From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission. Hamby and Buschatzke acknowledged during this panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference that the lower basin must own the structural deficit, something the upper basin has been pushing for for years. CREDIT: TOM YULSMAN/WATER DESK, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
LAS VEGAS โ Around 8 a.m. Dec. 13, Becky Mitchell swapped flip-flops for heels, donned a blazer and headed out of her Las Vegas hotel room to fight for Coloradoโs right to water in a drier future at the biggest water gathering of the year.
At the 2023 Colorado River Water Users Association meeting last month, Mitchell, 49, would glad-hand and spar with 1,700 of the Colorado Riverโs most powerful water users. As Coloradoโs first full-time Colorado River commissioner, Mitchellโs job is to make sure Coloradans donโt lose out as the seven basin states vie for the critical, and limited, resource.
โThereโs always some tension within the seven states whether we portray it or not,โ Mitchell said. โItโs good for people to see that. Weโre dealing with important issues.โ
Mitchell, originally from Hawaii, is a Colorado School of Mines graduate who has worked on Colorado water issues for the state since 2009. In addition to serving as Coloradoโs representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission, she has also been the director of the stateโs top water agency, the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Instability in the basin, which provides 40% of Coloradoโs water, is just adding to the pressure. Cities, industries and farms could face more severe water shortages by 2050, according to the stateโs water plan.
โIf youโre not passionate about this, youโre not paying attention,โ Mitchell said. โWhen you look at the science and the history, I donโt know how it doesnโt move you.โ
For the federal government and the seven state commissioners the main task at hand is to plan how water is stored and released from the basinโs two largest water savings banks, lakes Mead and Powell, after 2026, when the current operating rules expire.
Based on their decisions and climate conditions, the river and its reservoirs could continue to dry up, as they nearly did in 2021 and 2022, or they could be brought back into balance, with demands for water reduced to match the riverโs shrinking supplies.
โEveryone is intent on protecting the interests of their particular constituency,โ said Estevan Lรณpez, New Mexicoโs Colorado River negotiator. โThings can get tense at times in these discussions. These are difficult issues for all of us.โ
Becky Mitchell. Photo credit: Colorado Department of Natural Resources
Mitchell in action
A typical day for Mitchell involves a steady flow of meetings, either in Colorado or across the basin states, with the political leaders, experts, utility managers, water users and others in the water community. The conference represented all of that, on hyperspeed, crunched into one windowless, enormous conference hall.
โThese things are overwhelming. I think people think Iโm more of a people person than I am. I actually like to definitely recharge as much as I can,โ Mitchell said, which mostly involved a U2 concert, karaoke and family time at the conference.
The annual gathering offers a chance to hammer home key points in a public forum with attendees from across the Upper Basin โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ and the Lower Basin โ Arizona, California and Nevada, Mitchell said.
Her main point: Thereโs only so much Upper Basin states can do when water users are already getting cut off each year, she said, while walking, coffee in hand, past slot machines and French-themed shops at Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino.
She headed into the first big conference meeting, where she and other state representatives on the Upper Colorado River Commission delivered prepared remarks and state updates to the audience. For Mitchell, that meant rehashing her โirrefutable truths,โ a set of standards by which sheโll vet any agreement the basin states propose.
Occasionally, someone stopped her in the hallways or at meals for sidebar conversations. (โXcel accepted!โ one person shared, referencing a historic agreement to purchase some of the oldest water rights in Colorado from Xcel.)
The next morning, tensions flared at the panel as she spoke stridently about her concerns about the negotiations and limitations on the water supply in Colorado, where at least some farmers, ranchers and other water users see their water shut off early as supplies shrink.
Several Coloradans said they felt well-represented by Mitchell during the conference, including leaders of the two tribes with reservation land in Colorado, the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute.
โSheโs strong in heart and mind to get the message out. Being blunt sometimes takes that,โ Ute Mountain Ute Chairman Manuel Heart said. Mitchell has advocated for tribes on a whole new level, and without her, theyโd be stuck in the status quo, Heart said.
โSheโs letting everybody else know: She stands with the tribes, and Colorado stands with the tribes,โ said Lorelei Cloud, acting chairwoman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe. โThatโs a big statement to make.โ
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada)
CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
Working outside of the mold
Mitchell doesnโt fit the traditional mold of a water buffalo in Colorado. Some attendees privately groused that Mitchellโs approach at the panel was too aggressive or her tone too scolding.
Several Coloradans said they loved Mitchellโs spirited and fiery manner. Many Coloradans at the conference were proud of her, said Ken Curtis, general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District.
โShe did have to earn some respect over some time, and I think sheโs earned it,โ Curtis said. โAnytime thereโs somebody new appointed to a position like this, that pretty much the whole state water community is watching, itโs got to be rough.โ
The slowly changing stereotype of a โwater buffalo,โ an insider term for negotiators of Colorado River agreements, is that of an older, white and male figurehead.
Mitchell is not those things. In her home life, she is the mother of five adult children, three of whom she adopted from Ethiopia where she frequently returns to work on water issues.
At the conference, her big laughs occasionally came with a slight snort, and once or twice, she broke out a Running Man-style dance move in the conference halls. She was frequently the most forceful speaker on the stage, and in past speaking events, sheโs gotten choked up while talking about water issues.
โPeople really see her sincerity, speaking from the heart, and theyโre willing to do the same,โ said Robert Sakata, a Colorado farmer and member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Mitchell said she has made a conscious decision to not shrink herself in the face of criticism. It is an example taught to her by her mother, she said, and one that she tries to teach to her daughters.
โThereโs been a couple times when Iโve tried to be quieter or politer to make myself heard, and it hasnโt worked,โ Mitchell said. โIโve had to make a choice to be in a place thatโs more uncomfortable for me. โฆ What weโre fighting for is too important to make myself small to make myself feel comfortable.โ
Fresh Water News was launched in 2018 as an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
2023โs above average snowpack gave a boost to Lake Powellโs dwindling water levels, and provided water managers more time to contemplate long-term policy changes. Photo: Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk
After years of dry conditions throughout the West, 2023 gave the regionโs water managers the greatest gift of all: a hefty snowpack.ย
This yearโs winter snow eventually melted and boosted the Colorado Riverโs beleaguered reservoirs. The Hail Mary winter storms came just in time. Without the savior snows, the riverโs second-largest reservoir, Lake Powell, was on a glide path toward losing the ability to produce hydropower at Glen Canyon Dam, not to mention the harm to the long-term ecological health of the river and its main tributaries.
But the more nightmarish scenarios of quiet turbines, empty reservoirs, and dry river beds were put on hold this past year, as more snow also means more time. When wet weather returned to the basin, the riverโs top negotiators quickly turned their attention away from the short-term emergency in front of them, and toward a more long-term set of solutions. Talk of not โsquanderingโ the gift of time became a standard talking point of decision-makers along the river that supplies more than 40 million people across seven U.S. states, 30 tribal nations and communities in northern Mexico.
One snowy year does not make for a lasting fix for the Colorado Riverโs fundamental gap between water supply and demand. A new year means new uncertainties over the riverโs future. And as it looks now, 2024 promises to be more consequential than the last.
Here at The Water Desk, these are the top things weโre paying attention to in 2024:
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map January 13, 2023 via the NRCS.
1. Reimagining how we manage the Colorado River
The snowy respite in 2023 gave both federal and state-level water managers the brain space to think long-term. A set of 2007 guidelines for the riverโs management expire in 2026. In October, the federal Bureau of Reclamation released its preliminary report on what should be included in the talks to renegotiate them. Theyโve given the various users โ states, tribes, environmental and recreation groups โ until March 2024 to submit their preferred plans for analysis and eventual inclusion in a draft set of guidelines later next year.ย
The current guidelines have quite a few detractors across the riverโs Upper and Lower Basins. And what should or shouldnโt be in the new rules has contributed to significant tension among river negotiators.
The various state leaders recently got the chance to publicly posture at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference, held annually in December in Las Vegas. All seven state-level negotiators, including representatives from California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming, sat beside each other on stage and made clear there was still distance between their positions on the big-picture problems plaguing the river and how to deal with them. The Arizona Republicโs Brandon Loomis has this excellent recap of what went down.
Leaders from California water agencies and districts signed funding agreements with federal officials at the 2023 Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. Photo: Luke Runyon/The Water Desk
The panelโs biggest news was a public commitment from the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada to address whatโs known as the structural deficit. This is the well-documented supply and demand gap that would exist even without climate change sapping snowpack and runoff. The deficit is estimated to be between 1.2 and 1.5 million acre-feet annually, and it has contributed greatly to the dwindling water levels at Lakes Mead and Powell. Who has to take the necessary cuts to account for that amount of water has always been an open question. Now, we have an answer: the Lower Basin states.
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
ย โThat makes sense. Thatโs our responsibility,โ said J.B. Hamby, Californiaโs river negotiator, at the Vegas gathering. โThis is a historic thing coming. Itโs on our shoulders to be able to resolve it.โ
But in a basin that in recent months has grown increasingly reliant on injections of federal cash to incentivize temporary conservation deals, how state leaders plan to find the funds and the political will to permanently deal with the structural deficit will be something to watch. Any commitments made by those state-level negotiators will need to be sold to a broad range of constituents, who at this point will expect to be handsomely compensated for a permanent cut to their supplies, as POLITICOโs Annie Snider explained in this November piece.
An additional layer of basinwide tension can be summed up in one word: equity. Itโs thrown around a lot in discussions of the Colorado River and the economic and social sacrifices needed to bring it onto a more sustainable path. Who should bear the greatest burden of the eventual cutbacks is still unclear. Upper Basin leaders, from Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, often point the finger toward the Lower Basin.
โWeโre not interested in striking a deal that allows the continuation of depleting the storage and dragging the system into crisis,โ said Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs top river negotiator. Mitchell made clear she felt users in her state were already feeling pain, while those downstream of the large reservoirs have mostly been made whole, even in the driest of years. But with Lower Basin users willing to take on big, intractable issues like the structural deficit, moving forward it will likely be more difficult for Upper Basin leaders to continue to cast all the blame downstream.ย
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
One more idea from the Las Vegas conference thatโs still largely conceptual, but is gaining some interest from those in power, is to use annual measures of basic hydrology โ like snowpack levels and streamflows โ to determine how much water ends up being delivered to the basinโs varied users. It sounds simple: only use what nature provides.
But that idea flies in the face of the riverโs foundational governing document, the Colorado River Compact, which put fixed volumes of water use on paper, regardless of whether it was a dry or wet year. For now, the idea seems to be more of a talking point than a specific policy proposal, and we will see if proponents can turn it into something Lower Basin users can get behind.
In recent years, the Colorado Riverโs 30 federally recognized tribes have grown their influence in the basinโs political landscape. Calls for a more formal tribal role in basinwide negotiations are being amplified by the tribes themselves, and by both state and federal leaders, such as Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
2023 presented some significant tribal successes. The Gila River Indian Community became a key player in negotiations over the Lower Basinโs conservation plan to secure federal dollars last spring. Federal officialsย promised the tribeย $150 million over three years to leave water they were legally entitled to in Lake Mead.ย
A canal delivers Colorado River water to the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix. Photo by Ted Wood/Water Desk
But in the long-term, deciding what that tribal role, or tribal seat at the negotiating table, could be and should be is unsettled. In June, at a Colorado River symposium at the University of Colorado Boulderโs Getches-Wilkinson Center, Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis called for leaders from all 30 sovereign tribes to be included in talks between federal and state officials. That idea received immediate pushback from state leaders on the feasibility of expanding the table by 30 seats.
Creating a single representative seat for all of the tribes is another option. But that, too, presents challenges. Is it fair or feasible to reduce the varied economies, cultures, geographies and spiritual practices of 30 sovereign nations into a single seat?
While basinwide tribal inclusion still happens in an ad hoc rather than institutional way, a draft agreement to formalize a governing relationship among six tribes and the four Upper Basin states has taken shape. The Upper Colorado River Commission has started inviting representatives from six Upper Basin tribes to participate in regular meetings. Commissioners could formalize the new agreement this February, as The Colorado Sunโs Shannon Mullane recently reported.
There appears to be broad agreement that more formally including tribes in the riverโs complex, multi-layered decision-making processes is the most just path to take. Deciding what type of basinwide governance structure will make tribal inclusion more than a talking point could make some progress in 2024 as the basinโs leaders say they finally have the brain space to take on longer-term issues, as KUNCโs Alex Hager reportedย in his piece from the Las Vegas conference.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map January 5, 2024 via the NRCS.
3. Winter snowpack can make or break
Snowpack in the southern Rockies entered 2024 with a weak start. There is still a lot of winter left to go, but beginning a new year with a significant snowpack deficit always brings a certain amount of hand-wringing from skiers and water managers alike.
Upper Basin snowpack stands at justย 64% of the long-term median. The snowiest months are still to come, but itโs much harder to get to an above-average snowpack after a slow start.ย
2023 was a stark example of what a wet winter can do. The sense of urgency among the riverโs policymakers diminished as the snow piled high. Headlines turned from documenting record lows at the big Colorado River reservoirs, to cheering modest gains in water levels.ย
The past yearโs heavy snows and subsequent rushing rivers came after three successive meager runoff seasons. The gains were significant, but not a total game-changer. As scientists often note, it takes multiple consecutive years of wet conditions to allow large reservoirs like Lakes Mead and Powell to fully recover.
The return of El Niรฑo tipped the scales toward a warmer and wetter winter in the Colorado River basinโs headwaters states. So far, weโve just been getting the warm, not the wet. No matter how you look at it, weโre having a dry start to winter, as my Water Desk colleague Mitch Tobin lays out in his latest Snow News post.
In 2023, Lower Colorado River leaders said their deal to conserve up to 3 million acre-feet between now and 2026 was enough to bring needed stability to the riverโs reservoirs. But that same point was used to justify agreements like the Drought Contingency Plans in 2019 and the 500+ Plan in 2021, which did not provide the long-term stability and certainty that water managers crave.
Scientists, such as Colorado State Universityโs Brad Udall, say we havenโt been imaginative enoughin envisioning just how bad things could get along the river. Another series of dry winters, the likes of which weโve seen in the past 25 years, is plausible.
2023 brought a reprieve. How the winter of 2024 will play out is still unclear. Its outcome will undoubtedly have ripple effects, and either amplify or ease the existing tensions playing out across the basin.
The Water Deskโs mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. Weโre an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A large storm system brought rain and snow to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts along with rain and snow in the eastern High Plains and Midwest. The Northeast remained largely unchanged from last week, with minor improvements in western New York, Pennsylvania and central Maryland where precipitation was 150% to 300% of normal. Further south along the Mid-Atlantic, 150% to 300% of normal precipitation fell, bringing improvements in Virgina, North Carolina and South Carolina. The southern part of the Southeast did not benefit from any of the precipitation that fell elsewhere along the Atlantic coast, bringing further degradations to an already very dry part of the country. The South remained the same as last week, with small areas of deterioration from northeast Texas into southwestern Arkansas, and north and central Louisiana.
A small part of southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi saw minor improvements. The High Plains benefited from a rain and snow weather system that moved through the area before the new year. Northeastern Colorado into eastern Nebraska had some improvement. Northern Colorado and Wyoming experienced deterioration without the benefit of the precipitation that fell further east and low snow water equivalent (SWE). The north-central Midwest had some improvements from the same storm that benefited the High Plains. Central, eastern and southern Midwest largely missed precipitation, causing deterioration in eastern Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, and eastern and northern Kentucky where groundwater and streamflow remain low. The West saw few improvements, except for New Mexico. Lack of precipitation and low SWE in higher elevations have left areas of Montana and Arizona worse off than last week…
A weather system bringing rain and snow moved through the High Plains midweek last week. Central and northern states experienced up to 400% of normal precipitation. Northeastern Colorado and eastern Colorado saw improvements in Exceptional (D4), Extreme (D3), and Severe (D2) drought conditions. These improvements are a continuation of improvements seen last week. The weather system that brought improvements to much of the High Plains largely missed north-central Colorado. Conditions worsened, introducing abnormal dryness and degrading from Abnormally Dry (D0) to Moderate Drought (D1). Northern Wyoming experienced similar conditions to Montana, leading to small Abnormally Dry (D0) and Moderate Drought (D1) expansions along the northern border with Montana…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending January 2, 2024.
Much of the West remains status quo for the week. Precipitation fell across much of the Pacific coast from Vancouver southward into central California. Montana has not benefitted from the recent precipitation, causing small degradations along its border with Idaho, Wyoming and North Dakota. Precipitation continues to miss Arizona, mainly the north. Over the past few months Abnormal Dry (D0) conditions expanded northward into southern Utah. New Mexico did see improvements in Extreme (D3), Severe (D2) and Moderate (D1) drought conditions in the interior northwest…
Little reprieve occurred across much of the South, with only 5% of normal precipitation falling. Western and central Texas remained unchanged, with a small improvement of Moderate Drought (D1) to Abnormally Dry (D0) conditions in the Panhandle. Parts of southeast Louisiana and Mississippi had small improvements with streamflows slightly improving. This is not the case for much of the South where short- and now long-term conditions continue to decline. Streamflow and groundwater continue to counteract what precipitation is received. Eastern Texas into western Louisiana and southwestern Arkansas saw 1-category degradations for all drought categories. Central Louisiana had Extreme drought (D4) conditions expand northward into Catahoula, Winn, Richland and Concordia parishes. Moderate Drought (D1) in northwest Louisiana extended west into eastern Texas and southwestern Arkansas. Mississippi stayed largely unchanged aside from the slight reduction of Moderate Drought (D1) in the far south. Tennessee saw improvements in the east, with improving soil moisture and benefits from the precipitation experienced in the Mid-Atlantic region. Central and eastern Tennessee, on the other hand, saw Severe Drought (D2) expand northward into Kentucky. Exceptional Drought (D4) was introduced in the South at the tri-boundary with Mississippi and Alabama due to the continued lack of precipitation for the past few months…
Looking Ahead
During the next five days (Jan. 2-7, 2024), more heavy precipitation is expected for the central and northern Pacific coast, with some areas of higher elevation also seeing some moisture. The Gulf Coast and southern Atlantic regions are expected to see heavy precipitation. This centers around southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Centerโs 6-10 day outlook (valid Jan. 3-9, 2024) favors above-normal precipitation for most of the country, with high probabilities found in the intermountain West, east of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, Alaska and Hawaii. Only southern Texas is expected to have below-normal precipitation. There is an increased probability of below-normal temperatures west of the Rockies, particularly in the southwest. Following the precipitation trend, areas of probable heavy precipitation in the east also have the probability of being warmer than normal. The Northeast has the largest probability of having above-normal temperatures.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending January 2, 2024.
Just for grins here’s a slide show of early January US Drought Monitor maps for the past few years.
Greetings in 2024, which promises to be an interesting year, along the Colorado River and beyond it too. May we come out of it affirmed nationally in our commitment to democratic governance, and improved in our execution of it on our river.
Back in the earlier part of the last century, the great conservationist and ecologist Aldo Leopold advised us to โthink like a mountainโ โ a large entity occupied by many life forms working together, sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, but keeping the whole system in a living, dynamic balance. Remove any part โ the wolves, in his story โ and something else would start to go out of balance (the deer) and a kind of disorder would spread through the whole system. When intruding on an ecosystem, he was saying, tread carefully and move incrementally, stop often to observe your unfolding consequencesโฆ.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Were Leopold here today, as we undertake the sobering Anthropocene task of more effective management strategies for the Colorado River weโve created from the river we found here, he might advise us to โthink like a riverโ โ being careful first to be sure we are working with the river we actually have today, not the river we thought we had a century ago when we began to develop the management strategies that finally crashed at their century mark in 2022. [ed. emphasis mine]
Am I suggesting that the river actually โthinks,โ like we humans (supposedly) think? No. I donโt pretend to know if anything else in the universe thinks like we think (when we choose to). But it ought to be evident, here in the Anthropocene Epoch, when we are altering โ consciously or unconsciously โ a lot of the planetโs systems, that we could be better at thinking things through than we seem to be, and we ought to be able to learn something about thinking things through from looking closely at the systemicย behaviorย of things that have been working much longer at the challenge of surviving, even thriving, with a measure of sustainable graceโฆ. Like our rambunctious river, before we went to work on it.
Illustration of the Hyporheic Zone, from D. Tonina and J. M. Buffington, 2009, Hyporheic Exchange in Mountain Rivers I: Mechanics and Environmental Effects. Geography Compass 3 (2009): 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00226.x
Watching a river (one of my favorite occupations), the first superficial observation might be: this is a stream of water that is leaving, flowing away from land that was not able to put it to use, so it is leaving the premises โ usually carrying some of the land with it. This is an accurate perception of one of the riverโs functions (without which, there would be no โdownstreamโ), but that is not to say that the flowing stream is nothing but a drainage ditch. The flowing stream actually interacts with the land it is moving through as much as it can, through what hydrologists call โhyporheic exchangeโ โ either moving some of its water into the land it is flowing through, or picking up groundwater trickling into the stream. And it isnโt just purely water that gets exchanged both ways: the water is full of micro-organisms and dissolved and particulate minerals and gases, nutrients that also move into or out of the land.
A riverโs boundary does not end at the channel margins. Even when not in flood, the riverโs water reaches out laterally, beneath the riparian forest and floodplain, and vertically, into the substrate beneath the channel.
This underground world, where water originating in the river channel is percolating, in darkness, through the spaces between grains of gravel and sand, is called the hyporheic zone. The term Hyporheic means, literally, โbeneath the river.โ The distinguishing feature of this underground world is that surface water percolates down into it, moves through it for a while, and then reemerges from the streambed, becoming part of the surface water again further downstream.
This exchange of surface and subsurface water happens all along the river channel, giving the hyporheic water a character distinct from ordinary groundwater. And in the process, the surface water becomes changed as well.
One of the changes that happens when water enters the hyporheic zone is that it becomes cooler. We have all had the experience of going into the basement of an old house on a hot day, and noticing how cool the air can be down there. Temperatures below ground are cooler in the summer time, and more constant throughout the day. The streambed is no different.
The water flowing in the hyporheic zone becomes cooled, and when it reemerges, it cools the surface water as it mixes. This is one of the ways that a stream can remain cool in the sunlight, and cool off again in the shade after flowing through blistering sunlight.
Since the water flowing into the hyporheic zone carries dissolved substances from the surface water, including oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other nutrient substances that nurture growth of plants and fungi, there is life in this underground world. Each grain of gravel and sand becomes coated with a living film of microbes, a โbiofilm,โ that is nurtured by this flowing water and thrives in the absence of sunlight. Microscopic creatures, and even larger creatures, big enough to be seen by our eyes, such as copepods, tardigrades, insect larvae, tube worms, roundworms, and even juvenile fish enter, and live in, the hyporheic zone.
It is this biological activity that leads to another important function of the hyporheic zone: water filtration and purification. The streambed acts as a sand filter, physically straining out tiny particles of silt and organic matter, helping keep the surface water clear. The biofilm absorbs chemicals out of the water. Some of these chemicals nourish the microbes making up the biofilm. Other chemicals, including toxins from human pollution like road runoff, are absorbed by the biofilm, and in some cases broken down into harmless substances by the microbes.
Hydrologists call a stream picking up water from the land itโs moving through a gaining stream, and a stream that is giving some of its water to the land a losing stream. I think the latter ought to be called a โgiving stream,โ but I guess weโve got to go with the hydrologist terminology. (Itโs Trumpthink to call the stream a โloserโ for trying to be generous with its water.) Whether a stream loses or gains water from the land it is passing through depends on the level of the water table in the groundwater in the vicinity of the stream: if the water table near the stream is higher than the surface level of water in the stream, the stream gains from groundwater that trickles in. If the stream level is higher than the water table near the stream, the stream โlosesโ (gives) water to the surrounding land.
Another observation about how a river behaves comes from looking at the material a stream is carrying, material it has cut, ground or otherwise eroded from its mountains, and realize that a river is both a creative and destructive force creating the landscape like a sculptor. Some sculptor โ maybe Michelangelo? โ said that his task was to remove the excess stone from a block of marble to reveal the beautiful figure within; so does the river create our magnificent vistas of mountains, couloirs, bowlsย ย and valleys by cutting into and moving stone.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
This reductively creative, creatively destructive process is enhanced in our river basin by the fact that most of the riverโs water supply comes from a winter snowpack that melts out quickly over a couple months in what passes for spring in the mountains, and most of the riverโs water goes ripping and tearing down the mountains, far too fast for more than a fraction of it to sink in as groundwater. But what does sink in is important to the river after that fast runoff; the groundwater moves at a leisurely pace through the ground โ ranging from days and weeks to as much as a century โ making its way down to the low places where the surface streams flow, and arriving in the post-runoff time, late summer and fall, when the stream needs the gain. The US Geological Survey has determined, through sophisticated studies of isotopes, that roughly half of the water in the Colorado River below its steeper tributaries entered the river as groundwater.
When the downhill slope gentles, even surface flows slow and the streams begin to drop the debris they have torn out and are carrying, and they move that debris around โ or move around the debris themselves: so doing, they create meadows and floodplains through which they loop and meander, generating a lot of hyporheic exchange. Much of this exchange may be only into immediate riparian areas; but when streams roll into their own created floodplains, they spreads their excess bounty more broadly, raising a water table that might nurture grassy meadows, cottonwood forests โ or lots of agricultural land. A good runoff makes a streamโs floodplains live up to their name, with shallow floods spreading new layers of silt and nutrients over them.
In trying to โthink like a river,โ we do have to think about land-based life too, and the relationship of land-based life to water โ which of course is existential: without water, there is no life as we know it on the planet. And land-based life depends absolutely on freshwater, which โ remember from the last post here โ is less than one percent of the water on the planet. And two-thirds of that modest percent is bound up in the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.
All the life on the planet depends on access to the remaining tiny fraction of freshwater โ which, by the time it has accumulated in streams and rivers is on its way back to the salty seas, despite their efforts to slow the process by meandering and offering their waters in hyporheic exchanges. More freshwater will come โ or at least it always has โ as the sun distills it again from the salty seas and precipitates it over the land, but stillโฆ. All that freshwater, essential to life, just running off to the seas where it disappears into the salt water, freshwaterโs equivalent of dyingโฆ.
If one wanted to let the imagination fly like an untethered kite for a moment โ land-based life itself might be described as a freshwater strategy for confounding gravityโs pull back into the ocean. We โ all of us, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria โ are made up of highly specialized little vessels whose chief component when we are alive, is water. This is true of aquatic life that stays in the water, but it is also true of the rest of the planetโs life project that came out of the water to live on the land, a diversity of stacks and arrays and mobile units of tiny specialized cells full of a mix of minerals and gases dissolved in water. The watery cells that arrange themselves as molecular bucket brigades in trees lift water as much as three hundred feet into the atmosphere, against gravity, profligately venting most of that water back into the atmosphere to maintain that upward flow. We animals carry water everywhere, against gravity, far from the rivers. In this flight of imagination, humans, around 70 percent water, could be described as water that stood up to look around and think and dream.
Beaver ponds and meadows. Photo Credit: Sarah Marshall via American Rivers
Reeling that kite in โ land-based life does interact with surface freshwater in many ways, some of which facilitate waterโs willingness to carry out hyporheic exchanges with the land and the water-using organisms on the land, and some of which work against such exchanges. Beavers work to slow the flow of water through the land, pooling it up in ways that slow but donโt stop the flow, and so doing, nurture wetlands and wet-meadow ecosystems. And we humans move water out back out onto the land to irrigate it, again and again with the same water in the arid lands, using it to grow life that would never grow there at all unassisted.
Many river stretches in Colorado have been impacted by human use. In her book โVirtual Rivers,โ Ellen Wohl describes how rivers and headwater systems have been degraded over time. โAs land-use changes have resulted in changes to the water and sediment entering stream channels, these channels may become unsightly, pose a hazard to human life and property because of excessive scouring or sediment filling, or no longer provide some desired function, such as fishing.โ
Here we see an unhealthy system with an incised stream channel that is disconnected from its floodplain, resulting in reduced water storage, less groundwater recharge, and degraded water quality. Unlike in a wetland system, runoff and flood water flow quickly out of a degraded meadow because they cannot spread out and seep in. Increased flows cause further erosion, cutting deeper and wider channels that are less meandering and sending more sediment downstream. Graphics by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
We are also guilty of occasionally conspiring with the vagaries of nature to destroy the hyporheic exchange between streams and the land they run through, as when we unconsciously overgraze a wet meadow in a dry year โ then a summer afternoon storm drops an inch or two of cloudburst rain on the meadow, and a raging torrent rushes down through the vulnerable sun-baked meadow, creating in an hour or so a gully that deepens in subsequent years, and draws down the water table of the former meadow, causing an ecosystemic change from a wetland ecology to a dryland ecology. Or a dam is built across the river, drowning the aquatic and riparian ecosystems above the dam and altering the ecosystems below the dam. Some of these kinds of changes are unfortunate; others are just unavoidable as we try consciously to make the planet more โfittingโ for human survival in ever-increasing numbers.
There are two further observations about these processes that seem almost confoundingly contradictory: the slower the flow, the more the stream or river gets to interact with the land. But at the same time, the more the water is spread out in those interactions, the more vulnerable the water is to the sunโs power. Among ourselves we say โuse it or lose it.โ But in the bigger picture, it is โuse itย andย lose itโ through increased evaporation and transpiration, as we โspread it out to dry.โ
So given all of that โ what can we say about โthinking like a riverโ today, as we start planning for the operation and maintenance of our Colorado River in the hotter and probably drier Anthropocene? Given that it is only two-thirds the river we thought it was a century ago when we started to โdevelopโ it?
The most obvious thing from observing the river at its own work is to do what can be done to โslow the flowโ of water back to the sea โ but to do it in ways that donโt just โspread it out to dryโ under the sun whose power is enhanced by our atmospheric changes.
One way to do this is to get more of the water underground but retrievable. Back in the 1930s, there was discussion about how best to bring the on-again off-again firehose of the Colorado River mainstem under a measure of control. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers wanted big bold mainstem dams, like Hooverโs dam (already under construction), but the brand-new Soil Conservation Service favored a lot of small reservoirs and erosion-restoration projects up in the headwaters of the western rivers, followed by better farming, logging and mining methods. The idea was to raise water tables and increase the quantity of groundwater making its slow way downhill underground and out of the sun, before joining the river in its hyporheic games.
We know who won that discussion. But today, there is a growing movement to restore degraded landscapes by repairing gullied valleys and raising water tables, getting more water underground and out of the increasingly brutal sun. City utilities are cautiously exploring aquifer recharge, where over-pumping hasnโt already collapsed the aquifers. And we are moving toward consent about the fact that bypassing Glen Canyon Dam would increase the amount of water available for use by a third to half a million acre-feet, with no realistic loss of storage (put it all in Mead Reservoir). Had we given fewer resources to the Bureau of Reclamation and more to the Soil Conservation Service in the โ30s, we would probably have more water in the river today.
I am not one of those who laments the fact that โthe Colorado River no longer flows to the ocean,โ and donโt find that fact inconsistent with โthinking like a river.โ The amount of active freshwater on the planet is so relatively miniscule in the big picture that I think it would be just fine if land-based life figured out ways to putย allย of it to work on the care and maintenance of land-based life. That will of course never happen with a vast watershed like the Mississippi โ although, given the dead zone its runoff is creating in the Gulf of Mexico, it might be better if itย wasย all used up before New Orleans. I do realize that the lack of Colorado River water flowing into the Gulf of California has impacts on sea life there, but everything seems to involve choices, and in this one, I am inclined by nature to come down on the side of land-based lifeโฆ.
I think it would be nice if we could dedicate one percent of the riverโs water to restoration of the beautiful old Colorado River delta โ but it would be even better if we could figure out how to make the vast โdesert deltaโ we have created instead (Phoenix on the east through all the Lower Colorado ag lands to Los Angeles on the west) something we could love rather than dislike so much as we seem toโฆ. Can we not build beautiful cities, desert โarcologiesโ that weโd like to live in rather than โauto-urbsโ under a carbon-gas smog spreading out like a cow pooping on a flat rock? Or agricultural lands that arenโt rural industrial slums plagued by inequity?
Thinking like a river โ water driven back to sea level by gravity (โItโs the law!โ) but doing what it can to slow its flow in places where it can give water back to the land as well as carry water off the landโฆ. The water has systematic processes going on that we can participate in โ have to, being water vessels ourselves needing constant replenishment. Weโve presumed, both consciously and unconsciously, to take charge of those systems along with a lot of other planetary systems; thatโs what the Anthropocene Epoch is, and either we rise to the challenges there weโve imposed on ourselves, or we will preside over our own slow and tedious unraveling. And maybe the first big challenge is slowing our own flow enough to begin to really think through the systems weโve often just overrun in enthusiastic arrogance.
This year was marked by incredible progress in terms of Audubonโs priorities for water conservation in the West, and yet, we have so much more to do for the birds and people who rely on clean and reliable water. In my lifetime, North America has lost more thanย 3 billion birdsโa catastrophe reaching a tipping point. If we act now, we can reverse this trend and protect people and birds in the arid West. And while daunting, we are making an impact.
Sometimes we hesitate to celebrate or call an achievement a โwinโ because the work is so massive and ongoing, with climate change and drought still present, and the threats facing the rivers, lakes, and wetlandsโand the essential habitats they provide to birdsโare growing. Adding more water into the Colorado River, Rio Grande or Great Salt Lake can feel tiny compared to what they need, or what they once were, or could be. But we are seeing birds respond. These victories add up and show decision-makers that new solutions can work, especially when scaled up. Thanks to our supporters and partners, weโve directed and secured more conservation funding from federal and state governments to these iconic watersheds, weโve changed public policies and water management where it was outdated and no longer serving todayโs needs, and we continue to push for better outcomes for precious water resources in the West.
Much of the work we do is often behind the scenes because of complex technical and legal requirements (such as water transactions to benefit Great Salt Lake or modeling to determine optimal timing for bird surveys). Because of this, it can be challenging to capture the impact weโre making. On top of that, this work can be politically messyโeven while we maintain great relationships with many legislators, government officials, and partners.
Despite the challenges, the momentum continues to build in our work around the West and in Washington, D.C.
Championed birds and basin-wide environmental resources in regular dialogue with Colorado River decision-makers in ongoing negotiations.
The range of Audubonโs work is vast: from implementing innovation and market-based solutions, to mobilizing science partners that address knowledge gaps for priority birds, and to thought leadership in water policies and management decisions. Hereโs a high-level view of that work:
Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust in its first year
At Great Salt Lake, Audubon, along with The Nature Conservancy, has been co-leading the Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust (aka the Trust)โa key effort among many solutions needed in protecting and enhancing the water quantity and water quality for the lake and its wetlands. These are some of the most critical habitats for birds in North America. The Trust, working with the State of Utahโs Divisions of Forestry, Fire and State Lands and Wildlife Resources, have facilitated, provided transaction costs, and contributed funding to water transactions for more than 50,000acre-feet of water for Great Salt Lake. The bulk of this water was donated or partially donated, including what is believed to be the largest-ever permanent water donation of water to Great Salt Lakefrom the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The wetlands surrounding Great Salt Lake provide crucial habitat for millions of migratory birds, recreational opportunities, and many other public benefits including protecting water quality.โฏ
This year is just the beginning, as weโll secure more water for Great Salt Lake in 2024 and beyond. In the face of climate change, unpredictable drought, and increasing water demands, the Trust, and many other interested parties will need to work collaboratively to bring more water to the lake.
Intermountain West Shorebird Surveys after a 30-year hiatus
Understanding how migrating shorebirds are responding to habitat changes as saline lakes face the threat of desiccation due to climate change and water diversions has been an essential driver for our work with partners in the regional Intermountain West Shorebird Surveys. Now with three seasons under our belt (Fall 2022, Spring 2023, and Fall 2023), Audubon and Point Blue Conservation Science aim to fill data gaps for at least 30 species of shorebirds and their vulnerable habitats in an area bounded on the West by the Sierra Nevada Mountains and on the East by the Rocky Mountains. Conditions have dramatically changed since the last major effort like this was undertaken over 30 years ago, and the need for updated information is more important than ever. We teamed up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, several Tribes, 11 state wildlife agencies, 35 Audubon chapters, hundreds of volunteers, private landowners, and many other non-profit organizations to count shorebirds in their peak migration windows at 200 sites across the Westโand we will do so through 2025โto inform shorebird conservation.
In the time since weโve kicked off this enormous survey effort, extremes of โweather whiplashโ have made for interesting results. For instance, August 2022 was the peak of this mega-drought; Spring 2023 had record-breaking runoff; August 2023 had the West Coastโs Tropical Storm Hilary. Weโve also seen surprising statistics so far, including a record-breaking maximum count of shorebirds at the Salton Sea. The previous max count was 105,000 and the most recent survey counted over 250,000 shorebirds.
We aim to fill more data gaps, but more resources and collaborations are needed to ensure a robust understanding of these species needs. From American Avocet to Wilsonโs Phalarope to Snowy Plovers, many species that rely on saline lakes throughout their lifecycle are benefitting from capable partnerships like this, increasing our shared knowledge and allowing for more focused management and protection of their unique habitat needs.ย
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Colorado River at a pivotal moment to reduce water use while including the needs of birds
The lifeblood of the American West received a lifeline this year with an above average winterโbut the decades-long overuse problems remain. We know that it may take a decade or more of above average winters to restore the main Colorado River reservoirs to pre-2000 levels. The overall trend is that the available water in the Colorado River is declining, even while the United States and Mexico, Tribes, state governments, cities within the basin, and farmers are doing more than ever to ensure available water supply for subsequent years.
We know that to save the Colorado River, we need toย use less water. And as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation continuesย long-term and short-term planningย on the Colorado River, itโs important to remember that while the Colorado River is unpredictable, planning for that future can help all of us in the long run. These plans need to also consider the enormousย third-party impactsย of reducing water uses in the Colorado River. Thank you to the Audubon network members who sent more than 31,000 comments to the Bureau of Reclamation in 2023 in favor of better outcomes for people, birds, and the environment.
Western yellow-billed cuckoo at Montezuma Well, Arizona.
Photo Courtesy of Gary Botello via the National Park Service
Wrapping up 2023 and looking ahead to next year
We remind ourselves that birds are not only essential components to a healthy ecosystem, birds are daily reminders of our interconnections. This year, a tagged Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo, a federally threatened bird, taught us a little bit of humility and awe when it passed through at least six protected areas on its international journey south. For these riparian-dependent birds, overuse and over-allocation of water in a drought and climate stressed region has led to a precipitous decline in their population. This one migrating bird had the power to remind us that the water work weโve prioritized and progress we are making matters.
As we move in to 2024, Audubon will continue to advocate for a more secure future for water in the West. Our livelihoods, our environment, and the well-being of future generations require that we continue this hard work now in hopes of preventing catastrophes later. And for migrating birds, keeping the water needed for the network of conserved, restored, and undeveloped habitat across the Southwest adds up today and towards long-lasting solutions. While the work is important, vast, and sometimes uncertain, we remain dedicated and even hopeful that our work and the work of our partners will result in better outcomes for people and birds.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a โlifelong passion for beautiful maps,โ it highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country โ in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
In a rather predictable โ but still maddening โ move, the off-road-vehicle lobby is suing the Bureau of Land Management over the agencyโs Labyrinth Canyon and Gemini Bridges travel plan for off-highway vehicle use.
The BlueRibbon Coaltion, Colorado Off-Road Trail Defenders, and Patrick McKay are challenging the โillegal and arbitraryโ closure of 317 miles of motorized routes on about 468 square miles of public land north and west of Moab between the Green River and Highway 191. The off-road coalition was already shot down once by the Interior Board of Land Appeals; now theyโre taking their gripes to federal court, using theย same spurious arguments.ย
Of course, these groups have every right to challenge federal agenciesโ decisions; environmentalists do it all the time. But whatโs maddening about these motorized-access groups is their intransigence โ even arrogance โ and stubborn unwillingness to compromise. They promise to โFight for Every Inchโ of motorized access to public lands, not for any real reason but as an end in itself, damn the consequences to the environment, the public, and wildlife.
The kerfuffle over the Labyrinth/Gemini plan is a perfect example.
Over the last couple of decades, vehicle traffic โ and the impacts โ have burgeoned on some 1,100 miles of motorized routes in the management planโs area. The type of traffic has changed, too, shifting from the relatively slow-going and quiet jeeps and SUVs to the dune-buggyesque side-by-sides that have become increasingly popular in recent years. They go faster, are noisier, and kick up more dust than other vehicles. They also carry more people into the backcountry than a motorcycle or old-school ATV, thus multiplying the adverse effects.ย
For years, river runners, public lands advocates, and local residents and elected officials have been pushing the agency to get a handle on the traffic on the 300,000-acre slickrock expanse. Last year, the BLM came up with four alternatives, ranging from keeping the status quo to closing up to 437 miles of trails. Yes, the strictest alternative would have closed less than half of the routes to vehicles, leaving almost 700 miles open to some form of motorized travel. In other words it was a compromise that favored the motorized crowd.
But even that went too far for the BLM, which ultimately shut down just 317 miles of motorized routes, while limiting motorized travel (to motorcycles or smaller ATVs, for example) on 98 miles. In other words, you can still burn gasoline and spew exhaust on more than 800 miles of routes on this one relatively small swath of public land. Meanwhile motorized travel remains mostly unrestricted on more than 10,000 miles of roads, two-tracks, and old trails in southeastern Utah.
There are still a lot of roads open under the new travel plan. Credit: The Land Desk
Thatโs not enough for the BlueRibbon Coalition and friends, however; itโs never enough for them. They are ideologically opposed to decommissioning even the most insignificant road spur, and they and their allies in local and state government will squander millions of taxpayer dollars to fight the closures. Their reasoning? Because OHV recreation is, in the words of the lawsuit, โa way of life in the American West.โ
Really? I mean, itโs the same trope rolled out whenever someone tries to get a coal plant to stop belching pollution all over folks or a mine to stop defiling the streams. In those instances it may have some validity: The move could affect the minersโ or the coal plant workersโ livelihoods, and therefore their way of life. But these folks will still be able to ride their noisy machines around on hundreds of miles of roads. Believe me: Nothing about this plan will affect their way of life.
I highly doubt the motorized coalition will prevail; even the most conservative judges are unlikely to fall for their faulty legal reasoning. And so, the plan likely will remain in place, as it should. Itโs a compromise, and an admittedly crappy one for those of us who would like to see a lot fewer vehicles โ and people โ trampling the landscape. After all, it still leaves the sprawling road network mostly intact. But maybe itโs the best we can expect, and at least it doesย something. And it will make it just a little easier for the quiet users, the bighorn sheep, the coyotes, and the silence to find a bit of refuge from the incessant whirr of combustible engines and the humans driving them.
Bighorns, along the Colorado River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
I hate to start out the New Year with kind of grim news, but itโs sure not looking good out there as far as snow goes. In fact, many parts of the West are experiencing one of their thinnest Jan. 1 snowpacks in the last two decades. And the last two decades, as you probably now, were generally lousy.
A dearth of precipitation is the main problem, of course, but abnormally warm temperatures arenโt helping matters. And remember, โnormalโ is based on the three decades between 1991 and 2020, which was a heck of a lot warmer than the previous three decades, which in turn was balmier than all the decades before that back to 1901. Seems like somethingโs going on here, eh? I wonder what?
Take the Great Falls, Montana, area, where the average temperature for the month of December was 37.6 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 12 degrees above normal. On one day, the high reached a whopping 64 F (a daily record) and the low dropped only to a balmy 51 F, for a daily average that was almost 30 degrees above normal. Meanwhile, the region received just .08 inches of precipitation for the month. Some more stats to ponder:
31: Number of monthly high maximum temperature records tied or broken across the West in Dec. 2023.
100: Number of monthly high minimum temperature records tied or broken across the West in Dec. 2023, including a 57 degree overnight low in Troutdale, Oregon, on Dec. 5 and 46 degrees in Benchmark, Montana, a whopping 5 degrees higher than the previous record low set in 2020.
0: Number of lowest minimum temperature records set across the West during December.
Wyoming seems to be bearing the brunt of the aridification this year. Statewide, the snowpack is now lower than ever recorded for the first of January. Ack.
And check out these stats from the National Weather Serviceโs Riverton, Wyoming, office:
Colorado is generally dry, as well, especially in the southwestern corner.
And Oregon? Blargh.
The only kind of bright spot seems to be in the Gila River Basin in southern New Mexico, where a good storm brought things up to the median for the period of record:
The Parker Dam straddles the Arizona-California border and backs up the Colorado River to form Lake Havasu. The dam also generates electricity. ยฉTed Wood Usage rights are granted for editorial and nonprofit purposes only. No commercial or re-sale rights are granted without permission of the photographer.
Californiaโs Colorado River Board said Wednesday [December 13, 2023] that several water agencies and one tribal nation signed the first in a series of agreements that will conserve up to 1.6 million acre-feet of water. The agreements build on previous commitments by California, Arizona and Nevada toย reduce water useย by 3 million acre-feet over three years, cutting usage by about 14% across the Southwest. Much of the reductions are occurring in exchange for payments funded through the Inflation Reduction Act. The deals to reduce water use are aimed at boosting the levels of Lake Mead, the nationโs largest reservoir near Las Vegas, which now stands at 34% of capacity.ย
The latest agreements โrepresent another critical step in our collective efforts to address the water management challenges the Colorado River Basin faces due to drought and climate change,โ said federal Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. โAddressing the drought crisis requires an all-hands-on-deck approach, and close collaboration.โ
[…]
A boat is shown on the Colorado River near Willow Beach Saturday, April 15, 2023. Willow Beach is located approximately 20 miles south of the Hoover Dam. Photo by Ronda Churchill/The Nevada Independent
Scientists have found that roughlyย half the declineย in the riverโs flow this century has been caused by rising temperatures, and that for each additional 1.8 degrees of warming, the riverโs average flow is likely toย decrease about 9%…Interior Department officials said the newly signed agreements secure conservation pledges of up to 643,000 acre-feet of water through 2025. The agreements, which were announced in Las Vegas, include $295 million in federal funds for conservation, water efficiency and protection of environmental resources. An acre-foot of water is enough to supply about three average homes for a year. The Coachella Valley Water District has agreed to save up to 105,000 acre-feet of water through 2025, roughly 10% of its supply from the river. The districtโs proposal was approved earlier this year, and involves curtailing the use of Colorado River water for replenishing groundwater. In exchange, the federal government is paying $400 per acre-foot of water…
Coachella Valley. Graphic credit USGS.
In another agreement, the Quechan Tribe of the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation agreed to save up to 39,000 acre-feet of water in the next two years…Leaders of Californiaโs Imperial Irrigation District, which delivers the single largest share of Colorado River water to farmland in the Imperial Valley, this monthย approved another agreementย to conserve up to 100,000 acre-feet of water…That deal secured reductions in water use through an existing agricultural conservation program in the Imperial Valley and negotiations among several agencies. About half of the water had previously been earmarked to be sent to the San Diego County Water Authority under a water transfer agreement, but will instead remain in Lake Mead. The conserved water is enough to raise the reservoirโs level 1.5 feet…
The All American Canal diverts water from the Lower Colorado River to irrigate crops in Californiaโs Imperial Valley and supply 9 cities. Graphic credit: USGS
Jack Schmidt, a professor who leads Utah State Universityโs Center for Colorado River Studies, recently analyzed reservoir levels and said in aย blog postย that โthe rate of loss this year is much lowerโ than in all but one of the previous 10 years, โsuggesting that current policies of reducing consumptive use may be working.โ
Figure 4. Graph showing reservoir storage in the 21st century in three parts of the watershed, as well as the total storage. Note that conditions on 30 November 2023, at the far right hand side of the graph, are similar to conditions in early May 2021 and less than during most of the 21st century. Credit: Jack Schmidt
He noted that while this yearโs ample snowpack in the Rocky Mountains brought an increase in reservoir levels, a portion of those gains have been used. He said the amount stored in the riverโs reservoirs is now the same as it was in May 2021.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Melinda Adams lights a field of deergrass on fire during the Tending and Gathering Garden Indigenous fire Workshop at the Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Woodland, Calif. Photo: Alysha Beck/UC Davis
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
While water managers from two countries, 30 tribes, seven states and countless other federal, state and local water managers discussed how to address the Colorado Riverโs structural deficit this week, Indigenous women were working to grow the next generation of water policy leaders. Some of those women were honored Wednesday [December 13, 2023] at the annual Tribes and Water Luncheon during the Colorado River Water Users Association meeting. Theย Indigenous Women’s Leadership Networkย was formed to connect emerging Native women working in environmental and natural resources fields to established women leaders, according to Daryl Vigil, co-chair of theย Tribes and Water Initiative. The leadership network is part of the tribal water initiative. But to the women in the program, it’s not just about networking, learning leadership skills or scholarships. It’s a way to restore women’s rightful place in tribal societies, as leaders, culture holders and bearers, and nurturers.
Lorelei Cloud, the acting Southern Ute Indian Tribe Chairwoman, is the network’s current co-chair. The leadership positions change hands over time to give other women leadership opportunities, Cloud said. Other current co-chairs could be part of a Native Who’s Who: former Fort Mojave Indian Tribe Chairperson and environmental and cultural activist Nora McDowell; Gwendena Lee-Gatewood, the first woman chairperson of the White Mountain Apache Tribe who now serves as a policy manager for the American Indian Cancer Foundation; and Fort Yuma-Quechan Tribal Councilmember Darnella J. Melancon, who’s also a noted crisis intervention specialist.
“We wear different hats โ mother, daughter, office staff, hydrologists and attorneys,” Cloud said. “But those roles don’t end when we get home.”
[…]
Colonization caused oftentimes catastrophic upheavals in social systems that had sustained communities and allowed them to thrive for millennia. Native women have labored to restore these systems ever since. Native women tend to be overlooked in a patriarchal mainstream society, Cloud said. But for more Indigenous women to enter leadership roles in tribal governments, environmental and water programs and the legal profession, women have a duty to help each other, she said…
[Autumn] Powell said her mother and aunts loomed larger than the men in the family. But when she left the nation to attend college, she learned that not everybody thinks having women in leadership roles is a good thing. “The patriarchy is misdirected,” said Powell, a geography major at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County who studies how place has value from the human perspective. She also learned that Native people on the East Coast have suffered greatly from colonial erasure. “‘They don’t live here,'” she recounted people saying about local Natives. “I said they were literally right here.”
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
This was a big flow year on New Mexicoโs Middle Rio Grande, but weird, in ways that highlight the challenges we face.
FLOW IN THE RIVER
Total flow into New Mexicoโs Middle Rio Grande Valley (measured at Otowi) sits at 1.26 million acre feet with two more daysโ flow to go, so round it off to 1.3maf.
Rio Grande flow at Otowi, with Brad Udall-style plots of 20th and 21st century means. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
So a big year! Yay! Look at all that water in the picture above, a bank-full Rio Grande flowing past Rio Rancho, New Mexico, in December. And yet there I was in August watching dogs gamboling on the sand bed of a nearly dry Rio Grande. Whatโs up with that?
The answer involves the interaction between a climate change-driven megadrought, the use of the river by human communities, and the tangle of rules that govern management of the 21st century Rio Grande.
The short term tangle involves El Vado Dam, currently being renovated and therefore unusable for storage. That meant that by August the declining inflow of late summer with a lousy monsoon left the river nearly dry, regardless of the winter snowpack.
This problem, which will go on for several more years, means that irrigators will depend on run-of-the-river operations for late summer irrigation for a while yet. Given that irrigation water also supports environmental flows on its way to the irrigation diversions, this is also bad for things like the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow and the river flowing through my city.
The longer term tangle involves competing community values among the various ways we use water, combined with a lack of tools to reduce that use.
Because, with climate changeย there is less water.
Albuquerqueโs Rio Grande, drying September 3, 2023. Photo credit: John Fleck/InkStain
INKSTAIN IS READER SUPPORTED
Inkstain has been a Nazi-free zone for more than 20 years, mostly because itโs just my blog and Iโm not a Nazi. (If you donโt know what Iโm talking about, bless you. Google โSubstackโ and โNazisโ, itโs the latest digerati kerfuffle.)
But, like all your favorite Substackers, it is reader supported! Thanks as always to our readers. (And if you donโt know what Substackers are, again, bless you.)
THE TANGLE: MOVING WATER IN TIME
First letโs pin some data to our bulletin board:
Total storage on New Mexicoโs Rio Grande and the Rio Chama, its main tributary. Credit: John Fleck/InkStain
Thereโs an old water management adage: Canals move water in space, reservoirs move water in time. We built them to store water in wet years, effectively moving it in time to dry years. So how much did we so move this year?
Inspired by Jack Schmidtโs monthly Colorado River posts, I spent my Saturday coffee wakeup this morning totaling up sorta year-end storage in the reservoirs I care about (from top to bottom Heron, El Vado, Abiquiu, Cochiti, Elephant Butte, and Caballo). It took longer than I expected because I was so distracted by all the amazing history embedded in this graph. 1986-87, yowza, whatโs up with that?
Flow this year was ~440k acre feet above the 21st century average. Total end of year storage is up ~220k acre feet. Thereโs so much mixing of apples, oranges, durian, and pawpaw here that itโs not a straight up comparison, but it should give you a feel for the challenge: we only saved a part of the bonus water. We used a lot of it.
The Management Levers
Letโs imagine for a moment that we wanted to pull some water management levers to change that balance by reducing consumptive use (by โuseโ I mean evapotransporation, human and non-human) in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Weโve basically got four different categories of use:
The cities, especially Albuquerque
The Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, which manages irrigation water for some commercial farms and a lot of custom and culture/lifestyle stuff
Domestic wells
The river โ evaporation and riparian consumption by our beloved bosque
Letโs take these in order of smallest to largest water use.
THE CITIES
Weโve already cranked down pretty hard on this lever. With a combination of water use reductions and a shift from groundwater pumping to imported Colorado River water, weโve already cranked down extremely hard on this lever. This is the one area of the system that is already aggressively regulated.
If you want to crank down harder on this lever, the two points of entry in the legal/political/policy system are the Office of State Engineer/Interstate Stream Commission, which do the regulating, and the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority Board, which is made up of elected city councilors and county commissioners.
THE DISTRICT
Consumptive use by the Conservancy Districtโs irrigators is several times larger than the cities. The District took voluntary action this year to reduce use, delaying the start of irrigation season and cutting diversions once they started by 20 percent to try to get more water to Elephant Butte Reservoir.
With federal money, the District paid folks irrigating a relatively small portion of the valleyโs acreage to fallow this year, and the acreage is going up in 2024. But the numbers remain small relative to the size of the problem.
If you want to crank down harder on this lever, itโs not clear to me what the stateโs legal authority might be. There may be some, but itโs not been tested. But the District is governed by an elected board. Thatโs a lever, though itโs worth pointing out that the board got a lot of crap this year from irrigators about they steps they did take. Incentives in all of this are weird, itโs tricky to figure out how to work this lever.
DOMESTIC WELLS
We donโt regulate these at all. We have no idea how much water they use, but it sure looks to use like thereโs a lot.ย We donโt really even know how many there are, there seem to be a lot drilled illegally. (If youโre a UNM Water Resources Student, hit me up on this! We have some ideas for a really impactful masters degree research project.) We probably need to think about building a lever here, but we currently donโt have one. The state legislature might be a place to start? Maybe some un-exercised legal authority at the Office of State Engineer? (Seeย NMAC 19.27.5.14, my day job, such as it is, is at a law school, though IANAL it sure looks like that could only apply to new wells, so horse out of barn etc.)
Birds and water at Bosque de Apache New Mexico November 9, 2022. Photo credit: Abby Burk
THE BOSQUE
The biggest water user, likely larger than irrigation, is the riparian corridor itself. Itโs largely unnatural, vegetation exploiting a niche created when we built levees and constrained the riverโs flow, but whatever. It feels like โnatureโ, and we love it. And even if we didnโt itโs not clear what a lever to reduce that use might look like.
VALUES
Each one of these uses is valued by some segment of our community, and we seem to lack the tools to reconcile these competing values, which is why Iโm pretty excited about the 2023 Water Security Planning Act.
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND METHODS
The reservoir data is from the USBRโs reservoir data archive. The latest 2023 data is from Dec. 18, so I matched up this yearโs with Dec. 18 in previous years. My quick sensitivity check led me to conclude โMeh, good enough for a blog post.โ For the early years, the USBR just reports a single year-end number for El Vado. My quick sensitivity check led me to conclude โMeh, good enough for a blog post.โ
It is, in fact, spelled โgageโ, just ask Bob, heโll tell you.
I currently have 26 browser tabs open, including one with an amazing list of obscure fruit, did you know that Mark Twain called cherimoya โthe most delicious fruit known to men.โ? I had a bunch more I wanted to say, but thatโs enough, itโs time to hit โpublishโ. Thanks for reading.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Coloradoโs mountains are experiencing one of their lowest snow Decembers in recent history, and this is anticipated to carry into next week…Western areas of Colorado, such as Routt and Moffat counties, will see some clouds next week and could get a dusting of snow at higher elevations according to the National Weather Service in Grand Junction.ย
The last time Colorado saw this little snow inย December was 2013…In terms of the recent dry spell in the Rockies, Hiris said, โWeโre not too far below normal at this point for most of Colorado, most of the bigger basins are sitting somewhere between 60 and 80% of snowpack.โ
[…]
OpenSnow meteorologist Joel Gratzย reported on the blogย that the next potential significant snowstorm in the Rockies could come the week of Jan. 8.
CPW will award over $1.1 million in funds from Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) and Colorado Waterfowl Stamps to projects in Colorado that support the Wetlands Program Strategic Planโs two main goals:
โImprove the distribution and abundance of ducks, and opportunities for public waterfowl hunting. Applications supporting this goal should seek to improve fall/winter habitat on property open for public hunting (or refuge areas within properties open for public hunting), or improve breeding habitat in important production areas (including North Park and the San Luis Valley in Colorado, and other areas contributing ducks to the fall flight in Colorado).
Improve the status of declining or at-risk species. Applications supporting this goal should seek to clearly address habitat needs of these species. See species list on the Wetlands Priority Speciesโ page. Also see the identified threats, recommended conservation actions and progress to date for these species in the Colorado State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) Conservation Dashboards.
The application deadline is Monday, Feb. 12. The Wetlands Funding Request for Applications is available on our website, and can be downloaded by clicking here.
Whatโs new for 2024 For projects on CPW properties (State Wildlife Areas and State Parks), CPW’s Regional Water Specialist must be consulted before applying.โ For additional questions, contact CPW Wetlands Program Coordinator Brian Sullivan at brian.sullivan@state.co.us.
About the program The Colorado Wetlands for Wildlife Program is a voluntary, collaborative and incentive-based program to restore, enhance and create wetlands and riparian areas in Colorado. Funds are allocated annually to the program and projects are recommended for funding by a CPW committee with final approval by the Director.
โWetlands are so important,โ said CPW Wetlands Program Coordinator Brian Sullivan. โThey comprise less than two percent of Coloradoโs landscape, but provide benefits to over 75 percent of the wildlife species in the state, including waterfowl and many declining species. Since the beginning of major settlement activities, Colorado has lost half of its wetlands.โ
Since its inception in 1997, the Colorado Wetlands Program and its partners has preserved, restored, enhanced or created more than 225,000 acres of wetlands and adjacent habitat and more than 210 miles of streams. The partnership is responsible for more than $50 million in total funding devoted to wetland and riparian preservation in Colorado.
This project explores the complex challenges facing the Colorado River basin through a visual journey using photography, informative graphics and maps. The exploration includes voices from often-overlooked Native tribes with deep connections to the basinโs water and traverses all seven basin states, extending southward to the Gulf of California in Mexico.
Water management in the seven Colorado River Basin states and Mexico are intertwined, yet each faces unique circumstances and challenges.
PAWSD Business Manager Aaron Burns opened the discussion by ex- plaining that the board gave direction at its Nov. 14 work session for staff to look at other rates and fees beyond the districtโs main water and waste- water rates, and attempt to use these to reduce the increases in water and wastewater rates. He stated that some of the areas discussed were availability fees, rates for waste haulers and rates at water fill stations. He added that staff from Stantec โ the company performing the rate study for the district โ incorporated the changes into the calculations, which made a โsignificantโ differ- ence, particularly in wastewater rate increases.
Zac Koch of Stantec then presented on the rate study, highlighting the changes made from the previous presentation in November. For water rates, Koch explained that the primary change in the study was that, as suggested at the November work session, availability fees will now scale in accordance with the increases in water rates, with the expected decrease in the number of lots remaining the same…[Koch] stated that rate increases would remain at 5 percent annually between 2026 and 2029, with 15 percent increases occurring in 2030 and 2031 to cover the increased expenses for Regulation 35 compliance, and no increase in 2032. According to Kochโs presentation, this would bring the projected monthly residential bill from $32.80 in 2023 to $89.11 in 2032, down from the $103.34 bill in 2032 indicated in the previous presentation…
Following a brief discussion, the board unanimously voted to accept the conclusions of the rate study and to set a public hearing on the rates for Jan. 25, 2024, at 5 p.m. at the PAWSD administrative offices at 100 Lyn Ave.
Click the link to read the article on the Pagosa Springs Sun website (Derek Kutzer). Here’s an excerpt:
At a Dec. 21 meeting, the Pagosa Springs Town Council voted to change the language of an amend- ment to its tap agreement with The Springs Resort and Spa. Since 2009, the agreement has provided a certain amount of โraw geothermal waterโ to The Springs Resort for commercial uses. The town currently obtains water rights to two geothermal wells down- town. The new language adopted by the council will leave open the possibility of raising the rate that the town charges The Springs Resort for municipal geothermal water to even higher than the $12,000 per-year rate in the current drafted amendment.
At the meeting, Town Manager David Harris said, โThe existing rates are set to expire in this calendar year,โ which prompted the town and The Springs Resort to draft this amendment for the council to consider.
Harris explained that this new amendment was the product of discussions with the owners of The Springs and that both parties believe it is a โfairโ agreement.
A below-average runoff this year could mean that reservoirs in Colorado and Wyoming would have to release water downstream to keep the lake from hitting levels that would threaten the Glen Canyon Damโs energy generation and make delivering water to Arizona, California and Nevada nearly impossible. Colorado River water managers have implemented similar emergency measures in recent years to keep Lake Powell from reaching crisis levels. Utah reaches its typical peak snowpack in early April, and the state gets about 95% of its water supply from snow.
A proposed state law would take aim at thirsty turf varieties planted along streets and roads in new developments. This housing project, Leyden Rock in Arvada, has less space devoted to front-yard turf than many older subdivisions.ย CREDIT:ย ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
The deepening troubles of the Colorado River, a significant source of water for most of Coloradoโs 5.9 million residents, has implications for the types of grasses we grow in our yards and in street medians.
Speaking in Las Vegas recently, former Arizona Gov. and former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt recalled warnings of worsening drought and imbalances between supplies and demand. โThereโs going to be a day of reckoning,โ Babbitt, 85, told Politicoโs E&E News, referring to the warnings of scientists during past decades. โHere we are. The crisis has arrived.โ
Coloradoโs mounting efforts to limit new expanses of thirsty turf wonโt solve the Colorado River problems. Colorado is just one of seven states in the basin. And even within Colorado, agriculture consumes roughly 90% of Coloradoโs water and cities about 7%. Exterior use, such as for watering thirsty Kentucky bluegrass yards, consumes 40% to 60% of municipal water.
But if this water use is on the margins, itโs one that many water managers believe must be addressed. Aย bill that originatedย in the Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee in October has the support of two of the stateโs largest cities and has sponsors from both political parties from across Colorado.
This proposal would preclude the installation of nonfunctional turf as well as artificial turf in commercial, institutional or industrial properties or in transportation corridors, such as along streets or in road medians. Nonfunctional turf is defined as grasses that are predominantly ornamental โ and that few will ever walk on unless to mow, yet still require heavy watering. Think, for example, of those giant carpets of green grass that commonly surround business parks such as the Denver Tech Center or Broomfieldโs Inverness business park.
The bill, however, does not address residential water use.
Many urban landscapes in Colorado are planted in Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty species that require close to double what the semiarid climate delivers. Native grasses such as blue gramma and even some imported species can survive with far less or even no supplemental water.
Continued population growth also adds pressure to city water utilities. The Colorado Water Plan projects growth of the stateโs current population to at least 7.7 million by 2050, mostly along the Front Range.
Legislators have been advised by the stateโs Colorado River Drought Task Force to bump funding to $5 million per year for turf removal. In 2022, they allocated $2 million, which has now been exhausted in grants to local jurisdictions.
Also informing Coloradoโs path forward will be recommendations from another task force, appointed by Gov. Jared Polis last January, to investigate opportunities for an accelerated transformation in use of water in urban landscapes. The 21 committee members were drawn from the ranks of local governments, academia, environmental advocacy groups and developers.ย
At their eight meetings, committee members wrestled with what should be the proper mix of incentives and mandates and ultimately just how far the state should push into matters of local land use. One member suggested that banning new turf in road medians was a no-brainer. Another member urged flexibility for local jurisdictions to achieve state goals. โWeโre going to be on this journey for a long time,โ said Catherine Moravec of Colorado Springs Utilities. โLess controversy will help keep us together.โ
In final meetings, now concluded, members agreed on the need to support state legislation. The Colorado Water Conservation Board, which oversaw the process, emphasizes that the task forceโs report will have no direct connection to legislation. The task forceโs pending report โmay be used by decision-makers at state, local or even neighborhood scales,โ said Jenna Battson, the agencyโs outdoor water conservation coordinator. โItโs a resource.โ The task force recommendations are expected to be released in late January after review โ and perhaps tweaking โ by Polis.
Northern Water maintains a demonstration garden at its headquarters in Berthoud that illustrates various landscaping alternatives.
CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
Changing the status quo
Water scarcity underlies all these discussions. Specific circumstances vary. Some jurisdictions, most notably those between Denver and Colorado Springs, depend upon receding underground aquifers for most of their water. They get very little or no Colorado River water.
Most other jurisdictions do rely upon the Colorado River. Ambiguity has long dogged the Colorado River Compact, the agreement reached by delegates from the seven basin states in 1922. What if runoff declined substantially? The river since 2000 has delivered an average 12.3 million acre-feet per year, far short of the 20 million acre-feet that delegates had assumed.
Must Colorado and the three other upper-basin states โ New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ leave more water to flow downstream if runoff declines even more? That would cause curtailment of diversions with water rights after 1922. A study commissioned by the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District found that 96% of Front Range water use could be subject to curtailment.
That includes diversions by Denver Water. โIt is possible that Denver Waterโs deliveries of Colorado River basin supplies could be curtailed for a period of time,โ advised a statement from Denver Water issued in August 2022 when the utility was issuing new water bonds.
That statement was issued the same month that Denver Water and 30 other utilities from Colorado to California that rely upon Colorado River Basin water committed to removing urban turf, with a goal of 75 million square feet in the case of Denver Water. Thatโs an area roughly equivalent in size to 1,800 football fields. At the current rate, that will be achieved in 100 years, according to Denver Water.
Even so, that was a sharp reversal for Denver Water, a utility that delivers water to 1.5 million people in Denver and 17 other municipalities in the metro area. Even after severe drought 20 years before, Denver made no move to remove turf. If drought got bad enough, the agency reasoned, it could ask customers to stop watering their yards. The utility now plans a pilot program in 2024 in conjunction with Resource Central to cost-share lawn removal with customers.
Greg Fisher, Denver Waterโs manager of demand planning and efficiency, told legislators in October that spending money to help remove turf makes no sense if thirsty nonnative turf species are simultaneously being planted elsewhere.
โUltimately, success for us is changing the status quo, creating a new cultural landscape that will benefit Coloradoโs environment and save water at the same time,โ he said. Fisher cited the ancillary benefit of providing habitat for pollinators, which is not provided by imported grasses. Denver supports the bill.
The proposed state law up for consideration in the 2024 session would also preclude artificial turf in lieu of grass. The bill says artificial turf releases harmful chemicals into watersheds and exacerbates the heat island effect compounded by rising temperatures in coming decades.
Colorado is famously a local-control state. Its towns and cities, many of them operating under home-rule charters, jealously guard local prerogatives. They, not the state, decide the speed limits on their streets and donโt like the state telling them what to do, particularly in land use. Always, there is tension.
But in water, the state has already adopted efficiency requirements. Any toilet sold in Colorado must consume no more than 1.2 gallons per flush. Colorado law also requires the most efficient pop-up sprinklers.
Should state law also override local authority in deciding landscaping choices? If still a sensitive area, even cities normally inclined to tell legislators to butt out are now more inviting of state engagement or at least inclined to remain neutral.
โAurora will typically be one of the communities that shows up and says donโt do anything at the state level that impedes our local control,โ Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water, told the legislative committee in October in support of the ban on planting new vegetation with high water needs. This proposal, he added, retains local control while providing strong guidance from the state.ย
Real estate developers in Aurora typically created lavish areas devoted to turf along streets, including this one, but a 2022 law dramatically reduced what is permitted in future developments.
CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
When Aurora changed its mind
For many years, Aurora tried voluntary programs for turf removal, in order to stretch its water. It made no sense if others then planted large amounts of grass. โWe didnโt have success until we mandated a ban on nonfunctional turf,โ Brown said.
In September 2022, Aurora City Council adopted a wide-ranging ordinance that is among the most aggressive in Colorado. It bans Kentucky bluegrass and other thirsty cool-weather grass in front yards of new residential developments. New golf courses are allowed, but not with thirsty grasses. They must have grasses that use less water. New ornamental water features, such as fountains, are also banned.
Several decades ago, Aurora had gained a reputation for lacking greenery due to the mostly treeless landscape of newer subdivisions.
โI would ask those people to go east of Aurora and see what they see,โ said Tim York, water conservation manager for Aurora. โThey wonโt see turf and they wonโt see very many trees. Although we arenโt against trees. We definitely need trees. Just be sure to put them in the right places.โ
Aurora, now with a population of 400,000, for many decades believed it needed well-watered turf in its urban landscapes. Even in the late 1980s, the city water department had just one employee devoted to conservation.
โIn retrospect, installing landscapes for aesthetic purposes that require over 2 feet of water per year was probably not the right way to do it,โ said York.
US Drought Monitor June 25, 2002.
The 2002 drought forced a new reckoning. That hot, dry, windy year revealed the inadequacy of Auroraโs portfolio of water rights and storage, both for that intense drought but also in regard to projected population growth. The cityโs utility manager warned of dire reductions if snow didnโt arrive. It did the next spring, on St. Patrickโs Day of 2003, but the episode revealed the cityโs vulnerabilities.
Both reuse and conservation became an active part of the municipal agenda. Since then, per-capita water use has declined by 36%. The population during that time has grown by 30%. The city offered rebates to residents willing to replace their thirsty turf.
In 2022, though, the city recognized the fallacy of creating a bigger problem that would have to be addressed later.
York, a landscape architect by training with experience in Las Vegas, contends that pleasant urban landscapes can be created with lesser volumes of water. It just takes more thoughtfulness about the function.
โThat function should not be that โIt looks prettyโ and that is all that it does,โ York said. โA water-wise landscape, done correctly with species variation, can be far more attractive than the monotonous green carpet turf found in most places.โ
Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said homeowners resisted the ban at first, as did some members of the City Council, who saw it as going too far. They were convinced by Coffman that taking action now may prevent more dramatic actions in the future if the Colorado River situation deteriorates further. Aurora gets 25% of its water from multiple sources in the Colorado River basin.
There were also arguments that water-wise landscaping is ugly.ย
โI donโt think itโs ugly,โ Coffman said in an interview. โWhat is ugly is when homeowners, because of the cost of water, give up on their yards. Thatโs ugly. But anyway, itโs the new reality we live in, and people have to get used to it.โ
Native grasses use far less water than Kentucky bluegrass and other imported species but can look bedraggled, as was evident in September at this site near the Colorado State University Spur Campus in Denver.
CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
Down the Colorado River
Nevada and California have adopted far more significant restrictions.
A century ago, when the Colorado River Compact was crafted, Las Vegas had a population of little more than 2,000. The compact allocated only 300,000 acre-feet to Nevada, compared with 4.4 million acre-feet for California.
By 1996, Las Vegas was becoming a metropolitan area, and lawns replicating those found in Midwestern towns were still being planted in an environment of soaring summer heat and only 4 inches of average precipitation. The Southern Nevada Water Authority began offering incentives for turf removal. That program has since then cost $285 million, according to a January 2023 report prepared for the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
In 2021, with the notion of an empty Lake Mead becoming an all-too-real possibility, Nevada banned all ornamental turf dependent upon Colorado River water. Ornamental in this case applies to grass used in street medians, entrances to developments and office parks โ in general, places where people rarely set foot except to mow. This covers about 31% of all the grass in the Las Vegas area.
California also took a very aggressive step in 2023. The law, Assembly Bill 1572, prohibits using drinking water for purely decorative grass in medians and outside business and in common areas of homeowner association neighborhoods, theย Los Angeles Times reportedย in September. The ban will take effect in phases between 2027 and 2031. It exempts sports fields, parks, cemeteries and residences.
Metropolitan Water, the agency that supplies wholesale water to most of Southern California, estimates that the bill will save 300,000 acre-feet. Thatโs equal to Nevadaโs Colorado River allocation.
Sterling Ranch may be Coloradoโs best example of judicious water use. The development of more than 3,000 houses lies in the southwest corner of metropolitan Denver. The developer set out to do better than 0.75 acre-feet annually per single-family residence, which is Douglas Countyโs requirement. It aimed for 0.4 acre-feet but has come in at 0.2 acre-feet. The developer expects an apartment complex will yield even less consumption, at 0.14 acre-feet per unit.
Andrea Cole, general manager of Dominion Water & Sanitation District, the water provider at Sterling Ranch, said โconservationโ is not used in messaging โbecause it implies that it was yours to use and we are asking you to please use less.โ At Sterling Ranch, she said, developers combined demand-management techniques โ including higher rates for outdoor water use โ with land-use planning to dial down water use.
Several Colorado jurisdictions have taken more-limited action in the past several years. In August, for example, Broomfield adopted a code limiting new turf grass to 30% of front and side yards of detached single-family homes and commercial properties. Turfgrass must primarily consist of low-water grasses. Both a city and a county, Broomfield has 77,000 people but with expectations of growing to 125,000 as land is developed.
In Edgewater, a municipality of moderately dense neighborhoods west of downtown Denver, redevelopment will be the primary target of regulations adopted in November. The regulations limit Kentucky and other cool-weather grasses to 25% of residential areas. It also has limitations in commercial and other areas similar to what is proposed in the proposed state law.
Paige Johnson, sustainability director for Edgewater, said the primary goals are saving water and creating and sustaining robust and diverse natural ecosystems.
In Castle Rock, areas surrounding a football field are planted with native grasses that use less water. Waterwise regulations typically exempt athletic fields, parks and other common and higher-use areas from prohibitions against imported grasses.
CREDIT: ALLEN BEST/BIG PIVOTS
And in Castle Rock
Castle Rock gets virtually no water from the Colorado River except for a tiny bit of reused water. It was a late bloomer among cities of metro Denver with fewer than 4,000 residents in 1980. The limited water from Plum Creek combined with wells drilled into aquifers of the underling Denver Basin were just fine.
It now has 80,000 residents but plans for 142,000 in decades ahead. In anticipation of that much larger population, it has been offering rebates of $1.50 per square foot for replacement of water-thirsty grasses with native species that use less water. Those who replace grass with concrete or artificial turf can get only $1. Both exacerbate heat-island effects of high temperatures and create more runoff problems during rains.
Castle Rock calls these less-thirsty yards โColoradoScapes.โ Such areas must have 75% vegetation to qualify.
In October 2022, after several years of outreach, Castle Rock adopted regulations that lifted the bar several notches higher. No thirsty grasses can be planted in front yards. Backyards, where families tend to gather, can have a maximum of 500 square feet. Castle Rock also banned new ornamental turf โ grass that no one actually walks on โ in road medians and at entrances to housing projects.
Mark Marlowe, director of Castle Rock Water, emphasizes cost in justifying the restrictions. Building water-treatment plants and distribution to meet peak demand during the hot days of summer bears a large price tag. Getting additional water from more distant places is also expensive.
Castle Rock residents today use 118 gallons per capita on average daily. โIf we can get our community below 100 gallons per capita a day, we can save upward of $70 million in long-term water rights and infrastructure,โ Marlowe said.
Similar to other Colorado cities, 50% of Castle Rockโs water was devoted to outdoor landscaping. That has declined to 42%. Marlowe projects it will continue to drop as Castle Rock Water has set a goal of removing 30% of the current non-functional grass turf in the municipality and replacing it with Coloradoscape by approximately 2050.
Limiting water devoted to outdoor landscaping helps Castle Rock in another way. Water applied to outdoor landscapes mostly disappears into the atmosphere, while about 90% of water used indoors gets treated. In many places in Colorado, this treated water is released into streams and rivers to satisfy those with water rights downstream.
Because it draws the water from the aquifers, Colorado water law allows Castle Rock to reuse that water repeatedly, to โextinction.โ Overall, the city hopes to achieve 75% renewable water by midcentury, reserving use of the Denver Basin aquifers to droughts.
Denver has a very different situation. A century ago, when Castle Rock was a small ranch town of fewer than 500 residents, Denver already had 256,000 people. Envisioning a far larger city, civic leaders had laid plans for Coloradoโs first major transmountain diversion to take water from the Fraser River via the Moffat Tunnel.
Now, the city is landlocked, able to grow upward but not outward. Water use has leveled off. The city has a strong water portfolio but wants to help residents learn how to use less water for landscaping.
โYou donโt have to have wall-to-wall grass to have an inviting city,โ said Denver Waterโs Fisher. He cautioned against pointing fingers at those with cool-weather turf. โI do think weโre trying to slowly change how people approach their landscapes and make that connection back to water,โ he said.
Only trees get watered at the Hugo Golf Club, located in Lincoln County in eastern Colorado. The fairways consist of buffalo grass, cactus and sand.
CREDIT: COURTESY PHOTO/LINCOLN COUNTY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
A golf course without water hazards
In Colorado Springs, the stateโs second-largest city, overall water demand has remained relatively flat since the mid-1980s. During that time, the cityโs population has nearly doubled. Most of that 40% decline in per-capita water use has occurred since 2001. Other Front Range cities similarly report substantial declines of 35% to 40%.
Colorado Springs Utilities has championed the use of native grasses in urban landscaping but also paid careful attention to the efficiency of preinstalled irrigation systems as it plans for a population of 800,000 in coming decades. Itโs now at 500,000.
The city also wants to help residents maintain their yards using water-wise techniques. Between 25% and 30% have stopped irrigating their yards. That neglect โhas a significant, negative impact on our collective quality of life and economic vitality,โ said Colorado Springs Utility in a statement. โOur work is to reach those customers as well.โ
The changing climate also poses challenges. Julia Galluci, supervisor of water conservation for Colorado Springs, said the city expects to have water resources available for outdoor watering about one day a week by 2050. โWe are trying to implement the kinds of landscapes that can survive in that kind of climate and environment,โ she said.
Colorado Springs has been moving slowly, only this year moving into its messaging of the more general population. โItโs not a quick fix,โ said Galluci.
Of course, if the Colorado River situation deteriorates rapidly, city and state policies may accelerate. After last winterโs strong snowpack, the big reservoirsโ Mead and Powell โ rebounded slightly after dropping to perilously low levels. In April 2022, railroad tracks on a ledge of the canyon wall that had been abandoned upon completion of the Glen Canyon Dam re-emerged after being underwater since soon after the dam was completed in 1966. Those artifacts are underwater again, but no one knows for how long.
As for new golf courses, they may look different in the future. Auroraโs recent commitment to restrictions was triggered by a golf course approved long before. The golf course has been granted authority to move ahead after agreeing to use a grass variety that will cause it to use 250 acre-feet annually instead of the 400 acre-feet that would be needed by more conventional grass.
Developers of the golf course will tap an aquifer with a projected 50-year supply. When that aquifer goes dry, they will not seek to use city water, Other golf course developers may also want to study new hybrid species of grass. A new type of Bermuda grass, for example, uses 50% to 75% less water.
Colorado has two golf courses that use no more water than comes from the sky. One is a nine-hole municipal course at Springfield, in southeast Colorado. The other lies 100 miles east of Aurora, near Hugo. The Hugo Golf Club falls under the heading of โpasture golf.โ It has 300 trees that get watered, but the fairways where bison once grazed now consist of native buffalo grass, cactus and sagebrush. For greens, it has sand. Naturally, it has no water hazards.
Of course, if the Colorado River situation deteriorates rapidly, city and state policies may accelerate. After last winterโs strong snowpack, the big reservoirsโ Mead and Powell โ rebounded slightly after dropping to perilously low levels. In April 2022, railroad tracks on a ledge of the canyon wall that had been abandoned upon completion of the Glen Canyon Dam re-emerged after being underwater since soon after the dam was completed in 1966. Those artifacts are underwater again, but no one knows for how long.
As for new golf courses, they may look different in the future. Auroraโs recent commitment to restrictions was triggered by a golf course approved long before. The golf course has been granted authority to move ahead after agreeing to use a grass variety that will cause it to use 250 acre-feet annually instead of the 400 acre-feet that would be needed by more conventional grass.
Developers of the golf course will tap an aquifer with a projected 50-year supply. When that aquifer goes dry, they will not seek to use city water, Other golf course developers may also want to study new hybrid species of grass. A new type of Bermuda grass, for example, uses 50% to 75% less water.
Colorado has two golf courses that use no more water than comes from the sky. One is a nine-hole municipal course at Springfield, in southeast Colorado. The other lies 100 miles east of Aurora, near Hugo. The Hugo Golf Club falls under the heading of โpasture golf.โ It has 300 trees that get watered, but the fairways where bison once grazed now consist of native buffalo grass, cactus and sagebrush. For greens, it has sand. Naturally, it has no water hazards.
Whitebark pines killed by a pine beetle epidemic that spanned from 2004 to 2012 blanket the steep face of Teewinot Mountain overlooking Jenny Lake. (Colin Wann/Creative Ascents/Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative)
Vegetation ecologists monitoring the latest mountain pine beetle epidemic fear for the survival of the Teton Rangeโs remaining ancient whitebark pine stands.
A keystone species that gained Endangered Species Act protections early this year, whitebark pines were hit hard by a plague of mountain pine beetles that spanned from 2004 to 2012.
A cold snap ended that wave, giving the regionโs embattled whitebark pine a temporary reprieve. Four years ago, however, scientists monitoring the gnarled high-elevation conifers started to see a larger concentration of โbrood treesโ harboring increasing numbers of the bark-boring insects.
โItโs just another beetle epidemic happening because they are not being slowed down by cold falls and springs โ like they naturally were before,โ said Nancy Bockino, a Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative whitebark pine field ecologist who has long monitored the species in Grand Teton National Park. โAnd itโs getting worse.โย
The red trees are whitebark pines that were recently killed by mountain pine beetles during an ongoing epidemic that started in 2019. More than a third of all beetle-killed trees in Grand Teton National Park were attacked over the last four years. (Colin Wann/Creative Ascents/Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative)
Bockino wrote about the ongoing infestation in a publication called Nutcracker Notes, which is produced by the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation. Her paper was ominously titled โ โHere we go again: The mountain pine beetle is killing our remaining old whitebarkโ โ and in the article she referred to the repeat epidemic as a โgrave situation.โ
โFirst,โ Bockino wrote, โthe loss of any of the few remaining cone-bearing whitebark is a significant setback for conservation and restoration.โ
Moreover, she added, โa second epidemic may result in so few whitebark pine that the delicate and obligate mutualism between the tree and the Clarkโs Nutcracker could collapse.โ
Clark’s Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) photographed in Deschutes National Forest. By David Menke – This image originates from the National Digital Library of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Images from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=266346
The Clarkโs Nutcracker is a species of jay thatย whitebark pine depends uponย to disperse its seeds. But dependency in the relationship is not entirely mutual: nutcrackers can subsist on other pine seeds when whitebark seed stocks are poor. In its rule listing whitebark pine as a threatened species, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that climate change could negatively affect nutcracker populations, potentially exacerbating whitebark decline.ย
Mountain pine beetle activity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from 2019 to 2022 from Forest Health Protection aerial surveys. Left, each blue dot is a severity-weighted polygon that represents up to 99 brood trees per acre. The right panel shows estimated mortality (low, moderate, severe) from Landscape Assessment System data 2003-2009. (Nutcracker Notes/Journal of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation)
The Tetons and Wind River Range have historically been bright spots for whitebark pine conservation within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Whitebark pine seeds are a major food source for grizzly bears, and during the height of the 2004-to-2012 epidemic, beetle-killed whitebark monitored by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team amounted to 76% of all the trees being monitored. A higher percentage survived in Grand Teton National Park, however.
Bockino and others surveyed Teton Range whitebark pine in 2022 to try to get a grip on the scope of the epidemic. They found that 54% of the overstory was dead from pine beetles. Just more than a third of those dead trees โ 35% โ showed signs of beetle attack between 2019 and 2022.
The reemergent threat from mountain pine beetles is also hitting whitebark hard in other southern swaths of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Increasing beetle activity has been observed in the Wyoming, Salt River and Wind River Ranges and at sites on the Caribou-Targhee National Forest, according to Bockino.
Unlike the nonnative fungus blister rust โ another threat to whitebark pine persistence โ mountain pine beetles are a native species that the long-lived tree evolved alongside. Whatโs changed and made pine beetles an existential threat are the survival rates of the bark-boring insect. Extreme cold in the spring and fall can knock back beetle populations, but the subzero temperatures needed for beetle die-offs are happening evermore infrequently as the climate warms.ย
A pine beetle found in a whitebark pine stand in Grand Teton National Park. (Colin Wann/Creative Ascents/Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative)
In the rule establishing whitebark pine as โthreatenedโ under the ESA, the Fish and Wildlife Service used 60-year intervals between outbreaks for scenarios modeling how the species would fare. โUnfortunately,โ Bockino wrote in her article, that interval is โin contrast to what is happening in the GYE,โ where there have now been two epidemics in less than 20 years.
โReal-time management action is urgent,โ she wrote. โThe prioritization of retaining every possible existing seed tree at all costs is unquestionable.โ
Grand Teton National Park vegetation managers arenโt standing idly by.
โWe know that without intervention, the persistence of the species is in jeopardy,โ said Laura Jones, the parkโs chief of vegetation management. โWeโve been gearing up for restoration actions and weโve continued doing work protecting trees. And we do have some new funding sources.โ
Grand Teton crews will begin planting 4,000 whitebark pine seedlings in the fall of 2025, Jones said. And there are ongoing efforts, she said, to install beetle traps at the known blister rust-resistant whitebark stands.
In healthy stands of whitebark pine, Bockino and others have also continued hanging pouches of verbenone, a pheromone that signals to the beetles the trees are already occupied. There was talk of stopping the labor-intensive pouch-hanging efforts during the lull between beetle epidemics.
โRight about that time, I was like, โWait a minute,โโ Bockino said. โWe were having this massive outbreak on Static Divide, with hundreds of trees getting killed over there. That was 2019. It just kept growing.โย
egetation ecologist Nancy Bockino sizes up a giant living whitebark pine in Grand Teton National Park in 2020. (Colin Wann/Creative Ascents/Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative)
Bockino has even gone so far as to ski up into the Tetons in the winter to strategically strip the bark off of beetle-infected trees. That fatally exposes the brooding insects to the sun and the cold, Bockino said.
At least one ecologist is committed to doing whatever it takes to keep old, gnarled whitebarks that remain alive.
โThink about it. A 700-year-old whitebark pine is beyond precious,โ Bockino said. โThatโs a long freaking time. Personally, Iโm trying to do everything I can to save those.โ
The 32-foot-tall sound erected at Northglenn’s Northwest Open Space is hiding a test drill. The city is testing pumping drinking water underground to store it at the site. Credit: Courtesy / City of Northglenn
โNormally what we do is pump our water from Berthound Pass into Standley Lake, but there are evaporative losses there,โ said Northglenn Water Resource Administrator Silas Adams. โWhat weโre testing is storing this water in case we need it. You say you plan for a rainy day, but weโre trying to set some water aside in case we have a dry day โ or an extended drought period.โ
Crews were set to begin drilling into the aquifers at the cityโs 2350 W. 112th Ave. water treatment facility in the Northwest Open Space during the first week of January. Drilling should be finished in April…Denver Water has tested underground storage, but Northglenn is the first northern metro community to try it. The plan is to test the waterโs quality before pumping it underground, beginning in April. The tests will look for trace elements, minerals and potential pollutants. Then, water will be pumped out from the aquifer a year or more later and will be tested again…
Water stored in Coloradoโs Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
Coloradoโs Front Range sits atop several aquifers, from Wyoming south to Colorado Springs โ the Dawson, Denver, Arapahoe, Laramie/Fox Hills and the Pike Rampart aquifers. Adams said Northglennโs goal is to pump water it gets from Berthoud Pass via Clear Creek into the Arapahoe and Laramie/Fox Hills aquifers. The Arapahoe aquifer covers some 4,700 square miles and is as deep as 1,700 feet below ground. More than 1,000 wells have been drilled into the aquifer, including several Colorado municipalities. The deeper Laramie/Fox Hills aquifer covers 6,700 square miles and is 2,400 feet below ground at its deepest points โ the deepest of the Front Range aquifers. Adams said Northglenn crews will need to drill about 500 feet down to reach the Arapahoe aquifer and 1,400 feet to reach the Laramie/Fox Hills aquifer…Northglenn already has the rights to pump a limited amount of water from the aquifers, but Adams said there is no limit to how much water it can pump in and then pump back out.
A low pressure system developed over the central Plains in conjunction with an amplifying upper-level trough dipping into the northern Plains brought active weather across much of the central to eastern U.S. Warm and moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moved northward ahead of the developing low pressure, producing widespread moderate to heavy rainfall from Texas to Louisiana. Meanwhile, a cold air mass from Canada dipped into the northern portions of the U.S. brought blizzard conditions to portions of the Central Plains and Upper Midwest. Temperatures were above-normal across most of the U.S., by as much as 20+ degrees F above average in parts of the Upper Midwest and Northern Plains. The most widespread improvements were made to parts of central Texas, eastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, southern Louisiana and from northern Alabama to western North Carolina, where above-normal precipitation was observed this past week. Dry conditions continued across the eastern portions of the Southern region, with degradations occurring across much of Mississippi and into Arkansas and Tennessee. Drought and abnormal dryness were also expanded or intensified in portions of the northern Rockies and in parts southern Illinois, southern Texas and in the Southeast. In Hawaii, heavy rainfall improved conditions over parts of Kauai, Oahu and the Big Island, while no changes occurred on Molokai, Lanai or Maui…
Heavy precipitation fell over much of eastern portions of the region, where rainfall totals were greater than 600% of normal and ranged between 1 to 4 inches this week. Exceptional drought (D4) was improved in eastern Nebraska, while extreme drought (D3) was improved in eastern portions of Nebraska and Kansas where precipitation totals were up to 3 inches above normal for the week. Above-normal precipitation also led to improvements to severe drought (D2) and moderate drought (D1) over parts of eastern Kansas and northeast Nebraska. Abnormal dryness (D0) was improved along parts of the eastern border of the High Plains and in portions of western Kansas and eastern Colorado. Conversely, dry conditions persisted in portions of eastern Colorado and Wyoming where precipitation remains below normal this week. Deteriorating conditions shown in short-term SPI/SPEI, streamflow, soil moisture and snow water equivalent (SWE) data justified degradations across these states. Abnormal dryness was expanded in parts of northern Colorado and in eastern and southern Wyoming, while abnormal dryness was introduced in north-central and northeast Wyoming…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending December 26, 2023.
Much of the West remained as status quo this week. Precipitation fell across much of the region, which was enough to prevent further degradation but not enough to warrant large improvements. Heavier precipitation fell across the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico, where rain totals were greater than 600% above normal this week. These beneficial rains, along with precipitation percentiles and short-term SPI/SPEI, soil moisture and streamflow data, resulted in abnormal dryness (D0) and moderate (D1) to extreme (D3) drought improvements along the southern border. Portions of La Paz and Yuma counties reported weekly rainfall totals up to 6 inches above normal. Conditions remained dry in northern parts of the Rockies, resulting in further deterioration across western Montana and eastern Idaho. Moderate drought and abnormal dryness were expanded in these areas based on short-term SPI/SPEI data, low snow water equivalent (SWE) percentiles and precipitation and soil moisture deficits. As for temperature this week, much of the region was above normal with well-above-normal temperatures were observed in parts of northeast Montana which were greater than 10 degrees F above normal…
Dry conditions continued across the eastern portions of the Southern region this week while heavy precipitation fell across much of Oklahoma and over parts of central and eastern Texas. Large portions of eastern Texas and Oklahoma received between 2 inches to 5 inches of rainfall (300% to 600% above normal) this week, resulting in improvement of exceptional drought (D4) in eastern Texas while extreme drought (D3) was removed from northeast Oklahoma and improved in parts of central and eastern Texas. Improvements were also made to moderate drought (D1) to severe drought (D2) conditions, along with abnormal dryness (D0), in this part of the region. Heavy rain was reported (2 to 4 inches of rainfall) over parts of southeastern Louisiana this week, resulting in the 1-category improvement across the area. Conversely, conditions continued to deteriorate in parts of Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee, where precipitation totals were 2 to 4 inches below normal this month. Exceptional drought was expanded in parts of central and northern Mississippi and was introduced into eastern Arkansas, while extreme drought was expanded into the northern portions of Tennessee and in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas this week. The expansion and intensification of drought categories were based on short-term SPI/SPEI, NDMCโs short-term blend, streamflow and soil moisture data…
Looking Ahead
During the next five days (December 26-30, 2023), An initial Plains/Midwest upper low will work to establish the eastern upper trough, and an associated surface system will spread rainfall of varying intensity over the East early-mid week along with the potential for lingering snow over the north-central Plains. Over the West, most precipitation should focus near the West Coast with a couple frontal systems tending to produce the highest totals over/near northern California. In terms of temperatures, expect unseasonably warm conditions in the East Tuesday and Wednesday ahead of the approaching frontal system. Morning lows should be particularly anomalous with readings 20-30 degrees above normal for much of the East and Upper Midwest. Warmer than normal temperatures will likely linger even longer in the Northeast through Thursday or Friday. Cooler air behind the system will initially still be on the mild side, with only slightly below normal readings over the central-southern Rockies/Plains on Tuesday. As upper troughing becomes established over the East later in the week, the Southeast and vicinity should trend cooler with temperatures dropping to 5-10 degrees or so below normal. Much of the West should see moderately above normal temperatures through the period.
The Climate Prediction Centerโs 6-10 day outlook (valid December 31, 2023 โ January 4, 2024) favors above-normal precipitation from California to Alabama, and across much of Alaska, with below-normal precipitation most likely from the northern Plains to the Northeast, in portions of the Northwest and Hawaii, and in parts of southern Florida and Alaska Panhandle. Increased probabilities for below-normal temperatures are forecast for much of southeastern U.S. and on the eastern islands of Hawaii, while above-normal temperatures over much of the West, along the northern tier and in parts of the southern Plains, as well as Alaska and western islands of Hawaii.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending December 26, 2023.
At this time last year, conditions in the Colorado River Basin were dire. We knew we were heading into the first Tier 2a shortage for 2023. But we also knew that more needed to be done to stabilize the critical levels of the Basinโs two main reservoirs โ Lake Powell (held back by Glen Canyon Dam) and Lake Mead (held back by Hoover Dam). Lake Powell was set to release the lowest volume since filling and Mead was anticipated to head into a Tier 3 shortage or greater in 2024. The Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) was considering additional protection measures as part of a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) that would modify Powell and Mead operations.
So, what happened this year โ and where are we headed for 2024 and beyond?ย
2023: Mother Nature and the Lower Basin States step up The Basin experienced excellent snowpack last winter and above average runoff in 2023. That helped forestall an immediate crisis, but more actions were necessary. In April, Reclamation released the Draft SEIS, with action alternatives that were unacceptable to the Lower Basin States. In May, Arizona, California and Nevada announced a consensus proposal to conserve historic volumes of Colorado River water in Lake Mead. With this proposal in hand, Reclamation withdrew its Draft SEIS and in October released the revised Draft SEIS with the Lower Basin Statesโ consensus proposal designated as an Action Alternative. We anticipate a final decision in spring 2024.
Historic conservation in Arizona Arizona has already made significant progress toward the Lower Basin States proposal, conserving those historic volumes of water in Lake Mead. In 2023, weโve conserved nearly 950,000 acre-feet, including our mandatory 592,000 Tier 2a shortage reduction, plus an additional voluntary contribution of more than 356,000 acre-feet. A big thank you to our 2023 conservation champions.ย
2024: A return to Tier 1 shortage The combination of favorable basin-wide hydrology and conservation efforts across the Lower Basin have improved the reservoir contents to the point that in August, Reclamation announced a Tier 1 shortage reduction for 2024 and not the Tier 3 or greater reduction that was anticipated earlier in the year. This still requires a heavy lift from Arizona with a 512,000 acre-foot reduction, just 80,000 acre-feet less than the Tier 2a shortage reduction weโve taken this year. This represents about 30 percent of CAPโs normal supply; about 18 percent of Arizonaโs Colorado River supply; and just under 8 percent of Arizonaโs total water use.
Looking toward the future The 2007 Shortage-Sharing Guidelines and the Drought Contingency Plans expire in 2026. The good hydrology and additional voluntary conservation in the Lower Colorado River Basin have resulted in a relatively stable Colorado River Basin system in the short-term, giving the Basin states and Mexico a bit of breathing room to negotiate the next set of guidelines that will go into effect post-2026.
In June of this year, Reclamation formally announced its intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for post-2026 operations and solicited public comments on the scope of specific operational guidelines, strategies and related issues. In October, Reclamation released its post-2026 Scoping Report, which summarized the more than 24,000 comments received and identified its anticipated purpose, need and proposed federal action.
Arizona has been working with the Lower Basin states to come up with concepts that would lead to a sustainable river system. The Lower Basinโs stated primary objectives are to: โข Improve the sustainability of the Colorado River over a broad, but plausible range of future conditions โข Increase the predictability of reductions โข Address the structural deficit by sharing reductions among the Lower Basin states and Mexico โข Share the risks and benefits of the system equitably within and between the basins
At the Arizona Reconsultation Committee meeting in November 2023, a new system contents approach was presented, basing shortage reductions on the volume of water available within Lake Mead, Lake Powell and the other major reservoirs in the system (Blue Mesa, Flaming Gorge, Havasu, Mohave and Navajo).
Unlike the current approach, which is based on the elevations of only Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the new dynamic approach is based on water available in all major reservoirs in the Colorado River system. This approach helps provide a clearer picture of the health of the system, as well as achieve supply/demand balance by triggering reductions based on the health of the system. To provide as much certainty as possible to water users, and with the understanding that drier futures are likely, the intent is to keep the reservoir contents in a range that ensures a less variable reduction volume. Of course, the primary goal is to avoid crashing the system with this approach. We anticipate a draft EIS in late 2024 with a public comment period to follow.
We anticipate that other alternatives will be put forward and that Reclamation will issue a draft EIS in late 2024 with a comment period to follow.
Federal forecasts for the Colorado Riverโs water supply โ the water source for 40 million people โ predict a substantial drop as the snow season limps into the new year.
Water flowing into Lake Powell is forecasted to be 79% of its historical average, according to a December monthly report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. One major cause is the poor showing of snow in the Rocky Mountains, but itโs not time to panic yet, water experts say.
Credit: Colorado Basin River Forecast Center
โItโs December, we still have several months of accumulation potential,โ said Russ Schumacher, Coloradoโs state climatologist. โThereโs no reason to freak-out about solely the fact that snowpack is low at this point because thereโs still time to make that up. But we also know that, as the climate has been warming, the snowpack that we do get doesnโt go quite as far.โ
In the Colorado River Basin, which stretches across seven Western states, a system of reservoirs catches water and meticulously times releases to provide a steady flow to farms, cities, industries and ecosystems around the basin.
The largest reservoirs are Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border and Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border. Together, they can store up to 53.9 million acre-feet of water, or about 92% of the reservoir storage capacity in the entire Colorado River Basin.
Both wereย drawn down to historic lowsย in the early 2020s. The good water year in 2023, when the basin saw above-average snow and rain, brought the reservoirs back from the brink of a crisis, but neither is close to its average conditions, let alone near full capacity.
Lake Powell key elevations. Credit: Reclamation
A bad water year โ with below-average precipitation and hotter conditions โ could send the reservoirs back toward dangerous lows, experts say. At Lake Powell, Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate hydroelectric power when the water level falls below 3,490 feet or release water at all when the level falls below 3,370 feet.
The outlook for Lake Powell has grown more grim since the start of the water year in October. Theย Bureau of Reclamation estimatedย that a total of about 9.4 million acre-feet of water would flow into Lake Powell between October 2023 and September 2024.
That estimate has dropped by nearly 2 million acre-feet. The December forecast estimates the reservoir will receive about 7.62 million acre-feet of water by September, about 79% of the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020.
Two million acre-feet is enough water to fill Blue Mesa twice over โ the largest reservoir in Colorado โ or to supply one year of water for about 4 million typical urban households.
For reference, last yearโs record snowpack sent more than 12 million acre-feet of water into the immense reservoir.
Even with just 7.62 million acre-feet expected to flow into Powell, Glen Canyon Dam is set to release 7.48 million acre-feet of water downstream to Lake Mead, an amount set by interstate agreements that govern how the reservoirs operate.
Graphic via Holly McClelland/High Country News.
Some projections indicate that the reservoir levels could fall low enough to trigger more emergency releases into Lake Powell from Upper Basin reservoirs, like Blue Mesa, which sits on the Gunnison River near the city of Gunnison.
River officials called on Blue Mesa to send water down to Lake Powell in 2021 to boost the reservoirโs water levels. That debt will be repaid by the end of December, said Chuck Cullom, executive director for the Upper Colorado River Commission, an interstate body that helps manage the Colorado Riverโs water.
โBetween now and 2026, I would just highlight for folks that it could be Groundhog Day in the early spring and summer about declining towards critical elevations,โ Cullom said during an Upper Colorado River Commission meeting Dec. 13 in Las Vegas.
The accumulation of snow in the mountains of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah provides much of the water for the Colorado River Basin. So far, that snowpack is off to a poor start, Schumacher said.
Federal data shows that the snowpack in the Upper Basin โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ is the third lowest for the end of December since 1986, he said.
Itโs similar to 2018, a year no one wants to repeat in the Southwest, Schumacher said.
โThat was a year that started off bad and never recovered,โ he said.
This year, warmer water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are causing El Niรฑo weather patterns, which normally bring slightly more precipitation to the Southwest and slightly less moisture to the mountains in northern Colorado.
โAt this point in the winter, the way bigger uncertainty is that we just donโt know whatโs going to happen with the weather for the next few months,โ Schumacher said.
More by Shannon MullaneShannon Mullane writes about the Colorado River Basin and Western water issues for The Colorado Sun. She frequently covers water news related to Western tribes, Western Slope and Colorado with an eye on issues related to resource management, the environment and equity. She can be reached at shannon@coloradosun.com.
For tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin, repairing a century of exclusion is a crucial step in planning for the riverโs future. A new proposal could grant them a permanent seat at the table.
Collectively, the 30 tribal nations in the basin have rights to about 26% of the Colorado Riverโs average flow, but states and the federal government have repeatedly left them out of major decisions about how the riverโs water is stored, divided up and distributed. This month, tribal representatives from around the Colorado River Basin took the mic at the biggest basin gathering of the year with a focus on correcting historical wrongs and asserting their rights to water.
โWe are still not directly engaged in the process that determines [the riverโs] future,โ Amelia Flores, chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, four tribes with land in Arizona and California said at the 2023 Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. โโฆ Our livelihoods and our traditions have no voice. We must do better.โ
Tribal water concerns have been addressed through legislation, court decisions, contracts and more through the decades. However, tribal leaders say they are informed of decisions about how the river is managed, instead of being included in the decision-making process.
State and federal leaders did not include tribes in the creation of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which forms the foundation of how the riverโs water is managed, despite federal recognition of tribal water rights in years prior. As recently as 2007 and 2019, state and federal partners developed new rules for managing the river in response to prolonged drought, but again, tribes were not included.
As basin officials plan for the riverโs future after 2026, when the current rules expire, tribal representatives say history cannot repeat itself. โIโve heard all the arguments as to why itโs not feasible to have representation of tribes at the negotiation table with the state and federal governments,โ Flores said. โIโm not buying it.โ
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
For the first time, six tribal nations are negotiating an agreement with four basin states and the federal government to give them a permanent voice at one important table. In 2022, tribes with land in the Upper Basin โ Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming โ began meeting with the Upper Colorado River Commission, a governance body made up of federal and Upper Basin state officials.
โThis relationship that weโve formed is very, very important on how the Upper Basin moves as a collective,โ said Lorelei Cloud, acting chairwoman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, which has land in southwestern Colorado. โWeโve gotten to a point now where we are sharing information with each other, and thatโs been monumental.โ
The draft agreement would formalize meetings between tribal, state and federal governments, regardless of any future changeover in leadership. The commission will consider and possibly vote on the agreement in February, according to Chuck Cullom, the commissionโs executive director, who called the agreement โhistoricโ but overdue. โItโs something we shouldโve been doing much earlier,โ Cullom said.
The river commission and tribal representatives highlighted the new agreement during a Dec. 13 meeting at the Las Vegas conference. The meeting marked the 75th anniversary of the commission and the second time all six tribes were invited to participate. The first was in 2022.
Tribal representatives from across the basin voiced their main goals and concerns in discussions related to water policy, agriculture and the riverโs future at the conference, which brings together all of the key players in the Colorado River Basin each year.
Unused water is a key issue for tribal leaders. About a dozen nations across the Colorado River Basin, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, which also is in southwestern Colorado, still had unquantified water rights as of 2021.
Settling these rights for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe needs to happen before 2026, Chairman Manuel Heart said. The tribe has completed the legal process to quantify the amount of water tied to its rights in Colorado but not in New Mexico and Utah.
In some cases, tribes may have quantified water rights but lack the infrastructure to deliver it to homes, businesses and farms. Both tribes in Colorado have rights to water they currently canโt access in Lake Nighthorse Reservoir near Durango.
That water flows downstream to Lake Powell and the Lower Basin โ where water users can get paid to let it flow by their lands, according to Upper Basin officials. Tribes, however, arenโt compensated for their unused water from settled water rights.
โIโd really like to see full support from all seven states to say yes, we do support tribes,โ Heart said. โThereโs a lot of water thatโs in the basin thatโs unaccounted for, that theyโre not even compensated for.โ
The Upper Colorado River Commission is trying to estimate just how much of this water flows downstream to benefit the Lower Basin, officials said.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
โThe last 20 years have been really hard for all of us, both Upper and Lower Basin. Every person,โ Heart said. โDemand, today, is at a high level. We canโt meet that demand.โ
The basin needs to look at new opportunities and partnerships, and work within the limits of the river, several tribal leaders said. โWe should all have the fundamental right to access clean water,โ Heart said. โWe should all have the right to use these waters based on what our needs are.โ
Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty
A man fishes along Blue River. The federal government Dec. 19, 2023, announced a $1.8 million grant for a habitat restoration on a section of the Blue River. Blue River Watershed Group/Courtesy photo
Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
December 25, 2023
A tributary of the Colorado River, Summit County’s Blue River has seen fisheries decline due to unnatural conditions associated with the Dillon Reservoir, which provides water to Denver
The federal government earlier this month announced $1.8 million in grant funding for habitat restoration along a stretch of the Blue River downstream from the Dillon Reservoir in Summit County. The funding will support a local environmental groupโs efforts to restore Gold Medal fishing on the Blue River, a status the river lost in 2016, according to Blue River Watershed Group advancement director Vanessa Logsdon.
โWeโre incredibly excited,โ Logsdon said. โThis is one of the largest grants weโve received, and this project is going to be an expensive project. Itโs a large area of the river, and itโs basically bank-to-bank restoration.โ
Blue River Watershed Group has partnered with Trout Unlimited to create an Integrated Water Management Plan for the Blue River watershed, Logsdon said. A tributary of the Colorado River, โthe Blue River faces quite a few threats and issues because of the dam,โ she said. On Dec. 19, the Biden Administrationโs Department of the Interior announced $1,857,570 in funding to complete the engineering and design for a habitat restoration project laid out in the management plan.โThe stretch of river where the work will focus is impacted by its proximity to the outflow from the Dillon Reservoir, according to the Interior Department news release announcing the Bureau of Reclamation WaterSMART grant awards. In the Blue River, the dam has contributed to an unnatural flow regime, below-average water temperatures due to cold-water releases from the bottom of the reservoir, and a lack of natural sediment and nutrient transport, the release states. The Integrated Water Management Plan is the culmination of years of scientific studies and research that aims to provide a roadmap for solving environmental issues on the Blue River, Logsdon said. The plan focuses on the stretch of river from its release at the Dillon Reservoir to Columbine Campground north of Silverthorne, she said.
Kit Carson Peak, right, and Challenger, also a 14,000-foot peak, as seen from the area near Moffat, in the San Luis Valley. Photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 24, 2023
Itโs called Kit Carson, but a state advisory board in January will review alternatives more acceptable to the Dinรฉ and others
My hike up Kit Carson Peak in June 2000 began with great ambition and ended with confusion. Confusion remains now, almost 24 years later, if in a different way. Weโre not sure what to call the 14,167-foot summit in the Sangre de Cristo Range.
My 12 hours above treeline that day left me hypoxic, my brain suffering from too little oxygen. I insisted that the route down took us the west side of Willow Lake, but my companions knew better.
Now I contemplate what to call Kit Carson from the floor of the San Luis Valley. A proposal before the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board would have us call it Frustum Peak. A frustum is a flat-topped cone or pyramid.
Still others prefer Crestone, as was considered โ but rejected โ by a federal board in 2011. Two other 14,000-foot peaks, Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle, lie a short distance away. Three 14ers named Crestone? One stone too many. Other names may yet be considered.
Colorado also has a town and a county named Kit Carson, but neither is up for change as they are not on federal land.
The state advisory board members will resume their discussion on Jan. 24. They will also review alternatives to Garfield Countyโs Dead Mexican Gulch, Jefferson Countyโs Redskin Creek and Redskin Mountain, and Montezuma Countyโs Negro Draw.
Sloans Lake with Mount Blue Sky in the background April 2, 2021.
Whatever they recommend will be just that. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names has final authority for names on federal lands as Colorado seeks to cleanse its geographic drawers of names with tawdry historical footnotes. Earlier this year, the 14er west of Denver gained a new name, Blue Sky. It had been called Evans, after the territorial governor in 1864 who seemingly turned a blind eye to the Sand Creek Massacre.
Christopher Houston โKitโ Carson has a more confused and interesting story. Born in Kentucky, reared in Missouri, he fled an apprenticeship in leathermaking for western adventures. As a fur trapper, he was quite successful. He survived.
Like other trappers, he found friends โ and foes โ among the native Americans, taking two of them as spouses. One called it quits, putting his belongings outside their teepee, as was the custom.
Taos was his favored home. His remains are buried there along with those of Josefa, his final wife. They both died in southeastern Colorado, at Boggsville, near todayโs Las Animas. By then, he was General Carson in the U.S. Army.
Kit Carson and his third wife, Josefa, both died in southeastern Colorado but are buried in Taos, which he considered home. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Consult โBlood and Thunder,โ by Hampton Sides, for an immensely rewarding read about Carson. Sides acknowledges the complexities of Carson and other frontiersmen. โThe mountain men lived with Indians, fought alongside and against them, loved them, married them, buried them, gambled and smoked with them,โ he writes.
Trappers unwittingly left a more damning legacy.
โAs the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought small pox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.โ
That is the conundrum of Carson. Itโs also the question many of us ask ourselves. Will we leave the world a better place โ or worse? Or both?
While in the U.S. Army, Carson was responsible for corralling the recalcitrant Navajo, who had long been feared by Spanish, Hispanic and Anglo settlers because of their persistent raiding and sometimes killing. He complained to superiors about the lack of provisions for the Navajo as he marched them to an encampment in eastern New Mexico. Once there, a third died.
Afterward, although gravely ill, Carson accompanied Ute leaders to Washington D.C. at their request to represent them in meetings with President Ulysses Grant and others.
Kit Carson was photographed in 1868 in Washington D.C., shortly before his death in southeastern Colorado at the age of 59. Photo/Wikipedia
His story was complicated.
Carson was mythologized in his own time. Today, we tend to idealize Native Americans even while we fail, in some important ways, to pay them their due, such as their water rights in the Colorado River Basin.
A former newspaper columnist in Colorado Springs responded to my ruminations on Facebook with this: โIn our re-naming craze, we should not name anything after humans any more. It turns out that all humans put their pants on one leg at a time.โ
Conquerors generally name things in their own honor. Sometimes, we do honor the vanquished. To honor Utes, among Coloradoโs 14ers we also have Antero, Shavano, and Tabeguache. We have none to honor Navajos, who call themselves Dinรฉ. If they emphatically dislike Kit Carson, so far they have not proposed an replacement.
Long-term drought and dwindling Colorado River supplies have Phoenix urgently pursuing highly treated sewage as a drinking water supply. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Phoenix, Southern California betting on purified sewage to fill drinking water needs.
After more than two decades of drought, water utilities serving the largest urban regions in the arid Southwest are embracing a drought-proof source of drinking water long considered a supply of last resort: purified sewage.
Water supplies have tightened to the point that Phoenix and the water supplier for 19 million Southern California residents are racing to adopt an expensive technology called โdirect potable reuseโ or โadvanced purificationโ to reduce their reliance on imported water from the dwindling Colorado River.
โ[Utilities] see that the river is overallocated, and they see that the climate is changing,โ said Kathryn Sorensen, former director of Phoenix Water Services Department. โTheyโre looking at this and understanding that the river supply is highly variable and extremely uncertain in the future.โ
The Colorado River that sustains nearly 40 million people and more than 4 million acres of cropland across seven states is shrinking because of climate change and overuse. The riverโs flows have declined approximately 20 percent over the past century, and a more than two-decade drought that began at the turn of this century has pushed the system to its limits.
With so much at stake, cities dependent on the river are strengthening water conservation measures and pursuing new sources of water with urgency.
Phoenix is quickly advancing plans to purify its wastewater for household use in the expectation of state regulatorsโ approval.
The cityโs water agency is drafting blueprints, securing funding and crafting communication strategies to assure customers that drinking recycled water is safe and necessary in the face of prolonged droughts and climate change.
Communities in California could see major advances in wastewater reuse in the near future. State regulators on Dec. 19 unanimously approved groundbreaking rules that will allow cities for the first time to pipe highly purified sewage water directly into drinking water supplies.
โThis will help the state live up to commitments to reduce our dependency on the Colorado River,โ the State Water Resources Control Board chair Joaquin Esquivel said before casting his vote of approval.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which relies on the Colorado River for about 20 percent of its supply, is hoping to launch one of the stateโs first direct potable reuse projects. It has plans well underway to build one of the worldโs largest wastewater purification plants and expects to release the projectโs environmental review next year.
โWe canโt be dependent on hydrology, we have to manage our own fate,โ said Adel Hagekhalil, Metropolitanโs general manager. โThe future is about recycling and reuse.โ
At full scale, Metropolitanโs plant would produce 150 million gallons of purified water each day, enough for roughly 400,000 Southern California households.
On Shaky Ground
Finding a new local, reliable water supply is critical for Arizona as more than a third of its water comes from the over-committed Colorado River. The search has become more pressing in recent years as Arizona has sustained cuts to its river supply.
Adel Hagekhalil
Under a drought deal with other states that rely on the river, Arizona this year took a 21 percent reduction โ or about six times the amount of water the city of Tucson uses annually โ with another round of cuts looming next year.
The inconsistent river supply is a major concern for Phoenix, the stateโs most populous city and its capital. Though Arizona farmers and tribes bore the brunt of the recent Colorado River reductions, thereโs a chance future cuts will be spread to cities under the next set of river operating rules that take effect in 2027. The revisions are under negotiation by the federal government, Mexico, tribes and the seven Western states that use the river.
The Phoenix metropolitan area has grown rapidly over the last 23 years despite the drought, augmenting its river supply with groundwater. But the underground stores alone wonโt sustain the region. Groundwater is also in great demand. Earlier this year Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs halted new permits for homes planned in areas of the state where groundwater is the only source of potable water.
โI will not bury my head in the sand, cut corners, or put short-term interests over the stateโs long-term economic growth,โ Hobbs said of her decision last June.
A Drought-Proof Source
Phoenix, the nationโs fifth-largest city, believes it can replace some of what it draws from the Colorado River and pumps from underground by recycling water thatโs flushed down sinks, showers, toilets and washing machines.
Starting clockwise from the consumer, the diagrams illustrate the conventional (left) and new (right) methods of treating wastewater to drinking water standards. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The allure of direct potable reuse or โadvanced water purification,โ is its ability to quickly get highly treated wastewater into the drinking water supply. The method treats wastewater through a three-step purification process involving membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis and ultraviolet light disinfection and adds it to a drinking water source without going through an environmental buffer.
The method also promises to be energy efficient. A 2021 study found that putting recycled water directly into the water supply requires far less power than long-distance water transfers or seawater desalination.
A more widely used water recycling method known as โindirect potable reuseโ requires treated wastewater to first go through an environmental barrier such as an aquifer where it is filtered naturally through layers of sand and gravel. The water is then pumped from the ground and treated again before entering the drinking water supply.
Orange County pioneered the technology in the early 1970s to increase its drinking water supply and replenish aquifers along the Southern California coast as a barrier to seawater intrusion. The county water district operates the worldโs largest plant of its kind.
Direct potable reuse has been used sparingly in parts of rural Texas, but Phoenix is looking to do it on a mass scale. And the city is wasting little time: The Phoenix City Council recently committed $30 million toward retrofitting a shuttered water recycling operation for advanced purification, even though Arizona regulators have yet to finalize rules for the technology.
Nazario Prieto, assistant director of Phoenixโs wastewater division, said the closed Cave Creek Reclamation Plant in north Phoenix is a perfect candidate for direct potable reuse as itโs near a facility that treats Colorado River water. A short pipeline could connect the two plants, allowing the recycled product to be blended with the Colorado River supply.
โThis is going to play a big role in our water resources portfolio, especially with the uncertainty on the Colorado River,โ Prieto said. โWaterโs precious here in the desert and this is a sustainable resource that keeps coming to us in the form of wastewater.โ
Phoenix is also exploring the construction of a larger, regional wastewater plant to serve Scottsdale, Tempe, Glendale, Mesa and other cities in the metropolitan area. A regional plant would be able to treat up to 80 million gallons of effluent per day and if built to full capacity, the regional and Cave Creek plants combined could supply about 20 percent of Phoenixโs yearly potable water needs.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality expects to issue final direct potable reuse rules by the end of 2024 and begin accepting applications for permits in 2025. It estimates recycled water could stream out of taps as soon as 2027.
Rendering of Phoenix’s proposed Cave Creek direct potable reuse project. Source: City of Phoenix
The massive wastewater recycling plant proposed for Southern California cities has also gained momentum in recent years due to dry conditions across its two key water sources, the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. And Southern California is getting some funding help from its neighbors.
Water agencies in Arizona and Nevada are helping to pay for Metropolitanโs project in exchange for to-be-determined slices of Metropolitanโs Colorado River supply. The proposed plant would be built in Los Angeles and could produce up to 150 million gallons of potable water a day, enough to serve more than 500,000 households.
Californiaโs newly adopted rules on direct potable reuse are expected to take effect in April, following a review by the state Office of Administrative Law. From there, Metropolitan would be able to present its plans to the state water board for approval.
The Yuck Factor
Water agencies are moving swiftly to bolster their scarce Colorado River supplies with recycled water, but first, they must convince customers and politicians that drinking water originating from sewage is safe and worth the treatment cost.
Overcoming the so-called โyuck factorโ could be a challenge for some utilities, though a recent direct potable reuse survey by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality found an appetite for the technology. A strong majority โ 70 percent of respondents โ said they would be โvery likelyโ or โsomewhat likelyโ to drink recycled wastewater. Some of the more skeptical responses included, โIt sounds miraculous, but I would be suspicious,โ โHow will it taste?,โ and โIs it safe for pregnant women?โ
Phoenixโs Prieto said the city is crafting a public relations blueprint and giving presentations about the technology to a variety of different business and community groups. He said the initial response has been mostly positive.
โSome people thought we were already doing [direct potable reuse],โ he said. โWeโre hopeful that we can gain the publicโs support and that they will see its safe and the best quality water provided anywhere in the city.โ
Beer is another tool being used to overcome the yuck factor.
Lucrative craft beerย competitionsย have been held in Arizona that require participants to use recycled wastewater, while Pima County has created aย mobile trailerย that treats effluent on site at breweries and provides clean water for brewing. Several Arizona and California breweries are now selling beer made with wastewater.
Kathryn Sorensen
Once Arizona and California approve direct potable reuse regulations, water suppliers will have to figure out how to fund the technology.
Phoenix estimates its Cave Creek project will cost approximately $300 million and that a larger regional plant could cost more than $2 billion.
The final price tag for Metropolitanโs project could top $4 billion by the time itโs finished. Both water suppliers are hoping to tap into state and federal grants to offset some of the cost to their ratepayers.
Major cities are likely to become the first adopters of the technology, but the goal is for rural towns to eventually implement it as well.
Recycled water could be a solution in areas that are burdened by poor groundwater quality or those that donโt have access to surface water. The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality said interest in the technology has broadened to smaller cities.
While adopting the recycling technology isnโt cheap, creating a new water source that alleviates pressure on both the Colorado River and aquifers may be priceless.
โItโs one of the biggest and most important tools,โ said Sorensen, who is now director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. โIt is absolutely critical to our water future.โ
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Elk Creek Marina at Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River was temporarily closed so the docks could be moved out into deeper water in 2021 after federal officials made emergency releases from the reservoir to prop up a declining Lake Powell. A state drought task force did not make recommendations regarding an interstate conservation program.ย CREDIT:ย HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Programs that would pay water users to conserve and send that water downstream for the benefit of the Colorado River system remain too controversial for Colorado water managers to agree on.
A statewide task force has failed to make recommendations to lawmakers about the primary issue they were supposed to tackle: how to address drought in the Colorado River basin and respond to a downstream call through water conservation programs.
Senate Bill 295 created the 17-member Colorado River Drought Task Force this year, with representatives from Western Slope water users, Front Range water providers, local governments, the state Department of Natural Resources, environmental groups and tribal leaders. The group met 10 times between July and December at locations across the state and remotely.
According to SB 295, the purpose of the task force was to provide recommendations for state legislation โto develop programs that address drought in the Colorado River basin and interstate commitments related to the Colorado River and its tributaries through the implementation of demand reduction projects and the voluntary and compensated conservation of the waters of the Colorado River and its tributaries.โ
But a draft recommendation about what a conservation program should look like lost on a 9-7 vote, meaning task force members did not advance it as a recommendation to legislators. A narrative about the issue was still included in the report.
โI was personally disappointed that some of the larger topics that are out there in the water world or brought up at the task force did not get support from the task force,โ said state Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Democrat who represents District 8 and was a sponsor of SB 295. โThey either didnโt have time or shied away from those conversations about longer-term solutions.โ
The losing recommendation contained many of the stateโs same long-discussed themes surrounding demand management: Any potential program should be temporary, voluntary and compensated, should avoid disproportionate impacts to any one region, and must not injure other nonparticipating water rights holders; and Western Slope conservation districts should be involved with projects within their boundaries.
Task force members could not agree on whether the timing was right for such a program, with some saying itโs โpremature.โ The โnoโ votes came from those representing Front Range water providers, the Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture, the Southwestern Water Conservation District and Coloradoโs two tribes, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Southern Ute Indian Tribe.
โI think there is a lot of institutional pressure that keeps us tethered to the status quo in water policy in Colorado,โ said Roberts, who represents Clear Creek, Eagle, Garfield, Gilpin, Grand, Jackson, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt and Summit counties. โWe owe it to Coloradans and the people in the West to grapple with the reality of what faces us in the decades ahead. โฆ Thereโs no time like the present to prepare for a bad situation.โ
The lack of recommendations about conservation programs highlights the complicated nature of water in Colorado and the difficulty of achieving consensus among competing interests. A 2021 work group that had been created to tackle speculation alsoย failed to make recommendationsย to lawmakers.
Water managers say any program designed to conserve water to send downstream to help boost the Colorado River system will likely involve mostly Western Slope agriculture. Members of a state drought task force could not agree on whether the timing was right for a conservation program, with some saying such a program is โpremature.โย CREDIT:ย BRENT GARDNER-SMITH/ASPEN JOURNALILSM
Conservation controversy continues
Demand management, water banking, system conservation, a strategic water reserve โ the names and details are different, but the basic concept is the same: paying water users to use less on a temporary and voluntary basis. They have been controversial in Colorado, with skeptics saying these types of programs could strip rural agricultural communities of their water.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board undertook its own demand management feasibility investigation in 2019 with eight work groups devoted to exploring different aspects of a potential program. The CWCB shelved the investigation last year without implementing a program.
Some have argued that implementing a state conservation program now would weaken or constrain Coloradoโs negotiating position among the six other Colorado River basin states as they hammer out new reservoir operating guidelines. The concern is that implementing a program now would remove the focus from where some say it belongs โ that the crisis is driven by overuse in the lower basin. Some task force members said they simply didnโt have enough time to thoroughly discuss conserved consumptive use (CCU) programs.
โUnfortunately, the task force spent very little time discussing this recommendation,โ Southwestern Water Conservation District General Manager Steve Wolff wrote in the report. โIf we had, we may have been able to develop language that we all could have agreed to and moved a recommendation forward. As written, there are aspects that could not be supported by Southwestern.โ
Alexandra Davis, Aurora Waterโs deputy director of water resources, served on the task force and voted โnoโ on the recommendation on conservation programs.
โItโs been contentious,โ Davis said. โThe CWCB has had a difficult time coming to some sort of idea of what kind of program would benefit the state as a whole and to create sideboards for something that we havenโt been able to agree on yet just seemed premature.โ
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District, which recognizes that any CCU program is likely to heavily involve water users within its 15-county Western Slope area, has taken the lead on demand management and system conservation discussions and has commissioned its own studies on the topic in recent years. River District General Manager Andy Mueller wrote the minority report on the task forceโs failed recommendation.
โUnfortunately, the task force was unable to provide clear guidance to the members of the General Assembly with respect to how our state should be prepared to move forward should the pressure to participate in an interstate conserved consumptive use program increase in the future,โ Mueller wrote. โWe respectfully disagree that the CCU proposal is premature, and that this conversation should wait until a specific program is implemented.โ
Although the River District does not necessarily endorse a CCU program, officials have repeatedly said they should be prepared with guidelines that protect water users if the state decides to go forward with one and that the River District should be involved to ensure a measure of local control.
โIf there are programs that are designed incorrectly, โฆyou will destroy the future of our communities,โ Mueller said at the Dec. 7 task force meeting in Denver. โWe have seen an interstate water conservation program roll out without any approval by our state legislature or our government and we could see another one come out. โฆ The West Slope will be the target of that produced water.โ
Mueller was referring to the Upper Colorado River Commissionโs System Conservation Program, which pays water users in the upper basin states โ Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah โ to conserve. The program was rolled out in 2022ย without evaluation or approvalย by the River District.
The Lake Fork Marina boat ramp at Blue Mesa Reservoir on the Gunnison River closed early for the season in 2021 after U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials made emergency releases from the reservoir to prop up a declining Powell. Members of a statewide drought task force could not agree to advance a recommendation regarding conservation programs to help aid the Colorado River system.ย CREDIT:ย HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
12 recommendations
The task force still came up with eight recommendations to legislators, most of which are expansions of or increased funding for existing programs: Continue funding of a technical assistance grant program; increase funding for aging water-related infrastructure; prioritize forest health and wildfire-ready watersheds; expand a temporary loan program to include storage rights; expand agricultural water rights protections beyond divisions 1 and 2 (the South Platte and Arkansas river basins); continue state funding of measurement tools; remove invasive species; and increase funding for municipal turf removal.
A sub-task force on tribal matters made four recommendations: fund a study of a potential pilot program to compensate tribes to not develop their water; have state officials write a letter requesting the U.S. Congress fully fund the Indian Irrigation Fund; waive a requirement for matching funds for state grant programs; and provide cultural protection of instream flows.
Task force Chair Kathy Chandler-Henry โ a nonvoting member of the group, the president of the River District board and an Eagle County commissioner โ said the time constraints were challenging. Coming up with recommendations in just five months for a field that normally moves at a snailโs pace was hard.
โI think the work that was done in that concentrated period of time is going to bear fruit in ways we donโt know about yet,โ she said. โI think that, in itself, is the real value of the task force.โ
The Sand Dunes Mushroom Cooperative is the answer that came out of the closure of the Colorado Mushroom Farm
Standing in a cold, unassuming warehouse off Gaumer Lane in Alamosa County, Matias Francisco holds out a handful of soy pellets and a handful of wood pellets. Heโs smiling. These little pieces of material are the food and energy for a hidden form of life: mycelium.
The warehouse is bare but insulated on the inside. There are machines wrapped in plastic and some still in their wooden boxes. A hopper is leaned over, already constructed, waiting. Francisco pulls up a hand-drawn blueprint on his phone showing where growing tents will be set up, where the humidifier will sit, and where six or seven โ and one day perhaps many more โ species of mushrooms will be produced.
Credit: Alamosa Citizen
โThereโs a science,โ he said. He spends a lot of his time lately researching the best environments to grow organic mushrooms and how to curate an environment that will lead to success.
โIt started out really small with an ideaโฆ.โ he said. โWeโre learning as weโre going along and learning the ins and outs of the trade. Our goal is to master it and get really good at it.โ
Francisco started his career as a coordinator. Working as a migrant coordinator at Adams State University, he eventually found himself working with employees of the mushroom farm. After the farm closed, he ended up being โthe mushroom guyโ because he knew that there could be solutions through conversations.
Conversations are how this new project got off the ground. This organic mushroom project is more than just creating a new avenue for culinary, beneficial, and most of all, delicious mushrooms. Itโs a connection to the community of mushroom growers. People, Francisco says, who are very tuned into the mushroom. The seven families creating this new organic fungus cooperative come from various parts of Mexico and Guatemala.
Mushrooms and their interactions with the people of regions in southern Mexico and many regions in Guatemala can be linked back thousands of years.ย
Credit: Alamosa Citizen
As people from these regions made their way to the San Luis Valley, which once had one of the largest mushroom operations in the United States, mushroom cultivation was familiar.
At the now-defunct Colorado Mushroom Farm, only three types were grown: portobellos, crimini, and button. They were sold around the state and across the country. When the only mushroom producing plant for hundreds of miles suddenly and quietly closed in September 2022, it left people with a special and unique set of skills and knowledge with hardly any recourse, and certainly without income.
Some 300 families were displaced. A majority, if not all, of the workers at the farm were migrants or were from families of migrants. Many of those people had worked for owner Baljit Nanda for the better part of 30 years. Entire generations worked in the blue-and-white-striped building just northeast of Alamosa.
Now the 10-acre plot of land sits cold and empty, waiting for the completion of bankruptcy court and environmental remediation.ย
Credit: Matias Francisco
Credit: Matias Francisco
In that midst of insecurity and a total loss of their current way of life, seven families came together and said they could do something with mushrooms that was totally different, completely unique.
Francisco said it was the good result of a bad thing.
The co-op was officially formed on Nov. 28, 2023. It took a yearโs worth of work for that alone to happen. Thereโs a lot of work left to be done, but Francisco says everyone is happy, excited and eager.
On top of learning the business side of cooperative farming, the seven families have been traveling to Bennet and Grand Lake, Colorado, to learn organic cultivation techniques from Sugar Moon Mushrooms and Mystic Mountain Mushrooms.
It started with a survey and a feasibility study. Francisco said the survey took a lot of time, a lot of translation, and a lot of house visits to complete. The survey was to get a sense of what the people wanted to do. Many of them wanted to form a co-op to purchase the old mushroom farm and revitalize it. So the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center came in and conducted a feasibility study to determine if that, in fact, could get done.
โOur program started out as a kind of a hope based off of a migrant coalition meeting we went to. In that coalition, hope was inspired,โ Francisco said in an earlier interview.ย
Through the surveys and study, he said, they were able to make โgood, conscious decisionsโ for figuring out how to get families back on their feet and โto figure out different ways, different avenues on how to grow organic, speciality mushrooms.โ
The goal is to serve anything from big shipments to local food hubs. Francisco told The Citizen that a happenstance meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte resulted in a conversation about how the chefs can get their hands on mushrooms for their menu.
โWeโve come far with this idea. I think the families are excited and weโre learning as weโre going,โ he said.
Once they have the operational warehouse, employees are trained, and practices are filed down to the careful science required for fungus cultivation, Francisco says they plan on starting with six to eight species. Theyโll start with Chestnuts, Lionโs Mane, Kingโs Trumpet, Blue Oyster, and a few other unique speciality species. โTheyโre more unique, theyโre not just regular organic mushrooms. Because these mushrooms will be cultivated with love from the people that are wanting to try to tell a story.โ
After they fine tune the processes for that, he plans on learning as a group how to farm other mushrooms. Whatโs more exciting for him, though, he said, was the concept of creating a unique species of mushroom through a liquid culture process.
Alece Montez, co-executive director of theย AJL Foundation, a company thatโs helping co-op members develop their business, said that because of the love the mushrooms are being cultivated in, it creates an environment that caters to โquality over quantity.โย
Credit: Matias Francisco
Credit: Matias FranciscoCredit: Matias Francisco
The timeframe to start full operations is sometime in late spring or early summer of 2024. There is still an overhead capital that is needed to ensure things can operate for some time.
โFinding the funding that will give them the freedom and space to explore and pioneer together and innovate together is really critical without them having to take out loans to do that. Itโs really critical that the co-op gets more grants and donations,โ Montez said.
She said they are looking at a capital fundraising effort to reach a goal of $1.5 million. Currently, they have earmarked funds that are helping workers to get paid while they train and to set up the operation.
The cooperative, she noted, doesnโt need a space the size of the former mushroom farm. She said the new operation, even as it sits in the final stages of nearing completion, is โmuch more sustainable. Itโs cleaner for the environment and less water intensive.โ
Is there pushback from Nanda and the representatives from Rakhra Mushroom Farm?
Montez said there hasnโt been any direct pushback, but she said there is a โsense that somehow this is competitive. If Rakhra opened again theyโre gonna be growing such different mushrooms than what the co-op is growing. And the co-op is going about it in a way that the labor โฆ Itโs just going to be a physically safer place to be working. Also I think itโs just a more belonging place because it is a co-op.โย
Helping hands, voices in direction of the company, collectively working toward improvements and sharing profits are what set the Sand Dunes Mushroom Cooperative apart from the old mushroom farm. โThey are all a part of that conversation,โ Montez said.
Francisco said that this journey has been all about growth: growth of people and growth of mushrooms.
โThis is more than a human effort,โ Montez said. โThis group is doing a lot to stay together, to work together. Itโs a human effort, and I think when you have a lot of families and people together trying to innovate on top of already facing so many barriers that it can be even more difficult when other members of the community have negative things to sayโฆ. I think people, naturally itโs very human, to fill in the blanks with stuff that isnโt true or with assumptions.โ
Montez said her hope is that the community will see that this is โan effort that will succeed. This is an effort that is meant to bring in more people and to really look out for everyone in the community. This isnโt just a few people trying to do right by their own families. Theyโre trying to figure this out so that they can make it possible for others to benefit.โ
$43.5 million can be used to acquire another property or will be added to the State Land Board Trustโs Permanent Fund that supports K-12 education
When the story of the appraised value of La Jara Reservoir was published, the question readers came back with was โSo what happens to the $43.5 million?โ which is the revenue the State Land Board would take in from the transfer of land to the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. For that answer we reached out to Kristen Kemp, communications officer for the State Land Board.
โProceeds of the trust land disposal can only be used in one of two ways: reinvested into the acquisition of another property or deposited into the Trustโs Permanent Fund. Specifically, we have up to two years to use the money to reinvest into the acquisition of another property; at the two-year mark the money must go into the Permanent Fund,โ she said of the policy set by the Colorado Legislature.
The State Land Boardโs $4-plus billion Trust comprises more than land, she explained. It has four main components: land, mineral estate, commercial real estate, and a $1.4 billion endowment called the Permanent Fund. The interest revenue the state earns from its Permanent Fund is used to support K-12 public education. In FY 22-23, the Permanent Fund generated $40.2 million in interest income, according to the State Land Board annual report.
Kemp earlier explained that the State Land Board โrarely dispose of trust land properties but revenue from ag and recreation leases had not been optimal at the La Jara property.โ There are no water rights that transfer with the sale of the La Jara Reservoir to the two federal agencies. Colorado Parks and Recreation is also part of the land exchange.
The distinctive โbathtub ringโ around Lake Mead is evident in this view overlooking Las Vegas Boat Harbor and Lake Mead Marina in August 2022. Credit: Christopher Clark/U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, CC BY-SA 2.0
The 1922 Colorado River Compact ignored available science and overallocated the riverโs water, a decision whose effects reverberate today. Now thereโs an opportunity to get things right.
On 24 November 1922, the Colorado River Commission officially allocated water rights to the seven U.S. states of the Colorado River Basin. The Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, collectively known as the Law of the River, eased years of dispute among these states, and they constitute a milestone in the history of the American West.
The 1922 compact provided regulatory certainty for water management. It called for water to be stored and released as needed (most notably with the construction of Hoover Dam), thus supporting a robust era of reservoir building. The reservoirs, in turn, unleashed huge potential for electric power generation and stimulated economic growth throughout the West.
The terms of the compact, however, were largely the product of development aspirations and political dealmaking, and they relied on optimistic estimations of the amount of water the river could supply that were not supported by existing surveys or science. One hundred years later, aย lasting water shortage crisisย has brought the governance structure outlined in the compact to its knees, and the effects reverberate far beyond the Colorado River Basin. The two largest reservoirs in the United States, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, have reachedย historic lows, threatening both the water supply and the hydropower generation capacity for tens of millions of users, as well as the nationโs food supply and flows critical to maintaining ecosystems.
This comparison of satellite images of the Glen CanyonโLake Powell region on the Colorado River shows the dramatic change in water level between 1999 and 2021. Credit: Modified from NASA images
Municipalities are consideringย drastic water-saving measures. Farmers and ranchers, who as a group are by far the largest consumers of Colorado River water, face unprecedented challenges and uncertainty. So do the economies and environmental systems that depend on reliable stream discharge for aquatic life and recreation.
It is tempting to place responsibility for the water shortages on climate change, which has resulted in reduced precipitation across the basin, and on population growth that outpaced plannersโ anticipation of water demands. Indeed, these are important exacerbating factors. A root cause of the dire situation today, however, lies in the commissionโs choice to ignore the best available hydrologic science as it negotiated the original compact. As discussions over the availability of Colorado River water continue and a new compact is negotiated over the next few years, planners must not make this mistake again.
The Law of the River
Even before the Colorado River Compact was established, the vast American West was a bustling frontier for mineral exploration, agricultural development, and westward expansion. California already had been diverting water from the Colorado River to irrigate the fertile Imperial Valley sinceย around 1901. Agriculture in sunny but dry southern Arizona was also booming. Other states envisioned securing more water for future irrigation of farmlands and for urban development.
Herbert Hoover presides over the signing of the Colorado River Compact in November 1922. Members of the Colorado River Commission stood together at the signing of the Colorado River Compact on November 24, 1922. The signing took place at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover presiding (seated). (Courtesy U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation)
Members of the commission included eight men, one each representing the Colorado River Basin statesโArizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyomingโplus the commissionโs chair, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who later became president of the United States. All parties realized the paramount importance of agreeing on consistent apportionments of the riverโs water to the states, which would provide needed certainty into the future [Kuhn and Fleck, 2019]. That meant estimating the magnitude of the riverโs discharge.
The main elements of the compact included the following:
The Colorado River Basin was divided into the Upper and Lower basins at Lee Ferry, Ariz. The Upper Basin includes four states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The Lower Basin includes three: Arizona, California, and Nevada (Figure 1).
Consumptive water use was divided evenly between the Upper and Lower basins, with each allowed 7.5 million acre-feet (~9.2 billion cubic meters) per year. The Upper Basin states were obligated to โnot cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.โ
The riverโs average discharge at Lee Ferry was assumed to be 16.4 million acre-feet per year. Allocating a total of 15 million acre-feet per year would leave the remaining water for future development and for Mexico.
Fig. 1. The Colorado River Basin covers parts of seven U.S. states as well as part of Mexico. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey
The allocation of 7.5 million acre-feet per year of consumptive use for each basin was grounded neither in the best available hydrologic calculations nor in climate variability projections. Rather, it was a compromise Hoover proposed between two endmember figures [Kuhn and Fleck, 2019]. One end was 8.2 million acre-feet per year, half the assumed annual average discharge at Lee Ferry of 16.4 million acre-feet per year, which itself was derived from a report by the U.S. Reclamation Service (now the Bureau of Reclamation) [Fall and Davis, 1922]. The other end was 6.5 million acre-feet per year, a figure proposed and advocated by the Upper Basin commissioners that reflected a roughly 50-50 split of the river discharge at Yuma [Kuhn and Fleck, 2019].
In the decades following the 1922 compact, a plethora of acts, orders, and agreements were written and signed to fine-tune the compactโs provisions, to authorize construction of dams for water storage and power generation, to build water transfer infrastructures, and to resolve interstate and intrastate disputes. Particularly significant was theย 1944 treatyย between the United States and Mexicoโstill in effect todayโthat guaranteed 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually for Mexico, bringing the total allocation to 16.5 million acre-feet per year.
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS.
Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
How Much Water Was There?
In the early 1900s, there were only a few stream gauges in the United States measuring river discharge. The middle section of the Colorado River Basin was one of the most remote and inaccessible regions in the nation at the time. In particular, the canyon region from the mouth of Green River in Utah to the Grand Wash in Arizona, covering a water course of approximately 840 kilometers (520 miles), was accessible to wheeled vehicles at only three points [La Rue et al., 1925]. Because of the inaccessibility, no stream gauges were established there until about 1920. The gauge station at Lee Ferry was established only in summer 1921.
The estimate of Colorado River discharge at Lee Ferry adopted in the compact originated with stream discharge measurements atย Laguna Diversion Damย (Figure 2) near Yuma in southern Arizona, a water course of approximately 1,002 kilometers (622 miles) downstream of Lee Ferry.ย Fall and Davisย [1922] derived the value by subtracting the discharge from the Gila River, which enters the Colorado at Yuma, from the measured discharge at Laguna Dam. The commission simply assumed that the volume gained by the Colorado from tributaries between Lee Ferry and Laguna Dam was about the same as the volume lost to evaporation over that same stretch of river corridor (black curve in Figure 2).
Fig. 2. Colorado River discharge at Lee Ferry, Ariz., from 1895 to 2022. From 1895 to 1920, the data show the difference between La Rue et al. [1925] and Fall and Davis [1922] estimates (data are from La Rue et al. [1925, Table 3] and Fall and Davis [1922, Table 6]). The long-term data show the natural discharge and its 20-year running average from 1906 to 2022 (data from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation). Abbreviation maf = million acre-feet.
Even today, it is challenging to estimate water loss due to evaporation and plant transpiration over a vast area of dry land influenced by seasonal floods and varying vegetation covers. Itโs clear that the commissionโs assumption, and therefore the 16.4-million-acre-feet-per-year estimate, was informed by grossly optimistic considerations and ignored the more conservative science and more reliable hydrologic data available at the time.
A lower estimate of Colorado River discharge had emerged prior to the compact on the basis of a more rigorous scientific approach by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist Eugene Clyde La Rue [Kuhn and Fleck, 2019]. Between 1914 and 1924, La Rue traveled hundreds of miles of the Colorado River and its tributaries to survey dam sites and conduct river discharge measurements. He probably collected more firsthand hydrologic data than anyone and was considered the most knowledgeable Colorado River expert of his generation [Langbein, 1975].
U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Eugene Clyde La Rue takes notes (top) while in camp on Diamond Creek, a tributary to the Colorado River in Arizona, in 1923. La Rue (bottom; standing in water) measures river discharge along Havasu Creek, another tributary in Arizona, also in 1923. Click image for larger version. Credit: Both:ย U.S. Geological Survey
La Rue calculated the average discharge at Lee Ferry between 1895 and 1920 to be 15.0 million acre-feet per year using records from stream gauges and tributary contributions upstream of Lee Ferry. Specifically, he used upstream gauges near Green River, Utah, on the Green River and near Fruita, Colo., on the Colorado River (Figure 1), combined with his records from several other tributaries, to estimate the discharge at Lee Ferry (red curve in Figure 2).
How significant is this difference? It represents nearly 10% of the river discharge assumed in 1922, and it is not far below the estimated reduction in demand needed to meet the current shortage. At aย U.S. Senate committee hearingย in 2022 examining short- and long-term solutions to extreme droughts in the western United States, Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Camille C. Touton testified, on the basis of a bureau analysis, that Colorado River Basin states would need to reduce consumption by 2โ4 million acre-feet in 2023 to protect hydropower generation at Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
La Rue argued that decisionmakers should use longer-term averages in estimating river discharge. Prior to 1899, there were no stream discharge measurements in the Colorado River Basin. La Rue creatively used water level records from Great Salt Lake in Utah, calibrated against later records of river discharge and lake levels, to infer earlier annual Colorado River discharges back to 1895 [La Rue and Grover, 1916; La Rue et al., 1925] (dashed red curve in Figure 2). Decades later, La Rueโs inferred discharges for those early years were found to be consistent with discharge values estimated from tree ring studies [Meko et al., 2007]. The different approaches of La Rue and Fall and Davis led to a disparity in their discharge estimates of approximately 1.4 million acre-feet per year.
Ignoring Available Science
Data and science characterizing the Colorado were limited in the 1920s, but La Rueโs river discharge estimate was known ever since he first published it in a USGS report in 1916. Yet his work only hovered in the background of the commissionโs negotiations. La Rue made a series of attempts to let the commission know that its perception of how much water was in the river was overly optimistic [Kuhn and Fleck, 2019]. In 1920, he tried but failed to facilitate a meeting between USGS and the Reclamation Service because of his concerns over the difference between his estimate, published in the 1916 USGS report, and Fall and Davisโs estimate, which first appeared in a preliminary Reclamation Service report in 1920.
As the preparation of the compact was gathering steam, La Rue took the unusual step of writing directly to Secretary Hoover. He received only a thank-you note in return. The commission refused to be distracted by any lower estimate of river discharge and forged ahead with the compact based on Fall and Davisโs estimate. The higher estimate, of course, meant more perceived water for everyone, which understandably would make negotiations easier. Whether the commission fully recognized the potential consequences of its inattention to and dismissal of La Rueโs lower estimate at the time is unclear.
Short-Term Measures
In 2007, the Colorado River Basin was experiencing the worst 8-year period of drought in more than a century of continuous recordkeeping. The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) issued interim guidelines to address issues related to Lower Basin water shortages and the management of the Lake Mead and Lake Powell reservoirs. These guidelines encouraged voluntary water conservation measures but did not attempt to reallocate water deliveries to compact states.
More than a decade later, as the drought continued, the combined storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead reached its lowest volume since the 1960s. In 2019, the Bureau of Reclamation then established aย Drought Contingency Plan, setting an example of collaboration across the Colorado River Basin. The plan required Upper and Lower basin states to work together to address the imminent water crisis and better manage the Colorado River system in the future.
The Lower Basin approach in the Drought Contingency Plan focused on reducing water demand to stabilize water levels in Lake Mead, while the Upper Basin approach focused similarly on maintaining water levels in Lake Powell. The plan also offered recommendations for voluntary water conservation programs to compensate farmers and other water users for reducing their water use without losing their water rights under the Prior Appropriation doctrine.
In May 2023, DOI announced a deal agreed upon by the three Lower Basin states to conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of water through 2026 to maintain reservoirs above critical levels. Of that amount, 2.3 million acre-feet will be compensated through funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to support water conservation efforts and enhancements to water system efficiency. The remaining conservation needed for sustainable operation will come from voluntary and uncompensated reductions by the Lower Basin states.
Bring Scienceโand All Partiesโto the Table
The interim management guidelines established in 2007 are set to expire in 2026, the date set for review and reauthorization of the 1922 compact. Between now and 2026, there is a window of opportunity to rebalance the allocation and availability of water. It is time to confront the fact that the combination of natural flow and reservoir storage on the Colorado does not provide enough water to meet current demands, as La Rue recognized 100 years ago. It is time to bring science to the negotiating table.
There is no shortage of examples where science has successfully informed water management policy [Loucks, 2021]. Consider the collaboration between Canada and the United States to manage Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River. In response to changing needs of various sectors (e.g., recreation, commercial fishing) and natural hydrologic conditions, the International Lake OntarioโSt. Lawrence River Board [2006] conducted a comprehensive multiyear study to guide revisions to the existing 50-year-old regulations on water levels and river flows for hydropower generation, river navigation, and flood controls.
The board engaged the public and experts, addressed issues pertinent to affected Indigenous communities as an integral part of the process, and applied state-of-the-art scientific knowledge to inform the discourse over new regulations.
For example, the 2006 study found that shoreline communities preferred lower lake levels, which minimize damages from flooding and erosion, whereas recreational users preferred higher levels. Meanwhile, scientific research considered in the study indicated that widely varying lake levels in the Great Lakes are favorable for healthier ecosystems [e.g., Wilcox et al., 2007]. Together the findings required the board to rethink the interests of shoreline communities and recreational users and of how to maintain reliable water intakes for hydropower. The board then devised regulation options that would benefit a greater number of interest groups than the current regulations did and minimize losses for any single group or geographical area. The study also developed adaptation alternatives to help manage climate changeโdriven uncertainties in future conditions.
There is no doubt that climate change, droughts, and population growth have exacerbated the Colorado River water shortage crisis. It is also obvious that the best available science was ignored 100 years ago and water from the Colorado River was overallocated. Negotiators today must learn from history andย embrace state-of-the-art scienceย to helpย reallocate the Colorado River sustainably.
Long-term up-to-date natural discharge data at Lee Ferry are available (Figure 2). As of 2022, the 20-year running average stands below 13 million acre-feet per year, a 20% reduction from what was assumed in the original compact. Further decreases are expected.
Milly and Dunne [2020], considering a moderate greenhouse gas emission scenario (i.e., Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5), predicted that average discharge from the Upper Colorado River Basin between 2016 and 2065 could be 5%โ24% less than it was in 1903โ2017. Miller et al. [2021] projected a 5% decrease at Lee Ferry for the period 2040โ2069 relative to 1975โ2005. Li and Quiring [2022] projected that discharge in the Upper Colorado River Basin will decrease 2.3%โ21.0% due to climate and land use change from 2040 to 2069. The 16.4-million-acre-feet-per-year figure, an overestimate in 1922, is far from realistic today and in the foreseeable future.
In addition to considering the best available science, all stakeholdersโnotably including those left out of the 1922 compactโmust have seats at the negotiating table. Twenty-nine Native American tribes in the Colorado River Basin were granted rights to water for their reservations by the United States Supreme Court inย Winters v. United Statesย (1908). And the 1922 compact states: โNothing in this compact shall be construed as affecting the obligations of the United States of America to Indian tribes.โ Yet the agreement made no explicit allocations because tribal representatives wereย not present during the negotiations, and no subsequent water deliveries were made because there was no infrastructure to convey water to tribal lands.
Formally incorporating tribal water rights is a necessity in the challenge of reallocating the Colorado River. A 2018 study conducted jointly by theย Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnershipย and the Bureau of Reclamation found that the 29 tribes have enforceable rights to as much as 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water per year [U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, 2018], or more than 20% of the 13-million-acre-feet-per-year recent average flow.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Similarly, the treaty rights of Mexico to Colorado River water also must be included. These rights are mandated by a standing international agreement and are a model for needed bilateral collaboration on allocating the water of the Rio Grande River, which has tributary headwaters in Mexico and the United States.
Realistic Reallocation
Reducing long-term regional allocations will be unpopular, but it is a necessity that negotiators need to accept. The reduced allocations must be embedded in the new compact, and whether as percentages of the natural discharge or of specific volumes, they must be based on robust estimates grounded in the best hydrologic and climate science available.
The total allocation also must account for all stakeholders and reflect expected declines in discharge over the coming decades. Furthermore, decisions and agreements on reallocation should precede regional- and local-scale actions taken to reduce water use, such as conservation, land use changes, water reuse, and water transfers, so that these actions can be implemented according to revised allocations.
Existing tools used to confront the water crisis, which have been used mostly on a volunteer basis and/or on local scales, have achieved limited success, attesting to the difficulty of the choices ahead and to the need for broader, more enforceable regulations. Remembering E. C. La Rueโs science-based approach and thinking long term will bring much to current negotiations and help sensibly reenvision the Colorado River Compact.
Kuhn, E., and J. Fleck (2019), Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River, 288 pp., Univ. of Ariz. Press, Tucson.
Langbein, W. B. (1975), LโAffaire LaRue, U.S. Geol. Surv. Water Resour. Div. Bull., AprilโJune, 6โ14.
La Rue, E. C., and N. C. Grover (1916), Colorado River and its utilization, U.S. Geol. Surv. Water Supply Pap., 395, 231 pp., https://doi.org/10.3133/wsp395.
La Rue, E. C., H. Work, and N. C. Grover (1925), Water power and flood control of Colorado River below Green River, Utah, U.S. Geol. Surv. Water Supply Pap., 556, 176 pp., https://doi.org/10.3133/wsp556.
Li, Z., and S. M. Quiring (2022), Projection of streamflow change using a time-varying Budyko framework in the contiguous United States, Water Resour. Res., 58(10), e2022WR033016, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022WR033016.
Meko, D. M., et al. (2007), Medieval drought in the upper Colorado River Basin, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34(10), L10705, https://doi.org/10.1029/2007GL029988.
Miller, O. L., et al. (2021), Changing climate drives future streamflow declines and challenges in meeting water demand across the southwestern United States,ย J. Hydrol. X,ย 11, 100074,ย https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hydroa.2021.100074.
Milly, P. C. D., and K. A. Dunne (2020), Colorado River flow dwindles as warming-driven loss of reflective snow energizes evaporation, Science, 367(6483), 1,252โ1,255, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay9187.
Wilcox, D. A., et al. (2007), Lake-level variability and water availability in the Great Lakes, U.S. Geol. Surv. Circ., 1311, 25 pp., https://doi.org/10.3133/cir1311.
Author Information
Shemin Ge (shemin.ge@colorado.edu) and Joann Silverstein, University of Colorado Boulder; James Eklund, Sherman & Howard LLC, Denver; Patricia Limerick, University of Colorado Boulder; and David Stewart, Stewart Environmental Consulting Group, Fort Collins, Colo.
Citation: Ge, S., J. Silverstein, J. Eklund, P. Limerick, and D. Stewart (2023), Fixing the flawed Colorado River Compact, Eos, 104, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EO230232. Published on 16 June 2023.
Most Greeley residentsโ average monthly utility bill for water, sewer and stormwater services will increase by about $7.84 starting Jan. 1.
The cityโs Water and Sewer Board approved new water utility rates for 2024 to support ongoing investments needed to continue providing safe, reliable and great-tasting water, the city announced in a news release.
The city explained the increases with the following breakdown:
$2.53 for water, to support projects for water supply and storage and help fund the location and removal of water service lines that contain lead;
$2.80 for sewer, to ensure compliance with environmental regulations for wastewater treatment;
$2.51 for stormwater, to upgrade storm drains to prevent flooding and protect local rivers.
The estimated increase covers an average-sized house and yard. Factors affecting customersโ individual bills include weather, property size and type of watering.
Californiaโs recent water cuts are a positive sign of cooperation and a step in the right direction, Amy Haas, executive director of theย Colorado River Authority of Utah, told The Salt Lake Tribune.
โBut one of my concerns, from a Utah perspective, is an over-reliance on compensated conservation,โ she said. โThis money is going to go away. So, what do we need to do to be prepared for in the way of reductions after 2026? And what happens if some of those reductions are not compensated?โ
Haas referred to the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding. Those laws provided billions of dollars for water infrastructure projects, but eventually, that funding will run out…
โ[The water cuts are] predicated on the unspoken assumption that this whole reduction in flows is temporary, that this is a drought and weโre going to get out of it, so letโs just spend some money to overcome it,โ Zachary Frankel, executive director of theย nonprofit Utah Rivers Council, told The Tribune…
Wednesdayโs agreement follows on the heels of a deal made last week between the Biden administration and Californiaโs Imperial Irrigation District, which receivesย 3.1 million acre-feet of Colorado River waterย each year. The federal government will send $77.6 million worth of new investments to the district, and the district will cut 100,000 acre-feet of its Colorado River water in 2023.
โAt the end of the day, from an Upper Basin standpoint, weโve got to make sure that conservation is really going to happen,โ Haas said.
Lake Powell Photo credit: Center for Colorado River Studies
CPW’s Daniel Cammack, right, and Fred Bunch of Great Sand Dunes National Park transfer Rio Grande chub and sucker captured from Crestone Creek into a holding tank for transport to Big Spring Creek on Sept. 26, 2023 in the San Luis Valley. CPW photos/John Livingston
A decades-long effort to establish new populations of imperiled Rio Grande chub and Rio Grande sucker fish in Coloradoโs San Luis Valley led to a historic day on the Medano Ranch of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) collaborated with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and National Park Service (NPS) on Sept. 26, 2023 to translocate a population of Rio Grande chub and sucker from Crestone Creek on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge to Big Spring Creek on the Medano Ranch.
More than 600 fish were collected from Crestone Creek and transported to Big Spring Creek, where aquatic biologists hope to create a new self-sustaining population of the native fishes. Currently, there are only seven known self-sustaining populations of Rio Grande sucker in the state.
โThis is just a good collaboration between the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and CPW and shows good common-sense management to replicate this resource in newly acquired habitat,โ said CPW Native Aquatic Species Biologist Daniel Cammack. โUsing these fish from Crestone Creek and moving them to a habitat where they are likely to thrive and start another population is a really great effort.โ
Rio Grande chub and suckers are currently petitioned to be listed as federally endangered. In Colorado, Rio Grande chubs are listed as a species of special concern and have lost as much as 80% of their historical range within the upper Rio Grande Basin. Rio Grande suckers are a state endangered species, whose occupancy has declined as much as 90%.
The NPS acquisition of Big Spring Creek and the Medano Ranch from The Nature Conservancy presented a unique opportunity to restore these fish to historic habitat in the low gradient creek. The creek is sustained by a perennial supply of spring water that averages 5 cubic feet per second, making it pristine habitat for the native fish species.
Through consistent monitoring of Big Spring Creek, the NPS determined conditions would be suitable for Rio Grande chub and sucker. As soon as it was deemed quality habitat, all three agencies worked together to quickly populate the stream.
โThis is a great opportunity to replicate an imperiled population from 20 miles north of us on the Baca Refuge,โ said Dewane Mosher, biologist for Great Sand Dunes National Park. โItโs important to secure those genetics from the wild fish here in the National Park.โ
Crestone Creek exists on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to Great Sand Dunes National Park and is roughly 20 miles north of the Medano Ranch. Fish were first discovered in Crestone Creek in the early 2000s by Ron Garcia, manager of the Baca Refuge. CPW aquatic biologist John Alves identified the population of fish as Rio Grande chub and sucker, only the second known population of both species that existed at that time.
Since that important discovery, CPW has worked with USFWS to protect and expand the population on the refuge, which is considered one of the most important populations in the speciesโ range.
โThis is an ideal opportunity and it was a historic day to restore some native fish into Big Spring Creek here at the Medano Ranch,โ said Fred Bunch, Chief of Resources Management for the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. โWe want to restore endangered species to their habitat. We are very optimistic about their chances of making it here. We want to help these species expand their habitat, and we want to be true to our word and do what we can to help these species.โ
The translocation project also allowed CPW and the USFWS to salvage a portion of the population within Crestone Creek. The creek flowing through the Baca Refuge has fluctuating water flows and was running below 1 cfs in September. The Rio Grande chub and suckers occupied small pools where high densities could have led to natural mortality in the winter.
โHistorically, Big Spring and Crestone would have been connected here in the Valley and fish may have migrated from one creek to another,โ said USFWS Fish Biologist Cole Brittain. โHowever, with recent drying and lack of water from the abundance of agriculture and ranching related water use, we donโt have those same connections today.
โWith the NPS acquiring this property, we can manually transport these fish, and thatโs a unique opportunity. This project is 20 years in the making and one we wish we could replicate all over the place, but these properties donโt come by very often. It takes a lot of work from a bunch of agencies.โ
Plans are in place to continue introducing more chub and suckers to Big Spring Creek in 2024 utilizing fish from CPWโs John W. Mumma Native Aquatic Species Restoration Facility and additional salvage of wild fish from Crestone Creek as opportunities are presented.
โPast experience with these reintroductions suggests that it can take anywhere from two to five years of stocking before a self-sustaining population is created,โ Cammack said. โWe will continue to monitor annually, hoping to detect young-of-year fish, providing evidence that natural reproduction is taking place.โ
CPW, NPS and USFWS will remain committed to the protection and restoration of these fish to their native range, as projects such as Big Spring Creek align with their shared mission.
โTheyโre not the species people want to go out and catch on hook and line, but they are an important part of Coloradoโs natural legacy,โ Cammack said. โThey evolved in this landscape, and if you want to consider the environment good as a whole, we want to keep all the pieces. Itโs important we not only pay attention to sport fish but also these native species that historically havenโt been managed very well.โ
CPW’s Daniel Cammack prepares to insert a pit tag in a Rio Grande chub after collecting it from Crestone Creek on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. Credit: CPW/John Livingston
Fish are transfered from a net to a bucket to be stocked in Big Spring Creek by CPW’s Rachel Jones.Big Spring Creek flows at 5 cfs through Great Sand Dunes National Park land. Photo credit: CPW/John LivingstonA collection of Rio Grande chub and sucker are pictured in a holding tank ahead of being redistributed in Big Spring Creek. Photo credit: John Livingston/CPWCole Brittain of the USFWS holds a large Rio Grande chub captured in Crestone Creek on the Baca National Wildlife Refuge. The chub was relocated to Big Spring Creek on Great Sand Dunes National Park land. Photo credit: John Livingston/CPW
From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission. Hamby and Buschatzke acknowledged during this panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference that the lower basin must own the structural deficit, something the upper basin has been pushing for for years. CREDIT: TOM YULSMAN/WATER DESK, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager). Here’s an excerpt:
December 15, 2023
The future of the Colorado River is being hashed out behind closed doors, and negotiators appear far from a long-term solution to the wide gap between water supply and water demand. At the Colorado River Water Users Association annual meeting in Las Vegas, representatives from the seven states that use the river spent three days opining on the progress of ongoing talks to determine how water will be managed after 2026, when the current set of rules expires…In a massive ballroom at the Las Vegas Paris Hotel, John Entsminger, Nevadaโs top water negotiator, forecasted that the next river-sharing agreement will be โa messy compromise that will be judged harshly by history.โ He and delegates from six other states that use water from the Colorado River are trying to agree on a new set of rules for sharing the dwindling supply. The current guidelinesย expire in 2026. Entsminger said a final agreement may join a patchwork of deals that have incrementally, but perhaps insufficiently, tweaked water use in response to two decades of dry conditions fueled by climate change.
โIf you look at the last 25 years of the Colorado River, you know these imperfect, messy compromises step by step by step have gotten us much closer to equilibrium than we were at the turn of the century,โ he said…
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
Some experts rallied for updates to the way water is measured. The Lower Basin states haveย come under fireย for failing to account for โsystem loss,โ or the water lost to evaporation and leaky canals, and critics say the official tally of how much water is in the Colorado River needs to account for that. Those losses total about 1.5 million acre-feet each year, mostly due to evaporation from the surface of Lake Mead, the nationโs largest reservoir. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.
โI don’t think the Lower Basin is going to agree to call it what it is, because there are a lot of political and legal issues around it,โ said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District. โBut if they would just permanently reduce their use, including that 1.5 million, I think we’d be a whole lot better off as a system.โ
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the โholeโ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really donโt change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
The Colorado Department of Agriculture has hired farmer Robert Sakata to serve as the first Agricultural Water Policy Advisor, a position which was created as a result of funding approved during the 2023 legislative session to engage with Colorado farmers and ranchers on water issues affecting agricultural users. He will start in his role effective January 1, 2024.
โI am beyond excited to have Robert joining our CDA team,โ said Commissioner of Agriculture Kate Greenberg. โHis lifetime of experience in water and as a farmer, his service to the state over many decades serving on related boards and commissions, and his clear commitment to serving Coloradoโs agriculture communities make him the right person at the right time. At a time when agricultural producers are facing historic challenges, Robert will bring both empathy and expertise to the table to represent CDA in supporting ag through these challenges. We look forward to seeing all that he will do in this new role.โ
Sakata is President of Sakata Farms Inc. in Brighton, Colorado which was started by his father Bob, and currently cares for 2,500 acres of irrigated farm ground between Brighton, Platteville and Hudson. He attended the University of Colorado studying Molecular Cellular & Developmental Biology and child psychology.
Growing up on the family farm, his parents were a great example of how important involvement in the community is. Following their footsteps, Robert is the founding president of the board of directors for the Colorado Fruit & Vegetable Growers Association which was created to fill a need for a common voice representing produce growers across the state.
โRobert brings experience that can only be gained by making a living in irrigated agriculture to this position,โ Conservation Services Director Les Owen noted. โThis will make him a tremendous asset to CDA in advocating for the agriculture industry on water issues.”
Sakata was appointed by Governor Polis in 2021 to serve on the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) as a representative of the South Platte Basin. Following the January meeting, Sakata will complete his term and serve as Commissioner Greenbergโs delegate to the CWCB.
Sakata also serves on the boards of the Fulton Irrigation Company, Brighton Ditch Company, and the New Brantner Irrigation Ditch Company. Robertโs past service on organizations include the Metro Basin Roundtable since its inception, the Colorado Water Congress Board of Directors, the National Onion Association Board of Trustees, Adams County Farm Bureau Board of Directors, and Colorado Onion Association Board of Directors.
Sakata served Colorado and worked closely with the Colorado Department of Agriculture for 15 years as a member of the Water Quality Control Commission, having been appointed by three different governors.
In the Fall of 2022, the Colorado Farm Bureau awarded Sakata the โOutside of Farm Bureau Service to Agriculture Award,โ a recognition that his recently passed father received in 2013.
In speaking of public service, Sakata said, โI am honored to be able to participate in water discussions no matter where in order to build trust and foster positive relationships that can carry meaningful dialogue forward.โ
El Departamento de Agricultura de Colorado (CDA) ha contratado al agricultor Robert Sakata como el primer asesor de polรญticas de agua agrรญcola. El puesto fue creado por la financiaciรณn aprobada durante la sesiรณn legislativa de 2023 para trabajar con los agricultores y ganaderos de Colorado en asuntos de agua en la agricultura. Ocuparรก su cargo a partir del 1 de enero de 2024.
“Estoy super emocionada de tener a Robert en nuestro equipo de CDA,” dijo la Comisionada de Agricultura, Kate Greenberg. โSu experiencia de toda una vida en el sector del agua y como agricultor, su servicio al estado durante muchas dรฉcadas en juntas y comisiones relacionadas, y su compromiso total de servir a las comunidades agrรญcolas de Colorado son reflejantes de una persona perfecta en el momento perfecto. En un tiempo en que productores agrรญcolas se enfrentan con desafรญos histรณricos, Robert aportarรก empatรญa y sabidurรญa para representar al CDA en el apoyo a la agricultura durante estos tiempos duros. Anticipamos ver todo lo que puede hacer en este nuevo rol.โ
Sakata es presidente de Sakata Farms Inc. en Brighton (Colorado), granja fundada por su padre Bob de 2,500 acres de tierras de riego entre Brighton, Platteville y Hudson. Estudiรณ Biologรญa Molecular, Celular y del Desarrollo, y Psicologรญa Infantil en la Universidad de Colorado.
Criado en la granja familiar, sus padres fueron un gran ejemplo de lo importante que es participar en la comunidad. Siguiendo los pasos de sus padres, Robert es el presidente fundador de la junta directiva de la Asociaciรณn de Productores de Frutas y Hortalizas de Colorado, que fue creada para dar una voz comรบn y necesaria y representante de los productores de verdura y fruta de todo el estado.
โRobert aporta a este puesto una experiencia que solo puede adquirirse ganรกndose la vida en la agricultura de riego,โ seรฑalรณ Les Owen, Director de los Servicios de Conservaciรณn. โEsto le convertirรก en un gran activo para CDA a la hora de defender a la industria agrรญcola en cuestiones relacionadas con el agua.โ
Sakata fue designado por el Gobernador Polis en 2021 para formar parte de la Junta de Conservaciรณn del Agua de Colorado (CWCB) como representante de la cuenca de South Platte. Despuรฉs de la reuniรณn de este enero, Sakata completarรก su mandato y se desempeรฑarรก como delegado de la Comisionada Greenberg ante la CWCB.
Sakata tambiรฉn forma parte de los consejos de Fulton Irrigation Company, Brighton Ditch Company y New Brantner Irrigation Ditch Company. Robert ha trabajado en organizaciones como la Mesa Redonda de la Cuenca Metropolitana desde su creaciรณn, la Junta Directiva del Congreso del Agua de Colorado, la Junta Directiva de la Asociaciรณn Nacional de Productores de Cebolla, la Junta Directiva de la Oficina Agrรญcola del condado de Adams y la Junta Directiva de la Asociaciรณn de Productores de Cebolla de Colorado.
Sakata sirviรณ a Colorado y trabajรณ estrechamente con el Departamento de Agricultura de Colorado durante 15 aรฑos como miembro de la Comisiรณn de Control de la Calidad del Agua, habiendo sido nombrado por tres gobernadores diferentes.
En otoรฑo de 2022, el Departamento de Agricultura de Colorado concediรณ a Sakata el โPremio al Servicio a la Agricultura fuera del Departamento de Agricultura”, un reconocimiento que su padre, reciรฉn difunto, recibiรณ en 2013.
Al hablar del servicio pรบblico, Sakata seรฑalรณ, โEs un honor para mรญ poder participar en debates sobre el agua, dondequiera que sea, con el fin de generar confianza y fomentar relaciones positivas que puedan llevar adelante un diรกlogo significativo.โ
Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help writeย the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States,ย I hesitated. Did weย reallyย need another warning of the dire consequences of climate change in this country? The answer, legally, was yes: Congress mandates that the National Climate Assessment be updated every four years or so. But after four previous assessments and six United Nations reports since 1990, I was skeptical that what we needed to address climate change was yet another report. In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises.ย Extreme eventsย like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactlyย as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didnโt seem to matter. Our report, which was released on Tuesday [November 14, 2023], contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can nowย link climate changeย to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of howย the feedback loopsย in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory. But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too…
…as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our countryโs greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow…Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation โ something Iโd long regarded as impossible โ in 2022 as we turned in the first draft. And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this.ย We nowย know howย to make the dramatic emissions cuts weโd need to limit warming, and itโs very possible to do this in a way thatโsย sustainable, healthy and fair. The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. Weโre not just warning of danger anymore. Weโre showingย the wayย to safety.
The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now. Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity.ย Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.
DALL-E thinks we need a very large table for this, suggesting a broad need for โcollective agencyโ to go along with our โcollective actionโ via InkStain (John Fleck).
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
December 20, 2023
The news out of last weekโs Colorado River Water Users Association is that, behind the scenes, a deal is taking shape with the potential to bring Colorado River Basin water use into balance with water supply.
The deal would eliminate the โstructural deficitโ, and creates a framework for a compromise over the Upper Basinโs Lee Ferry delivery/non-depletion obligation.
This is huge. But so are the caveats โ in terms of both the challenges remaining for a deal, and the definition of the problem we are trying to solve.
The U.S. Lower Basin states โ California, Arizona, and Nevada โ have converged on a set of numbers to permanently reduce their use on a year-in, year-out basis by a minimum of 1.25 million acre feet per year, eliminating the โstructural deficitโ โ the year-in, year-out gap between inflows and outflows that has drained Lake Mead over the last two decades.
If separate negotiations with Mexico lead to additional reductions south of the border (which is how this has played out in the last two rounds of basin scheming), total durable, permanent Lower Basin reductions on the order of 1.5 million acre feet a year appear to be within reach.
If more cuts than that are needed to balance the system, the Lower Basin states at CRWUA made it pointedly, publicly clear that they are asking the Upper Basin states to share in the additional pain.
Implicit in that final point is the opportunity for a version of what we used to call the โGrand Bargainโ โ a Lower Basin concession that the riverโs flow may not be sufficient to deliver 82.5 million acre feet per year. That would require even deeper cuts in the Lower Basin. To avoid interstate litigation over a Colorado River Compact delivery shortfall, the Lower Basin is offering a โModest Bargainโ of a sort โ an Upper Basin contribution of water matching in some way (itโs not clear in what proportion to the additional Lower Basin cuts) in return for the Lower Basin not wading into a legal fight over the meaning of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact.
To the extent that this moves from the meeting rooms and hallway conversations of CRWUA to public view, the seven states need to come together on something that can be put down in writing, publicly, by (I think) March in order for the Bureau of Reclamation wizards to begin the modeling work. So this is on a very fast track.
This is a very big deal, and very good news. Butโฆ.
SOME TERMS AND CONDITIONS MAY APPLY
There are a bunch of caveats.
The final AZ-CA-NV split of the 1.25-ish million acre feet is not fixed, but it is close, converging on a set of numbers that make sense, respecting some of Californiaโs senior priority status, but not insisting on it as thoroughly as the stateโs proposal of last February.
Suffice to say that the remarkable Lower Basin use numbers this year โ currently at 5.8 million acre feet for the three U.S. states, the lowest total U.S. draw on Lake Mead since the modern record-keeping regime began in 1964 โ shows that cuts like this are totally doable without wrecking the economies of the three states.
If we donโt have three-state numbers yet, weโre a lot farther from figuring out how each of the three states will divvy up the cuts among their users. This will be hard. Well for two of the states, anyway, Nevada just has one major user to do the divvying.
But will voluntary cuts of the scale needed be possible without the big inflow of federal cash that has helped so much this year? The precedent set by all the money sloshing around the Lower Basin right now poses a challenge.
And what of the Upper Basinโs relentless โitโs a Lower Basin over-use problem!โ rhetoric over the last year. Now that the Lower Basin folks have basically said โYup, and hereโs what weโre gonna do about thatโ, have the Upper Basin folks painted themselves into a corner that makes the broader compromise needed on the next steps that much harder?
WHOโS AT THE TABLE RIGHT NOW?
All of this is predicated on a narrow definition of the problem we are trying to solve, which is basically a mass balance problem โ figuring out how to match our use of water with the supply available, rather than over-using and draining the reservoirs. This is important! But itโs not the only thing.
This is a process dominated by the economically and politically powerful current water users. If we have a collective action problem here, we also have a โcollective agencyโ problem. It is a system under which โagencyโ โ the power to influence outcomes โ is tightly controlled and narrowly distributed.
What about interests other than the big water agencies and their representatives in state government? This is clearly a state-to-state conversation right now, heading toward a desire for a seven-state proposal come March. In the last two rounds of this โ the 2007 Interim Guidelines and the Drought Contingency Plan โ the statesโ proposals have carried the day.
What about the Colorado River Basinโs 30 Tribal Sovereigns? Itโs not clear to me how their needs and interests are being incorporated into this process. In this regard, one is reminded of Neil Gorsuchโs dissent in this yearโs Navajo decision, where he analogized to the tribe standing in line after line again and again at the DMV, only to be told that this isnโt the right line. Then which is?
What about non-water-consuming environmental values, which have similarly had a hard time figuring out which process might be the right one? The states could, in theory, act on behalf of those non-water agency interests in the deal theyโre so furiously negotiating. Will they? Will the federal government step in and insist if the states donโt?
There was hope as we headed into the negotiation of the post-2026 river management regime that broader interests and values would be represented. It will be interesting to see what else beyond a seven-state proposal gets consideration in the discussions to come.
A note on sources and methods: I spent last week resting, looking at art, watching falling snow, reading a book (actually several), and not going to CRWUA. My deep thanks to my many friends who attended and filled me in what they heard and saw. All errors are mine. (Also, is that a Cocker Spaniel in the picture, a couple of seats to the chairโs left?)
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
Click the link to access the report on the NIDIS website (Britt Parker; Joel Lisonbee, Elizabeth Ossowski ; Holly R. Prendeville; Dennis Todey). Here’s the executive summary:
Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made to improve the Nationโs capacity to proactively manage drought risk by providing those affected with the best available information and resources to diagnose and quantifyโor assessโdrought conditions. Drought assessments can be a snapshot of present drought severity and extent, an analysis over time of drought duration, a retrospective look at the underlying drivers of a drought, an analysis of the impacts of drought on people or systems, or any other attempt to understand the dynamics of a particular drought. These assessments have a vital role to play in supporting communities in preparing for, mitigating, and responding to drought.
Improvements in data products, more accurate drought assessments, and investments in better coordination have served drought-prone communities well. Continuous integration of new needs and requirements from those communities is essential to maintaining the continuity of progress our country has already made. Today, the changing climate is causing the probability of extreme events to change, a phenomenon known statistically as non-sta-tionarity. In the future, the intensity, duration, and frequency of droughts may change. This poses new challenges that are being raised by scientists, decision-makers, and practitioners. These challenges include the difficulty to distinguish natural variability, meaning the naturally occurring oscillations in the climate system, from forced trends, or the seemingly permanent changes caused by anthropogenic climate change. This also includes the complexity of understanding drought within socio-economic considerations and resource constraints (e.g., funding, capacity) that might limit the ability to integrate the latest science into operational data products.
Around the country, those engaged in drought decision-making are considering a number of questions such as: Do current methods for assessing drought conditions consistently and deliberately consider non-stationarity? If not, could this result in a missed opportunity to promote drought planning and response strategies that build long-term community resilience and reduce risk? What research is needed to produce drought indicators that account for climate change? And what resources are available to support their development and integration into the current suite of indicators?
A technical meeting to discuss this issue was co-hosted by NOAAโs National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and USDA Climate Hubs on February 28โMarch 1, 2023, where scientists, decision-makers, and practitioners were asked to address an overarching question: โWhat approaches should be taken to better incorporate non-stationarity into drought assessment?โ Answering this question thoroughly demands thoughtful consideration of (1) the phenomenon of drought itself; (2) the experience of drought and its impacts; (3) the purpose of assessment of drought and its impacts; and (4) the preparation for and response to drought and its impacts, including actions to reduce impacts as well as policies and adaptation. Of these considerations, the technical workshop focused largely on better understanding and assessing the phenomenon itself by breaking the topic down into four sub-topics: (1) considering climate variability and drought assessment; (2) understanding drought in an aridifying (drier-trending) climate; (3) discerning drought in a humidifying (wetter-trending) climate; and (4) defining drought in terms of risk and likelihood of event.
This report captures the ideas and feedback of more than 100 subject matter experts from over 44 institutions across the drought research and practitioner communities who participated in the meeting and reviewed this report. The two-day meeting identified priority actions and outstanding research questions that would continue to advance drought assessment in a changing climate. From the large volume of input received at the meeting, ideas were collated and refined; however, they were not distilled down to a few top priorities, nor were ideas further fleshed out to incorporate a prescriptive scale for implementation. Instead, this report captures the breadth of feedback from the meeting itself.
In total, the report highlights priority actions and research questions across the following fifteen focus areas to improve drought assessment by addressing gaps identified by the research and practitioner community. These fifteen focus areas are presented individually with the acknowledgement that if they are approached as siloes, progress will be curtailed. Many are cross-cutting, progress in one will accelerate progress in another, and it is key that the drought community approach these issues collaboratively. Finally, while the primary focus of the technical working meeting was on better understanding and assessing the phenomenon (of drought) itself, focus areas on related planning, governance, and communication considerations are also critically important and were captured.
Learning with Indigenous Communities
Benchmarking our Understanding and Assessment of Drought in a Changing Climate
Ensuring Equity in Drought Monitoring and Assessment
Evaluating Data Relevance, Fidelity, Integration, Metadata and New Technologies
Determining the Physical Drivers of Drought and How They Are Changing
Understanding Drivers of Aridification and Their Interactions with Drought
Addressing Regional Differences in Non-stationarity
Improving Drought Indicator Performance
Using Precipitation Effectiveness More Broadly to Capture Rainfall Variability
Quantifying Water Demand in a Changing Climate
Evaluating Drought Impacts and How They Are Changing
Assessing Drought in Terms of Risk
Assessing Policy through the Lens of Non-stationarity
Strengthening Planning, Management, and Adaptation
Improving Communication and Collaborative Knowledge Exchange
Across this discussion of diverse and important focus areas, chronic issues emerged that plague our Nationโs efforts to adequately assess drought and its impacts, and these are exacerbated by climate change. These include gaps in drought monitoring and assessment that present equity issues and under-resourced observation and monitoring networks that require additional investment.
This report offers a rich collection of ideas for action and research that federal, tribal, state, local agencies and academic institutions can advance. Further prioritization and specification may be warranted to discern where limited resources might be most impactful, and this will be the focus of an accompanying synthesis paper for publication in 2024. Although the intent of the report is not to provide authoritative guidance or design specifications for specific research or programmatic endeavors, it is intended to illuminate current and future needs to best account for a changing climate in our drought assessment practices.
I was planning for this post to be tip-toeing into a conversation about the prior appropriation doctrine, a conversation which we badly need to have throughout the interior West, but which will likely be vigorously, even violently, opposed by those holding senior water rights in every western watershed.
But instead of that โ Iโve been captured by the season, the dark season of long nights and short days that has made us โ all the way back to our distant ancestors living in stick-and-mud wickiups (maybe especially them) โ want to take a break from the daily round, and instead contemplate the larger problem of helping the sun return. So โ a short break here, from worrying about the water we donโt have, or about 2026 and a new set of bandaids and splints for dragging into the future the Marleyโs Chain that we call the Law of the River. No big bonfire either, or Saturnalia or Christmas or Kwanzaa just yet, although each in its good time. Instead, just a celebration, or at least acknowledgement, of our currently fading sun โ and a revisit to the relationship between the sun and the water that the sun giveth and taketh away, the two things without which we would not be here.
A study by MIT researchers confirms that the planet harbors a โstabilizing feedbackโ mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range. Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT; NASA
Think, for starters, of the planet misnamed โEarth,โ held by the mysterious force of gravity in an uneven circle around the sun at about 66,000 miles per hour, too fast for gravityโs centripetal force to pull it into the sun, but not so fast that centrifugal force would let it leave the sunโsโpull on a straight line into the black night of space โ a delicate kind of dynamic balance.
But โ โEarthโ: had we seen it first from above like we can now, from satellites on the upper edge of our atmosphere, we would have called the planet โWater,โ or maybe more romantically, โOceania.โ Water covers 70 percent of the planet; we are a planet awash in water. Where the water came from, we can only hypothesize; but we have it โ and we are also just the right distance from the sun we circle so that a lot of our water is in its liquid form. A few million miles closer to the sun and our water would be vapor in the atmosphere, as on Venus; a few million miles farther away, and the oceans and land would lie under deep layers of ice โ the recent Pleistocene writ larger. But we are in the โsweet spotโ between those extremes, where the tilt of the planet is such that in our yearโs passage around the sun, most of us are getting a taste of both the water-as-ice world and the water-as-vapor world, winter and summer; but thanks be, water-as-liquid continues to be where, or what, most of the water is.
Diagram credit: USGS
The majority of that water, of course โ 97 percent of it โ is too salty for land-based life on the 30 percent of the planet currently not underwater. We know that the presence of any water at all on that 30 percent of the planet depends on the sun turning water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor โ in effect, โdesalinatingโ it โ then wafting some of that cleansed water-as-vapor over the land on winds also generated by the sun, where the water-as-vapor cools as it rises over the land and condenses as precipitation โ water-as-ice or water-as-liquid, but either way, what we call โfreshwater,โ and need more than any other single resource (with the possible exception of the sun).
More than two-thirds of the freshwater that falls over the land gets โbankedโ on the planetโs remaining glaciers and ice sheets, mostly useless to life. A majority of the remaining third (of just 3 percent of the total water, remember) soaks in as groundwater, some of it โtributaryโ (eventually working its way underground into streams), and the rest non-tributary (going into โdeep-storageโ in aquifers). The top layer of water that soaks into the ground is what most of our land-based plants depend on for life and living.
The diminished remainder โ less than one percent of all the water on the planet โ is surface water: the rivers, streams and lakes we see, use, play in and generally love to death. This is the water that most of the animal life on earth, including us mammals, depend on for life and living. We human mammals, however, have learned how to pump groundwater up to the surface for animal uses.
Sunset over the Yampa River Valley August 25, 2016.
But this is the point at which the sun ceases to be just a good friend. Its propensity for turning water-as-liquid into water-as-vapor does not stop at the edge of the ocean, and as soon as the sun and its agent winds deliver the precipitation to us โ mostly water-as-ice in the Colorado Riverโs mountains โ it goes to work converting it back to water-as-vapor.
Western Water Assessment/Nature Conservancy/USDA Snowtography guide cover January 2022.
The sun and wind donโt even wait till the water-as-ice turns to water-as-liquid; the wind goes to work as soon as the snow lands, the sun as soon as the clouds disperse; both sun and wind begin turning an unknown quantity of the water-as-ice directly into water-as-vapor, through the process of sublimation. Only snow that falls on the lee and shaded side of rocks, trees or ridges, or falls through a forest to the ground, is safe from the sun and wind. If it is intercepted on the branches of forest trees, it is sublimated from there too. Estimates of the amount of a snowpack lost to sublimation on exposed areas range as high as 30 percent. Researchers on a large Department of Energy project are making a very complex and instrument-intensive effort to determine more accurately how much is lost to sublimation, and studies are going on in the Western forests to see if there are management strategies that would better protect the snow from sublimation.
The snowpack that survives the winter melts in the spring and early summer, water-as-liquid that either soaks into the ground or runs off in streams, both processes in which its meets other sets of challenges from the sun. The sun that soaks into the ground is eagerly sought out by the roots of plants, and is carried up into their stems, leaves and flowers. There, around 5-10 percent goes into the growth of the plants, and most of the rest is transpired through leaves into the atmosphere as vapor, partly to create a favorable micro-environment around the plant, and โ one irrationally suspects โ patly because thatโs what their lord and master sun wants them to do. (False fact alert.)
The water that runs off, either because the slope is too steep or rocky to soak in or because the ground is already saturated, encounters other challenges. Bouncing down the mountainsides in whitewater streams, dry air catches and vaporizes tiny droplets. Then once the water-as-liquid calms down in the valleys, it encounters lots of users, including us. Much of it is captured by plants, some โwild,โ some domesticated, with a large portion of that being transpired back to the atmosphere. Anywhere it is exposed to the sun, some of it is evaporated. In the Colorado River Basin, the water-as-liquid eventually encounters a dam and reservoir, where it becomes a sitting duck for the sun. The hotter the reservoirโs environment, the more is lost โ although reservoirs in the upper reaches of the river are only partially exempted from evaporation; they lose water-as-liquid into thinner dry air. Again, we donโt have an accurate measure of evaporation from the sun and its sidekick winds, but estimates Iโve seen are around 800,000 acre-feet in โsystem lossesโ (mostly evaporation) from the states above the canyons, and 1.2 million acre-feet system losses from the states below the canyons. Nearly a sixth of the river as it has been running the past 20 years โ and those numbers get a little worse in dry years of low precipitation.
Low soil moisture can soak up snow runoff, leaving less for rivers and reservoirs. Image credit: Denver Water.
So the sun giveth and the sun taketh away. A 2022 summary study of Colorado River science cites findings that only 10 percent of the precipitation that falls over the Colorado River Basin actually shows up in the river. A goodly portion of the rest undoubtedly goes to groundwater โ but a recent US Geological Survey study (too complex in its science for me to really comprehend) shows that roughly half of the riverโs water below the snowpack zone (roughly 8,000 feet elevation and above) is groundwater making its way into the stream. Since about 85 percent of the riverโs water originates above the 8,000 foot elevation, the sun clearly does quite a lot of its taking-away before the streams ever emerge in what could be called the human-use region.
There is, however, another co-conspirator with the sun, in determining the ratio of water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor, and that is the planetโs atmosphere โ what isย inย the atmosphere. The atmosphere has a regulatory function for the ratios of water-as-ice to water-as-liquid, and water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor. Small changes in the amount of carbon and nitrogen gases in the atmosphere change those ratios significantly. At the height of the Pleistocene Epoch (most of the past two million years plus) the quantity of carbon gases in the atmosphere had dropped to less than 200 parts per million (ppm), decreasing the capacity of the atmosphere to hold solar heat, and the precipitation that fell as snow and piled up in glaciers in the mountains and ice sheets on the leveler land โ ice masses with a weight sufficient to crack and depress the continental crust, leaving depressions that filled up with the Great Lakes when the ice melted.
Sometime in the last half-million years or so, however, something caused the carbon gases in the atmosphere to begin slowly increasing, and the balance of water on earth began to shift back from the cold dry epoch of water-as-ice toward water-as-liquid. Perhaps volcanic activity, perhaps fires in forests dried out for want of water, maybe some assistance from paleo-people burning forests and grasslands to keep forage optimal for the animals they hunted โ some combination of factors and events bumped up the carbon gases in the atmosphere to 300 ppm plus or minus, and the planetary climate grew warmer and wetter, mellowing into the Holocene Epoch these past 10,000-15,000 years.
So comparatively mellow was the Holocene, with water-as-liquid replacing water-as-ice in comparative abundance, that all the forms of life that had survived the Pleistocene thrived โ thrived so well that many species, plant and animal, experienced episodes of the โtrauma of successโ: outgrowing their resource base in episodes of swarming, and ultimately being brought back into balance through rough action by the rest of their environments, by โnatureโ โ a menu of measures that includes pandemic disease, famine, infighting, social breakdown, and all the other consequences of too many individuals competing for too little food, water, and โelbow room.โ
We are certainly in that category of swarming species, but are a unique case, being not locked into instinctual behavior, but either blessed or cursed with the capacity to see whatโs going on and take steps to adapt culturally, thus avoiding (or at least deferring) the depredations of famine, pandemic disease and war over food, water and land. But our adaptations get ever more complex and difficult to maintain, and usually have unforeseen consequences that have to be dealt with through even more complexity.
Our current success in staying ahead of the disasters that usually brings swarming species back into balance quickly, if brutally, has depended heavily on releasing carbon substances long sequestered in the ground, burning them โ and consequently driving up the capacity of the atmosphere to hold the sunโs heat. The good news there is that weโve probably precluded the usual interstadial return to the Pleistocene winter. But the bad news is that we have begun to significantly increase the conversion of water-as-liquid to water-as-vapor. Weโve all seen the summerย virga,ย when falling precipitation over a desert is evaporated by rising heat before it can get to the ground โ beautiful in the desert, but not something we want to see everywhere and all the timeโฆ.
But time next year for all that. Wishing you all a meaningful and (if itโs not contradictory) joyful holiday season. See you again in 2024 โ when weโll again go down by the river and all its problems (for which a good primer would be to look at the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa).
Moderate or heavy precipitation amounts fell in three main areas this week: central and northern California, parts of the southwestern Great Plains (especially southwest Kansas through the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles), and along the East Coast. Warmer-than-normal temperatures occurred this week across much of the central and northern contiguous United States. For areas in drought or abnormal dryness that received heavy precipitation amounts, improvements occurred locally due to lessening precipitation deficits and increased streamflow and/or soil moisture. In areas between the southern Great Plains heavy rain and the East Coast heavy rain, deficits in streamflow, soil moisture, and precipitation worsened, leading to widespread degrading conditions. Heavier rains fell on the northeast half of Puerto Rico this week, and scattered moderate drought and abnormal dryness continued on the island. A mix of degradations and improvements occurred in Hawaii this week, with a wet trade wind pattern bringing needed rainfall to windward slopes of Oahu and Molokai. Alaska remained free of drought and abnormal dryness…
In parts of southern Colorado, south-central and eastern Nebraska, and much of Kansas, moderate to heavy precipitation amounts fell this week. Improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness occurred in a north-to-south band across central and western Kansas, where this weekโs precipitation lessened precipitation deficits and improved soil moisture. Localized improvements to drought also occurred in south-central Nebraska, where this weekโs rain was enough to alleviate precipitation and soil moisture deficits somewhat. Low snowpack and dry conditions for the past few months continued in northern Colorado, leading to a southward expansion of moderate drought and abnormal dryness in high elevations.
The wet weather in southern Colorado led to some improvements to drought conditions. Dryness from the past couple of months increased in eastern South Dakota and in the Black Hills, leading to abnormal dryness expanding or developing in both areas. Temperatures in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas were mostly 3 to 9 degrees above normal, with a few local cooler exceptions. In the Dakotas, temperatures ranging from 6 to locally 15 degrees warmer than normal were common…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending December 19, 2023.
Coastal central and northern California, and parts of the northern Central Valley and northern Sierra Nevada, received heavier precipitation this week, exceeding 2 inches in some places. Lighter precipitation amounts fell in coastal portions of Oregon and Washington. In parts of northern and southeast New Mexico, precipitation this week was enough to improve streamflow, soil moisture and precipitation deficits sufficiently for localized improvements to drought conditions. Short-term drying in parts of east-central Utah led to a small expansion of abnormal dryness. In southwest and south-central Montana, low snowpack amounts, short-term precipitation deficits, and soil moisture deficits led to localized expansion in drought and abnormal dryness. A reassessment of short- and long-term conditions in northwest Montana, the northern Idaho Panhandle, and parts of central and western Washington led to localized improvements to ongoing drought and abnormal dryness…
A soaking rain event occurred this week in parts of the western Great Plains, especially in the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles and adjacent western Oklahoma and western north Texas. In these areas, precipitation deficits and soil moisture improved enough for widespread improvement to abnormal dryness or drought. Recent rains from before this week led to a reassessment of conditions and some localized improvements in eastern Tennessee. Drier weather occurred in between these locations, with the exception of some rain across Louisiana (which did little to improve the situation but prevented worsening of conditions). Deficits in soil moisture, streamflow, and short- and long-term precipitation continued to locally worsen in northeast Texas, Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and western Tennessee, leading to degrading conditions in some of these areas. Other than parts of Mississippi and Louisiana, most of the region experienced warmer-than-normal temperatures this week, with western Oklahoma and parts of western north Texas and the Texas Panhandle coming in at 4 to 8 degrees above normal…
Looking Ahead
From Wednesday, December 20 to Christmas evening, the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center is forecasting three areas of heavier precipitation accumulations. The first, where amounts are likely to be between 0.75 to 3 inches of precipitation, is forecast for far western Oregon and Washington. In the Southwest, 0.75 to 2 inches of precipitation is forecast from Arizona into southern California, with higher amounts possible near and northwest of Los Angeles. From the central Gulf Coast northward to the middle Missouri and Mississippi River Valleys, precipitation amounts are forecast to range from a half inch to 2 inches, with locally higher amounts possible from northeast Texas into western Arkansas, and along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts.
From December 26-30, the NWS Climate Prediction Center forecast favors below-normal precipitation for most of the region from the Mississippi River and Great Lakes west to the Great Basin. Above-normal precipitation is favored along the West and East Coasts and in deep south Texas. Below-normal temperatures are favored in areas near the Louisiana and Texas coasts. Elsewhere, near- or warmer-than-normal temperatures are forecast for much of the rest of the contiguous United States. Except for southwest Alaska, above-normal precipitation is favored for much of the state. Colder-than-normal temperatures are more likely in the western third of Alaska, while the eastern third is more likely to see warmer-than-normal weather. Drier-than-normal weather is favored across Hawaii, and cooler-than-normal temperatures are favored on the Big Island and the eastern half of Maui.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending December 19, 2023.
Click the link to read the article on the Carbon Brief website (Multiple Authors):
Nearly every country in the world has agreed to โtransition away from fossil fuelsโ โ the main driver of climate change โ at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai.
It is the first time such an agreement has been reached in 28 years of international climate negotiations.
The commitment is included in the first โglobal stocktakeโ of how countries can accelerate action to meet the goals of the landmark Paris Agreement.
However, many countries walked away from the talks frustrated at the lack of a clear call for a fossil-fuel โphase-outโ this decade โ and at a โlitany of loopholesโ in the text that might enable the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas to continue.
Despite an early breakthrough on launching a fund to pay for โloss and damageโ from climate change, developing countries were left disappointed by a lack of new financial commitments for transitioning away from fossil fuels and adapting to climate impacts.
COP28 president and oil executive Dr Sultan Al Jaber hailed the โworld-firstโ achievement of getting โfossil fuelsโ in a UN climate change agreement.
However, his presidency was overshadowed by allegations the UAE intended to use COP28 to make oil-and-gas deals.
Away from the negotiations, COP28 brought a wave of new international pledges โ covering everything from oil-and-gas company emissions and tripling renewables, through to food systems and how the world can better integrate action on climate change and biodiversity loss.
Here, Carbon Brief provides in-depth analysis of all the key outcomes in Dubai โ both inside and outside the COP.
