Tag: Jay Lund
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Out With the Old Drought and In With the New?
By Jay Lund We are just a few months into this year’s wet season, and progress has been great. Statewide, California is about 800,000 acre ft below average surface water storage for this time of year. California’s water year began with surface storage about 3 million acre ft (3 full Folsom Reservoirs) less than historical…
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How engineers see the water glass in California
How do engineers see the water glass in California? Mostly the same as they did four years ago when this blog was first posted, though with today’s drought the glass is perhaps down to a quarter full — or three-quarters empty. By Jay R. Lund Depending on your outlook, the proverbial glass of water is either…
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The Coming Droughts of California in 2017 – November 27, 2016
By Jay Lund California is a big diverse place. California probably will experience droughts this year of different types in different places, and no drought at all in some places, simultaneously. Even if conditions this year are very wet, with flooding, parts of California will have drought issues. (This is what makes California a great…
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Water is for fighting over? – a review of John Fleck’s recent book
By Jay Lund Most expressions on Western water issues are reflex or studied advocacy favoring a single viewpoint or opposing other viewpoints. A minority provide thoughtful and reasonably balanced insights. John Fleck’s new book, “Water is for fighting over” is at the 1% extreme of thoughtful readable pieces on western water. The book is one…
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Drought Prospects in California for the New 2017 Water Year – October 1, 2016
This blog post has been superseded by more recent storms this water year. See the January 2017 Tails of California’s Drought. This older post remains of some retrospective significance in how slow and fast drought conditions can change – Jay Lund By Jay Lund Happy New Water Year 2017! Hopefully everyone has recovered from their…
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How much water was pumped from the Delta’s Banks Pumping Plant? A mystery.
By Jay Lund As the old saying goes, “Someone with one watch knows what time it is, someone with two watches is never sure.” Water accounting is fundamental to water management, but is not easy. But any accounting is more difficult and expensive if it is less organized. To illustrate this point, let’s look at…
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Ecogeomorphology: A Transformative Expedition Education
This week, the Center for Watershed Sciences is proud to feature our flagship education course, Ecogeomorphology. What began as a collaboration between then-Professors Jeffrey Mount and Peter Moyle to introduce students to cross-discipline thinking in expedition settings has developed into a transformative opportunity for the select graduate and undergraduate students to experience a range of settings…
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Economic Analysis of the 2016 California Drought for Agriculture
by Josué Medellín-Azuara, Duncan MacEwan, Richard E. Howitt, Daniel A. Sumner, and Jay R. Lund The drought continues for California’s agriculture in 2016, but with much less severe and widespread impacts than in the two previous drought years, 2014 and 2015. Winter and spring were wetter in the Sacramento Valley, to the extent of several…
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Better accounting begets better water management
by Jay Lund Sustainable use of groundwater in California will require major changes in groundwater management, use, and recharge. Under the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, groundwater basins as a whole are responsible for sustainability. But millions of people and thousands of governments and private land managers must recharge more water and pump less to…
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How bad is water management in California?
by Jay Lund California’s combination of climate, native ecosystems, and human uses makes water management inherently hard, unsatisfactory, and evolving. California is doomed to have difficult and controversial water problems. No matter how successful we are. California is one of the few parts of the world with a Mediterranean climate (Figure 1). These climates tend…
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Water and salt exports from the Delta – A tale of two plots
By Jay Lund and William Fleenor Where does water exported from the Delta come from? And where does the salt in Delta exports come from? Water and salt exported from the Delta comes from several sources: Sacramento River (largest high-quality source) (Sac) San Joaquin River discharge (usually modest flow, but much saltier from agricultural drainage)…
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Inevitable Changes to Water in California
By Jay Lund A shorter version of this piece originally appeared as an op-ed in the Sacramento Bee. “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” (anonymous) Water is always important for California, as a dry place with a boisterous economy and unique ecosystems. A growing globalized economy and society historically drive changes in California’s water…
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California’s Delta-Groundwater Nexus: Delta Effects of Ending Central Valley Overdraft?
By Timothy Nelson, Heidi Chou, Prudentia Zikalala, Jay Lund, Rui Hui, and Josué Medellín–Azuara Surface water and groundwater management are often tightly linked, even when linkage is not intended or expected. This link has special importance in drier regions, such as California. A recent paper examines the economic and water management effects of ending long-term…
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ENSO the Wet Season Ends (almost) – March 31, 2016
By Jay Lund Summary of conditions March 2016 has been unusually wet, and quite a contrast to February. The “Godzilla” El Nino this year has been a bit “Gonzo”, but overall has brought a welcome above average precipitation for northern California, after four solid drought years. The unevenness of the precipitation is some concern, and…
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Using Game Theory To Encourage Cooperation in Levee System Planning
By Rui Hui, Jay Lund and Kaveh Madani Levees protect land from floods, but not perfectly. Different levees on a river often are controlled by different agencies or groups. A landowner on one riverbank sees the levee system differently from a landowner on the opposite bank or downstream. Each landowner, or elected levee board, is…
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Let people pay what water is worth – Sell your conserved water
By Jay Lund During dry years, water becomes scarcer, and, economically, people should pay more for it. But most urban residents do not pay directly for water scarcity. We only pay the financial cost of providing water through pipes, pumping, treatment plants, and reservoirs. We do not pay for the lost value that water…
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ENSO the Drought Strikes Back! The 2016 Drought so far – March 1
By Jay Lund Summary of conditions February 2016 has been dry, despite El Nino-besotted promises of aqueous abundance. There is sometimes a difference between climatic conditions and hydrologic reality (and economic reality). Annual precipitation and snowpack are now about average or a little less. Fortunately, the largest reservoirs continue to fill slowly, relative to previous…
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want – A Mick Jagger Theory of Drought Management
by Jay Lund “You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes you just might find You get what you need,” Rolling Stones (1969, Let It Bleed album) The ongoing California drought has many lessons for water managers and policy-makers. Perhaps the greatest lesson is how unimportant a drought can be if…
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ENSO it’s raining. The 2016 Drought so far – February 1
by Jay Lund Summary of conditions January 2016 has been much wetter than the previous Januaries during this drought. Precipitation is modestly above average, as is snowpack, and climatic conditions remain promising. The largest reservoirs are mostly fuller than a year ago, although not nearly to average conditions for this time of year. Groundwater is…
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ENSO it Begins? The 2016 Drought – so far – January 3
By Jay Lund “One afternoon they take me … to witness a great religious ceremony. It is the invocation to the gods for rain.” John Wesley Powell (1895, p. 338) 2016 starts with slightly above average precipitation and snowpack and promising climatic conditions, but a long way to go… Summary of conditions California remains in…