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Colorado River farm fallowing pilot moves forward, with approvals slated for next month

By
Fresh Water News
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Rancher Bryan Bernal irrigates a field that depends on Colorado River water near Loma, Colo. Credit: William Woody
Rancher Bryan Bernal irrigates a field that depends on Colorado River water near Loma, Colo. Credit: William Woody

By Jerd Smith

To help restore the dwindling Colorado River, farmers and ranchers in Colorado have submitted 36 proposals which, if approved, will authorize them to temporarily stop irrigating their land this year in return for federal cash payments, allowing more water to stay in the river.

The effort is known as the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) and is part of a broader initiative by Colorado and three other states to help stabilize the river system.

The Colorado River Basin includes seven states. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming comprise the Upper Basin, while Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. Efforts to cut agricultural water use are underway in the Lower Basin as well.

The Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC), which is responsible for approving and implementing the pilot program, received 88 applications from growers in the four Upper Basin states, including the 36 from Colorado. How much water savings the pilot might generate across the four states is unclear. The UCRC did not respond to a request for comment. It is expected to make decisions on which applications will move forward next month. A special public meeting to address the SCPP is scheduled in Salt Lake City April 10.

If all of Colorado’s applications are approved, 5,480 acres of land on Western Slope farms and ranches would be involved, resulting in more than 8,334 acre-feet of what’s known as conserved consumptive use water being saved for the river, according to an initial analysis of the applications by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). Typically, when water is applied to fields, a portion of that liquid returns to the stream and isn’t used by the crop itself. The portion that is used by the crop is considered consumptive use. In most water rights transactions, it is only this consumptive use water that can be transferred or sold to another user. The applications included options to save water ranging from switching to less thirsty crops to partial-season irrigation to full-season fallowing.

Map showing general locations of proposed SCPP projects in Colorado. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board
Map showing general locations of proposed SCPP projects in Colorado. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board
Summary of SCPP project proposals in Colorado by basin. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board
Summary of SCPP project proposals in Colorado by basin. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board

In January, the federal government and the UCRC, which represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, signed an agreement providing $125 million in federal funding over a three-year period to pay for the initiative.

Last week, the CWCB, the state’s lead agency for water planning, designated the SCPP as an official conservation program under state law, meaning that growers who participate would not be penalized or see their water rights harmed.

The applications were made by agricultural producers in the Yampa, White, Colorado, Gunnison and San Juan/Dolores river basins, according to the CWCB. Each basin is a major tributary to the seven-state Colorado River system.

Reducing farm and ranch water is considered critical to helping stabilize the river because agriculture consumes about 80% of the river’s supplies.

Each year millions of acre-feet of Colorado River water are used to grow crops across the basin. How much the pilot program might help reduce that amount has yet to be determined. The 8,334-plus acre-feet of water savings represented in the Colorado applications is remarkably little, and could indicate that growers are skeptical about the program, officials said.

“That the pilot program has attracted few applications is an indicator that the prices the UCRC is offering, $150 an acre-foot, are too low,” said Jennifer Gimbel, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior who also served as a director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

Another issue, Gimbel said, is that the SCPP water will be left in the Colorado River to benefit the whole system, rather than being transported to Lake Powell, where it could be held for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.

“There is no protection for this [SCPP] water,” Gimbel said. “It could go directly to the Lower Basin states. There might be [Upper Basin] farmers out there saying ‘why bother?’”

Last summer, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton ordered the Colorado River Basin states to come up with a consensus plan to cut water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet.

This Upper Basin pilot program is one effort to help do that, at least in the short term.

In Colorado, however, critics say the process has moved too fast to allow proper in-state review. And they say that the CWCB’s and the UCRC’s failure to make applications public, so that they can be reviewed by taxpayers and water districts who oversee those irrigation systems, raises questions about the program’s transparency.

Steve Wolff manages the Durango-based Southwestern Water Conservation District, one of the districts which sought to review applications within its boundaries. Wolff said his district wants a chance to determine if other water users would be harmed by the federally funded fallowing program.

He said that CWCB Director Becky Mitchell, who also serves as the Colorado Commissioner on the UCRC, failed to honor a commitment made last year to allow the Southwestern district, along with the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River District, to review the applications and approve them based on their criteria, not just the criteria of the Upper Colorado River Commission.

“It needed to be an open and transparent process,” Wolff said. “Everybody should be allowed to see these. It’s public money and that should allow a public review process.”

Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. But in a river district board meeting March 16, Mueller also said he was disappointed at the change in the review process.

“That was disturbing to us,” Mueller said, “because it is a reversal from a commitment made by the commissioner last December.”

Chris Arend, public information officer for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and a spokesperson for Mitchell, declined to comment on that point, but said in an e-mailed statement that Mitchell and the CWCB would give the districts the same opportunity to comment on the applications as the CWCB was being given.

And Mitchell said at last week’s CWCB meeting that she would work to have applications that have been redacted to protect private information released to the public eventually.

Gimbel said this SCPP will help show that agricultural water users can conserve water.

But she said the Upper Basin should move forward with what is known as a demand management program, something the states are working on that would free up water to fill a special 500,000 acre-foot drought pool in Lake Powell, where the water would be saved for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.

“To me this [SCPP] is a great first step,” Gimbel said. “But it is going to cost more and require more political will” to craft a long-term agricultural water conservation program that will help stabilize the Colorado River and keep water in Lake Powell for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Fines for breaking US pollution laws can vary widely among states – that may violate the Constitution

By
The Conversation US
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The Clean Water Act was meant to keep pollution out of U.S. waters.
David McNew/Getty Images

By Jerry Anderson, Drake University

It’s expensive to pollute the water in Colorado. The state’s median fine for companies caught violating the federal Clean Water Act is over US$30,000, and violators can be charged much more. In Montana, however, most violators get barely a slap on the wrist – the median fine there is $300.

Similarly, in Virginia, the typical Clean Water Act violation issued by the state is $9,000, while across the border in North Carolina, the median is around $600.

Even federal penalties vary significantly among regions. In the South (EPA Region 6) the median Clean Water Act penalty issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional office is $10,000, while in EPA Region 9 (including California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii), the median is over six times as high.

We discovered just how startling the differences are in a new study, published in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. My colleague Amy Vaughan and I reviewed 10 years of EPA data on penalties issued under the Clean Water Act.

There is a relatively simple solution, and another good reason to implement it: These disparities may violate the U.S. Constitution.

Why such big differences?

We think the main reason for the differences is that the EPA has not fulfilled its duty to require robust state enforcement.

Many federal environmental statutes – including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and toxic substances laws – enable the EPA to delegate enforcement to state agencies. In fact, state agencies undertake the vast majority of enforcement actions of these federal laws.

However, the EPA is supposed to delegate enforcement only to states that are deemed capable of taking on this responsibility, including having the ability to issue permits and conduct inspections. Importantly, the states must have laws authorizing an agency or the courts to impose sufficient penalties on violators.

Water spills out of a pipe into a river.
Federal laws like the Clean Water Act helped end corporate practices of pouring toxic wastewater into rivers, as this paper plant was doing near International Falls, Minn., in 1937.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Most state delegations occurred long ago, in the 1970s and ‘80s, shortly after Congress passed these major environmental statutes. In 1978, EPA decided that it would require states to have a minimum of $5,000-per-day penalty authority before they would be delegated enforcement power for the Clean Water Act. Forty-five years later, that required minimum is still the same.

In contrast, the Clean Water Act gives the EPA and federal courts much higher penalty authority – it started at $25,000 per day and, because of congressionally mandated annual inflation adjustments, had risen to $56,540 by the end of 2022.

That difference shows up in the fines: We found the average penalty issued by states is about $35,000, while the average penalty issued by the federal EPA is over five times as high at $186,000. The median state penalty is $4,000, while the median federal penalty is almost $30,000. While the EPA tends to be involved in the most serious cases, we believe low state penalties can also be traced to more lenient state penalty provisions.

In some cases, penalty differences might have a legitimate explanation. However, the degree of disparity among statutes and penalties that we found with the Clean Water Act suggests the U.S. doesn’t have uniform federal environmental law. And that can run afoul of the Constitution.

A question of unconstitutional unfairness

The EPA has the power to require states to have more robust penalty provisions, more in line with federal penalties. The EPA also can provide better guidance to the states about how those penalties should be calculated. Without guidance, virtually any penalty could be justified.

As an environmental law expert, I believe the U.S. Constitution requires EPA to take these steps.

A basic tenet of fairness holds that like cases should be treated alike. In federal criminal law, for example, sentencing guidelines help limit the disparity that can result from unlimited judicial discretion.

Unfortunately, environmental law doesn’t have a similar system to provide uniform treatment of pollution violations by government agencies. Extreme penalties, at both the high and low ends, may result.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that disparate fines can reach a degree of randomness that violates the fairness norms embodied in the due process clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In a case in the 1990s, the Supreme Court determined that a $4 million punitive damage award in a complaint involving only $4,000 in actual damages violated the due process clause. The court held that the amount of punitive damages imposed must bear some relationship to the actual harm caused by the conduct. Moreover, the court noted that punitive damages must be reasonable when compared to penalties imposed on others for comparable misconduct.

I believe the same test should apply to environmental penalties.

Unless we have some uniform system of calculating penalty amounts, the discretion allowed results in vastly different penalties for similar conduct. Our study focused on the Clean Water Act, but the results should trigger more research to determine whether these issues arise in other environmental areas, such as the Clean Air Act or hazardous waste laws.

The comparatively lenient enforcement we discovered in some states is not only unfair, it’s ultimately bad for the environment.The Conversation

Jerry Anderson is Dean and Professor of Law at Drake University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Is the Western drought finally ending? That depends on where you look

By
The Conversation US
-

 

California’s snowpack was more than twice the average in much of the state in early March 2023.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

By Dan McEvoy, Desert Research Institute

After three years of extreme drought, the Western U.S. is finally getting a break. Mountain ranges are covered in deep snow, and water reservoirs in many areas are filling up following a series of atmospheric rivers that brought record rain and snowfall to large parts of the region.

Many people are looking at the snow and water levels and asking: Is the drought finally over?

There is a lot of nuance to the answer. Where you are in the West and how you define “drought” make a difference. As a drought and water researcher at the Desert Research Institute’s Western Regional Climate Center, here’s what I’m seeing.

How fast each region recovers will vary

The winter of 2023 has made a big dent in improving the drought and potentially eliminating the water shortage problems of the last few summers.

I say “potentially” because in many areas, a lot of the impacts of drought tend to show up in summer, once the winter rain and snow stop and the West starts relying on reservoirs and streams for water. Spring heat waves like the ones we saw in 2021 or rain in the mountains could melt the snowpack faster than normal.

A US map shows heavy rain across much of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Arizona
Atmospheric rivers in January brought heavy rain across large parts of the West. Another powerful storm system hit in March.
Climate.gov

California and the Great Basin

In California, the state’s three-year precipitation deficit was just about erased by the atmospheric rivers that caused so much flooding in December and January. By March, the snowpack across the Sierra Nevada was well above the historical averages – and more than 200% of average in some areas. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced it was ending emergency water restrictions for nearly 7 million people on March 15.

It seems as though most of the surface water drought – drought involving streams and reservoirs – could be eliminated by summer in California and the Great Basin, across Nevada and western Utah.

Two images of Lake Oroville, from November 2022 to late January 2023 show a sharp decline in water levels and a wide ring around the edge.
The early 2023 storms likely could have filled Lake Oroville, one of California’s largest reservoirs. But reservoirs are also essential for flood management, so managers balance how much water to retain and how much to release.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin

But that’s only surface water. Drought also affects groundwater, and those effects will take longer to alleviate.

Studies in California have shown that, even after wet years like 2017 and 2019, the groundwater systems did not fully recover from the previous drought, in part because of years of overpumping groundwater for agriculture, and the aquifers were not fully recharging.

In that sense, the drought is not over. But at the broader scale for the region, a lot of the drought impacts that people experience will be lessened or almost gone by this summer.

The Colorado River Basin

Similar to the Sierra Nevada, the Upper Colorado River Basin – Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and northwestern New Mexico – has a healthy snowpack this year, and it’s looking like a very good water year there.

Map showing highest snow water equivalent in California, the Great Basin and Arizona
The snow water equivalent, a measure of snowpack, was over 200% of average in several areas on March 21, 2023.
Drought.gov

But one single good water year is not going to fill Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Most of the region relies on those two reservoirs, which have declined to worrying levels over the past two decades.

Two good water years won’t do it either. Over the next decade, most years will have to be above average to begin to fill those giant reservoirs. Rising temperatures and drying will make that even harder.

So, that system is still going to be dealing with a lot of the same long-term drought impacts that it has been seeing. The reservoirs will likely rise some, but nowhere close to capacity.

The Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest isn’t having as much rain and snow, and it’s a little drier there. But it’s close to average, so there’s not a huge concern there, at least not right now.

Forests, range land and the fire risk

Drought can also have longer-term impacts on ecosystems, particularly forest health.

The Sierra Nevada range has seen large-scale tree die-offs with the drought in recent years, including in northern areas around Lake Tahoe and Reno that weren’t as affected by the previous drought. Whether the recent die-offs there are due to the severity of the current drought or lingering effects from the past droughts is an open question.

Even with a wet winter, it’s not clear how soon the forests will recover.

Rangelands, since they are mostly grasses, can recover in a few months. The soil moisture is really high in a lot of these areas, so range conditions should be good across the West – at least going into summer.

Dead and dying trees with yellow needles on a forest ridge.
Drought and bark beetles have killed millions of trees across California in recent years, contributing to wildfire risk.
David McNew/Getty Images

If the West has another really hot, dry summer, however, the drought could ramp up again, particularly in the Northwest and California. And then communities will have to think about fire risk.

Right now, there’s a below-normal likelihood of big fires in the Southwest for early spring due to lots of soil moisture and snowpack.

In the higher-elevation mountains and forests, the above-average snowpack is likely to last longer than it has in recent years, so those regions will likely have a later start to the fire season. But lower elevations, like the Great Basin’s shrub- and grassland-dominated ecosystem, could see fire danger starting earlier in the year if the land dries out.

Long-term outlooks aren’t necessarily reliable

By a lot of atmospheric measures, California appears to be coming out of drought, and the drought feels like it’s ending elsewhere. But it’s hard to say when exactly the drought is over. Studies suggest the West’s hydroclimate is becoming more variable in its swings from drought to deluge.

Drought is also hard to forecast, particularly long term. Researchers can get a pretty good sense of conditions one month out, but the chaotic nature of the atmosphere and weather make longer-range outlooks less reliable.

We saw that this year. The initial forecast was for a dry winter 2023 in much of the West. But in California, Arizona and New Mexico, the opposite happened.

Seasonal forecasts tend to rely heavily on whether it’s an El Niño or La Niña year, involving sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific that can affect the jet stream and atmospheric conditions around the world. During La Niña – the pattern we saw from 2020 until March 2023 – the Southwest tends to be drier and the Pacific Northwest wetter.

 

NOAA explains El Niño and La Niña.

But that pattern doesn’t always set up in exactly the same way and in the same place, as we saw this year.

There is a lot more going on in the atmosphere and the oceans on a short-term scale that can dominate the La Niña pattern. This year’s series of atmospheric rivers has been one example.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 22, 2023, with the latest snowpack map.The Conversation

Dan McEvoy is Associate Research Professor in Climatology at the Desert Research Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Little information released on conservation-program proposals

By
Aspen Journalism
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The main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. The Upper Colorado River Commission has released few details of proposals for a system conservation program designed to boost water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

By Heather Sackett

Upper Colorado River Basin water managers have released little information so far about the Colorado proposals submitted for a conservation program, raising concerns about the approval process of the program, which aims to dole out $125 million in federal taxpayer money.

The Colorado Water Conservation Board on March 22 posted on its website the heavily redacted applications for 22 projects that meet the preliminary criteria for approval in a rebooted System Conservation Program (SCP). But in addition to redacting the applicants’ personal identifying information, nearly everything else has been blacked out as well: the location of the projects, such as which streams and ditches are involved; details of the water rights involved; and how much the applicants are asking to be paid for their water. (Here is an example of one of the applications.)

The Colorado River Water Conservation District wrote a memo and discussed the issue at a board meeting Thursday. The state and the Upper Colorado River Commission, which is administering the program, had invited the River District and the public to provide input on the project proposals. But with so little information available, the River District said that is impossible.

“Most, if not all, substantive details are blacked out,” the memo reads. “Thus, it is not possible to provide meaningful analysis of the applications, including whether implementation of the individual proposals would cause injury to other West Slope water users.”

River District General Manager Andy Mueller said his organization, which advocates for water users across 15 Western Slope counties, has concerns about the lack of a public process.

“At this point, that program is not something the district is going to have the capacity to weigh in on in any substantive manner,” he said. “We are proceeding to prepare comments from the district to the UCRC in terms of our concerns about how this process happened… It’s not the way we wish it had been to say the least.”

Becky Mitchell, CWCB executive director and state commissioner to the UCRC, had promised that the River District and Southwestern Water Conservation District would have a say in the approval of project proposals within their boundaries. The River District then developed criteria to evaluate projects, which included who could benefit from program money and preventing too much participation in a single basin. But on March 10, Mitchell walked back her commitment, saying only the UCRC could approve projects, using its own criteria.

The SCP was restarted this year as part of the UCRC’s 5-Point Plan, which is aimed at protecting critical elevations in the nation’s two largest and depleted reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The program will be paid for with $125 million in federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and will pay water users in the upper basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — to cut back. The original SCP, which ran from 2015 to 2018, saved an estimated 47,000 acre-feet of water, at a cost of about $8.6 million. For the renewed program, the UCRC set a baseline price of $150 per acre-foot of water saved, but applicants can ask for more.

Paying water users to irrigate less has long been controversial on the Western Slope, with fears that these temporary and voluntary programs could lead to a permanent “buy and dry” situation that would negatively impact rural farming and ranching communities.

This ditch in the Yampa River basin is used to irrigate fields. A handful of West Slope agricultural water users have submitted proposals to be paid to use less water as part of a rebooted system conservation program.

Officials say more information to come

CWCB and UCRC officials say more details of the projects will be made available after they are approved and contracts are in place. The UCRC is set to consider the proposals at an April 10 meeting.

The decision to redact nearly all the information in the applications was a result of a conversation among the UCRC commissioners, said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom.

“There was a discussion, and that’s what the four state commissioners were comfortable sharing at this time,” Cullom said.

According to Amy Ostdiek, CWCB section chief for Interstate, Federal and Water Information, the final implementation agreements and verification plans might look different — after analysis, revisions and back-and-forth with UCRC consultant Wilson Water Group and the applicant — from what was initially proposed. That is part of the reason the information in the proposals is not yet public, she said.

“We, frankly, didn’t want to make a bunch of personal information about our water users or their property, their water rights or how they value them public until we knew we were moving forward with the project,” Ostdiek said. “If they are providing a lot of information that doesn’t get incorporated,… we didn’t want to release that personal information when it wouldn’t be part of a project anyway.”

Ostdiek said the UCRC received more than 80 proposals for projects across the upper basin states. Thirty-six of those were in Colorado, and 22 so far have been given preliminary approval. Those 22 projects (one of which involves land in Wyoming) are estimated to involve 5,800 acres of land and save up to 9,618 acre-feet of water. Most propose halting irrigation for at least part of, if not the entire, season. Ostdiek said the state and division engineers at the Department of Water Resources are reviewing the proposals to make sure projects don’t cause injury to other water users.

Ostdiek said the approval process by the UCRC would be different from that of CWCB, which was narrow and simply designated SCP as a “state-approved conservation program” so that participants could be protected from Colorado’s “use it or lose it” law.

“(The UCRC) will be looking at individual projects,” she said. “It will be a different process than what our board did.”

Both Ostdiek and Cullom said more information will be publicly available after the approval process, but exactly what information that will be is unclear.

“We need to coordinate with the other three upper division states,” Ostdiek said. “We are still kind of working through these issues, but I think it’s fair to say more information will be available once these projects are contracted.”

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Urban Water Conservation Success in the Colorado River Basin

By
Eos
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A sign in front of a rock and a plant. Snow covers the ground.
A section of a Colorado Springs Utilities Water-Wise Neighborhood demonstration garden displays plants that require very little water. Credit: Jane Palmer

By Jane Palmer

Nevada lawmakers are considering a bold step to ensure that Las Vegas’s basic water needs will continue to be met in the near future. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), which manages the city’s water, is seeking authority, through a sweeping omnibus bill, to cap a single family’s residential water use in southern Nevada to about 160,000 gallons (600,000 liters) annually.

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“If approved, this provision would really only affect our community’s largest water users,” said SNWA spokesperson Bronson Mack—“that top 20% of residential water users who use more than 35% of all water delivered to the residential sector.”

This latest development is just one of the ways the authority has sought to protect its community’s access to water. And it’s been so successful in its mission that in the past 20 years, southern Nevada has reduced water consumption from Lake Mead by about 30%, even as the area’s population increased by more than 750,000. When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared a shortage of water in the Colorado River in 2021, the region and the city handled the 25,000-acre-foot (1.2-million-liter) reduction of their water supply in 2022 with relative ease.

An aerial view of Lake Mead. The bathtub rings reveal the declining water levels. Credit: Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Despite the megadrought in the U.S. West and the fact that the Colorado River’s flow is shrinking fast, it’s been a similar story in other cities in the Colorado River Basin. Colorado Springs, Colo., a city of more than half a million, uses the same amount of water it did in the 1980s, even though its population has nearly doubled. In 2020, per capita residential water use in Tucson, Ariz., was down by about 32% from its average in 1996.

“This is a desert, and we should live like we are in a desert by being efficient with the limited water supply we have.”

The water conservation success in these basin cities has been attributed to a mix of incentives, regulations, tiered water pricing, and education. Raising awareness about water scarcity and the natural environment has proved key—especially in Las Vegas, which receives only about 4 inches (110 millimeters) of rainfall per year, said Zane Marshall, director of SNWA’s water resources department. “This is a desert, and we should live like we are in a desert by being efficient with the limited water supply we have,” he said.

Embracing the Natural Environment

Currently, 40% of Colorado’s municipal and industrial water use goes toward outdoor irrigation, and the majority of that outdoor use goes toward watering turfgrass—the thick, dense grass that carpets lawns, golf courses, sports fields, and playgrounds. But bright green grass isn’t native to Colorado.

Consequently, in Colorado Springs, the second-largest city in the state, there’s been a focus on encouraging householders and businesses to convert nearly 1.8 million square feet (168,000 square meters) of turfgrass to the natural vegetation of the landscape. Although Colorado Springs Utilities’ primary goal is to conserve water, it also strives to create an urban environment that people can enjoy.

“We want to make sure that the landscapes are healthy and attractive while providing all the ecosystem services that urban landscapes need to provide,” said Julia Gallucci, a Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation supervisor.

To that end, the utility has two Water-Wise Neighborhood demonstration gardens where they test many plant species, including 11 grasses, to determine water use and climate adaptability. Visitors can stroll through the gardens or view photos online and learn how to practice water-conscious landscaping.

A garden with short and tall bushes and a stone path
The Water-Wise demonstration gardens in Colorado Springs display a range of natural plants, shrubs, and grasses that require little irrigation. Credit: Colorado Springs Utilities

In southern Nevada, the water authority has capitalized on its proximity to Lake Mead and Colorado River water. Virtually every drop of the community’s indoor water use is treated and then returned to Lake Mead. Every gallon returned acts as a credit against the region’s water allocation for the year. “It’s a unique situation in that the community’s indoor water use doesn’t negatively impact the available water supply,” Marshall said.

In Tucson, the city is using rainfall to bolster its water supply. Although, like Las Vegas, Tucson is a desert city, it receives more rainfall, mostly in the monsoon season. In 2012, Tucson Water started a program to rebate homeowners up to $2,000 for the purchase of rainwater-collecting equipment or the adoption of landscape design systems that could capture rainfall.

“It’s a way to augment the supply, while naturally the city is focusing on using less water,” said Susanna Eden, research and outreach programs officer of the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center.

The idea is to integrate the harvested water with cultivating desert-adapted plants. In 2013, the city implemented a Green Streets policy, requiring that new and reconstructed roadways be designed to harvest the 10.6 inches (270 millimeters) of rainfall the city gets per year to sustain such plants near the road. “That meant that the city itself was practicing what it was advocating for other people,” Eden said.

Lessons for Future Savings

Cities account for only a fraction of the total water drawn throughout the Colorado River Basin. Eighty percent of the water in the basin feeds agriculture, and thermoelectric power and mining also withdraw some of the river’s water. Some of the lessons gleaned from urban water conservation efforts could inform other water users in the basin. For example, getting everyone to the table in water discussions and educating parties on both the crisis and possible ways forward have proved essential in the success of conserving water in southern Nevada, Marshall said.

“Efficiency is the most cost-effective source of water for us, and it will ensure that we don’t need to develop more water supplies.”

Gallucci concurred. Colorado Springs Utilities’ goal is to cultivate urban landscapes that need watering, on average, only 1 day a week. Hitting that target in the next 20 years will require education for the entire community, she said. “The switch to native vegetation is really beautiful, and it could mean less maintenance over time, but you have to have the right formula,” she said. “We don’t want people to fail because they were trying to do the right thing.”

Measuring how water is used and identifying any inefficiencies are also important in continuing to improve water conservation, whether in cities or on farmland, Gallucci said. In cities, these types of measurements need to take place from the distribution system all the way through to the customers so that every loose end, every inefficiency, can be tightened up. “Efficiency is the most cost-effective source of water for us, and it will ensure that we don’t need to develop more water supplies,” Gallucci said.

Rebates, incentives, and retrofits all cost money, but in the Colorado River Basin, it’s a case of pay now or pay later, Marshall said. So it is best to invest in water savings strategies as soon as possible. “The cost of bringing in water from elsewhere is way more expensive than conservation,” he said. “Conservation is our least expensive form of water.”

—Jane Palmer (@JanePalmerComms), Science Writer

Travel for this article was supported by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative based at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Colorado places 9th in national water conservation ranking

By
Fresh Water News
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Lawn sizes in Castle Rock are sharply limited to save water, with some homeowners opting to use artificial turf for convenience and to help keep water bills low. Oct. 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
Lawn sizes in Castle Rock are sharply limited to save water, with some homeowners opting to use artificial turf for convenience and to help keep water bills low. Oct. 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News

By Jerd Smith

As Western states prepare to double down on saving water, in part to help save the Colorado River, a new ranking shows Colorado in ninth place nationwide for its water-saving laws and policies, and in fourth place among states in the Colorado River Basin.

The ranking, produced by the Chicago-based Alliance for Water Efficiency (AWE), analyzes state policies designed to encourage, or mandate, wise use of water.

Ron Burke, president of AWE, said little progress has been made nationwide since the rankings began in 2012 and with climate change and drought, especially in the West, more work needs to be done quickly.

“Kudos to Colorado and the other states who made the top 10, but Colorado has room for improvement,” Burke said.

Colorado earned 42.5 points out of 89. In its scorecard, AWE recommends the state do more to require drought response plans, reduce water loss in utility delivery systems, and require water rate structures that encourage conservation.

The national average in the rankings was 23 out of 89.

Kevin Reidy is a state water conservation specialist at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. An adviser to AWE for the ranking project, Reidy said the scorecard is a valuable tool, but doesn’t capture everything Colorado does at the state level.

“The scorecard focuses mostly on state laws and less on state-level incentives and collaboration. Even though Colorado is quite successful in driving state water efficiency policy through cooperative means, we usually don’t rank as high as those states that mandate water efficiency more often,” Reidy said in a statement.

“I think the scorecard is a good tool for state law assessment but in Colorado where we tend to collaborate more than legislate, it might not capture everything that is occurring,” he said.

In January the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved a major update to the Colorado Water Plan, a broad-based set of guidelines designed to help address looming water shortages. The state has also recently formed a new task force designed to look at ways to reduce water use on landscapes.

Still, these days the big question in the American West is how quickly and by how much the seven states in the Colorado River Basin (CRB), Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, can reduce water use, as demanded last year by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

In the Colorado River Basin, Colorado came in behind the top-ranked California, Arizona and Nevada on AWE’s scorecard.

The ongoing drought, widely believed to be the worst in 1,200 years, has already forced cutbacks in the region, but much more work remains.

“The CRB states, out of necessity, are doing comparatively well,” AWE’s Burke said. “What [Reclamation] has said is cut water use by 20% in the CRB because there is just not enough water. That means there has to be a net savings, not just less water use per capita. It’s going to have to be less water actually used.”

The scorecard looks only at state-level water policies, rather than the policies and programs adopted by local governments and local water utilities. In Colorado many of these entities have already adopted water loss initiatives, rate structures that encourage conservation and drought response plans.

Because Colorado, and many states, are so-called home-rule governments, states have limited authority to impose mandates on county and city governments.

Burke said the scorecard also doesn’t evaluate how much water each state and its communities actually use, in part because the data isn’t widely available, and because focusing on state-level policies is increasingly important, especially as the federal government channels billions of dollars to help conserve water and improve infrastructure nationwide.

“Water use and efficiency occurs largely at the local level, so this is an evaluation of how well states are helping local entities conserve water,” Burke said.

Diana Denwood is a water conservation specialist at Aurora Water and she was among the authors of a 2022 Colorado WaterWise report, the State of Water Conservation in Colorado, that focuses on local, individual water providers in Colorado. Colorado WaterWise is a nonprofit alliance of water providers and others that advocates for water conservation.

“In terms of what Colorado is doing, we are seeing that there are a lot of great water conservation programs that are being implemented by water providers. But of course there is always room for improvement,” Denwood said.

The WaterWise report found, among other things, that 23% of water providers surveyed do not have dedicated conservation staff and 58% do not have dedicated conservation budgets, other than staff time, to implement programs.

Colorado Springs Utilities is one of the largest municipal water suppliers in Colorado and, like others, is ramping up its water saving efforts because of drought, climate change and the crisis on the Colorado River.

Colorado Springs Utilities’ Julia Gallucci, water conservation supervisor, said AWE’s scorecard is an important component in evaluating how the U.S. is performing.

“This is a great data point related to water conservation. Most states are home rule states so it doesn’t measure how municipalities are doing. But I do think the more critical the resource becomes the more you have to have these measures at a statewide level regardless of home rule,” Gallucci said.

Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

As climate change and overuse shrink Lake Powell, the emergent landscape is coming back to life – and posing new challenges

By
The Conversation US
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The white ‘bathtub ring’ around Lake Powell, which is roughly 110 feet high, shows the former high water mark.
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer

By Daniel Craig McCool, University of Utah

As Western states haggle over reducing water use because of declining flows in the Colorado River Basin, a more hopeful drama is playing out in Glen Canyon.

Lake Powell, the second-largest U.S. reservoir, extends from northern Arizona into southern Utah. A critical water source for seven Colorado River Basin states, it has shrunk dramatically over the past 40 years.

An ongoing 22-year megadrought has lowered the water level to just 22.6% of “full pool,” and that trend is expected to continue. Federal officials assert that there are no plans to drain Lake Powell, but overuse and climate change are draining it anyway.

As the water drops, Glen Canyon – one of the most scenic areas in the U.S. West – is reappearing.

This landscape, which includes the Colorado River’s main channel and about 100 side canyons, was flooded starting in the mid-1960s with the completion of Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. The area’s stunning beauty and unique features have led observers to call it “America’s lost national park.”

Lake Powell’s decline offers an unprecedented opportunity to recover the unique landscape at Glen Canyon. But managing this emergent landscape also presents serious political and environmental challenges. In my view, government agencies should start planning for them now.

A tarnished jewel

Glen Canyon Dam, which towers 710 feet high, was designed to create a water “bank account” for the Colorado River Basin. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation touted Lake Powell as the “Jewel of the Colorado” and promised that it would be a motorboater’s paradise and an endless source of water and hydropower.

Lake Powell was so big that it took 17 years to fill to capacity. At full pool, it contained 27 million acre-feet of water – enough to cover 27 million acres of land to a depth of one foot – and Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines could generate 1,300 megawatts of power when the reservoir was high.

Soon the reservoir was drawing millions of boaters and water skiers every year. But starting in the late 1980s, its volume declined sharply as states drew more water from the Colorado River while climate change-induced drought reduced the river’s flow. Today the reservoir’s average volume is less than 6 million acre-feet.

Nearly every boat ramp is closed, and many of them sit far from the retreating reservoir. Hydropower production may cease as early as 2024 if the lake falls to “minimum power pool,” the lowest point at which the turbines can draw water. And water supplies to 40 million people are gravely endangered under current management scenarios.

These water supply issues have created a serious crisis in the basin, but there is also an opportunity to recover an amazing landscape. Over 100,000 acres of formerly flooded land have emerged, including world-class scenery that rivals some of the crown jewels of the U.S. national park system.

 

As Lake Powell recedes, it is uncovering formerly flooded land and things that past visitors left behind.

Bargained away

Glen Canyon made a deep impression on explorer John Wesley Powell when he surveyed the Colorado River starting in 1867. When Powell’s expedition floated through Glen Canyon in 1869, he wrote:

“On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed. So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features – carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments … past these towering monuments, past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour.”

Glen Canyon remained relatively unknown until the late 1940s, when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed several large dams on the upper Colorado River for irrigation and hydropower. Environmentalists fiercely objected to one at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border, alarmed by the prospect of building a dam in a national monument. Their campaign to block it succeeded – but in return they accepted a dam in Glen Canyon, a decision that former Sierra Club President David Brower later called his greatest regret.

New challenges

The first goal of managing the emergent landscape in Glen Canyon should be the inclusion of tribes in a co-management role. The Colorado River and its tributaries are managed through a complex maze of laws, court cases and regulations known as the “Law of the River.” In an act of stupendous injustice, the Law of the River ignored the water rights of Native Americans until courts stepped in and required western water users to consider their rights.

Tribes received no water allocation in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and were ignored or trivialized in subsequent legislation. Even though modern concepts of water management emphasize including all major stakeholders, tribes were excluded from the policymaking process.

There are 30 tribes in the Colorado River Basin, at least 19 of which have an association with Glen Canyon. They have rights to a substantial portion of the river’s flow, and there are thousands of Indigenous cultural sites in the canyon.

Another management challenge is the massive amounts of sediment that have accumulated in the canyon. “Colorado” means “colored red” in Spanish, a recognition of the silt-laden water. This silt used to build beaches in the Grand Canyon, just downstream, and created the Colorado River delta in Mexico.

But for the past 63 years, it has been accumulating in Lake Powell, where it now clogs some sections of the main channel and will eventually accumulate below the dam. Some of it is laced with toxic materials from mining decades ago. As more of the canyon is exposed, it may become necessary to create an active sediment management plan, including possible mechanical removal of some materials to protect public health.

The creation of Lake Powell also resulted in biological invasives, including nonnative fish and quagga mussels. Some of these problems will abate as the reservoir declines and a free-flowing river replaces stagnant still water.

On a more positive note, native plants are recolonizing side canyons as they become exposed, creating verdant canyon bottoms. Restoring natural ecosystems in the canyon will require innovative biological management strategies as the habitat changes back to a more natural landscape.

Finally, as the emergent landscape expands and side canyons recover their natural scenery, Glen Canyon will become a unique tourist magnet. As the main channel reverts to a flowing river, users will no longer need an expensive boat; anyone with a kayak, canoe or raft will be able to enjoy the beauty of the canyons.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which includes over 1.25 million acres around Lake Powell, was created to cater to people in motorized boats on a flat-water surface. Its staff will need to develop new capabilities and an active visitor management plan to protect the canyon and prevent the kind of crowding that is overrunning other popular national parks.

Other landscapes are likely to emerge across the West as climate change reshapes the region and numerous reservoirs decline. With proper planning, Glen Canyon can provide a lesson in how to manage them.The Conversation

Daniel Craig McCool is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Utah.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Calls grow for statewide water conservation standards; some cities skeptical

By
Fresh Water News
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Castle Rock Water Conservation Specialist Rick Schultz, third from the right, inspects and tests a new landscape watering system in Castle Rock, one of many Douglas County communities reliant on the shrinking Denver Aquifer. In a Fresh Water News analysis of water conservation data, Castle Rock leads the state, having reduced its use 12% since 2013. Oct. 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
Castle Rock Water Conservation Specialist Rick Schultz, third from the right, inspects and tests a new landscape watering system in Castle Rock, one of many Douglas County communities reliant on the shrinking Denver Aquifer. In a Fresh Water News analysis of water conservation data, Castle Rock leads the state, having reduced its use 12% since 2013. Oct. 21, 2020. Credit: Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News

By Allen Best

With the Colorado River crisis deepening and the warming climate continuing to rob streams and rivers of their flows, talk in Colorado has resumed about how to limit growing water demand statewide for residential use.

A new report commissioned by the Common Sense Institute and written by Colorado water veterans Jennifer Gimbel and Eric Kuhn, cites the need for broader conservation measures such as removing non-functional turf in new development, among other things.

“Lacking statewide or regional standards, home developers are free to choose cities with less strict conservation standards,” they wrote in the November 2022 report, “Adapting Colorado’s Water Systems for a 21st century Economy and Water Supply.”

“Regional approaches are needed,” they added in their broad-ranging report. They suggest regional conservancy and conservation districts might be a vehicle in lieu of statewide standards.

Gimbel, a senior scholar at CSU’s Water Center and former director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, and Kuhn, retired general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, summarized their findings last Friday in a presentation at the Colorado Water Congress Annual Convention. The water congress is a bi-partisan group representing dozens of water users across the state.

“We have to do more with less,” said Kuhn. He cited projected statewide population growth of 1.6 to 1.8 million new residents by 2050, most along the Front Range, but also the probability that the warming climate will make less water available, particularly from the Colorado River.

Kuhn warned that deliveries of water from the Colorado River Basin to the Front Range are by no means guaranteed. Several Front Range water providers, including Pueblo, Denver and Northern Water have at least some water rights that are younger, or more junior than those farther downstream in places such as California, and could be vulnerable if mandatory cutbacks ever occurred. Within individual states in the West, older water rights are typically fulfilled before younger water rights during times of scarcity, though it’s yet to be seen how mandatory cutbacks would materialize across the entire Colorado River Basin.

“Curtailment of those junior users is not acceptable at any time in the future,” said Kuhn.

Earlier during the conference, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called for a “comprehensive approach to housing to preserve our water resources.” He cited multiple benefits for revised land-use policies: reduced traffic, saved money for consumers and – most important, he added, it “limits demand on water resources.”

Polis said the Colorado Water Conservation Board will lead a task force on integrating land use and water demand. This 21-member Urban Landscape Conservation Task Force is to include representatives of 8 water utilities, 2 conservation districts, 2 environmental NGOs, with the balance to come from areas of expertise and interest such as stormwater, equity, and urban planning.

Local control, a basic precept of Colorado’s form of government, will also likely be an issue. Towns, cities and counties who are authorized to govern themselves in most cases, often resist state control in matters they believe should remain in local hands.

Aurora, if lately a shining light for turf removal and strict water conservation policies, harbors skepticism of any potential statewide mandates. “Aurora must retain control of what our city looks like,” says Greg Baker, Aurora Water’s spokesman.

Aurora is open to discussion but “it needs to be a proportional discussion,” says Baker. “We don’t want to tell agriculture how to use their water, but they account for 85% of water use in this state.”

In 2014, when Ellen Roberts, then a state senator from Durango, introduced a conservation bill, she found significant opposition.

Roberts said she introduced the bill, which did not pass, to get the conversation going in Colorado about stepped-up conservation programs. “My concern was that if we waited for that to happen naturally, it might never happen or it would be so slow it would have no meaningful impact,” she says.

This latest report was designed for the business community, says Gimbel, but with the understanding that it needed to include the water community. “It was our opportunity to tell the business community ‘pay attention, because what happens with water is going to affect our economy one way or another.’”

Allen Best grew up in eastern Colorado, where both sets of grandparents were farmers. Best writes about the energy transition in Colorado and beyond at BigPivots.com.

Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

State officials draft bill on stream restoration

By
Aspen Journalism
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This beaver dam analogue, with posts across the creek and soft, woody material woven across, was built by environmental restoration group EcoMetrics, keeps water on the landscape by mimicking beaver activity. The state Department of Natural Resources has penned draft legislation clarifying that this type of restoration project does not need a water right. CREDIT: JACKIE CORDAY
This beaver dam analogue, with posts across the creek and soft, woody material woven across, was built by environmental restoration group EcoMetrics, keeps water on the landscape by mimicking beaver activity. The state Department of Natural Resources has penned draft legislation clarifying that this type of restoration project does not need a water right. CREDIT: JACKIE CORDAY

By Heather Sackett

Colorado officials have drafted a bill aimed at addressing a tension between stream restoration projects and water rights holders.

The draft clarifies that restoration projects do not fall under the definitions of a diversion, storage or a dam and do not need to go through the lengthy and expensive water court process to secure a water right.

But before a project begins, proponents would have to file an information form with the state Division of Water Resources showing the project will stay within the historical footprint of the floodplain before it was degraded and doesn’t create new wetlands, the draft bill proposes. These forms would be publicly available, and anyone could then challenge whether the project meets the requirements by filing a complaint, which would be taken up by DWR staff.

If stream restoration projects were required to secure a water right and spend money on an expensive augmentation plan, in which water is released to replace depletions it causes, it could discourage these types of projects, something the state Department of Natural Resources wants to avoid.

“We are trying to make it clear that stream restoration projects do not fall under the definition of diversion,” said Kelly Romero-Heaney, the state’s assistant director for water policy. “However, we put limits on what a restoration project is or isn’t and the restoration project has to fall within the historical footprint of the stream system.”

This stream restoration project on Trail Creek, in the headwaters of the Gunnison River, mimics beaver activity. Some worry that projects like this have the potential to negatively impact downstream water rights.CREDIT: JACKIE CORDAY
This stream restoration project on Trail Creek, in the headwaters of the Gunnison River, mimics beaver activity. Some worry that projects like this have the potential to negatively impact downstream water rights. CREDIT: JACKIE CORDAY

Slowing the flow

Restoration projects on small headwaters tributaries often mimic beaver activity, with what are called beaver dam analogues. These temporary wood structures usually consist of posts driven into the streambed with willows and other soft materials woven across the channel between the posts. The idea is that by creating appealing habitat in areas that historically had beavers, the animals will recolonize and continue maintaining the health of the stream.

The goal of process-based restoration projects like these is to return conditions in the headwaters to what they were before waterways were harmed by mining, cattle grazing, road building and other human activities that may have confined the river to a narrow channel and disconnected it from its floodplain.

In these now-simplified stream systems, water, sediment and debris all move downstream more quickly, said Ellen Wohl, a fluvial geomorphologist at Colorado State University.

“Natural rivers have all these sources of variability,” Wohl said. “They have pools and riffles, meanderings, obstructions like wood and beaver dams. All those things can help slow the flow, which leads to less bed and bank erosion. It allows sediment to be deposited gradually along the channel, and you increase biological processing and recharge of ground water and soil moisture.”

Although these projects benefit the environment, improve water quality and create resiliency against wildfires and climate change, keeping water on the landscape for longer could potentially have impacts to downstream water users. Under Colorado’s system of prior appropriation, the oldest water rights — which nearly always belong to agriculture — have first use of the water.

Some are concerned that if the projects create numerous ponds in the headwaters, it could slow the rate of peak spring runoff or create more surface area for evaporation, meaning irrigators may not get their full amount of water.

John McClow is an attorney for the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District and is chair of a Colorado Water Congress sub-committee studying the bill, which will make suggestions to the bill’s sponsors. He said there have been wet meadow restoration projects in the headwaters of the Gunnison River that have harmed water rights holders.

“We had some examples of well-intentioned but poorly designed projects,” he said. “In each case we worked with water rights holders and removed the obstruction so their water rights were not impaired.”

McClow said he would like to see the bill set a standard to avoid problems at the outset of projects.

State Sen. Dylan Roberts, who represents District 8 and is chair of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, is one of the bill’s sponsors. He said part of the bill’s urgency is so that Colorado can take advantage of unprecedented federal funding for stream restoration from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

“If we can demonstrate to the federal government that we have a streamlined process for stream restoration projects, then we will make Colorado significantly more eligible for those federal funds,” Roberts said. “We are trying our best to position our state to receive the resources that we deserve.”

Roberts, a Democrat whose Western Slope district includes Eagle, Garfield, Grand, Moffat, Rio Blanco, Routt and Summit counties, expects the bill to be introduced later this month.

Romero-Heaney said the state’s system of water law works well because it is adaptable to the evolving needs of Coloradans. The stream restoration legislation aims to reduce barriers to projects while still protecting water rights.

“We are at that moment where we need to make a decision: Do we want to have a future with healthy streams that are providing all those environmental services, or do we want to make that future pretty difficult to achieve?” she said. “It’s a soul-searching conversation for the water community.”

Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times. This story ran in the Feb. 5 edition of The Aspen Times, the Vail Daily, the Glenwood Springs Post-Independent and the Feb. 6 editions of the Grand Junction Sentinel and Steamboat Pilot & Today.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

Why rain on snow in the California mountains worries scientists

By
The Conversation US
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A series of atmospheric rivers in early 2023 covered the Sierra Nevada in snow. Mario Tama/Getty Images

By Keith Musselman, University of Colorado Boulder

Another round of powerful atmospheric rivers is hitting California, following storms in January and February 2023 that dumped record amounts of snow. This time, the storms are warmer, and they are triggering flood warnings as they bring rain higher into the mountains – on top of the snowpack.

Professor Keith Musselman, who studies water and climate change at the University of Colorado’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, explained the complex risks rain on snow creates and how they might change in a warming climate.

What happens when rain falls on snowpack?

For much of the United States, storms with heavy rainfall can coincide with seasonal snow cover. When that happens, the resulting runoff of water can be much greater than what is produced from rain or snowmelt alone. The combination has resulted in some of the nation’s most destructive and costly floods, including the 1996 Midwest floods and the 2017 flood that damaged California’s Oroville Dam.

Contrary to common belief, rainfall itself has limited energy to melt snow. Rather, it is the warm temperatures, strong winds and high humidity, which can transport substantial energy in the form of latent and sensible heat, that predominantly drive snowmelt during rain-on-snow events.

Snowpack has air spaces that water can move through. As the rain falls, the water can travel relatively rapidly through the snowpack’s layers to reach the underlying soil. How streams respond to that runoff depends on how much water is already flowing and how saturated the soil is.

When the soil isn’t yet saturated, it can dampen or delay a flood response by soaking up rain and melting snow. But when the ground is saturated, snowmelt combined with rain can lead to fast and devastating flooding.

One of the challenges for dealing with these rain-on-snow events is that the flood risk is hard to forecast.

To predict whether a flood will occur requires knowledge of weather and hydrological conditions. It requires knowing the soil moisture and snowpack conditions before the storm, the elevation at which rain transitions to snow, the rainfall rate, the wind speed, air temperature and humidity, and estimates of how those factors contribute to snowmelt. Additionally, each factor varies in time during a storm and varies in complex ways, especially across a mountainous landscape.

This is why rain-on-snow floods are characterized as compound extreme events. Despite the extensive damage they can cause, it may be surprising how little is known about how they vary in time, spatial extent and intensity.

California is getting another atmospheric river, with more rain on snow expected. How does the rain-on-snow effect differ by elevation in the mountains there?

In the California mountains right now, it’s the middle elevations that people need to pay attention to.

The lower elevations have primarily seen rainfall rather than snow, so there is less snowpack to melt. And in the highest elevations, colder temperatures promote the continued accumulation of deep snowpack and rainfall is less likely.

In the middle transition zone – where either substantial rainfall or snowfall can occur – rain-on-snow events are most common, causing both melting and risk of roof collapses.

If all storms were created equal, there would be well-defined rain zones and snow zones, and the rain-on-snow flood risk would be low. But that isn’t what happens. Instead, not only does the snow zone elevation vary during an event, but it also varies substantially from one storm to the next.

The most destructive rain-on-snow events occur when rivers are already running high and soils are saturated, which can occur in response to a series of warm atmospheric rivers interacting with a deep snowpack – like California’s mountains have right now. The order in which these storms occur – or the storm sequencing – is especially important for assessing flood risk because these events are, in part, caused by rapid shifts between cold periods of snow accumulation followed by warm rainfall events.

What does research show about the future risk of rain-on-snow events in a warming climate?

Even less is known about how rain-on-snow flood risk may respond as the planet warms.

In a warmer climate, there will be less risk of rain falling on snow in the lower elevations as the snowpack declines, particularly in warmer regions such as the Pacific Northwest.

But at higher elevations, more frequent rain-on-snow events are expected. While warmer temperatures are expected to increase rainfall intensity, research shows that’s not the most important driver of this risk. Much of the expected increase in rain-on-snow flood risk is a result of the rain-snow transition zone expanding higher in elevation to include alpine areas that historically received predominantly snowfall.

Flood control and reservoir management systems in these mountainous regions will have to consider these future changes in rain-on-snow events – in addition to changes in rainfall intensity and storm sequencing – to fully understand and prepare for the local flood risk as the planet warms.

So, will projected increases in precipitation extremes and winter rainfall increase rain-on-snow occurrence and the associated flood risk? Or will less snow cover and larger soil moisture deficits reduce rain-on-snow flood risk in a warmer climate?

In a future climate, the response of rain-on-snow flood risk is expected to change in complex and often contradictory ways. The projected changes are likely to vary by region, season, climate model, emissions scenario and future time horizon. It’s a costly risk that requires more research.

Keith Musselman is Assistant Professor in Geography, Mountain Hydrology, and Climate Change at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.

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