Climate change tough on Colorado Plateau

Scott Condon in the Aspen Times (Colorado): Conservationists are lobbying the Bureau of Land Management to overhaul its policies in the Colorado Plateau after the agency's own study indicated big alterations are coming over the next 50 years because of climate change.

The vast Colorado Plateau is home of the spectacular canyon country and soaring mountain ranges of western Colorado and much of Utah. It covers 32,387 square miles, much of it public land managed by the BLM. It stretches from Grand Junction on the east to St. George, Utah, on the west and from Arizona to Wyoming. Moab, Utah, the popular offseason playground for hikers, bikers and Jeepers from Aspen and throughout the Colorado mountains, is in the heart of the plateau.

The BLM recently completed a rapid ecoregional assessment that examines current conditions and analyzes how the landscape could be altered by climate change and other “change agents” such as wildfire, invasive species and road development.

“This report describes fundamental changes in how the Colorado Plateau will look and how it functions,” said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney for Earthjustice Denver. One finding of the report is that the average annual temperature of the plateau could increase 1 degree Celsius in the short term and around 2 degrees by 2060. The biggest warming could occur during winters.

The report said predicting future precipitation amounts is more difficult, but the trend is for a drier climate in the short term and a radical mix of periods of much drier and much wetter weather by 2060. The variation is due to the extreme terrain — low canyons will be drier; mountain ranges will be wetter during summers...

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, shot by National Park Service, public domain

Smaller Colorado River projected for coming decades, study says

EurekAlert via the Earth Institute at Columbia University: Some 40 million people depend on the Colorado River Basin for water but warmer weather from rising greenhouse gas levels and a growing population may signal water shortages ahead. In a new study in Nature Climate Change, climate modelers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory predict a 10 percent drop in the Colorado River's flow in the next few decades, enough to disrupt longtime water-sharing agreements between farms and cities across the American Southwest, from Denver to Los Angeles to Tucson, and through California's Imperial Valley.

"It may not sound like a phenomenally large amount except the water and the river is already over-allocated," said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the new study.

The study expands on findings published in 2007 in the journal Science that the American Southwest is becoming more arid as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift from human-caused climate change. It also comes on the heels of a major study of the Colorado River Basin by the U.S. Department of Interior that projected longer and more severe droughts by 2060, and a 9 percent decline in the Colorado's flows.

"The projections are spot on," said Bradley Udall, an expert on hydrology and policy of the American West, at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Everyone wondered what the next generation of models would say. Now we have a study that suggests we better take seriously the drying projections ahead."

The present study narrows in on three key regions for water managers—the Colorado River headwaters, the greater California-Nevada region and Texas, which gets nearly all of its water from within state borders. The study makes use of the latest models (those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Fifth Assessment Report due out next fall), to estimate seasonal changes in precipitation, evaporation, water runoff and soil moisture in the near future, 2021-2040. "It's a much finer grain picture than the one we had in 2007," said Seager....

The Colorado River, near Page, Arizona, shot by Adrille, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Forest Service weighing options to save one of world's oldest groves of trees

The Republic (Indiana): The U.S. Forest Service is trying to save one of the world's largest and oldest organisms, a 106-acre aspen thicket being threatened by pests, wildlife and climate change on a mountain slope in central Utah.

Without help the aspen grove could die and finish off a common root system believed to be tens of thousands of years old. It gave birth to genetically identical aspens that aren't sustaining new generations of sprouts. "We probably don't have more than 10 years with this clone," said Terry Holsclaw, a silviculturist for the Fishlake National Forest near Loa, Utah.

Kevin Mueller, program director for the Utah Environmental Congress, said, "I call them the standing dead." The only good way to ensure the aspen stand's future may be to log the mature trees, encouraging the root system to generate sprouts, experts say.

A $100,000 fence would be required to protect the saplings from munching deer and elk, but even this approach may not solve every problem. Scientists aren't certain the root system is healthy enough to send up a sufficient number of suckers to fight off beetles, fungus and gnawing rodents.

Another option is to rip through the root system with tractor blades. Separating a root from the tree stimulates it to regrow a shoot. Likewise, the Forest Service could clear the stand with a controlled fire. Those are some of the options under study by the U.S. Forest Service, which is expected to make a decision on its approach next year. The agency's success will determine the fate of an aspen grove estimated to have taken root about 80,000 years ago....

La Sal mountain range in mid fall. Taken above Horse Creek Gorge Showing aspen trees on several peaks including Haystack, Mellenthin, Peale, and Tukuhnikivatz. Manti-La Sal National Forest in Utah, shot by Infected enigma

The Colorado River's (nonexistent) emergency plan

Rob Davis in the Voice of San Diego points out a hole in the governance of the Colorado River’s water: The Colorado River, the lifeblood water supply of San Diego and the Southwest, made history late last year. And it wasn't good. Lake Mead, the reservoir holding the Colorado River back behind the Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, hit its lowest point since being filled in the 1930s. Had it dropped just a few more feet, federal officials would've declared the first shortage in the river's modern history. Arizona and Las Vegas would've gotten less water.

Fortunately, the lake's decline stopped. Officials began a massive transfer of water from Lake Powell, the river's other major reservoir, on the Utah-Arizona border. Along with a wet winter in the Colorado Rockies, that staved off what was once unthinkable. The Colorado River wasn't supposed to come up short.

Though the Southwest got a reprieve, it was a troubling sign for a river relied on by 27 million people in places like San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas and across the border in Mexico. The Colorado River today faces two serious threats, either of which would mean less water for the arid Southwest.

The first: The river's annual supply was divided in the 1920s during a historically wet period. The Southwest created its expectations of the Colorado's annual yield during one of the wettest centuries on record. If yields return to their historic average, there won't be enough water to go around.

The second: Climate change is projected to cut the Colorado's yield between 10 percent and 30 percent by 2050. Even a small reduction would have a major impact. In the lower Colorado basin, California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico take nearly every last drop to which they're entitled. Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography say a 10 percent drop could cause shortages in six of every 10 years.

Underlying those dire projections is a major uncertainty: If the Colorado consistently comes up short, no one knows who will cut consumption to keep Lake Mead from running dry. A short-term plan is in place from the time the reservoir hits 1,075 feet above sea level until 1,025 feet. Arizona and Las Vegas take that hit. (At 895 feet, the reservoir wouldn't be able to distribute water and the Hoover Dam wouldn't produce power. The lake is currently at 1,096 and climbing.)…

Hoover Dam, shot by Tobi 87, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune raises the danger the American west has largely forgotten – erosion and dust: It was called “The worst hard time

An editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune raises the danger the American west has largely forgotten – erosion and dust: It was called “The worst hard time.” The Dust Bowl, when millions of square miles of formerly productive earth literally dried up and blew away, and took the hopes and fortunes of much of America right along with it.

There were many reasons for the disaster, a perfect dust storm of causes natural (eight years of drought) and human (plowing up the Great Plains). The result was a depopulation of large swaths of America’s midsection that have never recovered, mass migrations and social upheavals, and, to our credit, improved farming methods that take some care to keep the soil where it belongs. And it could very well happen all over again. This time, in Utah. And, when it does, it will be even more our fault than it was the last time. Because now, supposedly, we know better.

Experts at the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of California-Los Angeles have released a report showing that the Southwestern United States is on the brink of another kind of dust bowl. Again, it will be a result of many factors, including that the process begins with a climate that is generally pretty darn dry to begin with and is exacerbated by global climate change and local disregard for the sensitivity of our soils…

Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma, in 1936

Water situation still serious in the US west

Michael Chihak in Arizona Public Media: "We've reached a crossing point of supply and demand on the Colorado River," says UA climatologist Gregg Garfin. The temporary increase in Colorado River water flow this spring gives water managers more time to prepare for ongoing supply shortages, the manager of the state's biggest water supplier says.

"It gives us a more significant period of time for us to plan for adaptation and make some other changes in some of our programs, to give us more resilience as we go forward, expecting that there will be a shortage at some time on the Colorado (River)," Central Arizona Project General Manager David Modeer said in an interview for Friday's Arizona Week. "The ability to have additional planning time and work with the other basin states to develop programs that can minimize or delay the onset of a shortage in the future is a real positive to us," he said.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation decided last month that the spring snow melt runoff was big enough to allow more water to be moved down the Colorado River into Lakes Powell and Mead to bring their levels up and keep Arizona from having to implement restrictions. It was a relief to Modeer and the whole state, because water in the lakes had dropped to critical levels in recent years.

That reprieve came in the 11th year of drought for the state, a situation that has been eased but not ended as a result of the winter snow pack. "We were quite relieved by that," Modeer said of the federal decision. "We were expecting that there would be a shortage declared probably as early as 2012, and then that would start the process going where we would have to begin curtailing some of our deliveries of water in central and southern Arizona."

…"I would say drought's a pretty steady thing, sometimes fickle with year-to-year variations," Garfin said. "But based on my best knowledge, we're still in drought and still have to be prepared for that." "We tend to have protracted droughts in the Southwest," he said. "Now we don't have good evidence that we're firmly in one of those phases, but there is a tendency to have protracted periods of 10 to 30 years of relatively dry conditions."…

The Colorado River near Page, Arizona, shot by Adrille, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Colorado River water crisis averted thanks to good snowpack

John Hollenhorst in the Deseret News: This year's winter weather has apparently helped avert a water supply crisis on the Colorado River. A decent snowpack in the drainages of eastern Utah, Colorado and Wyoming helped make that happen. A water shortage declaration now seems very unlikely this year. But some experts believe it's inevitable someday.

The two principle storage reservoirs on the Colorado River are Lake Powell in southern Utah, and Lake Mead near Las Vegas. After a decade of drought, both are hurting. If Lake Mead drops a little further, it would force a declaration of a shortage and a potential cascade of orders to cut water use. But a good winter snowpack seems to have saved the day, according to Malcolm Wilson, water resources chief of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

"It is highly, highly unlikely that we'll see a shortage declared for the lower basin," Wilson said. "It is a good year. It's one of the better ones we've seen certainly in the last decade, and we're looking to a really good inflow."

In fact, Lake Powell and Lake Mead are expected to rise significantly this year. But University of Utah professor Dan McCool, who has studied water issues for 30 years, says it's a close call. "Nature is shooting at us with a machine gun. So, we may have dodged a bullet this year, but there will be many more bullets in the future," McCool said.

He says the Colorado is a river caught between rising demand and declining supply. "The projected demands far exceed the projected supply," McCool explained. Many scientists expect climate change to reduce the Colorado River's water supply even further. "Then we have the makings of a disaster," McCool said….

The bridge over the Colorado River, right next to the Glen Canyon Dam, shot by Brian Thomas,
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Healthy snowpack bodes well for Arizona

Tony Davis in the Arizona Star: The northern Rockies have been slammed with enough snow this year that it might be possible to delay shortages of Colorado River water for Arizona water users for two to five years, officials say. After years of drought and below-normal snowpack in the Colorado's Upper Basin, primarily in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, this year's snowpack there is now about 120 percent of normal, said a U.S. government forecasting agency.

The Colorado River Basin Forecasting Center predicts that April-July runoff into Lake Powell, which straddles the Arizona-Utah border, will be about 113 percent of normal. That's about 9 million acre-feet of water. An acre-foot is about 325,850 gallons.

Last year's April-June runoff was only 73 percent of average, or 5.79 million acre-feet, said Brenda Alcorn, a forecaster for the center in Salt Lake City. For the decade of 2000-2009, the Colorado's average annual flow into Lee's Ferry, just below Lake Powell, was the lowest for any decade since authorities started keeping records on the river more than a century ago.

Last year's low snowpack and runoff sent Lake Mead at the Arizona-Nevada border to its lowest level since 1937, about 1,082 feet above sea level. That prompted predictions that the Central Arizona Project might start seeing shortages affecting farmers, mines and other users of excess CAP water as early as 2012. Excess CAP is water that a local government, tribe or other user has a contract for but isn't buying or using.

But now, if the snowpack stays strong into the spring and the river runoff continues to flow as predicted, a shortage could be delayed for two to three years past 2012, said Dan Bunk, a Bureau of Reclamation hydrologist in Boulder City, Nevada…

Cascade Geyser, Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. National Park Service

Water scarcity in US west gets serious

David A. Gabel in Environmental News Network: Water scarcity has always been a problem in the southwestern desert, with practically everyone relying on one river, the Colorado, to quench their thirst and the thirst of their crops. Increased water demands coupled with a long protracted drought in the Upper Colorado River Basin has created a potentially dire situation. The effects can be seen in Lake Mead, the giant lake along the border of Arizona and Nevada. Lake Mead has reached its lowest levels since 1937, the year the Hoover Dam was completed.

…The fastest growing region in the US is the southwest.. Unfortunately, it is the region that can least afford massive population increases. Places like the Las Vegas metropolitan area in Nevada and the Valley of the Sun in Arizona have grown by leaps and bounds in past few decades. Phoenix is now the nation's fifth largest city. Recent economic turbulence may have put a damper on that growth, but the higher water demand is still there.

Increased demand is a key factor, but perhaps not as important as the lack of rainfall across the southwest which feeds Lake Mead. According to the US Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, the Upper Colorado River Basin has had only 89 percent of its average precipitation for 2010. They predict that this autumn, the temperature will remain above average and precipitation below average, leading to worsening conditions.

The current drought began way back in October 1999. At that point, Lake Powell, the second largest reservoir in the US located along the Arizona-Utah border, was near full capacity. Over the next five years, inflow into the lake was about half of the average. It has increased somewhat since then, but remains low.

At this point, nobody is able to predict when the drought will end. Normally, droughts occur as a natural climate variation, and the pendulum always swings back towards a wetter climate. However, the current drought has lasted much longer than normal, and local residents have become concerned with possible consequences….

Lake Powell with the "bathtub ring" from receding water visible. Shot by Davejenk1ns, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Massive fire reaches Utah homes

Erin Alberty, Jeremiah Stettler and Roxana Orellana in the Salt Lake Tribune: …At least 1,400 homes had been evacuated as of midnight and some had caught fire, said emergency responders who descended on Herriman from across the valley and pushed through crowds of onlookers.

…The blaze started during a National Guard training session when a spark from a soldier’s round ignited dry brush, said Utah National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Hank McIntire. “They knew immediately and they got on it right away,” but did not have enough manpower and equipment to contain the fire, McIntire said.

From Camp Williams, the fire moved into Arnold’s Hollow of Rose Canyon and jumped over a dirt road that had previously acted as a barrier on Camp Williams’ northern border at Black Ridge, said Unified Fire Authority Capt. Brad Taylor. Bulldozers were digging up fire breaks to the fire’s east to keep it from spreading into the valley, but Taylor said they would not be effective until the winds die down….

The red dot shows the location of Herriman, Utah. Adapted from Wikipedia's UT county maps by Seth Ilys. Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License

Deadly flash floods leave their mark

Jim Skillington in Disaster News Network: Flash flooding in Texas, Wyoming and Utah have turned deadly this week after several days of heavy rain. In Texas alone, nearly a dozen inches of rain has swamped the central portion of the state. In Comal County, emergency responders plucked nearly 90 people from their homes or trees after the Guadalupe River overflowed its banks. At least one person was killed in the flash flooding.

In addition to property damage Texas health officials were warning of water contamination when a sewage treatment plant was overrun by the flooding. New Braunfels Utilities shut down the plant but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said downstream residents should wear protective clothing when cleaning up their homes.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry warned residents to keep an eye on forecasts that predict additional rainfall as he activated emergency resources to deal with the flooding. "We will. . .continue to take action to protect Texans as needed," he said.

Rain wasn't the only hazard to hit the state Wednesday. The National Weather Service said a small tornado caused property damage in Jefferson County. As Texans coped with the heavy rain, emergency officials in Wyoming and Utah dealt with record flooding in those states as well….

The Trinity River flooding in Dallas, Texas (USA) on 8 July 1908

Officials, advocates debate Great Salt Lake management

Charles F. Trentelman in the Standard-Examiner (Utah): A massive dust storm Tuesday turned Top of Utah gray, raised particulate pollution and served as a coincidental introduction for this year's Great Salt Lake Issues Forum. … Dozens of weather scientists, water managers, state wildlife officials and lake advocates focused on what Jodi Gardberg, Great Salt Lake Watershed coordinator at the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, called "a unique ecological gift that has to be preserved."

The lake is under assault from climate change, drought, population growth and overuse. At the same time, it is home to critical wildlife habitat, the world's largest brine shrimp fishery and major manufacturing facilities, and is a major Utah tourism draw.

While presenting the results of sometimes years of study, the speakers said over and over that they were just beginning. For example, Clay Perschon, founder of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' Great Salt Lake Ecosystem program set up in 1996 to manage shrimp and avian life on the lake, said when he looked for research to guide his efforts, "the short of it was, there just hadn't been (research). So much of the work we had to invent as we go."

…Jim Steenburgh, chairman of the University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Sciences, said climate change will affect the snow and rain that fills the lake, but beyond knowing that there will be more warm years, fewer cold years, earlier spring runoffs and drier summers, there is no way to say how big the changes will be. "We're pretty confident in warming, but how warm is subject to investigation," he said.

…He warned to be wary of averages when trying to manage the lake. Utah weather is made up of extremes, he said, "and we spend too much time thinking about those averages when we should be thinking about these ups and downs."…

Evaporation ponds on the Great Salt Lake west of Ogden, Utah, shot by Jeff Kubina, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Water plans could leave Utah dry if nature balks

Tom Wharton in the Salt Lake Tribune: The water projects affecting Utah and the Colorado River Basin and the price tags to build them keep piling up. Washington, Iron and Kane counties want to spend $1 billion on a pipeline to bring 100,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell to southwestern Utah.

Kane County hopes to then join San Juan County in selling off 50,000 acre-feet of water rights to facilitate a nuclear power plant near Green River, Utah. That's as much as East Canyon Reservoir holds. In an average year, the power plant would reduce river flows by 2 percent. That could increase to up to 10 percent in a drought.

….What really frightens me, though, is what happens if a major, sustained drought hits the Western United States and there simply isn't enough water available to meet urban, industrial and agricultural needs? Climate change could make such droughts even more severe than they have been historically. Are we setting ourselves up for an ecological and environmental disaster?

….Do the water planners, dam builders, power-plant proponents, farmers who rely on water to feed us, home developers and government officials really know if what they are proposing is ultimately sustainable?…

Lower Ribbon Falls, the Grand Canyon (in Arizona, actually), shot by Kkaufman11

Big wildfires hit western US states

Disaster News Network: A massive wildfire exploded in three different directions in the mountains north of Los Angeles Saturday night destroying more homes and threatening as many as 12,000 homes. Meanwhile in Utah, emergency officials were urging residents to leave in the face of another rapidly spreading wildfire.

Emergency officials said they expect the fire, now stretching 19-miles from east to west, will continue to spread. They are predicting Sunday will produce "extreme fire conditions." More than 2,000 fire fighters are working to control the San Gabriel Valley fire that has already consumed more than 35,000 acres.

On Saturday the Station Fire, as it has been named, was moving between Acton near the Antelope Valley to Altadena in the San Gabriel Valley at a rate of approximately 2.5 miles per hour. Some the flames were shooting up as high as 80-feet.

…In New Harmony, Utah, emergency officials were going door-to-door Sunday morning to encourage residents to evacuate in the face of a growing wildfire that has already burned three homes and is threatening dozens more. The Mill Flat Fire has already consumed more than 10,000 acres and is expected to continue to spread with forecasts of wind gusts of 25 mph or more. About 150 residents are already in area shelters….

Shot of a 2006 fire in Oregon by Wing-Chi Poon, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License

Climate warming predicted for Utah

Amy Joi O’Donoghue in the Deseret News: Climate change over the next 100 years could raise Utah's average temperature by as much as 9.4 degrees, leading to widespread impacts on outdoor recreation, wildlife, tourism and agricultural industries, according to an analysis by The Nature Conservancy.

The report, released Thursday, put Utah in the top 10 for greatest temperature increases, with the spike threatening elevated risks of heat-related deaths, compromised water quality and the disappearance of wildlife.

"From the food we put on the table to plant and animal species that make our state unique, this study shows that none of us is immune if temperatures continue to rise as projected. We can now see that climate change will directly hit us here in Utah, in our own backyards," said Dave Livermore, director of the Utah chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

…The conservancy said that even under the best-case scenario, which assumes the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere will decrease each year, Utah's temperatures will increase by up to 6.5 degrees by the end of the century.

…In Utah, the conservancy warned of the potential impacts of such temperature increases, pointing to soil erosion due to drought, dust-caused acceleration of snowpack melt, decrease in soil fertility and eroded air quality due to dust particles. The conservancy also said a heated-up Utah could lead to agricultural losses because of depleted range for livestock and at the same time, create more susceptibility to wildfires because of an increase in invasive plant life….

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, in Utah