Scripps Oceanographic Study - Expect 60 - 90% Miss Rate In Colorado River Water Deliveries By 2050

[hatrack]

EDIT

"All water-use planning is based on the idea that the next 100 years will be like the last 100," said Scripps research marine physicist Tim Barnett, a co-author of the report. "We considered the question: Can the river deliver water at the levels currently scheduled if the climate changes as we expect it to. The answer is no."

Even under conservative climate change scenarios, Barnett and Scripps climate researcher David Pierce found that reductions in the runoff that feeds the Colorado River mean that it could short the Southwest of a half-billion cubic meters (400,000 acre feet) of water per year 40 percent of the time by 2025. (An acre foot of water is typically considered adequate to meet the annual water needs of two households.) By the later part of this century, those numbers double.

The paper, "Sustainable water deliveries from the Colorado River in a changing climate," appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The analysis follows a 2008 study in which Barnett and Pierce found that Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Colorado River created by Hoover Dam, stood a 50-percent chance of going dry in the next 20 years if the climate changed and no effort was made to preserve a minimum amount of water in the reservoir.

The new study assumes instead that enough water would be retained in the reservoir to supply the city of Las Vegas, and examines what delivery cuts would be required to maintain that level. "People have talked for at least 30 years about the Colorado being oversubscribed but no one ever put a date on it or an amount. That's what we've done," said Barnett. "Without numbers like this, it's pretty hard for resource managers to know what to do."

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http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Climate_Change_Means_Shortfalls_In_Colorado_River_Water_Deliveries_999.html

[hunter]

1. !!!

It's time to pay very close attention to the Australian drought.