California WaterBlog

by Jay Lund Happy New Water Year!  October 1, 2021 is the beginning of the 2022 water year in California, the traditional beginning of California’s “wet season”, such as it will be. Although there are many fine and interesting stories from California’s current drought, so far, a few stories seem more important and worth summarizing…

by Jeanette Howard, Kirk Klausmeyer, Laura Read, and Julie Zimmerman Droughts are extreme, but not necessarily extreme events — at least not in the way we humans usually experience events as discrete, episodic occurrences. Droughts are continuous and exhausting; they can come out of nowhere and take us on a rollercoaster of waiting for precipitation…

By Jay Lund “Mega-drought” has become a frightful “thing” in public and media discussions.  In the past 1,200 years, California had two droughts lasting 120-200 years, “megadroughts” by any standard. 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…

by José M. Rodríguez-Flores, Spencer A. Cole, Alexander Guzman, Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay R. Lund, Daniel A. Sumner California’s Central Valley is the source of more than $30 billion of farm value. It produces more milk than any state outside California, and dominates national production of dozens of fruits, vegetables, tree nuts and rice. The valley…

by Jay Lund Droughts and this drought in California California has more hydrologic variability than any state in the US, meaning that we have more drought and flood years per average year than any other state.  This is a problem, but has also meant that we have designed for droughts, which are always testing us.…

by Peter Moyle Everywhere you go in California, people live in landscapes where non-native species are conspicuous:  European grasses turning the hills golden, earthworms tilling our garden soil, exotic trees providing shade, bullfrogs jumping into backyard ponds, starlings making tight maneuvers overhead. In this blog, I want to describe the language of our relationships with…

by Nicholas Pinter, Jay Lund, Peter Moyle This is a slightly-edited re-posting from May 5, 2019. A review of 170 years of water-related successes in California suggests that most successes can be traced directly to past mistakes.  California’s highly variable climate has made it a crucible for innovations in water technology and policy.  Similar water…

by Peter Moyle The Delta smelt is either extinct in the wild or close to it; in the past year only a handful have been caught, with great effort. In contrast, the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory (FCCL) has considerable success spawning and rearing the smelt in captivity. This coming winter, the FCCL…

by John Abatzoglou, Anna Rallings, Leigh Bernacchi, Joshua Viers, Josué Medellín-Azuara California’s 2021 water outlook became grimmer this spring as the state did not get fabulous February or miracle March precipitation. Unsurprisingly, spring streamflow forecasts from snowfed basins in the Sierra were far below average. For example, early April forecasts from California DWR called for…

by Wyatt Arnold A California water myth which becomes especially pernicious in droughts is that California is “running out of water” (Hanak et al. 2009). Viewing California’s supply and demand pressures in terms of fixed water requirements perpetuates this myth and invariably places undue attention on building additional supply infrastructure. Instead, managing water as a…

by Wyatt Arnold A California water myth which becomes especially pernicious in droughts is that California is “running out of water” (Hanak et al. 2009). Viewing California’s supply and demand pressures in terms of fixed water requirements perpetuates this myth and invariably places undue attention on building additional supply infrastructure. Instead, managing water as a…

 by Dylan Stompe, Teejay O’Rear, John Durand, and Peter Moyle             The San Francisco Estuary (estuary) is sometimes called the most invaded estuary in the world, and for good reason. Through many avenues, hundreds, if not thousands, of species have been introduced to San Francisco Bay, the Delta, and their rivers. Some introductions were byproducts…

by Peter Moyle and Andrew Rypel California is home to 131 kinds of native fishes that require freshwater for some or all of their life-cycle. Most of these fishes are found only in California and most (81%) are in decline (Moyle et al. 2015, 2020). Thirty-two (24%) are already listed as threatened or endangered by…

by Rob Gailey and Jay Lund Domestic wells serve sizable potable water demands in California and much of the world. These wells tend to degrade and fail with declining regional groundwater levels. In areas of irrigated agriculture, impacts to shallower domestic wells may occur from ongoing groundwater use and worsen during drought when agricultural pumping…

– Curated by Jennifer Cribbs (jecribbs@ucdavis.edu) Note from the Curator: Restoration implies returning to a prior state. A broken cup carefully glued, might appear nearly as whole as the original, but will always differ from the original.  Ecosystem restoration attempts to return an evolving web of interconnected species and physical processes to a prior state.…

Jobs and Irrigation during Drought in California Farmworkers harvesting cauliflower in Monterey County. Photo by John Chacon/California Department of Water Resources by Josué Medellín-Azuara and Jay Lund During droughts organizations and stakeholders look for ways of getting the most from every water drop. This is not an exception in California where roughly 40 percent of all water…

by Francisco Bellido Leiva, Robert Lusardi and Jay Lund  We may be entering a time when more mechanistic understanding can be used to estimate effects of habitats and flows on fish populations and health, and help design ecosystem restoration efforts. An integrated portfolio approach to protecting and restoring winter-run salmon would begin with a model…