or other issues that then shut down the pumps? That’s the reliability of that infrastructure and its capacity to deliver water away from the boundaries of how we expect it to operate. The other piece of this is reli- ability of deliveries. How do we take water out of the Delta, particularly in a wet year, put it into the ground, and track it so that when we do have the droughts water being delivered from ground water or from storage is properly credited back to the Delta? That’s part of the benefi t of the reliability of a fi x in the Delta. And yet, when water leaves the Delta it kind of disappears. We don’t think about it in terms of this bigger picture of how we’re trying to reach for more reliability, more predict- ability, and the ability to having water in the right place at the right time to meet more of the agricultural and environmental needs.
Pitzer: How much are we accounting for the anticipated impacts of climate change on our water supply? It’s constantly talked about but are we doing enough to actually plan for and have contingencies in place?
Davis: I think we’re starting to. I think it’s really interesting to see how the BDCP planning has been so impacted by those long-term projec- tions on how we’re going to be shift- ing so much of our water supply from snow storage to precipitation and the timing, because that has really changed a lot of the operational considerations in the Delta fi x. When I look at the bigger picture of climate change and what we’re anticipating, I don’t think we’ve done enough. I think we’re just starting that conversation. It’s a very interesting conversation because it has to do with better understanding of vulnerabilities. And what can we control and what can’t we control as individual water agencies. It’s driving a lot of conversations that weren’t in place 10 years ago about integrative watershed management, where there’s infrastructure that we can jointly invest in that manage water supplies better overall.
January/February 2013
How can we be opportunistic about capturing stormwater? It’s a huge conversation in Southern California about how can we do this better. We’ve actually ignored stormwater as a water supply and only treat it as a water quality problem. I think a lot of changes fl ip that around and we’re now looking at it much more how we take advantage of that water when it’s available. I see a conversation starting and I think over the next 10 years it’s going to be very interesting to see how urban water management plans shift and really talk about how they’re going to be positioned to better withstand droughts that are going to be longer and better deal with the infrastructure of how to take advantage of the water when it comes. And then of course deal with sea level rise and some of the other infrastructure problems.
McClurg: What about the upstream reservoirs, which brings us to the question of interagency cooperation? We built the system based on snowmelt and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has fl ood release levels, where water is released at certain reservoir levels. If we’re going to get more rain than snow, what are we going to do with the structures upstream?
Hanak: This is something that my co-authors, Jay Lund and Richard Howitt, and some of the other folks at UC Davis have been able to look at in the big picture sense with the CALVIN [California Value Integrated Network] Model that they use, which is a water grid of California that allows you to move that water, store that water, block the water if you break the Delta conveyance. It also allows you to put some economic numbers behind that. And they’ve tortured this thing like crazy with the climate models that are out there to see what happens if we get a really warm, wet kind of climate change, what does that mean for fl oods? But then also what happens if we get a warm, dry kind of climate change and what does that mean? Or if as most of the models predict, we don’t get much change in the average, just
Watch a clip from the Foundation’s stormwater management video.