Tag: Jay Lund
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Improving mandatory State cutbacks of urban water use for a 5th year of drought
By Jay R. Lund There is usually great uncertainty about when a drought will end, but certainty that longer droughts bring tougher economic and ecosystem conditions as water in aquifers and reservoirs is further depleted. Long droughts, like the current one, also bring opportunities to use water more efficiently, based on lessons from the drought so…
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Watering up Halloween, California style
By Ghost Writer What better way to spook Californians this Halloween than to appear as a slobbering “Godzilla El Niño.” Or draped in a bedsheet as Godzilla’s opponent, “The Blob,” the amoeba-shaped patch of unusually warm Pacific water blocking storms in California. Too scary? Not to worry. Researchers at UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences…
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Urban water conservation for the birds
By Jay Lund People who save water like to know their conserving is doing some good, such as sustaining economic growth, building municipal reserves for longer droughts or supporting the environment. But many urban residents are concerned their water savings will go to uses they value less — such as supplying more wasteful customers, new…
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The banality of California’s ‘1,200-year’ drought
By Jay Lund California’s ongoing drought will continue to break records and grab headlines, but it is unlikely to be especially rare from a water policy and management perspective. Estimates of the current drought’s rarity range from once in 15 years to once in 1,200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014), depending on the region and…
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How research programs stack up — a photo essay
By Jay Lund Riding into work the other day, I was thinking how our understanding of hard problems requires understanding a lot of pieces and how those pieces fit together – sort of like how a pile of bricks gets transformed into a habitable structure. If every research study is a brick in our understanding,…
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For a change in Delta perspective, move a few feet
By Jay Lund Each year my family takes a week’s vacation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on our old sailboat. We often follow some Delta veterans who show us new places. As an engineering professor working on California’s water problems, I research the Delta mainly as a water supply hub and a flood-prone landscape. Sailing…
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Drought bites harder, but agriculture remains robust
Spanish version By Richard Howitt, Duncan MacEwan, Josué Medellín-Azuara and Jay Lund Today we release our second annual report estimating the economic impacts from prolonged drought. More than anything, the results of our 16-page analysis of the current growing season speak to agriculture’s remarkable resilience to multiyear surface water shortages. They also show that the…
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California Drought: Virtual Water vs. Real Water
This article was originally published Feb. 27, 2014 By Jay Lund There has been considerable kvetching during this drought about California exporting agricultural products overseas, with some saying that this implies we are virtually exporting water that we should be using in California. Those concerned should take comfort with California’s major imports of virtual water. Much of…
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Drought killing farm jobs — even as they grow
By Josué Medellín-Azuara, Richard Howitt, Duncan MacEwan, Daniel Sumner and Jay Lund With all the news about the drought drying up farm jobs, it seems paradoxical that California agriculture actually came out a bit ahead on employment growth last year. The industry gained a monthly average of more than 4,000 jobs, up 1 percent from…
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Harsher drought impacts forecast for California agriculture
By Richard Howitt, Duncan MacEwan, Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund and Daniel A. Sumner The drought is expected to be worse for California’s agricultural economy this year because of reduced water availability, according to our preliminary estimates released today. The study, summarized below, estimates farmers will have 2.7 million acre-feet less surface water than they would in a…
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Ten ways the feds can help ease drought in the West
Since the onset of California’s drought emergency 16 months ago, federal agencies and Congress have been seeking to help the state through funding and new and existing legislation. Here are 10 recommendations for new federal actions. Although many focus on California, they are relevant to other western states facing similar challenges. Because droughts are a…
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Keeping accounts for groundwater sustainability
Rob Gailey, Graham Fogg, Thomas Harter, Jay Lund, Helen Dahlke, Richard Frank, Tim Ginn, Richard Howitt, Mimi Jenkins, Bonnie Magnuson, Josué Medellín-Azuara, and Samuel Sandoval Solis The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 creates an opportunity to establish standards for the way California accounts for its stores of groundwater, which provide up to 60 percent…
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Water rationing and California’s drought
By Jay Lund California cities and water utilities will be stressed to meet the state’s aggressive urban conservation mandates in this fourth year of drought. Following Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order, the State Water Resources Control Board developed specific reduction targets for each major urban water supplier, ranging from 8 percent to 36 percent of…
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Jobs per drop irrigating California crops
By Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund and Richard Howitt Some of the most popular drought stories lately have been on the amount of what water needed to produce food from California, as a consumer sees it — a single almond, a head of lettuce or a glass of wine. The stories are often illustrated with pictures of common…
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Dollars and drops per California crop
By Josué Medellín-Azuara and Jay Lund When it comes to water, California’s irrigated agriculture is always under the public magnifying glass because it is the largest managed water use in the state and the economic base for many rural areas. During a prolonged drought like the current one, however, crop water comes under a microscope.…
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The California Drought of 2015: A preview
By Jay Lund This fourth year of drought is severe, but not yet the driest ever. The drought’s impacts are worsened by record heat, which has dried out soils and raised the demands for irrigation, and the historical high levels of California’s population, economy, and agricultural production, and historical low levels of native fish species. There is…
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Water giveaways during a drought invite conflict
This article first ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 20, 2015. By Jay Lund and Peter Moyle When labor is scarce, people move to better jobs with higher wages.…
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Creating effective groundwater sustainability plans
Jay Lund, Thomas Harter, Robert Gailey, Graham Fogg, Richard Frank, Helen Dahlke, Timothy Ginn, Sam Sandoval Solis, Thomas Young — UC Davis Andrew Fisher, Ruth Langridge — UC Santa Cruz Joshua Viers, Thomas Harmon — UC Merced Patricia Holden, Arturo Keller — UC Santa Barbara Michael Kiparsky — UC Berkeley Todd Greene, Steffen Mehl —…
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The California Drought of 2015: March
By Jay Lund Droughts are strange, and this one is becoming scarier. February began with a nice few stormy days, but has since looked like this January – very dry. And so far, the March forecast is not wet. At the beginning of March, the Northern Sierra (Sacramento Valley) Precipitation Index was down to 88%…
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Dutch lessons on levee design and prioritization for California
This is the second of an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By Jay Lund In any lowland, levees define how humans live and how they disrupt native habitats. This is as true for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as it is for coastal Louisiana, Vietnam and the Netherlands. Flood…