California Drought Update
March 19, 2015
by Patrick Ruckert
California this past week has seen an explosion of warnings, calls for rationing, hand-wringing, hysteria, and just outright nonsense about the drought.
On March 12, Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, whom I have often cited in these reports, published an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times, titled: “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-famiglietti-drought-california-20150313-story.html
Famiglietti says, “California is running out of water,” and provides the data on how much and how rapidly the stored water, especially in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have been declining the past few years.
He writes, “Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”
His proposals for addressing the drought though, are a more intense application of the same policy that has already failed. That is, mandatory rationing instead of voluntary rationing of water; the acceleration of groundwater monitoring; and planning for the long-term.
He, like all of the state water managers and political leaders will not touch the only solution– that is the political and economic revolution required to not only solve the water crisis in California, but the continued destruction of the real physical economy of the nation.
Regular readers of this report are familiar with my alternative policies, stated repeatedly over the past year, so I will not write it out again here. For newer readers the attachment above, which puts in one document a number of such discussions, can catch you up.
Famiglietti’s commentary was followed by the State Water Resources Control Board announcement on March 17, adopting expanded emergency regulations to enforce regulations adopted last year but not enforced. Here is the comment made by State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus with the announcement:
“We are experiencing the lowest snowpack and the driest January in recorded history, and communities around the state are already suffering severely from the prior three years of drought. If the drought continues through next winter and we do not conserve more — the consequences could be even more catastrophic than they already are. Today’s action is just a tune-up and a reminder to act, and we will consider more significant actions in the weeks to come.”
Commenting on the snowpack, which at 12 percent of average is even below last year’s low of 28 percent of average, Marcus said, “That snowpack is just terrifying.” The snowpack provides more than 30 percent of the state’s water supply normally. She then went on to describe the emergency action as, in her words, “quite modest.”
So, what dramatic measures are being taken? None. The measures include limiting to two days a week or three days a week yard watering, having restaurants only serve water when asked, and enforcing the fines for violating the rules. Nothing that responds to Famiglietti’s more draconian demands.
The New York Times jumped in on March 17, with a good summary of the state of the state:
“California is facing a punishing fourth year of drought. Temperatures in Southern California soared to record-high levels over the weekend, approaching 100 degrees in some places. Reservoirs are low. Landscapes are parched and blighted with fields of dead or dormant orange trees. And the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is counted on to provide 30 percent of the state’s water supply as it melts through early summer, is at its second-lowest level on record.
“The federal government has warned farmers for the second year in a row that it would not be providing any water from its Central Valley Project reservoir system. Any hope climatologists had that California would be rescued again by a wet El Niño winter weather system is fading with the arrival of spring.
“State regulators voted Tuesday to impose a new round of water conservation rules, including sharp restrictions on landscape watering and orders to restaurants not to serve water to customers unless asked. Farmers said they anticipated leaving as much as one million acres fallow, nearly twice the area that went unplanted last year.
“Santa Barbara is turning to a desalination plant it built in the early 1990s, but never used, to convert ocean water into drinking water, despite its expense and inefficiency. In communities like Oakland and Sacramento, water districts are reporting increased thefts by people tapping into their neighbor’s faucet or the fire hydrant on the corner.
“In one sign of the kind of competition being set off by the scarcity, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a regional agency that provides water for much of the area, authorized up to $71 million to buy water from farmers in the Sacramento Valley, who get it from a state agency. In some cases, the farmers were paid three times as much as in 2010, the last time this was done. With those kinds of prices, farmers say it makes more sense to take the money and leave more land unplanted.”
The Los Angeles Times on March 18 in an article titled, “Overpumping of Central Valley groundwater creating a crisis, experts say,” by Bettina Boxall, contributes to the sense of crisis rapidly building in the state. Boxall writes:
“The overpumping has escalated during the past drought-plagued decade, driving groundwater levels to historic lows in some places. But in a large swath of the valley, growers have been sucking more water from its sands and clays than nature or man puts back for going on a century.
“They are eroding their buffer against future droughts and hastening the day, experts warn, when they will be forced to let more than a million acres of cropland turn to dust because they have exhausted their supplies of readily available groundwater.”
Yes, the drought is serious, and forecasts are being made by farmers and farm organizations that more than one million acres will be fallowed this year, more than double the officially recognized 400,000 acres last year. But, creating hysteria and panic without providing solutions will only create conflict between farmers and the cities, northern and southern California and neighbor against neighbor.
Boxall, like other reporters singles out the Central Valley as the center of the crisis:
“The Central Valley aquifer extends for about 400 miles under the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. The subterranean water, some of which seeped into the ground 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, is California’s biggest reservoir. Yet it has been largely unregulated and unmonitored. Most of the more than 100,000 wells that pierce the valley floor are unmetered and landowners have taken what they wanted.”
Boxall reports that Charles Burt, chairman of the Irrigation Training and Research Center at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, said, comparing the annual groundwater overdraft in the valley with crop water usage, figures that 1 million to 1.5 million acres will go out of production in coming years in the Central Valley.
To put a more human face on all these reports, the Lake Don Pedro community, which gets it water from Lake McClure behind the Exchequer Dam on the Merced River, will completely run out of water in June. That is 3,200 people who will be without running water. The dam is presently at 8 percent of capacity.
Santa Barbara is likely to move to a Stage III drought, requiring mandatory rationing by May, as its water supply in Lake Cachuma is running dry. The city has recently moved to rebuild the desalination plant in built in the 1990s but never used. With millions of dollars now being spent to reactivate it, it will begin providing fresh water sometime in 2016/
Why is it so damn hot in California?
As I reported last week, the winter temperatures in the state have been well above normal. Los Angeles and San Diego last weekend had temperatures in the 90s.
An article in the Washington Post on March 16, by Jason Samenow, “California’s ridiculous run of record heat inflaming dire water situation,” includes the following:
“The weather pattern responsible for the heat and drought is a bulging area of high pressure over the West, extending into Alaska, that has blocked rain-bearing weather systems from coming ashore. Dubbed the ‘ridiculously resilient ridge‘, models have forecast its demise on several occasions, only for it come back stronger.
“University of Washington professor of atmospheric science Dennis Hartmann, in a guest essay at Climate.gov, says a particular configuration of sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific is behind this pattern. He calls it the ‘North Pacific Mode’, which is characterized by a plume of warmer than normal ocean temperatures from the western tropical Pacific that extends eastward and northward towards the West Coast of North America.
“‘This pattern brings warmth and drought to the West and cold to the East, as we have observed the past two winters,’ Hartmann writes.
“Hartmann stops short of attributing this pattern to global warming and notes this kind of pattern has been seen in the past.”
Lake Mead and the Colorado River
On March 11, the U.S. government released its latest forecast on the water level of Lake Mead, behind the Hoover Dam, announcing that the reservoir is expected to fall to a new record low next month and slip downward from there. The expected flows into the Colorado River this year will be below normal, for the twelfth year since 2000.
Since January 2000, Lake Mead’s surface has fallen more than 125 feet, from an elevation of 1,214 feet above sea level to 1,080 feet expected next month. This level has not been seen since the lake began to be filled in 1937.
Las Vegas hopes to complete a new pipeline from the lake well below any expected low surface level sometime this year. Ninety percent of the city’s water comes from the lake.
With or without the new pipeline, Nevada generally faces water shortages if drought on the Colorado River persists into the next two years, said Michael Connor, deputy secretary of the Interior Department.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California also relies heavily on water from the Colorado River. The water is stored in Diamond Valley Lake, a man-made off-stream reservoir located near Hemet. With a capacity of 800,000 acre feet, it is one of the largest reservoirs in Southern California. Construction of it began in 1995, and it was first filled by 2003.
On March 19, the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) announced plans to indefinitely suspend private boat launches at the lake beginning April 15, because of low lake levels. Diamond Valley is the storage site for WMD’s emergency water supplies.
From the March 16 release by the MWD:
“Storage levels at Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet in southwest Riverside County are expected to begin receding in early April as water is drawn to meet the region’s supply needs.
“Today, storage in the lake stands at 390,000 acre-feet, 48 percent of capacity. Since January 2014
when the 4,500-surface-acre lake held 583,600 acre-feet, Metropolitan has withdrawn 193,000 acre-feet to meet member agency needs, dropping lake levels 44 feet.”
Last week I reported that on March 2, the WMD issued a statement reiterating that its allocation plans to cut 2015 water supplies by 5 to 10 percent, to its 26 member public agencies, still stand.
In addition, the WMD is offering to buy more than $70 million worth of water from rice farmers in the Sacramento Valley at $700 per acre-foot. That is more than the WMD has ever paid for water. Of course, the deals are depend the Western Canal Water District, which is coordinating the sales, getting its full supply of water, which has been growing slimmer by the day.
Last year, because of water supply cuts, rice farmers idled 20 percent of their land, and the projections are that it will be higher this year, even before some of the farmers sell their water to the WMD.
Hydropower
A recent report published by the Pacific Institute, which focuses on water issues, states that California’s drought is shifting the sources of energy for electricity. Diminished river flows have resulted in less hydroelectricity, more expensive electricity and increased production of greenhouse gas emissions as more electricity is produced from natural gas.
In an average year, hydropower provides 18 percent of the state’s electricity. For the last three years of drought it has been less than 12 percent.
Now back to the Hoover Dam. Foreign Policy magazine on March 16 featured the article, Hydropower and the Challenge of Climate Change. Here is the opening paragraph:
“The Hoover Dam was and is a marvel of engineering, a 700-foot wall of concrete holding back the Colorado River. Its 17 massive power turbines supply electricity for southern California and a chunk of the U.S. Southwest. But in the space of a year, the Hoover power plant will have essentially shrunk in half, from about 2,100 megawatts of generation capacity in early 2014 to about 1,200 megawatts this spring, all because of the impacts of drought caused by climate change.”
The assertion that the drought is caused by climate change is not a claim most climatologists would make, but the point made about the decline of hydroelectric production at the dam is real.
Crops
Oranges
In addition to the drought, which saw last year 15,000 acres of orange trees uprooted, is now fighting an crop-threatening disease. The citrus industry involves 3,500 growers and 125,000 hectares. The growers are spending $25 million to battle citrus greening disease, which is carried by the Asian citrus psyllid. The disease has devastated orange crops in Florida, Texas, Mexico and Brazil.
Wildfires
Big wildfires this winter are quadruple what is normal, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is maintaining its highest level ever of seasonal firefighters straight through the winter.
This winter fires have burned 3,200 acres, whereas a normal winter it is about 800 acres. Fire officials expect the fire danger to be even higher this year than last year.
That is the headline from Capitol Public Radio on March 16. The Delta Smelt is the notorious fish in the Bay Delta which has been the excuse, since it is on the endangered species list, for withholding the pumping of water from the Delta to the farmers in the Central Valley. Now, it appears, the Smelt is going extinct anyway. Isn’t nature wonderful? No matter what man does, some species just do not have the capability to continue to exist. That is evolution. Only mankind can change himself; only mankind is a self-evolving species. Smelt cannot change their nature or behavior; mankind always does that.
Here is some of the text from the Capitol Public Radio report:
“‘Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,’ UC Davis fish biologist Peter Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council.
“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.
“‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. ‘Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’
“Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California.”
