by Jay Lund Happy New Water Year, 2023!  (October 2022 – September 2023) The first New Year celebration for California’s water wonks is October 1, the beginning of the new Water Year, the nominal beginning of California’s wet season.  California sometimes has its first big rain storm earlier, and sometimes later, but by convention the…

By Ryan Miller and Nicholas Pinter Following a major flood or other natural disaster, the US federal government provides disaster assistance to individuals and local and state jurisdictions to help them recover. Over the past ~20 years, these federal payments have totaled nearly $150 billion (in 2020 dollars), including over $20 billion for recovery from Hurricane…

With summer wrapping up and a new school year upon us, we decided it was a good time to reflect on outreach done by researchers at the Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS) at UC Davis. Some of the outreach was organized by the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee while others took initiative and pursued…

by Jay Lund The graphic below seems to apply to any bureaucracy, with larger bureaucracies showing this tendency more strongly.  In this vortex conception of management, one can often make more progress from the periphery than from the center of power. The center spins rapidly, always changing directions, but moving little in space.  Those in…

By Nicola Ulibarri California uses plans as a primary tool for managing water throughout the state. Regulations like the Urban Water Management Planning Act of 1983, Regional Water Management Planning Act of 2002, Water Conservation Act of 2009, and Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 require local water agencies to write plans documenting their available…

This week’s CaliforniaWaterBlog post is an excerpt (Box 1) from a recent Delta Independent Science Board report on non-native species and the California Delta.  This excerpt summarizes the experience of the Great Lakes, and how its physical and ecological management has led to waves of profoundly disruptive species invasions, resulting in a sequence of “novel”…

by Jay Lund People often have strange ideas about how water works.  Even simple water systems can be confusing.  When water systems become large complex socio-physical-ecological systems serving many users and uses, opportunities for confusion become extreme, surpassing comprehension by our ancient Homo sapien brains. When confused by conflicting rhetoric, using numbers to “follow the…

By Peter B. Moyle and Thomas L. Taylor ‘Tens of thousands of these fish once ascended streams in Spring. They are of major cultural importance to the Pomo people who harvested them as a valued food source.’ When you read statements like this, most likely it is salmon that come to mind. Yet this statement characterizes…

Water resource planners regularly rely on computer models to illuminate relationships between human- and natural-systems. Anyone who has tinkered with one of California water supply models knows this is a deeply left-brained exercise. During Winter 2021, as part of Jay Lund’s Art and Water class, water resource engineering students took a break from creating and analyzing…

By Peter Moyle Few native species are as controversial as Delta Smelt. It is a 3-4 inch translucent fish that lives only in the California Delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet. This place also happens to be the heart of California’s complex water supply system which provides fresh drinking water to 35-million…

This is another dry year.  How do California’s engineers see a partially-full water glass?  Mostly the same as they did in the original 2012 version of this post, but we’ve added a few more perspectives. by Jay R. Lund Depending on your outlook, the proverbial glass of water is either half full or half empty.…

by Francheska Torres, Miranda Tilcock, Alexandra Chu, and Sarah Yarnell The Yolo Bypass is one of two large flood bypasses in California’s Central Valley that are examples of multi-benefit floodplain projects (Figure 1; Serra-Llobet et al., 2022). Originally constructed in the early 20th century for flood control, up to 75% of the Sacramento River’s flood flow can…