Thursday, February 22, 2007

Managing the Chaffee County RICD Chaffee County is working on managing their new recreational in channel eiversion water right, according to the Mountain Mail. From the article, "Commissioners discussed the timing of eight 'event days' privy to 1,800 cubic feet per second minimum flows in the Arkansas River based on the decree that was finalized in October. They plan to have the event day window coincide with FIBArk in Salida and any June river event in Buena Vista. Commissioners discussed the issue at their work session in Salida. Currently there is no event in Buena Vista scheduled to coincide with the event days, which are restricted to June in the decree. Buena Vista's second-year Paddlefest is planned for May 18-20, too early to benefit from the event day minimums. However, Paddlefest organizer Earl Richmond said a June event in Buena Vista that would take advantage of the RICD flows is on the drawing board... "Paddlefest will remain the week before Memorial Day because it is designed as a kickoff to the whitewater season. Flows during last year's event were about 1,750 cubic feet per second, Richmond said, well below the June peak above 2,000 cfs. Paddlefest benefits from the lower flows because it has a significant learn-to-kayak component. 'High flow is great for avid, active paddlers, but really high flows make it hard to learn to kayak on the Arkansas,' Richmond said. In addition to deciding on the eight event days by April 1, commissioners will also have to decide on a 30-day period of minimum flows of 1,400 cfs by May 1. Commissioners directed county staff to place RICD management decisions on a yearly calendar so future staff and commissioners will remember to set RICD flow timing every year." Category: Colorado Water 6:25:32 AM     Energy policy: Oil shale development The meeting in Grand Junction with Shell oil over oil shale development disappointed many that attended, according to the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. From the article, "A meeting Wednesday night in Grand Junction that Royal Dutch Shell billed as a chance to hear the public's concerns about the company's Piceance Basin oil shale research projects and 'definitely implement' public comments turned out to be something a bit different. Shell neither solicited public comments nor took any effort to write them down. The meeting was the third of four public open-house sessions presenting information about Shell's four Piceance Basin oil shale research and demonstration projects, including its private Mahogany Research Site and three other proposed projects on public land. Those three sites are now beginning the state permitting process, which could take about a year. The previous two meetings were held Tuesday in Meeker and Wednesday morning in Rangely. The final meeting is scheduled for Rifle at 9 a.m. today at the Garfield County Fairgrounds exhibit hall. Company spokeswoman Jill Davis said last week Shell wants to hear public feedback about its research plans and said the company will 'definitely implement' the comments it receives at the meetings and alter its state permit applications accordingly. But on Wednesday, after a short presentation outlining general details of Shell's first planned oil shale test, Davis told the crowd gathered in a Grand Junction Double Tree Hotel ballroom to direct questions about the projects to company technical personnel scattered around the room." Category: 2008 Presidential Election 6:17:00 AM     Global warming and the West Here's a short report on the 16th annual Colorado Agricultural Outlook Forum at the Double Tree Hotel in Denver from the Greeley Tribune (free registration required). From the article, "Is human activity a contributor to global warming? Probably. Is agriculture contributing to warmer temperatures? Maybe. Are greenhouse gases the crux of the problem? No. There are too many variables that are not predictable that all a part of warming temperatures globally, but there are implications of that on Colorado agriculture, two Colorado State University experts said Wednesday... "[Dennis Ojima, a senior research scientist with the CSU Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory] said there have been climate implications to Colorado agriculture for the past 150 years, but the last five years have been some of the warmest years in recent history, and the world will continue to warm for the next 100 years or so. There has been a .15 degree increase in the past 100 years, but .2 degrees warmer in the winter. 'We may be headed for a climate that will be consistently warmer but not as much variability,' Ojima said. That will result in an increase of growing degree days, which could lead to more crop stress if that is combined with lessening water supplies. Seasonal availability of water may be altered, he said, and extreme weather events could increase. Air pollution also will be a contributor, as both said recent research has indicated that during an upslope weather condition, Front Range pollution is pushed into the mountains and there is an indication mountain precipitation has been reduced by as much as 30 percent." Category: Colorado Water 6:06:37 AM     Roaring Fork Watershed meeting tonight in Basalt The future of the Roaring Fork Watershed is the subject of this article from the Glenwood Springs Independent (free registration required). From the article, "Mark Fuller knows meetings about water resources sound like a dry topic, but he makes a convincing case that everyone in the Roaring Fork Valley should be interested in a process beginning tonight in Basalt. Fuller, the executive director of the Ruedi Water and Power Authority, is part of a group coordinating a detailed plan for the Roaring Fork watershed. Everyone from ranchers concerned about having enough water to irrigate hay fields to anglers worried about water quality to maintain trout fisheries on streams is needed to develop strategies for future water use in the Roaring Fork Basin, Fuller said. "So he's hoping that the meeting pulls as many people off the streets as it does water attorneys and utility managers: 'We don't just want it to be a bunch of water geeks talking to other water geeks,' he said. The meeting, from 7:30-9 p.m. at Basalt High School, is officially called the Roaring Fork Watershed Plan. The plan will have two phases; the first will be a 'State of the Watershed' comprehensive report tackling issues like quantity and quality of water. The second phase will be recommendations on topics such as guarding the basin's water against outside interests that covet it... "Any basin that hasn't studied its needs and made a plan for the future could find any unallocated water tapped for use elsewhere. The Roaring Fork watershed has got some so-called excess water. 'It's certainly got more than other basins in the state,' Fuller said. 'We've got a target on us.' Planning might not prevent additional diversions, he said, but it can assure sufficient compensation and mitigation for diversions." Category: Colorado Water 5:49:39 AM     New water storage? Most water watchers agree that part of the solution to sustainable water supplies is to build new reservoirs. Of course, since we're talking water in the West the experts can't agree about where, when or how large the reservoirs will be. Here's a short article on the subject from the Rocky Mountain News. They write, "Climate change may mean less water in Colorado rivers and streams, but experts can't agree on whether building more reservoirs is a wise investment or a waste of billions. A series of recently released studies on climate change in the West predict more drought, warmer weather and greater water loss because of evaporation. 'The future doesn't portend a new abundance of nature's water. Rather, nature will be taking more water than it's now delivering,' said Martin Hoerling, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder... "Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and other cities tap the Colorado River in western Colorado and move about 500,000 acre-feet to reservoirs that serve the Front Range... "Hoerling and other weather researchers said that climate trends argue against building more reservoirs that rely on the Colorado River. 'If you add reservoirs, you are not going to fill them,' he said. The Colorado River serves seven states - Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah in the upper basin and Arizona, California and Nevada in the lower basin. When the 1922 Colorado River Compact divided the water among the states, the annual flow was estimated at 15 million acre-feet. Hoerling said that the recent annual flows are about 13 million acre-feet, but by 2050, climate change may drop that to about 10 million acre-feet - less than what is currently used by all of the states. That could mean there would be no extra water to store in Colorado, which hasn't claimed it's full share of the river, he said. 'You can build all the reservoirs you want, but there are no existing surplus flows to fill them,' he said. "That's not the conclusion that Chips Barry, manager of Denver Water, draws from the studies. Denver Water supplies 1.2 million homes in Denver and the suburbs. 'It's a powerful argument for building more storage,' Barry said. 'More storage is one of the ways to adapt to climate change.' Barry said the climate studies also found a trend toward episodic periods of heavy precipitation with earlier and heavier runoff seasons. 'When you have a highly variable precipitation pattern, you store as much water as possible in times of plenty,' he said. 'That's the lesson of the West. You need more storage for the swings.' That doesn't mean a revival of the big dam building era that started in the 1960s after the devastating droughts of the 1950s. Barry said that the best dam sites - mountain canyons - already have reservoirs. Environmental issues, political conflicts and costs make new reservoir construction difficult, he said... "The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, which serves Fort Collins, Greeley and other towns in Larimer, Weld and Boulder counties, is studying several new storage projects. 'As we look at the forecasts for less runoff and most of it coming down all at once, we think we need to grab it as fast as we can,' said Brian Werner, the district's spokesman. The district is studying a 500,000 acre-feet reservoir near Maybell in northwestern Colorado to capture the Yampa River flows, he said. The Yampa River flows into the Colorado River, so the project would claim part of the state's share of the river... "Nolan Doesken, the state's climatologist, said that the recent studies have shifted the discussion from whether there was climate change to 'what do we do about climate change? We know we are grateful for the water-storage projects we have now, but will new ones be cost effective? I have no idea,' he said. 'That decision is the greatest challenge for the combination of science and policy that our part of the country has seen in a long time.'" Category: Colorado Water 5:42:37 AM     Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic Variability Here's a short overview of the National Research Council's conclusions of what is expected for the Colorado River Basin, from the Rocky Mountain News. From the article, "Global warming likely will reduce Colorado River flows in the coming decades, increasing competition for the West's lifeblood liquid, a federal panel said Wednesday. Reduced Colorado River flows also would contribute to more severe, frequent and longer Western droughts, the National Research Council panel concluded in a six-chapter report, Colorado River Basin Water Management: Evaluating and Adjusting to Hydroclimatic Variability [pdf]... "The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. 'The point that we make is that the technological and conservation operations, although very useful and necessary, will not in the long run constitute a panacea for coping with the limited water supplies in this desert area,' said panel chairman Ernest Smerdon, dean emeritus of the University of Arizona College of Engineering and Mines. The report's projections for the West's future echo a climate- change update issued Feb. 2 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That panel's latest study said the U.S. West is likely to warm around 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. The warming, unless accompanied by increased precipitation, would result in regional drying and reduced stream flows, it said. The new National Research Council document calls for further study of the Colorado River Basin but offers no solutions for the West's water woes... "'There's not much in here that should be a surprise to anybody,' Eric Kuhn, manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in Glenwood Springs, said of the new study. 'The big question is, will the water management infrastructure - meaning the big state and federal agencies - adopt it or dismiss it because it's telling them things they don't want to hear?'" The Denver Post adds, "Water for lawns, showers, fountains and farms will become increasingly scarce in the West, according to a dire new assessment of the Colorado River Basin, which stretches from Wyoming to California. A new report from the National Research Council describes growing pressure from three trends: fast population growth, global warming and a 2,000-year history of recurrent droughts worse than what has been seen in the last 100 years. 'This should be a wake-up call,' said Connie Woodhouse, a climate researcher with the University of Arizona at Tucson and one of the report's 13 authors. 'Water is a precious commodity in the semi-arid West,' Woodhouse said. 'It's not a given. And it's going to become even more precious in the future.'[...] "The region has heated up more than 2 degrees since 1895. It will continue to warm as people pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to 18 computer models used in a recent United Nations climate report, Smerdon said. That makes snow melt earlier, when reservoir managers aren't always prepared to 'catch' water, and it means more water is lost by evaporation and plants pulling water through their roots and releasing it into the air." More coverage from the Salt Lake Tribune. They write, "The recent drought the Colorado River basin endured pales in comparison with dry spells from centuries ago. One of these mega-droughts likely will strike again someday. And water managers and scientists need to be prepared, according to a new National Academy of Sciences report. The report looked at studies that examined tree-ring data to assess drought conditions over the past several hundred years. Severe droughts were noted in the late 1500s and the mid-1800s before scientists began installing gauges along the Colorado River, on which most Western states rely heavily as a water source, Connie Woodhouse, a University of Arizona researcher involved with the report, said during a Wednesday tele-conference. While models all project a warmer climate for the Colorado River basin, there is less agreement on the future of precipitation." Here's another article about the report from KVOA News 4, Tucson. From the article, "Citing several tree-ring studies, which helped write a hydrological history of the Colorado dating back more than 500 years, the scientists concluded that the river is more vulnerable to prolonged, intense droughts than previously thought. The report said temperatures also have risen along the Colorado in recent years and have already affected snowmelt in some areas with long-term warming possibly shrinking the river's flow and increase demand. Growing cities will force states to strike deals with farmers, but even that supply is limited, according to scientists. The report said the combination of threats eventually will overwhelm the seven river states, which have struggled to produce a short-term drought plan." Here's an article about the report from the Los Angeles Times (free registration required). California knows a thing or two about trans-basin diversions from the Colorado River. They write, "Global warming will worsen drought and reduce flows on the Colorado River, a key water source for Southern California and six other Western states, according to a report released Wednesday... "The report acknowledges some uncertainty over whether climate change will alter the amount of precipitation in the basin. Even if it doesn't, Smerdon added, 'the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that warmer temperatures will reduce Colorado River stream flow and water supplies.' That is because the snowpack that feeds the Colorado will shrink as the climate grows hotter. More precipitation will fall as rain instead of snow, and the snowpack will melt earlier, diminishing late spring runoff. As the mercury rises, water demands will also increase. There will be more evaporation from croplands and reservoirs, and wild land vegetation will suck more moisture from the soil, reducing runoff." Category: Colorado Water 5:26:13 AM

© Copyright 2007 John Orr. Last update: 3/1/07; 6:56:44 AM.