Tag: Jay Lund
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Water storage successes, failures, and challenges from Proposition 1
by Jay Lund The California Water Commission recently allocated $2.7 billion from Proposition 1 bonds for eight water storage projects. Proposition 1 was passed in 2014 to fund a range of projects, including “public purposes” of water storage projects, such as for ecosystem support, flood risk reduction, water quality, recreation, and emergency response. Among its…
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Managing Domestic Well Impacts from Overdraft and Balancing Stakeholder Interests
by Robert M. Gailey and Jay R. Lund The historic drought in California from 2012 through 2016 brought unprecedented groundwater level declines and reports of dry domestic supply wells. This was particularly true in the Central Valley. New research on conditions in Tulare County during the drought provides insight regarding tradeoffs in interests between domestic…
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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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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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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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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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Duel Conveyance: Delta Tunnel Dilemmas
by Jay Lund A new option has entered public discussion of Delta water supplies, having only one cross-Delta tunnel instead of two. The official State WaterFix proposal is for two tunnels (totaling 9,000 cfs capacity) under-crossing the Delta for 35 miles to allow up to 60% of Delta water exports to be directly from the…
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We hold our convenient truths to be self-evident – Dangerous ideas in California water
by Jay Lund Success in water management requires broad agreement and coalitions. But people often seem to group themselves into communities of interests and ideology, which see complex water problems differently. Each group tends to hold different truths to be self-evident, as outlined below. These beliefs, when firmly held, do not stand up to scientific…
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Reflections on Cadillac Desert
by Jay Lund In 1986, when Mark Reisner published his book Cadillac Desert, I had just begun professing on water management. The book went “viral,” before the word viral had its present-day internet-intoxicated meaning. The book offered a compelling revisionist history and understanding of water development in the American West, based on economic self-interest, ideology,…
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California’s drought and floods are over and just beginning
By Jay Lund California is a land of extremes – where preparing for extremes must be constant and eternal. The last six years demonstrated California’s precipitation extremes. From 2012-2015, California endured one of its driest years of record. 2016 was an additional near-average year, classified into drought because water storage levels were so low. 2017…
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Pumping out the Inland Sea – Delta exports in a time of plenty
By Jay Lund This is northern California’s wettest year of record, so far. The Yolo Bypass has been flooded for most of this wet season, and is still flowing. Are Delta water exports going to exceed the previous record exports from 2011 (6.5 maf)? The figure above compares this year’s Delta water exports compare…
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California’s Floods of 2017, so far
by Jay Lund What a wild water month! Floods, spillway damage, and levee failures! Mass evacuations! And Donald Trump and Barack Obama are not even remotely to blame! Flood control and preparation are vitally important for California. Now we remember. This year we see California’s raw, boisterous, and often irresistible flood potential. And we see…
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California’s Wettest Drought? – 2017
By Jay Lund Wet. After five years of drought, most of California finally has become wet. The mountains are exceptionally wet and covered with snow. The state’s reservoirs are fuller than their long term average (with a few exceptions). Flood control structures are being employed, some for the first time since 2006. We can now…
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Indicators of a drought ending in northern California
Jay Lund Droughts are common in California, a large, generally dry, and hydrologically complex place. So it is hard to rely on a single index of the end or beginning of a drought. A single storm is rarely enough to end a drought in California, especially a long drought like the one that seems to…
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Tails of California’s Drought
by Jay Lund Storms are filling reservoirs, building snowpack, and flooding in ways not seen since the most recent California drought began in 2012. The state’s reservoirs today contain 1.2 million acre-ft more water than the long-term average for this time of year (the first time above average in 6 years). Two years ago reservoir…