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California WaterBlog

Previous Posts

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  • California’s Water Data Problems are Symptoms of Inchoate Science and Technical Activities

    “The truth is lost when there is too much contention about it.” – Publius Syrus (43 BC) by Jay Lund In 2016, California’s legislature passed AB 1755, the Open and Transparent Water Data Act, requiring that State agencies provide water data online, including existing datasets, with open-data protocols for data sharing, transparency, documentation and quality…

  • How engineers see the water glass in California

    It looks like 2018 will be a dry year, with snowpack about 50%.  How do engineers see the water glass in California?  Mostly the same as they did six years ago in the original version of this post, but we’ve added a few more perspectives. By Jay R. Lund Depending on your outlook, the proverbial…

  • Is Ecosystem-Based Management Legal for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta?

    by Brian Gray (PPIC Water Policy Center), William Stelle (former NOAA Fisheries West Coast Administrator), and Leon Szeptycki (Stanford University, Water in the West)* Introduction In a recent three-part series posted on this website, a group of independent experts (including one of the authors here) proposed new ways to manage the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem. The…

  • Back to Dry – Get Organized and Prepared for Drought Again

    by Jay Lund Despite this week’s rain and snow, California is back to dry conditions again after a very wet 2017.  With about four weeks left in the normal wet season, the Sacramento Valley is at about 65% of average precipitation (less than 1/3 of last year’s precipitation).  The southern Central Valley has less than…

  • Advice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan Part 3: Science for Ecosystem Management

    by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation Improving Delta ecosystem functions under the State Water Board’s proposed Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan will require a complex series of changes to water and land management—and a strong science program to guide actions. This science effort will need to go well beyond current Delta science programs…

  • Advice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan Part 2: Recommended Actions to Improve Ecological Function in the Delta

    by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation By strategically linking freshwater flow releases with the management of tidal energy and investments in landscape changes in the Delta, it is possible to improve ecological food webs and habitat for native species and reduce the effects of pollutants. Projects to address these problems should be concentrated…

  • Drought Water Right Curtailment – Analysis, Transparency, and Limits

    By Jay Lund, Ben Lord, Andrew Tweet, Wesley Walker, Chad Whittington, Reed Thayer, Jeff Laird, Quinn Hart, Nicholas Santos, William Fleenor, Julia Pavicic, Lauren Adams, and Bradley Arnold Drought often means not having enough water to satisfy all water-right holders. Assessing which water-right holders should curtail their use and by how much is not simple. …

  • Advice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan Part 1: Addressing a Manageable Suite of Ecosystem Problems

    by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center Recommendation The State Water Resources Control Board and the parties seeking to incorporate voluntary settlement agreements in the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan should identify a specific, tractable set of problems that can be addressed over the next 15 years through this plan. We urge the participants to…

  • Lessons for SGMA from other State-Local Collaborations

    by Dave Owen California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is known primarily for establishing statewide requirements for sustainable groundwater management.  But the statute did another important thing: it introduced an intriguing yet relatively rare model of state and local governance into groundwater management. Typical state and local governance models involve delegating authority to local governments, with…

  • Ecological Incentives for Delta Water Exports

    by Jay Lund and Peter Moyle All parties in the Delta have an interest in a healthy ecosystem and in healthy water exports.  Without a healthy ecosystem, endangered species requirements increasingly intrude on water exports and Delta landowners.  Without healthy water exports, the south and central Delta becomes dominated by brackish agricultural drainage and state…

  • Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Water in California

    by Erik Porse Los Angeles is a grand American urban experiment. It brings emerging ideas into the mainstream, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. In the early 20th Century, it seemed fanciful to build a metropolis in a region receiving limited seasonal rainfall. But LA adopted the ideas of the time at grand scales.…

  • Will Delta Smelt Have a Happy New Year?

    by James Hobbs and Peter Moyle The results of 2017 surveys of Delta fishes are coming in. Already, the results are clear:  it was an unhappy year for Delta smelt. The wet year with high outflows should have created an increase in the population, as happened in 2011.  Instead numbers stayed extremely low.  The US…

  • New paths to survival for endangered winter run Chinook salmon

    by Anna Sturrock and Corey Phillis Many Californians have seen headlines about endangered Sacramento River Winter Run Chinook salmon (“winter run”) on the “brink of extinction.” But not many people know exactly what winter run are, nor why they are endangered. Like all salmon, winter run reproduce (spawn) in freshwater. Their offspring migrate to the…

  • Beginning of 2018 drought? – December 31, 2017

    by Jay Lund Every year is different for water management in California. The 2012-2016 water years were among the driest and warmest on record.  2017 was the wettest year of record for much of California, with thousands of water managers struggling to store as much water as possible in reservoirs and aquifers. So far for…

  • Nudging progress on funding safe drinking water

    by Jay Lund This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to Richard Thaler, who pioneered “nudging” to help people volunteer to make more personally and socially beneficial decisions.  As an example, having employees automatically enrolled for retirement contributions and then allowing them to lower their contributions results in considerably more retirement savings than having them…

  • Making water for the environment count in an era of change: Cautionary tales from Australia

    by Alison Whipple The specter of California drought looming again on the horizon gives renewed urgency for water policy and management reforms. Recent discussions reflect a growing recognition that our future depends on us making water count for both humans and the environment. For much of our state’s history, water has counted primarily in its…

  • A Water Right for the Environment

    by Brian Gray, Leon Szeptycki, and Barton “Buzz” Thompson California’s management of water for is not working for anyone. Environmental advocates argue that state and federal regulators have set water quality and flow standards that do not adequately protect fish and wildlife, and have not enforced these requirements when they are most needed. Farm and…

  • A Tale of Two Fires: How Wildfires Can Both Help and Harm Our Water Supply

    by Gabrielle Boisramé Now that summer is over and rain has returned to California, it appears that the dramatic 2017 fire season is finally behind us. The effects of fire season can linger, however, with the possibilities of erosion and polluted runoff from burned areas. Napa County has even issued suggestions for how to protect…

  • Duel Conveyance: Delta Tunnel Dilemmas

    by Jay Lund A new option has entered public discussion of Delta water supplies, having only one cross-Delta tunnel instead of two. The official State WaterFix proposal is for two tunnels (totaling 9,000 cfs capacity) under-crossing the Delta for 35 miles to allow up to 60% of Delta water exports to be directly from the…

  • Moving Salmon over Dams with Two-Way Trap and Haul

    by Peter Moyle and Robert Lusardi Removing Shasta Dam is the single best action we can take to save California’s wild salmon.  Not possible, you say? Then there are two alternatives. One is to provide plenty of cold water and diverse, highly managed habitat below dams. The other is to transport fish to now-inaccessible habitat…

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