ARCHIVE
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Modeling, Measuring, and Comparing Crop Evapotranspiration in the Delta
by Jesse Jankowski Crop evapotranspiration (ET) is the biggest managed loss of water in California, accounting for roughly 80% of human net water use, and includes crop water applications transpired from plants and evaporated from soil. Methods to estimate ET have been developed based on a robust scientific understanding of its physics and data collected…
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Reality Check of California Water Fix Model results in a Critical Flow Year
by William Fleenor In 2008 a group from the Center for Watershed Sciences (including this author), joined by an economist from the Public Policy Institute, published findings that suggested that an alternative conveyance for Sacramento River water might improve ecological conditions in the Delta and improve reliability for Delta water exports [1, 2]. The original…
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Groundwater Recovery in California – Still Behind the Curve
by Thomas Harter and Bill Brewster California has a unique and highly variable climate in which drought reoccurs periodically. California began this century in a dry period from 1999 to 2005, and experienced droughts from 2007 to 2009, and 2012 to 2016. Such wet-dry cycles can be seen in Figure 1, which shows total rainfall…
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Brown is the new gold: Water strategy is starting to pay dividends
by Nan Frobish Governor Brown has unveiled a sweeping new strategy, “Brown is the New Gold,” to simultaneously make California more robust to drought, secure private water rights, buffer California’s growers against disastrous losses from a looming national trade war, and facilitate a market for environmental water. “Leadership has not been clever enough, or strong…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…