status, complete quality assessments and quality control of operators’ monitoring data, and provide feedback.
This report will also be particularly useful for operators and contractors who conduct oil and gas activities on U.S. federal or Tribal lands, surface management agencies who are responsible for advising and enforcing those activities, stewards of private lands and other landowner reclamation projects.
Reclamation has several phases, including interim and final reclamation, which each have differing overall goals. The report can help foster relationships between surface management agencies and operators, highlight timeframes, and provide operators with specific steps and goals in the reclamation process.
The report may prove particularly useful for restoration efforts funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $4.7 billion for orphaned well site plugging, remediation and reclamation across federal, Tribal, state and private lands (see Through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, 24 States Set to Begin Plugging Over 10,000 Orphaned Wells).
Read the full report online: Oil and gas reclamation—Operations, monitoring methods, and standards: U.S. Geological Survey Techniques and Methods
Water Measurement Rules Now in Effect for #YampaRiver, #WhiteRiver, #GreenRiver, and #NorthPlatteRiver Basins — #Colorado Division of Water Resources
From email from the Colorado Division of Water Resources (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
January 26, 2024
The Colorado Division of Water Resources announced that as of January 16, 2024, new rules governing the measurement of surface and groundwater diversions and storage are now in effect for Division 6. The division includes the Yampa, White, Green and North Platte River basins.
“The Division 6 Measurement Rules are the first set of rules covering surface water measurement in the State of Colorado and are a significant milestone for the Division of Water Resources,” said Erin Light, Division 6 Engineer. “The adoption of the rules will provide the Division of Water Resources greater leverage in assuring that the diversion and use of water is administerable and properly measured and recorded.”
For background, Colorado statutes include a requirement that owners of ditches and reservoirs install headgates where water is taken from the natural stream. These statutes also give the state and division engineer the authority to require owners and users of water rights to install measuring devices.
“Accurate measurement of diversions is critical to protect Colorado’s entitlement to water, including under the Colorado River Compact, and to ensure we are maximizing the beneficial use of the public’s water resource for consumptive and environmental purposes,” said Jason Ullmann, Deputy State Engineer.
The statutes, however, do not include any specifics regarding what is considered an acceptable headgate or measuring device. Historically, it has been administered by the Division of Water Resources (DWR) through issuing orders to owners for the installation of headgates or measuring devices.
“Over several years, Division 6 has issued hundreds of orders for the installation of operable headgates and measuring devices with varying degrees of success,” said Division Engineer Light. “I believe that these rules will help water users in Division 6 by providing clarity regarding what structures require measurement and what is considered an acceptable level of accuracy for the required measurement methods.”
The rules describe two types of measurement methods: measuring devices, which are physical devices (flumes, weirs, etc) that are placed in a diversion for measurement. Then there are alternative measurement methods, which are typically indirect methods of measuring flow rates without a physical device.
Water users are provided the following time periods to comply with the rules:
- Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 cfs – 12 months (January 16, 2025);
- Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 2.0 cfs and less than 5.0 cfs – 18 months (July 16, 2025);
- Diversion structures with a capacity or water rights less than 2.0 cfs – 24 months (January 16, 2026);
- Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights greater than or equal to 5.0 AF – 12 months (January 16, 2025);
- Reservoirs with a capacity or water rights less than 5.0 AF – 24 months (January 16 2026).
Water users unsure of their decreed water right or permitted well permit flow rates and volumes can use DWR’s online tools available through CDSS (https://dwr.state.co.us/Tools/) to find this information. Anyone who has questions regarding how these Rules apply to their diversion or how to install a measuring device on their system can contact the DWR’s Division 6 Lead Hydrographer at (970) 291-6551. The Rules are available on the DWR website as a Laserfiche imaged document.
Mining Monitor: Uranium buzz, buzz, buzz — Jonathan P. Thompson (@Land_Desk) #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 26, 2024
⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️
The uranium-mining buzz is reaching a fevered pitch lately as uranium prices climb above $100 per pound, the highest since October 2007. I already reported on Energy Fuels’ intent to begin or resume production at its Pinyon Plain and La Sal complex mines. But nearly every day another press release lands in my inbox touting a big find or big plans somewhere on the Colorado Plateau.
Let’s start with the headline that irks me the most: “Churchrock could pump out 31 million lb of US uranium over three decades, Laramide PEA shows.” On its surface, this one looks like just another attempt to drive up share prices. And it probably is. But it’s the location and the name that gets to me: The project is just a couple of miles from the 1979 Church Rock disaster, when a uranium mill tailings dam failed, sending 94 million gallons of acidic liquid raffinate and 1,100 tons of uranium mill tailings rushing down the Puerco River and across the “checkerboard” area of the Navajo Nation. The slug of material, containing an estimated 1.36 tons of uranium and 46 trillion picocuries of gross-alpha activity, continued past Gallup and down the Puerco for another 50 miles or more, seeping into the sandy earth and the aquifer as it went, and leaving behind stagnant and poisonous pools from which livestock drank.
It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.
Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:
It seems like an appropriate site for a memorial, warning about the potential dangers of mining and energy development. But a new mine? I’m afraid so. For years, Hydro Resources worked to build an in-situ recovery operation there (and at another site closer to Crownpoint). ISR is a form of mining in which a solution is pumped underground to dissolve the uranium ore and then it’s pumped back out and processed. As one might expect, area residents, the Navajo Nation, and environmental advocates pushed back on the proposal.
Last year Laramide bought the project from Hydro Resources and is now looking to jumpstart it. I doubt it will come without a fight. In other mining news:
- Laramide is busy these days: They also recently announced the U.S. Forest Service has restarted the environmental review and permitting process for the company’s proposed La Jara Mesa project north of Grants, New Mexico. During the uranium industry’s last “renaissance” (lasting from 2007 to 2011), Laramide looked to open an underground mine on Cibola National Forest land. They made it as far as a draft environmental impact statement, released in 2012, before low uranium prices stalled the project.
- Nexus Uranium says it will begin exploratory drilling on its Wray Mesa claims near La Sal, Utah, on the northern edge of the Lisbon Valley.
- Anfield’s subsidiary, Highbury Resources, acquired another 12 Department of Energy uranium leases from Gold Eagle Mining in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado. The tracts are near Slickrock, on Monogram Mesa south of the Paradox Valley, and near Uravan. Anfield also says it plans to reopen the Shootaring uranium mill near Ticaboo, Utah, although it appears to have made little progress in that regard.
- Thor Energy says it has found high-grade uranium at its Wedding Bell and Radium Mountain projects on a mesa just east of the Dolores River in western Colorado.
- Kraken Energy got the Bureau of Land Management’s go-ahead to drill on Harts Point, right along the northeast border of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. This is the second time the company (or its partners Atomic Minerals and Recoupment Exploration) have purportedly received a drilling permit for the slickrock peninsula adjacent to the Indian Creek climbing area. The first time the company failed to come up with a reclamation bond and the permit was cancelled.
- Australia-based Okapi Resources is set to begin exploratory drilling near Cañon City, Colorado, raising concerns among the locals.
- And, perhaps the only big buzz in the lithium space right now (lithium prices are in the dumps): American Battery Metals is pushing its Lisbon Valley lithium project. Well, that is to say they are looking to get exploratory drilling permitted.
- Explore the above projects and more on the Land Desk Mining Monitor Map.
Five-year field study by Argonne and @NREL finds that strategic planting of native grasses and flowering plants at solar sites fosters growth in vegetation that attracts insect communities #solar #ActOnClimate
Click the link to read the release on the Argonne National Laboratory website (Marguerite Huber):
January 17, 2024
Two solar facilities built on rehabilitated agricultural land were restored with native plants. Argonne researchers observed pollinators thrive.
Bumblebees buzz from flower to flower, stopping for a moment under a clear blue Minnesota sky. Birds chirp, and tall grasses blow in the breeze. This isn’t a scene from a pristine nature preserve or national park. It is nestled between photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays on rehabilitated farmland.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.
Smart land use choices provide multiple benefits
Global insect biodiversity has been in decline due to habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. Restoration of insect habitat paired with smart land use changes toward renewable energy developments could help reverse the course.
For instance, as a carbon-neutral source of electricity, expanded PV solar energy development is critical to mitigating climate change. According to the DOE’s Solar Futures Study, approximately 10 million acres of land in the U.S. will be needed for large-scale solar development by 2050 in order to meet grid decarbonization and climate change goals. But some lands are better suited for PV solar development than others. Disturbed lands such as former agricultural fields are ideal locations to hold rows of solar panels compared to lands that have been previously undisturbed.
Even more strategies can be added to this winning combination to support insect conservation. Agrivoltaics is the combination of solar energy production with agricultural and vegetation management practices. One type of agrivoltaics focuses on the establishment of habitat for insect pollinators and other wildlife that can provide important ecosystem services, such as pollination. Pairing solar energy facilities on previously disturbed lands with habitat enhancement sounds like a logical win-win strategy to address energy and biodiversity challenges. To date, however, there has been little field data available to document the feasibility and the ecological benefits of this novel land use approach.
If you build it, will they come?
The two studied solar sites were planted with native grasses and flowering plants in early 2018. From August 2018 through August 2022, the researchers conducted 358 observational surveys for flowering vegetation and insect communities. They evaluated changes in plant and insect abundance and diversity with each visit.
“The effort to obtain these data was considerable, returning to each site four times per summer to record pollinator counts,” said Heidi Hartmann, manager of the Land Resources and Energy Policy Program in Argonne’s Environmental Sciences division, and one of the study’s co-authors. “Over time we saw the numbers and types of flowering plants increase as the habitat matured. [ed. emphasis mine] Measuring the corresponding positive impact for pollinators was very gratifying.”
By the end of the field campaign, the team observed increases for all habitat and biodiversity metrics. There was an increase in native plant species diversity and flower abundance. In addition, the team observed increases in the abundance and diversity of native insect pollinators and agriculturally beneficial insects, which included honeybees, native bees, wasps, hornets, hoverflies, other flies, moths, butterflies and beetles. Flowers and flowering plant species increased as well. Total insect abundance tripled, while native bees showed a 20-fold increase in numbers. The most numerous insect groups observed were beetles, flies and moths.
In an added benefit, the researchers found that pollinators from the solar sites also visited soybean flowers in adjacent crop fields, providing additional pollination services.
The benefits of solar-pollinator habitats
“This research highlights the relatively rapid insect community responses to habitat restoration at solar energy sites,” said Lee Walston, an Argonne landscape ecologist and environmental scientist who was lead author of the study. “It demonstrates that, if properly sited, habitat-friendly solar energy can be a feasible way to safeguard insect populations and can improve the pollination services in adjacent agricultural fields.” Walston also serves as head of the Ecology, Natural Resources, and Managed Systems department in Argonne’s Environmental Science division.
The research findings suggest two important implications of habitat-friendly solar energy. One is that habitat-friendly solar sites can play an important role in conserving biodiversity. Large amounts of ground-mounted solar is expected to be developed in the future, but if properly sited, habitat-friendly solar can offset the losses of natural areas to provide biodiversity benefits. Second, habitat-friendly solar sites can help mitigate land-use conflicts associated with the conversion of farmland for solar energy production. As approximately 80% of future ground-mounted solar development could occur on agricultural lands, the proper siting of habitat-friendly solar energy on marginal farmland can not only preserve prime farmland, but it could make prime farmland more productive through the pollination services provided by habitat-friendly solar energy.
Overall, additional research is needed to understand the feasibility of habitat-friendly solar across different regions and to meet different ecological goals such as conserving a target insect or wildlife species.
Funding was provided by the InSPIRE project through the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.
Grand County Organizations Awarded Grants in Second Year of Funding — @Northern_Water
Click the link to read the release on the Northern Water website:
In its second year of grant funding, the Windy Gap Environmental Fund (WGEF) has awarded four Grand County organizations funds for various environmental projects. The Northern Water Municipal Subdistrict contributed funding as part of the settlement to end the federal lawsuit over Chimney Hollow Reservoir. The WGEF Committee awarded $680,000 in 2023, in addition to $1,065,000 of grant funding allocated in 2022, for a total of nearly $1.75 million.
The largest grant awarded in December 2023 was for $401,179 to Learning by Doing for its final design and implementation of the Willow Creek Restoration Project. Learning by Doing is a solution-focused collaborative group of local, state, federal and nonprofit water stakeholders charged with safeguarding Grand County rivers and streams. Learning by Doing was also awarded another $25,000 grant for the design of a stream restoration project at Kaibab Park.
Additional grants awarded include:
- $150,000 to the Town of Fraser to complete a stormwater infrastructure survey.
- $104,144 to the Grand Lake Recreation Foundation for design of river restoration of the Colorado River in the vicinity of the Red Top Valley Ditch diversion.
The WGEF is administered by the Grand Foundation, while the WGEF Committee reviews proposals and allocates grant funding. The committee is composed of three representatives from the Municipal Subdistrict and three from the Upper Colorado Watershed Environmental Team.
Construction of Chimney Hollow Reservoir began in August 2021 after the Municipal Subdistrict won a federal lawsuit in the first round that challenged the permit issued by the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers. The Municipal Subdistrict then settled during the appeal process, which required a $15 million contribution throughout the four-year construction timeline that will be administered by the Grand Foundation to pay for projects that enhance the Colorado River and its many tributaries in Grand County.
#Drought news January 25, 2024: Temperatures were below normal for all areas outside the plains of #Colorado and #Wyoming
Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor website.
Click the link to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s an excerpt:
This Week’s Drought Summary
The current period was dry over most of the country with the greatest amount of precipitation occurring along the west coast and from east Texas into Arkansas. Temperatures were well below normal for most locations east of the Rocky Mountains, where departures were 5 degrees or more below normal for most areas. The greatest departures from normal were over Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern portions of Alabama and Mississippi where readings were 20-25 degrees below normal. The warm winter continued in the West with temperatures 5-10 degrees above normal over a majority of the region. The warmer-than-normal temperatures have been a challenge for snow accumulation with many locations, especially in the northern Rockies, having a very challenging start to the snow accumulation season. With an active pattern through the central Plains into the Midwest the past few weeks, a reassessment of drought indicators was done in many locations this week to examine drought intensity levels and adjust where the data supported it. In most instances, drought remains but the data allowed for intensities to be reduced. The end of the period had an active pattern again developing in the southern Plains and into the South where widespread precipitation was anticipated after the data cutoff for this week. These locations will be assessed on next week’s map…
High Plains
It was a mostly dry week over much of the region with only eastern Kansas receiving widespread, albeit light, precipitation. Temperatures were below normal for all areas outside the plains of Colorado and Wyoming and northern North Dakota where they were 3-6 degrees above normal. Outside of these areas, temperatures were generally 9-15 degrees below normal for the week. The wetter pattern over the last several months allowed for a reassessment of the data to investigate potential changes in the drought intensity levels. It was noted that even though the last 9-12 months have a stronger signal toward the wet spectrum, there are still long-term issues that go out 24-36 months or more in much of the central Plains. In looking at the data, support for the existing extreme drought in eastern Nebraska was not there, so it was improved to severe drought this week. In Kansas, areas of moderate and severe drought were also improved based on the lagging support for these intensity levels. Degradation took place over portions of northern North Dakota and eastern Wyoming where abnormally dry conditions were expanded based on the short-term dryness in these regions…
West
Above-normal temperatures dominated much of the region with departures of 9-12 degrees above normal over portions of western Wyoming, northern Nevada, central Idaho and northeast Utah. Temperatures were cooler than normal over Washington, northern Oregon, northern Idaho and much of Montana. The greatest rains were along the coast with some flooding issues being reported this week, especially in southern California. Further inland, it remained dry and the dryness coupled with the warmer temperatures has allowed for snow drought to develop, especially in the northern Rocky Mountains. The wetter pattern over the most recent weeks allowed for a reassessment of conditions over New Mexico and into eastern Arizona, where improvements were made. Areas of extreme and exceptional drought were reduced this week in western New Mexico while severe drought was improved in western New Mexico into eastern Arizona. Moderate drought was expanded over western Wyoming and severe drought was expanded over western Montana. Oregon had moderate and severe drought improvements in the west while moderate drought expanded in the central portion of the state. Washington saw moderate drought improved along the northwest coast and western portions of the state with abnormally dry conditions expanding in the north central…
South
Cooler-than-normal conditions dominated the region with departures of 10-15 degrees below normal common in the region. The greatest rains took place in east Texas to southwest Arkansas and into southeast Oklahoma. These rains continued past the data cutoff period and everything from Tuesday morning forward will be assessed on the next map. The rains allowed for some improvements, with a full category change over much of east Texas and improvements to moderate drought over central and northern Arkansas as well as the far northwest corner of Louisiana and southeast Oklahoma…
Looking Ahead
Over the next 5-7 days, the active pattern over the South and Southeast will continue, with much of the region anticipating 3-5 inches of precipitation. The coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest also will remain active with the next system coming ashore. Dry conditions are expected over the central and northern Plains, northern Rocky Mountains and Southwest. Temperatures will flip back to a warmer-than-normal pattern for most of the country, with greatest departures above normal over the northern Plains and upper Midwest.
The 6–10 day outlooks show a high probability of warmer-than-normal temperatures over much of the U.S. during this period with the highest probabilities over the Plains and Upper Midwest. There is a high probability of below-normal temperatures over Alaska and much of Florida. The precipitation outlook has the highest probability of below-normal precipitation over much of the eastern third of the U.S. with the greatest chances over the Ohio River valley. There are above-normal chances of above-normal precipitation over much of the West and into the Plains during this time.
2024 #COleg: Resilience and Stewardship for #Colorado’s Waterways, 2024 Legislative Priorities: @Audubon supports proactive water strategies to benefit birds and people — Audubon Rockies
Click the link to read the article on the Audubon Rockies website (Abby Burk):
A new year brings a new opportunity for Colorado decision-makers to shore up water resource vulnerabilities and accelerate resilience and stewardship practices. Policy is born by addressing a solution to a problem. Impacts of climate change and unsustainable water demand bring uncertainty to Colorado’s birds, communities, watersheds, and waterways. Resilience and stewardship are top themes for 2024 legislation on water, our most valuable natural resource. Audubon Rockies is busy working with lawmakers, agencies, and partners to prioritize healthy, functioning, and resilient watersheds and river systems for people and birds—the natural systems that we all depend upon.
Below are the two top water priorities for Audubon in the 2024 Colorado legislative session. Please make sure you’re signed up to hear about opportunities to engage with them.
1. Clean Water Stewardship for Colorado
Speaker of the House McCluskie mentioned the need to restore protections removed from the Sackett vs. Environmental Protection Agency decision in her opening 2024 legislative session remarks:
“Water is intrinsic to the Colorado Spirit, and the lifeblood of our agriculture industry and tourism economies. The recent United States Supreme Court decision about the definition of Waters of the United States leaves many of our waterways in Colorado unprotected. In the wake of this difficult decision, we have an opportunity to take action to reestablish these critical protections.”
It is imperative to protect our waterways for all of Colorado to thrive. The United States passed the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972 for water quality and related public health protections, realizing the outsized importance of our rivers, streams, and wetlands to communities and wildlife. At the time when waterways were literally burning with industrial waste, Congress recognized the threat to public health and addressed the widespread problem with bipartisan support and passage of the CWA. The CWA aimed to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation’s waters and took a watershed approach due to the connectivity of waters from headwaters to lowlands. The CWA protects waterways and their many benefits by requiring certain activities such as the construction of highways to minimize or mitigate their impact.
Despite the CWA’s successes over the last 50 years, there has been a lot of litigation and legal interpretations over the years. Most recently, the United States Supreme Court, through the Sackett case decision, effectively rewrote the CWA by severely narrowing the scope of its protections. Before Sackett, the CWA provided for the protection of the majority of Colorado’s wetlands and streams at the federal level.
So what is the void created by the Sackett decision for Coloradospecifically? In Colorado, we no longer have a federal partner to help protect our waterways. The decision upended a regulatory system that protected water quality for public health. Wetlands and streams are crucial ecosystems, particularly in Colorado, where we are semi-arid to arid. Before Sackett, the CWA would have protected all Colorado waters with a significant affect on downstream water quality and availability. After the Supreme Court decision, protections were sharply reduced.
Here are some examples of waterways that now have reduced or no federal protections in Colorado:
- Wetlands that are not adjacent to a flowing river
- Playa lakes, which are groundwater-dependent,
- Fens, (a type of peat-accumulating wetland fed by mineral-rich ground or surface water)
- Headwater streams that flow only after precipitation events
In Colorado, 26 percent of streams only flow in response to rainfall, and 59 percent flow seasonally. By some estimates, as much as two thirds of Colorado’s waterways have lost protections.* Nationwide, approximately 63 percent of all wetlands are now unprotected.
With the loss of 3 billion birds in the past 50 years—in part due to dwindling wetlands and significant development of natural spaces—and Audubon science showing that two-thirds of North American bird species are at risk of extinction from climate change, action is needed at the state and federal levels to protect the water bodies and habitat that birds need to survive. Protecting water quality is a bipartisan stewardship issue and brings broad public support. We look forward to working with the state as it creates a wetlands and streams protection program for water quality protection that works for Colorado’s unique waterways. If Colorado does this right, it could be a model for other semi-arid Western states to follow suit.
2. Resilient tools to deal with long-term uncertainty in the Colorado River
Despite near-term optimism (and a momentary sigh of relief) from a heavy 2023 snowpack and recent January storms, climate change and unprecedented drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin for the last 24 years are threatening Colorado’s ability to satisfy water users, ecosystem needs, water-related recreation, and, potentially, interstate obligations. There are real consequences for people, birds, and every other living thing that depends on rivers in this region.
In 2023, the Colorado General Assembly determined that it is in the best interest of Colorado to form a task force to provide recommendations for programs to assist Colorado in addressing drought in the Colorado River Basin and the state’s interstate commitments related to the Colorado River and its tributaries (SB-295, Section 1). From August through December 2023, the Colorado River Drought Task Force and a sub-task force on Tribal matters, met to draft a report on recommendations for further actions. You can learn more about the recommendations here.
As Colorado contends with near-certainty of continued warming, severe drought, and declining river flows over the next several years, we need more flexible ways to manage and deliver water to support the Colorado River we love. Colorado needs tools and resources to proactively respond to drought conditions and maximize the benefits to the state, its water users, and river ecosystems from once-in-a-generation competitive federal funds available to address the Colorado River Basin drought. Audubon will be engaging this session for solutions that will provide new and innovative solutions to the water threats we face.
*The State is waiting for additional guidance from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to determine exactly how many of Colorado waters may lose protection.
Employment opportunity at the Colorado Division of Water Resources: Hydrographer (EPST II)
Division 4 in Montrose: Gunnison & San Miguel River Basins, & portions of the Dolores River. Division 5 in Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Basin (excluding the Gunnison River Basin). Division 6 in Steamboat Springs: Yampa, White and North Platte River Basins. Division 7 in Durango: San Juan River Basin and portions of the Dolores River. Credit: Colorado State University
Click the link to go to the State of Colorado Job Opportunities website:
Description of Job
OPEN ONLY TO CURRENT RESIDENTS OF COLORADO. This posting may be used to fill more than one vacancy.
Hydrographer duties include measuring and evaluating data to determine the stream flow quantity at assigned stream gaging stations, and maintaining such gages; measuring water flow in canals and ditches in support of state Water Commissioners; servicing, calibrating, monitoring, and repairing all equipment associated with stream gaging stations, including telemetry equipment; inspecting water measurement structures, reporting on their accuracy and recommending solutions to any problems observed; and, evaluating and compiling official flow records for state and federal publication. These duties will be primarily performed within the Colorado River Basin.
Employment opportunity at the Colorado Division of Water Resources: Assistant Division Engineer (PE II)
Division 4 in Montrose: Gunnison & San Miguel River Basins, & portions of the Dolores River. Division 5 in Glenwood Springs: Colorado River Basin (excluding the Gunnison River Basin). Division 6 in Steamboat Springs: Yampa, White and North Platte River Basins. Division 7 in Durango: San Juan River Basin and portions of the Dolores River. Credit: Colorado State University
Click the link for all the to go to the State of Colorado Job opportunities website:
Description of Job
This posting is open to current and non-current residents of the State of Colorado at the time of submitting your application. However, if you are selected and accept the position, you will be required to establish residence in the State of Colorado.
The purpose of this position is to provide leadership, guidance and oversight to the Division 5 operations group responsible for Augmentation Plan coordination and administration. This group supports water rights administration by developing methodologies to collect and analyze water diversion and delivery data to verify augmentation plan operators are operating in compliance with all applicable court decrees, statutes, rules and regulations and to analyze Water Court applications, including reports of engineering experts, consult with the Water Court Referee regarding all applications, write reports summarizing the agency’s position and negotiate or provide expert engineering support / testimony to litigate any conditions necessary to protect existing water rights; to supervise professional and technical staff; and provide assistance to the public in understanding Colorado water law.
Say hello to the Colorado Climate Blog — @ColoradoClimate
Click the link to go to the Colorado Climate Center blog:
You can head over to https://climate.colostate.edu/blog and check out our latest blog posts now. For example, is the old 80/20 rule actually true (80% of our state’s precipitation falls on 20% of the population)?
In addition to checking out the website anytime, you can also subscribe to our blog mailing list – just use the sign-up form on the blog page. Once you subscribe, you’ll get our blog posts delivered directly to your inbox (about once a week). What could be better with your morning cup of coffee than learning a bit more about Colorado’s climate?!