Tag: California water
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Lessons Learned Measuring and Modeling Evaporation across California
By Dennis Baldocchi and Carlos Wang . . . Rainfall and snow falling across the state have several fates. One is runoff to rivers, reservoirs and the ocean. Another is storage in the snowpack, soil and groundwater. The third is evaporation from vegetation, soil and open water bodies. Historically, the rates and amounts of evaporation…
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Bargaining for Tribal Water in California
By Leslie Sanchez and Eric C. Edwards Stark power disparities between Native American tribes (tribes) and nontribal entities in California have shaped tribes’ legal standing to assert water rights claims, bargaining power in resolving claims, and the ability to assert meaningful control over water rights. This post outlines the status of tribal water rights in California and…
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Trade-offs in California Water Discussions
By Jay Lund In policy and management, we should always be interested in performance, both overall effectiveness and efficiency of solutions, as well as trade-offs across objectives. These are often depicted on plots of Pareto-optimality, showing the relative performance of alternatives, the performance of efficient (Pareto-optimal) solutions, and trade-offs across these most efficient alternatives, often compared with…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 2 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series of blogs that examines how the incoming Trump Administration may—or may not—be able to change how water is managed in California. The first blog covered three issues: the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), updates of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plans, and major infrastructure projects. The…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 1 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: Interim Director Karrigan Börk appeared on the NPR show AirTalk a few weeks ago to address California water policy under a Trump administration; the segment starts at 18:00. This blogpost is the first of a 2 part series exploring the topic from a nonpartisan perspective with a goal of predicting likely outcomes…
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Pathways to research: An interview with Jon Walter
By Cathryn Lawrence This blog is the first in a series featuring interviews with scientists from the Center for Watershed Sciences to learn what sparked their passion to pursue a scientific research career. Kicking off the series we interview Jonathan Walter, a Senior Researcher and quantitative ecologist at CWS, who works on issues relating to the…
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October is Over – What it means for this water year and some other musings
by Jay R. Lund October 2024, the first month of the 2025 Water Year, has been dry, the 16th driest October in 103 years of Northern California precipitation records. And the forecast for the next 10 days shows little for most of California. DWR has a nice map of this (see figure 1 to see…
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The Delta Smelt Controversy in Sociological Perspective
By Caleb Scoville The Delta Smelt is a small, endangered fish that lives exclusively in the heart of the state’s water distribution system, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At times, regulations to protect smelt affect conveyance of water to 35 million Californians and the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. As Peter Moyle put it in a 2022 post,…
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How well do you know California water?
California has an extensive and complex water system. Can many people name all the waterways on this common California water map (with the names removed)? Give it a try. No cheating. (Unlike some map quizzes and the 1957 California Water Plan, this map has no imaginary features, except perhaps when some of the river channels run dry.)…
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How the Grinch Saved the Creek: A Collection of California Water Fables
By Scrooge Jones Did you know the Grinch played a crucial role in the return of salmon to Putah Creek? It was actually a pretty big deal. And if it wasn’t for Charlie Brown and the gang, who knows what the state of economic-engineering optimization models for California water management would be today? ‘Tis the…
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Dammed hot: California’s regulated streams fail cold-water ecosystems
by Ann Willis, Ryan Peek, and Andrew L. Rypel Given the current drought, it’s no surprise that California’s dams are struggling to provide cool water habitats to support native freshwater ecosystems. But what if they were never able to support them under any conditions? New research shows how current stream management fails to provide the…
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The Earth is Falling! – Land Subsidence and Water Management in California
By Jay Lund, Thomas Harter, Rob Gailey, Rick Frank, and Graham Fogg Groundwater problems are mostly invisible. However, as California has come to rely more on groundwater during the drought, land subsidence from groundwater drawdown and accumulating overdraft has become a visible concern in some areas. Some of this subsidence has been dramatic. Almost 4…
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Could California weather a mega-drought?
By Jay Lund In the past 1,200 years, California had two droughts lasting 120-200 years. Could the state’s water resources continue to supply enough water to drink, grow crops and provide habitat for fish with such an extreme, prolonged drought? With careful management, California’s economy in many ways could withstand such a severe drought. That’s…
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The ultimate California water cheat sheet
There’s only so many acre-feet of water jargon the public can absorb during a drought. Here’s a primer that avoids wading into cubic-feet-per-second, appropriative water rights, overdraft, conjunctive water use and the like. Further reading http://CaliforniaWaterBlog.com Hanak, et al. 2011, Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation, Public Policy Institute of California http://mavensnotebook.com
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New environmentalism needed for California water
By Jay R. Lund California needs a new environmentalism to set a more effective and sustainable green bar for the nation and even the world. For decades, we have taken a “just say no” approach to stop, prevent or blunt human encroachments onto the natural world – often rightly so. Early environmentalism needed lines in…
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UC Davis speakers series: Critical problems for California water policy
By Chris Austin California’s water future is at a critical juncture. The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is declining, both as a reliable hub for exporting water for millions of Californians and millions of farmed acres, and as an ecosystem supporting a vast array of wildlife. The Delta Reform Act of 2009 set a fundamentally new state…
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Unmasking California’s water ‘Maven’
By Chris Bowman Still in their early teens, Joshua and Noah Austin have yet to reject their mother’s idea of family fun. Chris Austin hauls the family around California to visit canals, dams and reservoirs. They recently made a week’s vacation following irrigation water from the Colorado River near Yuma, Ariz., to farms in the…
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Priming the pump for a water bond
Ellen Hanak, Co-Director of Research and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), testified at a Feb. 26 legislative hearing concerning California’s capacity to incur additional water bond debt. (The Legislature has placed an $11 billion water bond on the November 2014 general election ballot to fund a wide variety of water…
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Climate change and California water – past, present and future
Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. – Charles Dudley Warner, 1897 By Jay R. Lund Talk of climate change and water in California is fraught with handwringing and delusions. Much discussion borders on alarmist or seems to presume magical abilities to precisely plan and prepare for a future climate. Here…
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California Water – The Great Remodeling Project
Jay R. Lund, Director, Center for Watershed Sciences, and Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis People periodically remodel their homes. A household might need a new room for children or an ailing grandparent, want a bigger kitchen, replace a leaky roof, or want more room to entertain. California’s water system is now…