Unprecedented drought challenges for Texas water resources in a changing climate: what do researchers and stakeholders need to know? (original) (raw)
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Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
Hydrological drought is a substantial negative deviation from normal hydrologic conditions and is influenced by climate and human activities such as water management. By perturbing the streamflow regime, climate change and water management may significantly alter drought characteristics in the future. Here we utilize a high-resolution integrated modeling framework that represents water management in terms of both local surface water extraction and reservoir regulation and use the Standardized Streamflow Index to quantify hydrological drought. We explore the impacts of water management on hydrological drought over the contiguous U.S. in a warming climate with and without emissions mitigation. Despite the uncertainty of climate change impacts, local surface water extraction consistently intensifies drought that dominates at the regional to national scale. However, reservoir regulation alleviates drought by enhancing summer flow downstream of reservoirs. The relative dominance of drought intensification or relief is largely determined by the water demand, with drought intensification dominating in regions with intense water demand such as the Great Plains and California, while drought relief dominates in regions with low water demand. At the national level, water management increases the spatial extent of extreme drought despite some alleviations of moderate to severe drought. In an emissions mitigation scenario with increased irrigation demand for bioenergy production, water management intensifies drought more than the business-as-usual scenario at the national level, so the impacts of emissions mitigation must be evaluated by considering its benefit in reducing warming and evapotranspiration against its effects on increasing water demand and intensifying drought. 1. Introduction Droughts are often perceived as natural hazards, which produce a complex web of impacts that span many sectors of the society and environment, including water supply, agriculture, energy, water quality, and riparian habitats (
An Assessment of Municipal Drought Contingency Planning in Texas
Water availability is an important environmental issue in the United States. Since water is becoming more a limited natural resource, water policy will be a primary source of controversy, specifically during periods of drought. Recent widespread droughts have raised concerns about our nation’s vulnerability to periods of water shortages. It is imperative that public administrators of municipal water supply systems develop drought contingency plans that deal with water shortages in a timely and systematic manner because droughts are a normal part of the climate for most regions, especially for Texas. The purpose of this research is twofold. The first purpose is to explain the ideal components of a municipal drought contingency plan. The elements include public involvement, drought response triggering criteria, successive stages of response, drought response management measures, enforcement and plan adoption. The next objective is to assess the drought contingency plans of retail public water suppliers submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to determine which retail public water suppliers utilized the model drought contingency plan and how close all the plans met the ideal components. The overall assumption of this research is that the model drought contingency plan developed by the TCEQ is an effective tool for retail public water suppliers in Texas to aid them in meeting the regulatory components of drought contingency plans. The first portion of this research examines, from a national level, the concept of drought, drought impacts, future impacts facing municipal public water suppliers, problems with traditional drought planning, drought policy, and lessons learned from previous droughts. A conceptual framework for a municipal drought contingency plan is developed from the review of available literature. The purpose of the review is to explain the components of an ideal plan. The paper later focuses on Texas, the setting for this research. A brief overview of Texas droughts and projections are presented. A description is provided for both the model drought contingency plan and the municipal drought contingency plans selected for assessment. The later part of the paper discusses the methodology used to assess the municipal drought contingency plans submitted to the TCEQ by retail public water suppliers in Texas. Content analysis is used to determine which municipal public water suppliers utilized the TCEQ model drought contingency plan in developing their plans and which did not. After determining which suppliers utilized the model, content analysis is further used for each of the drought contingency plans to determine which ideal components are included in all of the plans. A discussion of how the practical ideal type of a municipal drought contingency plan is operationalized into measurable items for assessment is provided. The findings of the analysis confirm that the model plan in Texas is an effective tool for retail public water suppliers in meeting the required components of drought contingency plans. The paper concludes with a summary of the research findings in relation to the practical ideal type of the model drought contingency plan in Texas and concludes with recommendations and suggestions for additional research.
The Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan An Opportunity for E
Natural Resources Journal, 2021
The Upper Basin Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan (“DCP”), signed May 2019, was created to maintain sufficient Lake Powell storage levels for consumptive water demand and for hydropower generation. One of the most important requirements of the DCP is the obligation for Upper Basin states to explore the feasibility of demand management programs for their respective states. This exploratory process is ongoing for Upper Basin states. The DCP exploratory process, as well as the potential implementation of demand management programs, offer unique opportunities for water professionals to increase the role of public engagement in the implementation of a particular type of demand management known as water-smart growth planning. These opportunities create an improved relationship between what some have referred to as an historical divide between urban and rural water users. Public engagement is crucial for implementing the integration of water-smart growth planning with large scale, multisectoral needs. Water-smart growth planning represents a strategy of conserving water for urban areas which can consequently improve the urban-rural relationship by encouraging cities to shoulder a proportionate responsibility for conserving water, limiting unsustainable growth, and, consequently, diverting less water from agricultural areas. This article proposes three mechanisms meant to enhance the integration between a public engagement which links water-smart growth planning with multiregional water needs in order to cultivate better relationships between urban and rural water users. These include: (1) water-smart growth updates to San Juan Basin municipal development codes, their integration with the next Regional Water Plan update, and its public outreach process; (2) the interrelated mechanism of expanding water market transactions in order to integrate greater engagement between regional municipalities who have adopted water-smart growth planning and San Juan River users such as the Navajo Nation; and (3) the development of Colorado State University’s collaborative framework, “Atlas of Collaborative Conservation in Colorado,” in order to generate information on water use, including associated pricing, and assign implementation capabilities to environmental organizations within Colorado’s eight major river basins.
Impact of climate change on adaptive management decisions in the face of water scarcity
Keywords: Upper Colorado River Basin Adaptive capacity Agent-based model Drought contingency plans Tribal water rights A B S T R A C T Reoccurring drought through the early 2000s has caused a serious water scarcity issue in the Colorado River Basin. Previous modeling studies have focused on the impact of climate change without considering the adaptive behaviors of farmers and under-utilized Indian water rights. In this paper, we use a coupled agent-based water resource model (ABM) to investigate how the adaptive decisions of farmers can affect water resource management under both climate change impacts and fully utilized Indian water right conditions. We used five General Circulation Model projections with RCP8.5 scenarios for the study. The results of farm-level decision-making showed different responses in irrigated areas that were changing due to climate change impact. While winter precipitation changes might partially explain the behavior changes, no specific pattern could be concluded based on their location. Also, farmers' responses about annual water diversion showed more significant inter-year variation compared to irrigated areas. Basin-level metrics showed that climate change impacts will generally worsen water scarcity issues as measured in Navajo Reservoir storage, flow to Lake Powell, and in-stream flow requirement. But these basin-level water scarcity metrics cannot reflect individual farm-level impacts under climate change, which is why modeling the bottom-up management actions is necessary. When the under-utilized Indian water rights are fully used, it is more likely to trigger the shortage sharing agreement due to the higher tribal water depletion. Evaluation of model uncertainty and a more realistic setup for adaptive actions under drought contingency plans are suggested for future research.
2010
Climate change presents a significant planning challenge for water management agencies in the western United States. Changing precipitation and temperature patterns will disrupt their supply and extensive distribution systems over the coming decades, but the precise timing and extent of these impacts remain deeply uncertain, complicating decisions on needed investments in infrastructure and other system improvements. Adaptive strategies represent an obvious solution in principle, but are often difficult to develop and implement in practice. This paper describes work helping the Inland Empire Utilities Agency (IEUA) explicitly develop adaptive policies to respond to climate change and integrating these policies into the organizations' long-range planning processes. The analysis employs Robust Decision Making (RDM), a quantitative decision-analytic approach for supporting decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty. RDM studies use simulation models to assess the performance of agency plans over thousands of plausible futures, use statistical "scenario discovery" algorithms to concisely summarize those futures where the plans fail to perform adequately, and use these resulting scenarios to help decisionmakers understand the vulnerabilities of their plans and assess the options for ameliorating these vulnerabilities. This paper demonstrates the particular value of RDM in helping decisionmakers to design and evaluate adaptive strategies. For IEUA, the RDM analysis suggests the agency's current plan could perform poorly and lead to high shortage and water provisioning costs under conditions of: (1) large declines in precipitation, (2) larger-than-expected impacts of climate change on the availability of imported supplies, and (3) reductions in percolation of precipitation into the region's groundwater basin. Including adaptivity in the current plan eliminates 72% of the high-cost outcomes. Accelerating efforts in expanding the size of one of the agency's groundwater banking programs and implementing its recycling program, while monitoring the region's supply and demand balance and making additional investments in efficiency and storm-water capture if shortages are projected provides one promising robust adaptive strategyit eliminates more than 80% of the initially-identified high-cost outcomes.
Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies, 2023
Study region: The Middle Rio Grande (MRG), defined by the portion of the basin from Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico to the confluence with the Rio Conchos in Far West Texas, U.S.A. and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Study focus: The future of water for the MRG and many other arid and semi-arid regions of the world is challenged by a changing climate, agricultural intensification, growing urban populations,and a segmented governance system in a transboundary setting. The core question for such settings is: how can water be managed so that competing agricultural, urban, and environmental sectors can realize a sustainable future? We synthesize results from interdisciplinary research aimed at “water futures”, considering possible, probable, and preferable outcomes from the known drivers of change in the MRG in a stakeholder participatory mode. We accomplished this by developing and evaluating scenarios using a suite of scientifically rigorous computer models, melded with the input from diverse stakeholders. New hydrological insights for the region: Under likely scenarios without significant interventions, relatively cheap and easy to access water will be depleted in about 40 years. Interventions to mitigate this outcome will be very costly. A new approach is called for based on “adaptive cooperation” among sectors and across jurisdictions along four important themes: information sharing, water conservation, greater development and use of alternative water sources, and new limits to water allocation/withdrawals coupled with more flexibility in uses.