Western USA drought worst in modern era

LTLFTcomposite said:

It could get so bad people will stop coming illegally.

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edatoakrun said:

LTLFTcomposite said:

I've wondered what a civil engineering project would look like to transport water from the Mississippi river areas that suffer from flooding to the western states...?

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The Columbia river is a much easier source to tap from an engineering standpoint, and given the future climate change expected, likely to be a much more reliable source.

I doubt any proposal would sell very well in the PNW, though...

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AndyH said:

LTLFTcomposite said:

It could get so bad people will stop coming illegally.

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From a water, pollution, and raw materials standpoint, the planet would be much better off if we shipped everyone in the US (well, at least all the illegal immigrants from Europe :lol: ) to the moon and let anyone else come here.

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• • “My grandfather did not travel across 4,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland.”
    
    -- Stephen Colbert, 2010 Congressional Testimony
    . . Opening Statement (video), 10 Best Quotes (text)

Prepare for extinction of delta smelt

Posted on March 18, 2015 by UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences

By Peter Moyle

I saw my first delta smelt in 1972, during my first fall as an assistant professor at UC Davis. I was on a California Department of Fish and Wildlife trawl survey to learn about the fishes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The survey then targeted young striped bass, but the trawl towed behind the boat captured large numbers of the native delta smelt.

I remember a single haul with a couple hundred of these iridescent finger-length fish being dumped into a container on deck. I decided to study smelt biology because these fishes were so abundant and yet so poorly studied. I would have no trouble collecting enough of them for my research.

Lee Miller, the biologist in charge of the surveys, started preserving the smelt catches for me. Each year for three years a pickup loaded with quart bottles of delta and longfin smelt would arrive at my laboratory. For a diet study alone, my technician and I dissected 1,055 delta smelt.

Today, few delta smelt remain in the wild. Researchers get their samples from special labs where the smelt are bred in captivity.

The state’s 2014 fall mid-water trawl survey showed the lowest number of delta smelt in 47 years of recordkeeping (See chart below). Last week, the state conducted its annual spring Kodiak trawl survey, which is designed to capture delta smelt as they aggregate to spawn. They caught only six smelt — four females and two males [1] [2].

The dismal catch prompted me to advise the state’s Delta Stewardship Council on Monday that delta smelt appear to approaching the point of no return, with extinction in the wild possible in the next year or two...

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The North Atlantic ocean circulation is an important part of a global ocean circulation that exchanges heat from the equatorial surplus to the poles where the energy is lost by thermal radiation to space. A slowed global oceanic ‘conveyer belt’ may further destabilize our changing global climate. We expect no new ice-age – but major negative effects are possible. The effects could be on global climate, fisheries, or also for example storminess.

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Update, March 24, 2015: So, we started this season’s water-watching in December with an eye to what early winter storms were doing to replenish the state’s critically low water reservoirs. We all know what’s happened since:

A wet December followed by one of the driest Januaries on record.

In February, a couple of nice shots of rain in Northern California, with scant precipitation farther south.

And then March. It’s not one of California’s Big Three months for precipitation. But in 1991, an occasion that water-watchers recall with increasing wistfulness, March produced such a bounty of rain and snow that it’s still known as a miracle.

A week before the end of the month, it’s clear we’ll witness no miracle this time. What we’re seeing instead is nothing short of shocking. The April 1 snowpack, to be officially reported next week, will be the lowest on record. And “lowest on record” doesn’t quite convey how extreme the situation really is.

Last year, the “snow-water equivalent” in the thin blanket of white covering California’s mountains stood at a shade under 25 percent of its historic average. That beat the record, a hair over 25 percent, set during the severe drought season of 1976-77.

And this year’s snowpack?

The network of electronic sensors sending in reports from highland locations from the Trinity Alps down to the southern Sierra is showing that statewide, the snowpack is at 9 percent of average — not even half of where it was last year, when it was at its record low.

Part of the standard California water lecture is to talk about our “frozen reservoir” in the mountains — a reference to the fact that anywhere between a third and a half of the water we use each year falls as snow, melts gradually as the weather warms, then comes tumbling down to our valleys as clear, cold water.

So, that’s not happening this year. Regardless of what the statistical summaries say about our reservoirs — our big Northern California lakes are still in good shape relative to last year, though far below average for the date — the near-total absence of snow means California, its 38 million people and its giant farm economy are headed into unknown territory.

Unknown, except that it will be very dry.

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The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has indicated that by the year 2025 75% of the world's population - that's 5.5 BILLION people - will be at risk due to insufficient water to grow enough food for an adequate diet. When used properly, GROW BIOINTENSIVE farming can use as little as 33% of the water per pound of food produced. At the same time you can grow enough compost materials to build the soil so it can hold more of the water and minerals to grow more food and achieve more sustainable soil fertility.

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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 need for concern, preparation and prudence, but little cause for panic, despite some locally urgent conditions...

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Bark beetles ravaging drought-stricken forests in California
By Peter Fimrite |
March 28, 2015 | Updated: March 30, 2015 11:00am

Armies of tiny bark beetles are ravaging drought-weakened pine trees throughout California in a fast spreading epidemic that biologists fear could soon turn catastrophic.

Local, state and federal officials are virtually helpless against the pestilence, which has turned hundreds of thousands of acres of forest brown and left huge fire-prone stands of dead wood.

The trees are being devoured by millions of native beetles, each about the size of a grain of rice. The insects, thriving in the warm weather and lack of freezing temperatures, are overwhelming the defenses of water-starved trees, attacking in waves and multiplying at a frenzied pace, depositing eggs under the bark that hatch into ravenous larval grubs.

“Things are looking really, really bad,” said Tom Smith, a forest pest management specialist for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “Basically we’ve got native bark beetles that are attacking the pines. They are only successful in attacking the trees when the trees are stressed. Right now all the trees are stressed because of drought.”

The infected trees are on private and public lands, in national parks, wilderness areas and managed forests. There seems to be no solution short of removing the dead and dying trees and hoping against hope for rain and cold. The worst of it is in the southern part of the state, but pest management experts say the plague is moving north...

“The amount of dead and dying trees is certainly a very significant fire hazard,” said Ken Pimlott, the director of Cal Fire. “It’s a multifaceted challenge. Large stands of dead trees create another problem also because, when you get into the Sierras, many of the homes have been built in and around these trees. We don't want to create alarm, but this is a forest health issue that has become a public safety issue.”...

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Weatherman said:

...the main benefit of the snowpack is that it extends the runoff....

This year, with reservoir levels starting out low, there's no concern about unnecessary releases...

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...While there is still debate about whether climate change has caused the lack of rain, there is less controversy about the role of warming temperatures. A recent study led by Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor in earth sciences at Stanford, found that in California over the past two decades, dry periods have more frequently overlapped with warm periods than in prior decades.

“It used to be that half the years were warm, and half were cool,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “Now we’re in a regime where most of the years are warm.”

Higher temperatures also reduce snowpack, now at record low levels. “In warmer conditions, precipitation falls as rain rather than snow,” Dr. Diffenbaugh said. “We saw that very clearly this winter.”

During major storms in December and February, warm conditions brought mostly rain and little snow to the Sierra Nevada.

Ordinarily, the snowpack naturally stores water, gradually melting into reservoirs and canals over the spring and summer. But with higher temperatures, Dr. Diffenbaugh said, what little snow there is melts sooner. “The water we have in the reservoirs now is essentially all we’re going to have until the start of the next rainy season,” he said...

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Weatherman said:

The statement "The water we have in the reservoirs now is essentially all we’re going to have until the start of the next rainy season" could have just as easily been said in June or July of a typical year after the snow has melted...

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LTLFTcomposite said:

Instituting water restrictions is easy. Getting any sort of compliance is quite another matter.

In the past here in FL when there have been concerns causing restrictions to be put in place I've observed most people completely ignore them and keep doing as they please.

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