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California WaterBlog

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  • California WaterBlog survey and recommended reads

    by Ann Willis Editor’s note: The survey link is now closed. Thank you to all who participated! If you have feedback, feel free to comment directly on this post. A. Willis 9/22/2016 As the water year comes to an end, we are curious about what topics California Waterblog readers would like to see addressed. Were…

  • New Baton Rouge flood map show limits of current risk and planning methods

    by Nicholas Pinter, Nicholas Santos, Rui Hui, Kathleen Schaefer The flooding in Baton Rouge and surrounding areas of Louisiana is a major disaster, claiming an estimated 13 lives and displacing more than 100,000 people from their homes. The National Weather Service reported that rainfall in Louisiana this past week reached up to a 1000-year event…

  • Scott Valley pioneers instream flow and groundwater management for reconciled water use

    by Gus Tolley The Scott River is one of California’s four major undammed streams and important spawning habitat for coho (a species listed as “threatened”) and Chinook salmon. This peaceful and pastoral agricultural valley is at the center of several water-related conflicts and lawsuits. However, it is also pioneering a range of instream flow and…

  • Economic Analysis of the 2016 California Drought for Agriculture

    by Josué Medellín-Azuara, Duncan MacEwan, Richard E. Howitt, Daniel A. Sumner, and Jay R. Lund The drought continues for California’s agriculture in 2016, but with much less severe and widespread impacts than in the two previous drought years, 2014 and 2015.  Winter and spring were wetter in the Sacramento Valley, to the extent of several…

  • Visualizing Flows – A Sandbox Experience with Modeling

    by Jeanette Newmiller In winter quarter 2016, Dr. Colleen Bronner of the UC Davis Department of Civil Engineering gathered a small group of graduate students and posed a challenge. To support new education standards involving teaching engineering methods throughout K-12 education, Dr. Bronner asked the graduate students design education outreach modules that reflected their research…

  • Local groundwater management in France and California

    by Corentin Girard   France and California have different environmental, agricultural, economic, institutional, and cultural contexts. However, both are moving to more local management of groundwater. In California, the 2014 Groundwater Sustainable Management Act required creation of  local Groundwater Sustainable Agencies (GSA) and Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSP) to end groundwater overdraft and other undesirable conditions…

  • Better accounting begets better water management

    by Jay Lund Sustainable use of groundwater in California will require major changes in groundwater management, use, and recharge.  Under the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, groundwater basins as a whole are responsible for sustainability.  But millions of people and thousands of governments and private land managers must recharge more water and pump less to…

  • St. Helena, California: Dealing with a Field-of-Dreams Levee, Residual Risk, and a Flood of Controversy

    by Nicholas Pinter A new $37.2[1] million levee in the town of St. Helena, on the floodplain of the Napa River, has a colorful history and has been stirring local acrimony since its inception.  This project illustrates both the attraction of levee protection, in this case protecting a low-income neighborhood (“low income” by Napa standards)…

  • Instream flows: Five features of effective summer flow strategies

    By Ann Willis As summer begins and stream flows drop throughout California, concerns resurface about whether there’s enough water to support critical ecosystems. Environmental flows have long been a contentious issue, often presented in conflict with existing water use. But there are five key ideas worth remembering as water users and regulators throughout the state consider…

  • How bad is water management in California?

    by Jay Lund California’s combination of climate, native ecosystems, and human uses makes water management inherently hard, unsatisfactory, and evolving.  California is doomed to have difficult and controversial water problems. No matter how successful we are. California is one of the few parts of the world with a Mediterranean climate (Figure 1).  These climates tend…

  • California Water Made Simple

    Celebrating end of the academic year, and the need to grade papers, here is a reprise post from January 29, 2014. 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…

  • Trump’s Dubious Drought Claims

    By Vanessa Schipani This post originally appeared on June 9, 2016 on FactCheck.org. The original post can be found here. Peter Moyle, Associate Director at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, and Jeffrey Mount, Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and founding director of CWS, dispel some myths in Trump’s Fresno rally speech. During…

  • Cue the Frogs! Water signatures, environmental cues and climate change

    By Ryan Peek, Helen Dahlke, and Sarah Yarnell An organism’s success relies on responding to environmental cues that trigger activities such as breeding, migration, feeding, predator evasion, etc. Responses can be finely tuned to specific cues, or may require multiple triggers. For example, changes in day length and air temperature cue many bird migrations over…

  • Water and salt exports from the Delta – A tale of two plots

    By Jay Lund and William Fleenor Where does water exported from the Delta come from?  And where does the salt in Delta exports come from? Water and salt exported from the Delta comes from several sources: Sacramento River (largest high-quality source) (Sac) San Joaquin River discharge (usually modest flow, but much saltier from agricultural drainage)…

  • Understanding predation impacts on Delta native fishes

    By Peter Moyle, Andrew Sih, Anna Steel, Carson Jeffres, William Bennett of University of California, Davis. Will endangered fishes, such as Chinook salmon, delta smelt, and longfin smelt, benefit from control of predators, especially of striped bass? This question is of interest because if the answer is ‘yes’, then predator control might increase the benefits…

  • SGMA and the Challenge of Groundwater Management Sustainability

    By Bill Blomquist It isn’t just the groundwater that has to be sustainable; it’s the management too. That’s why the title of this post shifts from the more familiar “sustainable groundwater management” to “groundwater management sustainability.” This perspective doesn’t come from the world of hydrologic or climate or environmental science, but from political science and…

  • Inevitable Changes to Water in California

    By Jay Lund A shorter version of this piece originally appeared as an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee. “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” (anonymous) Water is always important for California, as a dry place with a boisterous economy and unique ecosystems. A growing globalized economy and society historically drive changes in California’s water…

  • Conservation of inland trout populations in California

    by Robert Lusardi This article originally appeared in California Trout’s The Current. For the full issue, click here. Native fish conservation and recovery is an onerous task.  While there are many threats, hybridization has played an integral role in the demise of numerous inland trout species throughout the western United States.  Nowhere is this more…

  • California’s Delta-Groundwater Nexus: Delta Effects of Ending Central Valley Overdraft?

    By Timothy Nelson, Heidi Chou, Prudentia Zikalala, Jay Lund, Rui Hui, and Josué Medellín–Azuara Surface water and groundwater management are often tightly linked, even when linkage is not intended or expected. This link has special importance in drier regions, such as California. A recent paper examines the economic and water management effects of ending long-term…

  • Sailing the Seas of Data Discovery

    by Megan Nguyen Which display is more engaging to you? The table or the map? Do you remember a time when you really needed to find something in your room that you know you for certain have but can’t remember where you placed it? And so then you have to search every nook and cranny…

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