Tag: Jay Lund
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.)…
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Adaptive Management Wheels
by Jay Lund In practice, adaptive management wheels have squarish corners. In ideal adaptive management, there is a steady or periodic process for gathering performance and environmental data, analyzing that data in the context of an integrative computer model, discussions based on the analysis to determine the most promising adaptations of management to reflect this…
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Some curious things about water management
By Jay R. Lund *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2012. Water management is often very different from what we think intuitively, or what we have been taught. Here are some examples. 1. Most water decisions are local. Water policy and management discussions often seem to assume that state and federal…
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Minimum Flow Laws in California and Chile
By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell California and Chile share a history of water allocation with little regard for instream uses of water, especially environmental uses. In California, for example, many water rights were obtained with no consideration of the environmental impacts of the water use,…
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Science seen from different perspectives
by Jay Lund The awe-inspiring Phil Isenberg used to talk about differences in culture between science and policy as being akin to the two cultures of scholarship discussed by C.P. Snow – science and humanities. It is hard for one mind to deeply appreciate the variety and importance of many ways of thinking, and more…
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Can Sacramento Valley reservoirs adapt to flooding with a warmer climate?
by Jay Lund and Ann Willis Editor’s note: This is a blog that was originally posted on 6/25/17. Since publication of the blog, there has been interesting newer research about running the San Joaquin rim dams for “functional flows” (Willis et al. 2022). This work also shows there is also an important component about…
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What’s the dam problem with deadbeat dams?
by Andrew L. Rypel, Christine A. Parisek, Jay Lund, Ann Willis, Peter B. Moyle, Sarah Yarnell, Karrigan Börk *this is a repost of a blog originally published in June 2020. Damming rivers was once a staple of public works and a signal of technological and scientific progress. Even today, dams underpin much of California’s public…
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This Drought is Dead – Long Live the Drought
by Jay Lund and Andrew L. Rypel Floods and droughts are not opposites and can occur simultaneously. This occurs often in California and is especially well-illustrated this year. Floods, droughts, and water scarcity are different. Floods are too much water at a place and time, and we would often pay to reduce the water present…
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Is the Drought Over? Reflections on California’s Recent Flood-Drought Combo
By Andrew L. Rypel, Jay Lund, and Carson Jeffres Early January was an unusually wild ride of atmospheric rivers. Nine sizable systems produced a train of storms beginning about New Years and lasting for several weeks across almost all of California. After three years of drought, the storms reminded us that California has flood problems…
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want – A Mick Jagger Theory of Drought Management
by Jay Lund [This is a reposting of a CaliforniaWaterBlog.com post from February 2016, near the end of the previous drought. For human uses, conditions seem somewhat similar to this point in the previous drought, so this perspective might be useful. A couple of more recent readings are added to this post.] “You can’t always…
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Considerations for Developing An Environmental Water Right in California
By Karrigan Börk, Andrew L. Rypel, Sarah Yarnell, Ann Willis, Peter B. Moyle, Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund, and Robert Lusardi This week, news emerged of a State Senate plan that would spend upwards of $1.5B to purchase senior water rights from California growers. Under California’s first-in-time, first-in-right water allocation system, senior water rights are filled…
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Demystifying mist as a source of water supply
By Jay Lund (originally posted in 2015) In some of the world’s driest places, atmospheric moisture is a major source of water for native ecosystems. Some algae, plants and insects in the Israeli and Namibian deserts get much of their water from fog, dew and humidity. The spines of some cacti species have evolved to collect fog droplets.…
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Why give away fish flows for free during a drought?
by Jay Lund, Ellen Hanak, Barton “Buzz” Thompson, Brian Gray, Jeffrey Mount and Katrina Jessoe This is a re-posting from 11 February 2014 (in the previous drought). With California in a major drought, state and federal regulators will be under pressure to loosen environmental flow standards that protect native fish. This happened in the 1976-77…