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Impact Of A Warming Climate On The Sierra Nevada And California’s Water

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Tara Lohan

Imagine a California where springtime temperatures are 7F warmer than they are today, where snowmelt runoff comes 50 days earlier and the average snowpack is just 36 percent of the 1981–2000 average. That may be the reality by the end of the century if we don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions, say researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles. A recent report from the UCLA Center for Climate Science analyzes how climate change will impact the Sierra Nevada and what that will mean for water resources.

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California Considers Charge On Utility Bills To Create Safe Water Fund

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Tess Townsend

Gaps in funding for water treatment are a major problem in California. Water providers operate independently, relying virtually entirely on customer fees to cover costs. For agencies with scale, money and access to quality water sources, this model works well. But absent those resources, contamination persists for years without resolution.

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OPINION: How Colorado River Basin States Can Improve Water Efficiency

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Mary Ann Dickinson

These are difficult times on the Colorado River. Diminishing flows and population growth are exacerbating the already contentious Colorado River allocations among the Colorado River Basin states. To move forward, state-level legal frameworks will have to be strong and comprehensive to ensure that water from existing allocations is conserved, and that states are prepared for the inevitable climate-induced shortages. While efforts around these issues are in play in varying degrees among the Colorado River Basin states, there is still a lot of strengthening that can be done.

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Pressure Mounts To Solve California’s Toxic Farmland Drainage Problem

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Matt Weiser

Many Americans know the name Kesterson as the California site where thousands of birds and fish were discovered with gruesome deformities in 1983, a result of exposure to selenium-poisoned farm runoff. Thirty-five years later, it is one of the oldest unresolved water problems in the state. Selenium, a naturally occurring element, is essential to people and animals alike in small doses. But selenium continues pouring off many San Joaquin Valley farms in larger quantities, which can be toxic.

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To Manage California’s Groundwater, Think More About Surface Water

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Ian Evans

California’s 2014 legislation, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was significant in that it was the state’s first major groundwater regulation. But Michael Kiparsky the founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, says that it was also significant in another way. “It breaks with what had been decades of a legal fiction that groundwater and surface water were not part of a single hydrologic system,” he says. While rivers, lakes and other surface waters are often thought of – and regulated – separately from the groundwater below, the two are connected.

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