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Invest In Farm Water Conservation To Curtail Buy And Dry, David E. Rosenberg
Invest In Farm Water Conservation To Curtail Buy And Dry, David E. Rosenberg
Publications
The term buy-and-dry plays to the fears of farm and ranch communities. In Owens Valley, CA in the early 1900s and Palo Verde Irrigation District, CA today, wealthy urban water providers buy up water rights, dry out farms and ranches, export purchased water out of basin to growing cities, or keep water in storage to counter reservoir draw down (James, 2021). As more farmers and ranchers sell their water rights, local businesses—irrigation, farm equipment, seed, and other agricultural firms—contract. Those contractions encourage more farmers and ranchers to sell 15 their water rights and farms. And a negative feedback loop gains …
Adapt Lake Mead Releases To Inflow To Give Managers More Flexibility To Slow Reservoir Draw Down, David E. Rosenberg
Adapt Lake Mead Releases To Inflow To Give Managers More Flexibility To Slow Reservoir Draw Down, David E. Rosenberg
Publications
A 20-year Colorado River drought continues and Lake Mead draws down. As Lake Mead falls through 8 elevation tiers to 1,020 feet (5.7 million acre-feet [maf]), releases drop and mandatory water conservation targets for California, Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico grow to 1.375 maf per year (USBR, 2019). How will different reservoir inflows, releases, and additional water conservation efforts beyond mandatory targets speed or slow Lake Mead draw down, stabilization, and recovery?
Adapting Colorado River Basin Depletions To Available Water To Live Within Our Means, Jian Wang, David E. Rosenberg
Adapting Colorado River Basin Depletions To Available Water To Live Within Our Means, Jian Wang, David E. Rosenberg
Publications
The Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs are drawing down because releases exceed inflows and releases adapt to reservoir elevations instead of elevation and inflow triggers. To help slow reservoir drawdown and sustain target elevations, we introduced a new rule that adapted basin depletions to available water. We simulated inflow-based operations and validated existing operations in a new open-source exploratory model for the Colorado River Basin. We developed the exploratory model to more easily adapt Upper and Lower Basin depletions to available water, reduce run time, and lower costs to use compared to the proprietary RiverWare Colorado River Simulation System (CRSS) …