Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

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Hungary Jack
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Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Hungary Jack »

Well, maybe. But one study suggests that increasing water use and dwindling snowpack could suck the lake dry in 13 years.

But it's not necessarily global warming that is causing the change. The Colorado watershed historically run much drier than it has in recent decades, and certainly much drier than when the Colorado River flow was allocated among western states in a 1922 agreement.

Somewhere, Powell is saying "I told you so."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/us/13 ... nted=print
Lake Mead Could Be Within a Few Years of Going Dry, Study Finds
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The lake, located in Nevada and Arizona, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, the scientists say, if the demand for water remains unchanged and if human-induced climate change follows climate scientists’ moderate forecasts, resulting in a reduction in average river flows.

Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.

“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.”

He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary.”

The two researchers used data on river flows and reservoir levels from the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that manages the lower Colorado River and the reservoirs of Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Terry Fulp, manager of the bureau office for the lower Colorado River, said he disagreed with the paper’s assumption that global climate models were sensitive or refined enough to forecast regional effects.

Other recent research has shown that the watershed feeding the Colorado River has historically had a tendency to be far drier than it has been in the past century. The new study projects that changes foreseen in a warming world could well help tip the region back into its dry norm. The river, at the same time, is essentially oversubscribed.

Colorado River water was apportioned among seven Western states in 1922 based on river flow levels that have since proved to be unusually high. Last fall, federal officials reached an agreement with California, Arizona and Nevada — the three states that share the lower Colorado River flow — on how to allocate water if the river runs short.

The agreement, including measures to encourage conservation, was expected to forestall litigation among various claimants for the water. It was based on an assumption that the current flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, just south of Lake Powell, could fall short of demand by as much as 500,000 acre-feet a year. The two reservoirs last year were at about 50 percent of capacity.

The Scripps study indicates that the odds are that the shortfall will exceed 500,000 acre-feet a year long before 2026, when the new agreement runs out. The study has been accepted for publication in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Pat Mulroy, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said that she had not read the study but that the agreement the states and federal government reached last year included provisions to reconvene if the water losses went beyond what they originally envisioned.

“We have to protect our communities against the worst possibility,” Ms. Mulroy said. “We have 90 percent of our water supply coming from Lake Mead.”

Among the plans being pursued, she said, are conservation (“We’ve started down this journey to make a cultural transformation in this community where water isn’t something they take for granted”) and a design for a project to find a rechargeable groundwater supply unconnected to the Colorado River.

In connection with the agreement, the Bureau of Reclamation released an extensive environmental analysis of water flows and storage in the lower Colorado basin, but the analysis did not take into account the effects of climate change.

In the executive summary of the bureau’s analysis, the authors wrote that global climate change models could not be scaled to local effects. The report used more than 1,200 years of tree-ring data to determine the historical record of river flows.

“Based on the current inability to precisely project future impacts of climate change to runoff throughout the Colorado River basin at the spatial scale needed,” it said, effects of climate change were not considered.

The question of scaling global models to regions and subregions has troubled many climate scientists. Professor Barnett, when asked about the reliability of projecting such models on the Colorado basin, agreed that the basin “is still a relatively small area.”

“There is concern about the representativeness of it,” he said.

But, he added, he and a colleague recently published a separate study that looked at how well climate models predicted Colorado River flows, comparing the modeled results with tree-ring analysis. “The agreement was excellent,” Professor Barnett said. After reviewing the new study quickly, Mr. Fulp, of the Bureau of Reclamation, said, “Our view is that there are better ways of going about those studies that will give us a more precise, better estimate of what these risks would be.”

He added, “I don’t mean to call it a doom-and-gloom scenario, but it’s got a little hint of that.”

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ghostrunner
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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by ghostrunner »

I like the fountain in front of the Bellagio whenever I see it on TV, but it always struck me as a ridiculous thing to do in the middle of a desert.

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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

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Welcome to the life of Georgians for the past year. Our local lake, which provides water for Atlanta and surrounding communities, is about 19 feet below normal levels; due to increased usage, lack of rain and poor planning by governments and corps of engineers. Water is also released from this lake to Alabama and Florida (for various reasons). Georgia is now fighting with these states to reduce the amount of water released. In the meantime, folks who paid a ton of money for lake front property now have docks and boats sitting in mud! Fortunately, we have received higher than normal rain amounts this month, so we are very slowly gaining some ground. Our water restrictions (no watering lawns, washing cars, etc.) will remain in effect for quite some time.

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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by heyzeus »

Two factors at work: changing climate patterns and exploding populations in places that don't have the natural water supply to provide for them. I live in such a place, and right now former oilmen are buying up property that has rights to underground water aquifers, and building billion dollar water pipelines to cities that need it. You might ask what happens when those aquifers run dry, too. You'd be asking a question that nobody wants to know the answer to, so we casually ignore it. After all, that would be 30 years from now!

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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Hungary Jack »

Simbagal23 wrote:Welcome to the life of Georgians for the past year. Our local lake, which provides water for Atlanta and surrounding communities, is about 19 feet below normal levels; due to increased usage, lack of rain and poor planning by governments and corps of engineers. Water is also released from this lake to Alabama and Florida (for various reasons). Georgia is now fighting with these states to reduce the amount of water released. In the meantime, folks who paid a ton of money for lake front property now have docks and boats sitting in mud! Fortunately, we have received higher than normal rain amounts this month, so we are very slowly gaining some ground. Our water restrictions (no watering lawns, washing cars, etc.) will remain in effect for quite some time.
Are you writing of Lake Lanier? I read somewhere that it's about 30% of capacity right now. But Lake Lanier should fill up again once your rains return. I guess that drought has been running for 2 years. Funny thing is that last year saw Atlanta get 60% of its normal precip, but it still had 30 inches of it. Most areas of the Southwest call it a good year if the get more than 15.

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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by thrill »

ghostrunner wrote:I like the fountain in front of the Bellagio whenever I see it on TV, but it always struck me as a ridiculous thing to do in the middle of a desert.
I've noticed that here in the desert, water is the most popular decoration. There are fountains and artificial ponds everywhere.

The Bellagio thing is worth it, btw.

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Hungary Jack
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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Hungary Jack »

heyzeus wrote:Two factors at work: changing climate patterns and exploding populations in places that don't have the natural water supply to provide for them. I live in such a place, and right now former oilmen are buying up property that has rights to underground water aquifers, and building billion dollar water pipelines to cities that need it. You might ask what happens when those aquifers run dry, too. You'd be asking a question that nobody wants to know the answer to, so we casually ignore it. After all, that would be 30 years from now!
Jesus,

If you are interested in the subject, there is a great, great book by Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, that chronicles the history of water development in the west. It's basically the history of the BuRec. One of my favorite reads of all time. I read it every 2-3 years.

Simbagal23
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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Simbagal23 »

Hungary Jack wrote:
Simbagal23 wrote:Welcome to the life of Georgians for the past year. Our local lake, which provides water for Atlanta and surrounding communities, is about 19 feet below normal levels; due to increased usage, lack of rain and poor planning by governments and corps of engineers. Water is also released from this lake to Alabama and Florida (for various reasons). Georgia is now fighting with these states to reduce the amount of water released. In the meantime, folks who paid a ton of money for lake front property now have docks and boats sitting in mud! Fortunately, we have received higher than normal rain amounts this month, so we are very slowly gaining some ground. Our water restrictions (no watering lawns, washing cars, etc.) will remain in effect for quite some time.
Are you writing of Lake Lanier? I read somewhere that it's about 30% of capacity right now. But Lake Lanier should fill up again once your rains return. I guess that drought has been running for 2 years. Funny thing is that last year saw Atlanta get 60% of its normal precip, but it still had 30 inches of it. Most areas of the Southwest call it a good year if the get more than 15.
No, I'm not ready to write it off just yet. The corps of engineers is revising its current rules on water release.....GA, FL and AL will have to agree to it and abide by it. Lets face it, we're a nation of water hogs...a drought like this brought it to our (and the nations) attention. Some conservation and a bit more rain and I think the lake will eventually be fine. It will take a while, though.... I guess one positive from the housing downturn is that development in our area has slowed/stalled, which means less water usage.

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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Gashouse »

Cadillac Desert is a good read.

I hear people talk about a 20+ year drought in the SW. Ummm, I don't think that can be called a drought. Drought is a short-term water shortage. Sure it can last several years, but when you're talking 20+ years, that's called a hydrologic pattern. when I do hydrology studies for work, we primarily use the last 30 years of rainfall data to quantify average precipitation.

Edit: HJ beat me to Cadillac Desert

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Hungary Jack
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Re: Enjoy Lake Mead While it Lasts

Post by Hungary Jack »

Simbagal23 wrote:
Hungary Jack wrote:
Simbagal23 wrote:Welcome to the life of Georgians for the past year. Our local lake, which provides water for Atlanta and surrounding communities, is about 19 feet below normal levels; due to increased usage, lack of rain and poor planning by governments and corps of engineers. Water is also released from this lake to Alabama and Florida (for various reasons). Georgia is now fighting with these states to reduce the amount of water released. In the meantime, folks who paid a ton of money for lake front property now have docks and boats sitting in mud! Fortunately, we have received higher than normal rain amounts this month, so we are very slowly gaining some ground. Our water restrictions (no watering lawns, washing cars, etc.) will remain in effect for quite some time.
Are you writing of Lake Lanier? I read somewhere that it's about 30% of capacity right now. But Lake Lanier should fill up again once your rains return. I guess that drought has been running for 2 years. Funny thing is that last year saw Atlanta get 60% of its normal precip, but it still had 30 inches of it. Most areas of the Southwest call it a good year if the get more than 15.
No, I'm not ready to write it off just yet. The corps of engineers is revising its current rules on water release.....GA, FL and AL will have to agree to it and abide by it. Lets face it, we're a nation of water hogs...a drought like this brought it to our (and the nations) attention. Some conservation and a bit more rain and I think the lake will eventually be fine. It will take a while, though.... I guess one positive from the housing downturn is that development in our area has slowed/stalled, which means less water usage.
"of" not "off", but I get your drift.

But the biggest water users and wasters is agriculture. They pay ridiculously low subsidized prices for the stuff, and have little incentive to conserve. Overuse of water saturates the topsoil and creates a water column that draws the salts up into the topsoil, ruining it. There is a lot of this going on out west.

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