All In One Boat

From Jeff Masters at his wunderground.com blog

“Are storms getting more extreme due to climate change? That is a difficult question to answer, since reliable records are not available at all in many parts of the world, and extend back only a few decades elsewhere. However, we do have a fairly good set of precipitation records for many parts of the globe, and those records show that the heaviest types of rains–those likely to cause flooding–have increased in recent years. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report, “The frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over most land areas”. Indeed, global warming theory has long predicted an increase in heavy precipitation events. As the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 IPCC report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. Satellite measurements (Trenberth et al., 2005) have shown a 1.3% per decade increase in water vapor over the global oceans since 1988. Santer et al. (2007) used a climate model to study the relative contribution of natural and human-caused effects on increasing water vapor, and concluded that this increase was “primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases”. This was also the conclusion of Willet et al. (2007).

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From East and West of the US come these ominous water stories.

In Florida:

South Florida’s Strictest Water Rationing Ever

For the first time in the agency’s history, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) declared last week an extreme District-wide water shortage and ordered the strictest rationing ever across South Florida.

”We’re not in any old drought. We’re in what I like to call the biblical drought. This is an enormous state of emergency.”
-Shannon Estenoz, a member of the South Florida Water Management District’s governing board

”We are facing Armageddon. I think we are going to see massive crop losses we have never seen before.”
-Malcolm ”Bubba” Wade, a board member and vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp., one of the region’s largest growers.

In California:

L.A. must dump water from two reservoirs

In the midst of a drought, Los Angeles officials announced Friday that 600 million gallons of water must be dumped from two reservoirs that supply a swath of the city because an unexpected chemical reaction rendered it undrinkable.

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As rising temperatures and shifting rainfalls continue to exacerbate water problems for growing populations, desalinization of sea water, long a grail for water starved localities, will come into serious play. Marin County, dependent on rain-fed reservoirs and water piped in from the diminishing Russian River, is taking a serious look.

The desalination plant would take San Rafael Bay water and subject it to various forms of treatment to produce drinkable water through reverse osmosis technology.

The plant would be situated on MMWD-owned land near Pelican Way in San Rafael. Bay water would be piped from an intake at the end of a newly refurbished Marin Rod and Gun Club pier near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

The desalination process would convert about half the volume of water taken from the bay into drinking water. The remaining water, or brine, would have a dissolved solids concentration about twice that of raw water. Brine would be blended and discharged back to the bay through an outfall operated by the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, which treats municipal and industrial wastewater generated in central Marin. Pretreatment of raw water to remove solids would generate sludge. This sludge would be hauled for disposal to the Redwood Landfill, according to the report.

Desalinization in Marin

Not everyone thinks a big plant is a great idea.

At a district board meeting Wednesday, about a half dozen people spoke against the plant proposal, criticizing everything from the purity, or lack thereof, of bay water, to the cost of the project – about $115 million.

Critics

You can read the whole report here, and see a chart of rain fall at Lake Lagunitas since 1850, here

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The Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers flow west out of the Sierra Nevada forming the Delta, the labyrinthine skein of water and wetlands that have for centuries of centuries been the living source of the San Francisco Bay. Now no more.

The freshwater yield of the Sierra’s snowmelt once surged through the delta and out the Golden Gate, creating a fluctuating brackish zone that sustained a vast food web, from plankton to the once-ubiquitous, now nearly extinct delta smelt, to salmon and steelhead. But with the completion of the government projects, the water went through home taps and San Joaquin Valley irrigation canals instead; the essential biological productivity of the delta wavered, and then dipped.

Through the years, the decline steepened, ultimately becoming a free fall. Adding to the stress of fresh water diversions were other factors: the maceration of fish by the huge pumps that send water south from Tracy; the introduction of exotic fish, mollusks, crustaceans and plants that competed with native species; and toxic runoff from agricultural operations.

The delta is now in its endgame. It is no longer, in fact, a true delta. Two great rivers still meet east of Suisun Bay, but the phenomenally rich wetland they created is, for the most part, gone. A maze of “islands” bordered by stagnant sloughs and canals exists in its stead. Buttressed by frangible earthen levees, these agricultural tracts have subsided from decades of compaction and soil oxidation; on some of the islands, tractors churn the peat soils 20 feet below houseboats and water skiers plying the sloughs just beyond the levees. One good quake on the nearby Hayward Fault and the levees would liquefy, during the region into a great inland bay.

Read Glen Martin’s fine report in the SF Chronicle Magazine.

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