Tag: Jay Lund
-
A chance to multiply your support for the Center for Watershed Sciences
California WaterBlog is a long-running outreach project from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, a research center dedicated to interdisciplinary study of water challenges, particularly in California. We focus on environmentally and economically sustainable solutions for managing rivers, lakes, groundwater, and estuaries. This weekend, for UC Davis Give Day (April 17 – 18, 2026),…
-
Not dry, but drought remains an issue, mid-wet season 2026
By Jay Lund . . . People in and out of California love the attention that comes with declaring droughts and the end of droughts. Given the many types and locations of droughts in California, it is rare to have no drought anywhere in the state. Yet, for the last two weeks, the UC Drought…
-
Day 12 – California Water: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
By Karrigan Börk and Jay Lund . . . California is full of gifts that keep on giving. California water provides for a bounty of social, environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. Water is the lifeblood of California farms, which have created one of the world’s great agricultural economies. Water carves our state’s beautiful landscapes and…
-
Nine California Water Rites
By Jay Lund . . . “Rite” noun:1. a religious or other solemn ceremony or act.2. a social custom, practice, or conventional act. California has complex and hallowed water rites. Here are some: Perhaps Western water rhetoric might become more concise by referring to these now-numbered rites. About the Author Jay Lund is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor…
-
Representing interannual variability for environmental flow operations: the functional flow regime
By Lindsay Murdoch, Sarah Yarnell, and Jay Lund California’s local communities and native ecosystems alike have adapted to cycles of flood, drought, and a healthy portion of everything in between. Our river management, on the other hand, has fallen out of natural balance and tends to oscillate between insufficient minimum flows and emergency flood responses,…
-
Happy New Water Year 2026! – following 2025’s Normal and Extreme Hydrology
By Jay Lund October 1 marks the beginning of California’s new Water Year (WY). Water years here run from October 1 until September 30 of the next calendar year and are named for the calendar year of the bulk of the water year (January-October). October 1 is also the nominal beginning of California’s wet season. California’s…
-
Change at the Center for Watershed Sciences
By Karrigan Börk Readers of the California Water Blog (Blog) may have noticed some changes over the past year. The Blog is a product of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS), and after many years of dedicated service, longtime CWS leaders Dr. Andrew Rypel (Director) and Dr. Cathryn Lawrence (Assistant Director) are transitioning…
-
AI explanations of California water management
By ChatGPT prompted by Jay Lund I was playing with ChatGPT and had some fun and insightful replies. (I’d interpret these insights, but I am no Professor of Literature, and it would probably get me into trouble. Please add your interpretations below in the replies.) 1) Prompt: Write a buzzword sentence on California water management. ChatGPT replied:…
-
The Seven Circles of Jargon Hell
By Jay Lund The circles of jargon hell move from “lazy and less effective communication of ideas” to a general audience, to a narrower already-expert audience, to a substitute for substantive communication, to intentionally harmful and pretentious obfuscation, all of which disrupt the reader’s comprehension and eventually destroy all interest in communication. Jay Lund is…
-
Trade-offs in California Water Discussions
By Jay Lund In policy and management, we should always be interested in performance, both overall effectiveness and efficiency of solutions, as well as trade-offs across objectives. These are often depicted on plots of Pareto-optimality, showing the relative performance of alternatives, the performance of efficient (Pareto-optimal) solutions, and trade-offs across these most efficient alternatives, often compared with…
-
Wet Season’s end for Water Year 2025
By Jay Lund California’s Water Year runs from October 1 of the previous calendar year through September 30. California’s “wet” season is traditionally October 1 – April 1. The rest of the year (and often parts of the “wet” season) is usually dry. We can get major storms into April, but often not. So almost all of this…
-
UC Davis Give Day! Seeking Support for our Graduate Students
California WaterBlog is a long-running outreach project from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, a research center dedicated to interdisciplinary study of water challenges, particularly in California. We focus on environmentally and economically sustainable solutions for managing rivers, lakes, groundwater, and estuaries. This week, for UC Davis Give Day (April 11-12), we have a matching gift…
-
Glasses at 50% in California
by Jay Lund 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 over the years. Depending on your outlook, the proverbial glass of water is either half full or half empty. Not so, for…
-
How to give a profoundly boring technical talk
by Jay Lund 1. The title should be packed with obscure acronyms that give no clue of the subject. An exciting talk might disturb the audience’s ability to relax, look at their phones, or quietly work in the back of the room. 2. Introduce each co-author with long-winded and complete backgrounds. Their lives and accomplishments…
-
How’s California’s water year developing? – early February 2025
by Jay Lund The first four months of California’s water year, which started in October 2024, have been wildly variable over the months and in different parts of the state. Every year, we never know what to expect of California’s wet season until it ends, usually in late March or early April. This year is…
-
Dear Santa: A California Water Holiday Wish List
by folks at UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences: Karrigan Börk, John Durand, Jay Lund, Christine Parisek, Andrew Rypel, Kathleen Schaefer, Jonathan Walter (authors listed alphabetically, and all are now PhDs. Congratulations to Doctors Parisek and Schaefer!) ‘Tis the season of gift-giving (and gift-seeking). So we thought a California Water Holiday wish list might be…
-
October is Over – What it means for this water year and some other musings
by Jay R. Lund October 2024, the first month of the 2025 Water Year, has been dry, the 16th driest October in 103 years of Northern California precipitation records. And the forecast for the next 10 days shows little for most of California. DWR has a nice map of this (see figure 1 to see…
-
Lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework and Opportunities for Chile
By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell Managing waterways for ecosystems with minimal loss to existing water uses is increasingly difficult. As we’ve discussed in the first two blogs in this series (here and here, now with Spanish language translations), California and Chile both struggle with this challenge. Both…
-
How well do you know California water?
California has an extensive and complex water system. Can many people name all the waterways on this common California water map (with the names removed)? Give it a try. No cheating. (Unlike some map quizzes and the 1957 California Water Plan, this map has no imaginary features, except perhaps when some of the river channels run dry.)…