News

2/3/11

An article published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters this week describes a new and simple way of measuring groundwater’s contribution to small streams on the surface. 

By taking snapshots of streams with a device designed to capture, through infrared radiation images, the temperatures in various parts of the water, the approach “advances the immediate detection and quantification of localized groundwater inflow for hydrology, geology and ecology,” the article’s authors, Tobias Schuetz and Marcus Weiler of the University of Freiburg’s Institue of Hydrology, wrote.

Groundwater, they found, tends to be cooler than surface water in summer and warmer in winter; the infrared devices record the difference and produce images that show groundwater as clearly as night goggles show a human figure in the dark.

By coincidence, on Tuesday, the same day the article was officially published, the California state assembly’s committee on water, parks and wildlife held a hearing on groundwater that was part science class and part exploration about what to do to regulate the use of groundwater in the state.

More than any state in the West, California severely limits the circumstances under which groundwater can be regulated in view of its connection to both surface water and other pockets of groundwater.

Only when it is in a “known and definite channel” underground is groundwater subject to significant controls. Hard pumping of the groundwater located outside such channels over the last 60 years has caused land in the San Joaquin Valley to drop more than 25 feet.

So while the Freiburg researchers show side-by-side photographs of streams as seen by the naked eye, and the same streams with the groundwater inflow clearly visible to infrared sensors, California water law, figuratively, closes its eyes, operating under theories that are largely oblivious to the connections that the Freiburg researchers and others have been documenting for decades.

Pumping groundwater beneath one’s land is commonplace in agricultural areas, and largely unregulated. Although the state does now monitor the levels of groundwater tables, legislative efforts to establish a state system to permit wells or simply monitor the amount of water pumped have failed repeatedly over the past decade.

But, as demonstrated by the hearing called by Assemblyman Jared Huffman, chairman of the water and parks committee, the effort to manage groundwater as if it were part of the surface water system may finally be gathering momentum. (It was going nowhere when I first wrote about the issue back in 2009.)

As Thomas Harter, a hydrologist at the University of California, Davis and a witness at Tuesday’s hearing, said in an interview, “In legal terms, there are, historically, two very different doctrines on how groundwater and surface water has been allocated.”

But, he added, “to the degree that groundwater feeds streams it’s important to stream flows and stream ecosystems.” And “streams are an important component of the groundwater budget in California,” he said.

Tony Rossmann, a lawyer in San Francisco. said that the state is unlikely to abandon its current legal distinction between groundwater an surface water soon.

The major constituency for the status quo is California’s $30 billion agricultural industry. But each new study that confirms the connections between water on underground and water on the surface gives a little more ammunition to environmental groups, legislators and water lawyers who want to bring groundwater under unambiguous state control, as it is in every other state except Texas.

Barry Nelson of the National Resources Defense Council took up the issue in a blog post this week, noting that over eight years, overpumping averaged even million acre-feet each year, he noted. “The impacts of this level of unsustainable pumping are far-reaching — declining water tables, increasing pumping costs, rivers like the Cosumnes literally sucked dry from below, subsiding land and more.”

“Liquid Assets,” a report issued last year by the California legislature’s legislative analyst’s office, recommended phasing in a system of permitting groundwater withdrawals.

As the authors of the new Freiburg study, even though their methodology is currently limited to small streams, their measuring process “may well improve our ability of sustainable water management in water-scarce regions” —– maybe even regions governed by laws and court rulings that create distinctions that fly in the face of this kind of science.

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Petition considers fall and spring runs distinct enough to be separate

1/28/11

Four environmental groups are asking the federal government to impose Endangered Species Act protections for another one of the Klamath River basin's struggling salmon stocks.

Spring-run chinook salmon should be considered separate from the more numerous fall-run chinook, the Environmental Protection Information Center, the Center for Biological Diversity, Oregon Wild and the Larch Co. maintain in their petition to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

That agency currently does not distinguish between the two runs on a technical basis, and the groups acknowledge that NMFS could choose to protect both spring and fall chinook, though fall chinook make up the core of the tribal and sport fishery in the river, and are a key element of the ocean commercial fishery.

Scott Greacen with EPIC said that an Endangered Species Act listing of spring chinook would draw more attention to the precarious position of the fish and force restoration efforts to more seriously consider them.

”This puts it on the table as a core issue,” Greacen said.

The decline in spring chinook -- once the dominant run in the watershed -- is in large part due to four dams that have cut off hundreds of miles of spawning grounds in the Upper Klamath Basin. Fishing, water diversions, logging and other practices have all taken their toll.

Spring chinook are now largely contained in the Salmon, Scott, Shasta and South Fork Trinity rivers, and number between 300 and 3,000. “Springers” migrate upstream beginning in March, spawn in the late summer and fall, and some juveniles migrate to sea quickly while others wait until the following spring.

Fall chinook, on the other hand, average about 120,000 a year, with about half of that number being hatchery-bred fish. They migrate in the late summer and early fall, and their young migrate out more quickly.

The petitioners say the difference in behavior and genetic distinctions make the two runs separate, and they should qualify as distinct. A spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service said the agency has not viewed the petition and could not comment on it.

The states of California and Oregon, several tribes and fishing and environmental groups have signed an agreement to tear out the four Klamath dams and embark on a $1 billion plan to restore salmon and shore up water supplies to farms in the upper basin. Tribes especially have worked to draw more attention to spring chinook during a process to determine whether removing the dams is in the public interest.

”I think there's a lot of importance being placed on spring chinook right now,” said California Department of Fish and Game biologist Mark Pisano.

He said Fish and Game considers the two runs of fish to be different behaviorally, and that spring chinook would be the likely source for upper basin reintroduction of salmon if the dams are indeed removed.

Supporters of the deal say that is the best way to bring spring chinook back from the brink, and some said that federal protection now is too little, too late, and won't change conditions on the ground.

”The one single thing that we can do is give them a place to live,” said Glen Spain with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

Spain said that ocean commercial fishermen can likely avoid impacts to spring chinook as they do for protected coho salmon, but that tribal fishermen may see effects.

A statement from the Karuk Tribe said it shares the concern over spring chinook. It echoed its stance that the Klamath agreements to remove the dams are the best way to help their struggling stocks.

”These fish have sustained Karuk People since the beginning of time,” the statement read.

Greacen said that the groups would oppose cutting back on tribal fishing. He responded to supporters of the Klamath agreements by saying that the deals don't address the whole Klamath basin, including the Scott, Shasta and Trinity rivers that are important to spring chinook. He added that no legislation to support the agreements has been introduced yet, that dam removal is likely years off, and that the petition is in part meant to help keep spring chinook viable in the meantime.

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1/28/11

A state and federal effort to sample wells has found that the groundwater it tested in Humboldt and Del Norte counties is particularly clean.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board on Thursday outlined their preliminary results at a meeting held at the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District. The state and federal programs sampled 58 wells in Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendocino, Lake and Napa counties, among thousands of wells tested statewide between 2004 and 2011.

The sampling falls under the USGS National Water Quality Assessment program and the State Water Resources Control Board's Groundwater Ambient Monitoring Assessment Program.

The programs aim to determine the status of groundwater quality, how it changes and how natural and human factors affect groundwater quality. The programs tested for a wide range of elements, nutrients, volatile compounds, pesticides and pharmaceuticals, as well as naturally occurring radioactive isotopes that can help scientists understand the age of groundwater. It also measured pollutants at much lower levels than state health detection standards.

Preliminary results show the Humboldt and Del Norte county wells to be free of most measured pollutants, or are at very low levels. USGS scientist Tim Mathany said there were no pesticides detected in the groundwater sampled there, one of the few areas in the country where that's true.

In inland areas to the south of the North Coast region, where there is more agricultural land, the survey turned up some pesticides, he said. There were only very low levels of inorganic constituents like heavy metals on the Humboldt and Del Norte coast, and none were above health-based benchmarks.

A complete report is expected this spring.

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1/22/11

Greenland's icesheet, feared as a major driver of rising sea levels, shed a record amount of melted snow and ice in 2010, scientists reported Friday, a day after the UN said last year was the warmest on record.

The 2010 runoff was more than twice the average annual loss in Greenland over the previous three decades, surpassing a record set in 2007, said the study, published in the US-based journal Environmental Research Letters.

Ice melt has now topped this benchmark every year since 1996, according to the paper, derived from long-term satellite and observational data.

Were it to melt entirely, Greenland's icesheet would drive up ocean levels by some seven metres (23 feet), drowning coastal cities around the world.

No credible projections today include a doomsday scenario for the coming centuries. But recent research, including the new study, suggest that Greenland will contribute more to rising seas than predicted only a few years ago.

Based on computer models, Tedesco estimated that runoff in 2010 was 530 gigatonnes, or billions of tonnes, compared to an average of 274 gigatonnes for the period 1958-2009, and 285 gigatonnes for 1979-2009.

"The process is far from being linear, and it is not possible to simply draw a line" into the future, said lead researcher Marco Tedesco, who heads the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory at the City College of New York.

But over the last 30 years "there has been an increase in runoff," he said in an email exchange.

Researchers have thrown up different figures for how much, and how fast, Greenland is shedding its icy mantle, which is up to three kilometres (1.7 miles) thick in places.

They concur, though, that climate change is largely to blame: temperatures in the Arctic region have risen at two to three times the global average over the last 40 years.

In Greenland, summer temperatures in 2010 were 3.0 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

"The capital, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873," Tedesco noted.

Globally, the year was also the warmest ever recorded, as was the decade it brought to a close, the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Thursday.

The new study focused on surface melt, runoff and the number of days when bare ice, free of snow, is exposed to the Sun's radiative force.

In 2010, "melting in some areas stretched up to 50 days longer than average," Tedesco said.

The study also showed that land area where melting has been observed has been increasing at a rate of about 17,000 square kilometers (6,500 square miles) per year.

Not only do melting snow and ice flow directly into the sea, they also form torrential under-ice streams that lubricate the passage of glaciers toward the ocean.

In assessing the icesheet's total mass loss, melt is only part of the picture, Tedesco said.

"Our calculations do not account for losses due to calving" -- the splitting of large chunks of glacier ice into the sea -- "and ice dynamics, which are as big if not bigger than those due to surface melting," he said.

Nor did they factor in cyclical contributions to the icesheet from snowfall, he said.

Current estimates of the Greenland icesheets net mass loss vary between 130 and 250 gigatonnes per year.

Antarctica is the world's biggest source of land ice after Greenland, but -- with the exception of West Antarctica -- is considered more resistant to any doomsday collapse.

By century's end, Greenland could contribute as much as 50 centimetres (20 inches) to average worldwide sea levels, many experts agree today.

This would double the predictions for overall sea-level rise in the UN climate panel's landmark 2007 report, which factored in glacial runoff and the thermal expansion of the sea, but not the loss of mass from Greenland.

A one-metre (3.25 feet) increase in the global watermark would devastate many island nations, and wreak havoc in heavily-populated delta regions across the planet.

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