Tag: reservoirs
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Day 10 – One lucky penny
By Christine A. Parisek . . . Imagine a time you were standing at the edge of a creek – perhaps small pebbles and cobblestone were stacked along the shallow water edge, aquatic vegetation pushed its way in between, and a light breeze rustled the trees around you as the water swirled and lapped playfully…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 1 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: Interim Director Karrigan Börk appeared on the NPR show AirTalk a few weeks ago to address California water policy under a Trump administration; the segment starts at 18:00. This blogpost is the first of a 2 part series exploring the topic from a nonpartisan perspective with a goal of predicting likely outcomes…
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10 Lessons from a Collaborative Modeling Approach to discussing more adaptive Lake Powell and Lake Mead operations
by David E. Rosenberg Water models serve a variety of purposes. Stakeholders and managers use models to simulate the effects of new possible management operations decades into the future. Models can quantify tradeoffs between stakeholder’s conflicting objectives. Models can also help stakeholders understand how their system works. In a recent study, I created a new…
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Can large dams help feed downstream ecosystems?
By Francisco J. Bellido-Leiva, Nicholas Corline, and Robert A. Lusardi About 1,500 dams obstruct, modify, and regulate flow in all but one of California’s major rivers. These dams provide Californians with reliable drinking and irrigation water, flood protection for low-lying communities, and hydropower for our electrical grid. But dams also threaten downstream ecosystems by severely disrupting…
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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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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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California’s continued drought
By Andrew L. Rypel As California’s drought deepens, it is worth checking in on the status of water supplies and what might be in store for the rest of the summer, and beyond. What started with the promise of a wet water year, ended up dry, again. In January, the 8-Station Index showed precipitation totals…
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Can one atmospheric river end California’s drought?
By Andrew L. Rypel and Jay Lund Given the quantity and intensity of last week’s rain, an obvious question is: ‘Is the drought over?’ Alas, the answer is a resounding no. But, the data are interesting and worth thinking about in more detail. As of now, the 8 station index in the northern Sierra registers…
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Should California expand reservoir capacity by removing sediment?
By Jay Lund Removing sediment from reservoirs is often suggested as a potentially better way to expand storage capacity than raising dam heights or building new reservoirs. This is a natural notion to explore given the cost and likely environmental impacts of traditional expansions. For perspective, the construction cost of conventional reservoir expansion is about…
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California droughts precipitate innovation
Percentage of average precipitation, Oct. 1, 2013 – Jan. 19, 2014. Source: National Weather Service “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste” – Paul Romer, Stanford University economist By Jay Lund The 2013 calendar year was the driest on record for much of California. There is almost no snow in the Sierra Nevada or…