Climate change effect on San Francisco Bay and Delta detailed in new study

Mike Taugher in the San Jose Mercury News via the Contra Costa Times: California's water problems and the ecological pressure on the West Coast's largest estuary will intensify in a warming world, according to a first-of-its-kind scientific study.

San Francisco Bay and the Delta will get warmer, saltier and clearer if global warming continues over the next several decades. That will increase the risk of extinction for some kinds of fish and could help unwanted species, including a toxic algae, flourish Flooding is likely to be more common upstream and along the coast, and water supplies will be stretched due to a shrinking snowpack, the researchers found.

In the Delta, already seeing a broad ecological decline, the probability of further ecological surprises will increase. "We're going to enter a new era of environmental conditions," said James Cloern, the study's lead author and a phytoplankton ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

Cloern said the seven-year study was the most complex research project he's undertaken in 36 years at the USGS. The researchers said their paper appears to be the first multifaceted assessment of how the estuary could respond to climate change.

...The researchers took two climate change scenarios they considered reasonably likely and projected what would happen to the estuary given the way it is managed now for wildlife and water supplies. In the first scenario, greenhouse gas emissions would be curbed in the coming decades, and the climate would turn out to be only moderately sensitive to the gases. In the second, bleaker, scenario, greenhouse gas emissions would continue to increase, and climate would react strongly to them....

NASA image of San Francisco Bay