California WaterBlog

by Robert M. Gailey and Jay R. Lund The historic drought in California from 2012 through 2016 brought unprecedented groundwater level declines and reports of dry domestic supply wells.  This was particularly true in the Central Valley. New research on … Continue reading →

by Eric Chapman, Emily Jacinto, and Peter Moyle 2017 was another good year for Chinook salmon in Putah Creek. Putah Creek is just a small stream flowing through Yolo and Solano counties, fed by releases of water from Lake Berryessa. … Continue reading →

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, water use limits as part of Executive Order B-37-16. Urban water utilities met … Continue reading →

by Peter Moyle, Carson Jeffres, John Durand The Delta is described in many ways.  When extolling the Delta as a tourist destination, it is described as a place of bucolic beauty; islands of productive farmland are threaded by meandering channels of … Continue reading →

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 from plants and evaporated from soil. Methods to estimate ET … Continue reading →

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 alternative conveyance for Sacramento River water might improve ecological … Continue reading →

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 experienced droughts from 2007 to 2009, and 2012 … Continue reading →

by Nan Frobish Governor Brown has unveiled a sweeping new strategy, “Brown is the New Gold,” to simultaneously make California more robust to drought, secure private water rights, buffer California’s growers against disastrous losses from a looming national trade war, … Continue reading →

“The truth is lost when there is too much contention about it.” – Publius Syrus (43 BC) by Jay Lund In 2016, California’s legislature passed AB 1755, the Open and Transparent Water Data Act, requiring that State agencies provide water … Continue reading →

It looks like 2018 will be a dry year, with snowpack about 50%.  How do engineers see the water glass in California?  Mostly the same as they did six years ago in the original version of this post, but we’ve … Continue reading →

by Brian Gray (PPIC Water Policy Center), William Stelle (former NOAA Fisheries West Coast Administrator), and Leon Szeptycki (Stanford University, Water in the West)* Introduction In a recent three-part series posted on this website, a group of independent experts (including one … Continue reading →

Jay Lund Despite this week’s rain and snow, California is back to dry conditions again after a very wet 2017.  With about four weeks left in the normal wet season, the Sacramento Valley is at about 65% of average precipitation … Continue reading →

by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation Improving Delta ecosystem functions under the State Water Board’s proposed Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan will require a complex series of changes to water and land management—and a strong science program to … Continue reading →

by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center* Recommendation By strategically linking freshwater flow releases with the management of tidal energy and investments in landscape changes in the Delta, it is possible to improve ecological food webs and habitat for native … Continue reading →

By Jay Lund, Ben Lord, Andrew Tweet, Wesley Walker, Chad Whittington, Reed Thayer, Jeff Laird, Quinn Hart, Nicholas Santos, William Fleenor, Julia Pavicic, Lauren Adams, and Bradley Arnold Drought often means not having enough water to satisfy all water-right holders. … Continue reading →

by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center Recommendation The State Water Resources Control Board and the parties seeking to incorporate voluntary settlement agreements in the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan should identify a specific, tractable set of problems that can … Continue reading →

by Dave Owen California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is known primarily for establishing statewide requirements for sustainable groundwater management.  But the statute did another important thing: it introduced an intriguing yet relatively rare model of state and local governance into … Continue reading →

by Jay Lund and Peter Moyle All parties in the Delta have an interest in a healthy ecosystem and in healthy water exports.  Without a healthy ecosystem, endangered species requirements increasingly intrude on water exports and Delta landowners.  Without healthy … Continue reading →

by Erik Porse Los Angeles is a grand American urban experiment. It brings emerging ideas into the mainstream, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. In the early 20th Century, it seemed fanciful to build a metropolis in a region … Continue reading →

by James Hobbs and Peter Moyle The results of 2017 surveys of Delta fishes are coming in. Already, the results are clear:  it was an unhappy year for Delta smelt. The wet year with high outflows should have created an … Continue reading →