Some curious things about water management
By Jay R. Lund *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2012. Water management is often very different from what we think intuitively, or what we have been taught. Here are some examples. 1....
View ArticleA Functional Flows approach to implementing Flood-MAR
by Bronwen Stanford, Julie Zimmerman, Kris Taniguchi-Quan, Ted Grantham, Sarah Yarnell, Alyssa Obester, Eric Stein, Jessi Ayers, Alex Milward As recent droughts have highlighted, groundwater overuse is...
View ArticleA Functional Flows approach to implementing Flood-MAR
by Bronwen Stanford, Julie Zimmerman, Kris Taniguchi-Quan, Ted Grantham, Sarah Yarnell, Alyssa Obester, Eric Stein, Jessi Ayers, Alex Milward As recent droughts have highlighted, groundwater overuse is...
View ArticleCan 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...
View ArticleYou Can’t Always Get What You Want – A Mick Jagger Theory of Drought Management
by Jay Lund [This is a reposting of a CaliforniaWaterBlog.com post from February 2016, near the end of the previous drought. For human uses, conditions seem somewhat similar to this point in the...
View ArticleThe Dreamt Land by Mark Arax: We’re all complicit in California’s water follies
by Ann Willis We are all sinners. At least, that’s the impression Mark Arax leaves in The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California. What’s bold, and distinguishes this book from others...
View ArticleThe Collapse of Water Exports – Los Angeles, 1914
by Jay Lund “In February, 1914, the rainfall in the Mojave Desert region exceeded by nearly fifty per cent in three days the average annual precipitation. Where the steel siphon crosses Antelope valley...
View ArticleThe folly of unimpaired flows for water quality management
by Ann Willis Unimpaired streamflow has long been the benchmark against which current stream flows are evaluated for environmental purposes. The underlying assumption is that if there is water in a...
View ArticleEastern San Joaquin Valley and other CA drinking water supplies at risk in...
by Amanda Fencl, Rich Pauloo, Alvar Escriva-Bou, Hervé Guillon During the 2012-2016 drought, the state received more than 2,500 domestic well failure reports, the majority of which were in the Central...
View ArticleGetting Strategic about Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation in California
by Jeanette Howard, Kurt Fesenmyer, Theodore Grantham, Joshua Viers, Peter Ode, Peter Moyle, Sarah Kupferberg, Joseph Furnish, Andrew Rehn, Joseph Slusark, Raphael Mazor, Nicholas Santos, Ryan Peek,...
View ArticleU.C. Davis Law’s Environmental Law Center Releases Proposition 3 White Paper
by Richard Frank This article originally appeared on Legal Planet on October 31, 2018 The U.C. Davis School of Law’s California Environmental Law & Policy Center has published a detailed analysis...
View ArticleThe Public Trust and SGMA
by Brian Gray In a recent decision in litigation over flows and salmon survival in the Scott River system, the California Court of Appeal has ruled that groundwater pumping that diminishes the volume...
View ArticleWater storage successes, failures, and challenges from Proposition 1
by Jay Lund The California Water Commission recently allocated $2.7 billion from Proposition 1 bonds for eight water storage projects. Proposition 1 was passed in 2014 to fund a range of projects,...
View ArticleScience, the Delta, and the future of San Joaquin salmon
by Peter B. Moyle I feel fortunate to be a biologist in an era and place, California, where science matters. Routine scientific studies rarely make headlines but they are relied on by decision makers...
View ArticleGroundwater exchange pools in Los Angeles: An innovative example of adaptive...
by Erik Porse, Kathryn Mika, Stephanie Pincetl, Mark Gold, and William Blomquist Across California, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) are devising plans to reduce long-term overdraft. As part...
View ArticleSGMA struggles to overcome marginalization of disadvantaged communities
by Kristin Dobbin Small Disadvantaged Communities (DACs), or DACs with less than 10,000 people, have long been disproportionately affected by California’s water management woes such as groundwater...
View ArticleImproving Urban Water Conservation in California
by Erik Porse The relatively dry 2017-18 winter in California resurfaced recent memories of drought conservation mandates. From 2013-16, urban water utilities complied with voluntary, then mandatory,...
View ArticleModeling, Measuring, and Comparing Crop Evapotranspiration in the Delta
by Jesse Jankowski Crop evapotranspiration (ET) is the biggest managed loss of water in California, accounting for roughly 80% of human net water use, and includes crop water applications transpired...
View ArticleReality Check of California Water Fix Model results in a Critical Flow Year
by William Fleenor In 2008 a group from the Center for Watershed Sciences (including this author), joined by an economist from the Public Policy Institute, published findings that suggested that an...
View ArticleGroundwater Recovery in California – Still Behind the Curve
by Thomas Harter and Bill Brewster California has a unique and highly variable climate in which drought reoccurs periodically. California began this century in a dry period from 1999 to 2005, and...
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