California drought

Gotcha, thx. Yeah I would assume initial set up costs would be extremely high as well not to mention it would have to be very close to the coast to be efficient which just so happens to be ultra prime real estate. Besides who wants an ugly "factory" next to their multi million dollar cliff side beach houses.. Ie. Carlsbad, arguably one of my favorite beach towns but those stacks right by the water and the runoff due to it kinda takes away some of the allure.


I did notice some of the local beaches where we are at have "brush stations" instead of the normal beach showers to get the sand off your feet and legs. Everything helps.

It actually did "rain" here on Friday afternoon. it was a very light misty rain for a couple hrs, but barely enough to get wet but enough to annoy you, go figure during an outdoor graduation ceremony we were attending. That misting rain did get a little heavier for maybe 15 mins then it totally stopped. Probably not even enough precipitation to register but I just though it funny that during one of the worst droughts is recent history it "rains" during our outdoor event...

 

This is exactly the misleading part: there aren't many people on this board who'll remember well how wet it was before 1950. The implication is that "we should not look at the 20th century average as normal" would imply that "what we grew up with" was wet and what is now is normal. On a contrary, what majority people remember is normal, and what is now is dry.

be careful with moray, bring knife and don't stick your hands into holes just b/c you saw a pretty shrimp.


water off SoCal is cold the only people who go in are divers and tourists.

 

I've been asserting that both agricultural and urban water use in CA are unreasonably inefficient.

Sure, all residential and industrial and non-Ag commercial use is less than 20% of CA's total consumption. If Ag would either improve their irrigation efficiency to near the best available, or quit growing low value, high water use crops for export (do Japanese and Chinese dairy cattle really need California alfalfa???), then the urban folks wouldn't have to conserve anything. Either move alone would be sufficient, without the other.

But even in town, surprisingly low water prices and a history of unmetered residential water (half of Sacramento is still unmetered) have allowed CA's per capita urban use to remain quite high. While some communities are in the same efficiency league as the European countries in the graph in that LATimes article, others are terribly inefficient and pull the statewide average far far higher. If the wasters could improve and cut their consumption to merely double that of the efficient communities, the overall state's urban water shortage would be over without any concessions from or conflict with Agriculture. And most of these efficiency improvements would still be cheaper than desalinization plants.

 

Last month, I found a local ag source indicating that alfalfa irrigation requires about 5 acre-inches of irrigation per added ton. So that means (12/5) = 2.4 tons of crop per acre foot of irrigation.

A CA commodity price list today shows premium alfalfa selling for typically $220/ton. So, alfalfa is selling for ($220/ton) * (2.4 tons/acre-foot) = $530 per acre-foot of applied irrigation water.

Thus, if desalinated water costs $2000 per acre foot in a region that shares water sources with these alfalfa farms, then its water users are subsidizing Japanese and Chinese dairy feed to the tune of $600/ton of alfalfa exported.

 

At present I suppose that no California agriculturalists pay $2000 ac/ft for water. Somebody may well be subsidizing somebody else, but I don't see where Asian alfalfa consumers fit in.

 

my daughter just got back from san francisco and parts north. no signs of a water shortage detectable to the tourist. green spaces, restaurants, hotels, you name it.

 

The idea of drinking recycled brown water is an interesting way to draw attention to Caly's water short-fall, but it only underscores the fact that there is a deep misunderstanding as to the nature of the real problem.
California already recycles their brown and grey water.
They treat both to potable standards and (IIRC) they return it to the aquifer.
People draw their drinking water from the aquifer.

The only thing that pulling water directly from waste water treatment plants will do is shorten the loop, but it's not going to replace water that's not already being returned to the groundwater supply, and we're only talking about the waste component of 20 percent of California's water throughput.
If BIG AG uses 80-percent of Caly's water, and if a large component of AGs water use is lost through evaporation, then maybe that's where you need to focus more attention.
Perhaps it's time to raise the price of meat nuts and some vegetables...or invest in more efficient means of irrigation, or build larger resoviors, or some desal plants, or all of the above.
No.
Desal plants are not as efficient as waste water treatment, but they're already treating waste water and returning it to the groundwater supply unless I'm misinformed about Caly's waste water management laws.

 

Thanks to the Clean Water Act, anyone not living at the head waters of most watersheds is already drinking processed 'brown water.' One can get an idea of how much by the amount of caffeine in the flow:

CURWOOD: So how does caffeine get into the water?

GRANEK: Well, in the temperate zone in the northwest where we live, there is no known natural sources of caffeine. So, when we see caffeine in rivers or lakes or the ocean, our understanding is that the source is human waste. And that human waste may be from coffee, it may be from energy drinks, from pharmaceuticals, etc.

CURWOOD: Now, where exactly did you find this caffeine...in the ocean, in freshwater?

GRANEK: Our findings were actually quite surprising. Our design was set up to look at high pollution threat areas and low pollution threat areas, and our high pollution threat areas were areas of the Oregon coast with the highest human population densities where there was a wastewater treatment plant in the vicinity and there was a river flowing into that ocean area.​

Source: Living on Earth: Caffeine in Ocean Water

Bob Wilson

 

Saves electricity too.
No need to brew coffee in the morning.

 

Bay Area and some of the coastal CA has no problem they get enough rain. You have to go east to see it.

We were in Yosemite at the beginning of August last year (before controlled fire went out of control) and the main waterfalls dried out. Normally that would have been in October.

 

New paper (11 June 2015) disputes "dry gets drier, wet gets wetter" claim.

Assessment of future changes in water availability and aridity - Greve - 2015 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library (Prepub abstract)

 

While we wait for that paper to get typeset:

• Increase in the range between wet and dry season precipitation : Nature Geoscience : Nature Publishing Group - ". . . On a regional scale, the tendency for wet seasons to get wetter occurs over climatologically rainier regions. Similarly, the tendency for dry season to get drier is seen in drier regions. Even if the total amount of annual rainfall does not change significantly, the enhancement in the seasonal precipitation cycle could have marked consequences for the frequency of droughts and floods."
  
• Greenhouse warming and the 21st century hydroclimate of southwestern North America - "Climate models robustly predict that the climate of southwestern North America, defined as the area from the western Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean and from the Oregon border to southern Mexico, will dry throughout the current century as a consequence of rising greenhouse gases. This regional drying is part of a general drying of the subtropics and poleward expansion of the subtropical dry zones. Through an analysis of 15 coupled climate models it is shown here that the drying is driven by a reduction of winter season precipitation associated with increased moisture divergence by the mean flow and reduced moisture convergence by transient eddies. . . ."
• Recent change of the global monsoon precipitation (1979-2008) - " . . . The ENSO has tighter regulation on the northern hemisphere summer monsoon (NHSM) than on the southern hemisphere summer monsoon (SHSM). More notably, the GM precipitation (GMP) has intensified over the past three decades mainly due to the significant upward trend in NHSM. The intensification of the GMP originates primarily from an enhanced east–west thermal contrast in the Pacific Ocean, which is coupled with a rising pressure in the subtropical eastern Pacific and decreasing pressure over the Indo-Pacific warm pool. While this mechanism tends to amplify both the NHSM and SHSM, the stronger (weaker) warming trend in the NH (SH) creates a hemispheric thermal contrast, which favors intensification of the NHSM but weakens the SHSM."

For more current information:
GOES West - Tropical Pacific Water Vapor Imagery Loop (Flash) - Satellite Products and Services Division/Office of Satellite and Product Operations

Also:
GOES West - Northeast Pacific Water Vapor Imagery Loop (Flash) - Satellite Products and Services Division/Office of Satellite and Product Operations

Bob Wilson

 

I'm thinking of waters such as the Hetch Hetchy, once a crown jewel of Yosemite National Park, now a storage reservoir that is piped directly to the Bay Area to be used once, bypassing the communities along the way. Or the waters of what was once the agriculturally productive Owens Valley, now dry as its water is intercepted and transported directly to LA, again generally to be used just once.

 

I'm seeing that CA has long recycled some water, and the volume has increased considerable this century. But of the total wastewater treatment of about 5 maf (million acre feet) annually, only about 0.67 maf is recycled. In most urban areas, the treated water is just disposed of as waste. In coastal areas, it is discharged into the ocean or into rivers flowing directly into the ocean.

You write about 'the aquifer' as if there is one monolithic aquifer under the whole state. But it has many different aquifers. Some water seeps into usable aquifers, but other water goes into unusable or contaminated aquifers, and still more seeps into ground that drains into the ocean, without any usable catch basins to pump from.

You missed another option -- grow more of that food elsewhere, outside the current drought zone. Put some more geographic and climate and political diversity into our food production, hopefully while reducing transportation costs as well.

 

I do not understand why alfalfa is still grown in California.. it is not like grape it can be grown anywhere.

 

I touched on that earlier.
If you return California's interior to its natural state (brown instead of artificial green) then the potable water problem is simply a distribution challenge for the overpopulated coast.
Of course, then you'll have well-heeled people from the California Almond Board screaming about how much that would devastate the nation's economy.

 

But the fish swim crazy fast now