Monthly Archives: April 2010

April 30, 2010 | 7:28 PM | By

Playing the State Water Lottery

Craig Miller

Photo: Craig Miller

I don’t know Mark Cowin, the director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. I haven’t even met the man, in person. But after listening to and reading his pronouncements about the state’s water supply, I’d guess he’s a guy who would barely crack a smile if he found himself holding a winning lottery ticket. I hazard that opinion because even after today’s great news about the Sierra snowpack–which is a little like finding out the state has won its annual water lottery–what Cowin emphasizes is that California isn’t out of the woods after the dry spell of 2007-2009. But more about that to follow. First, the details on the DWR’s final Sierra snow survey.

DWR announced on Friday that statewide, the water content stored in the Sierra snow is at 143% of normal for the date; 188% in the northern Sierra, 121% in the central mountains, and 139% in the southern reaches of the range. Up and down the Sierra, those figures are more than double the levels of the past two years, and are up to seven times as much as surveyors found in the bone-dry spring of 2007.

Last week, the Department announced it would increase allocations from the State Water Project to 30% of the amount requested from 29 urban and agricultural customers. Today’s snowpack news prompted the department to say that it’s likely to increase deliveries. How much? “Only marginally,” Cowin said in a phone interview this afternoon. “We’ll have to run the numbers, and we’ll probably make that determination in the next week or two.”

How much water will State Water Project customers get, eventually? Let’s run some numbers of our own.

The main reason the department cites for the very tight supply in the midst of a year of “normal” precipitation is the continuing below-average levels at California’s biggest state-owned reservoir, Lake Oroville. As of Friday afternoon, the lake is at 72% of normal for the date and about 60% full. But the stats that Cowin’s water geeks are crunching aren’t about the level today, but where they guess it will be as runoff begins to pour from the snow-blanketed mountains through the Feather River watershed into Lake Oroville. DWR officials have insisted that it believes runoff will be held down because of dry conditions caused by the last three drought years. You wonder if they’ll still believe that after assessing the impact of an unusually wet April and its impact on the snowpack.

While pondering that, here are some other numbers to consider if you want to play what I’ll call the State Water Project Allocation Game:

  • After running far below its 2008-2009 levels all season, the water storage in Lake Oroville caught up and passed year-ago levels this week. The lake’s storage has increased six percent—more than 150,000 acre-feet—since last Friday.
  • As noted above, this year’s snowpack is better than double last year’s.
  • Last year, the state delivered 40 percent of requested water shipments to its SWP customers. The average allocation for the past 10 years is 68 percent.

Considering all of the above—last year’s deliveries, the snowpack, the sudden late-season surge in Lake Oroville’s levels—it’s a no-brainer that water deliveries will at least match last year’s 40 percent. The question is whether the allocation will go higher. All Cowin would say on that subject today is that he thinks that 45%, the amount DWR described two months ago as the upper limit for shipments this season, is still accurate.

But Cowin did say, as he has more and more frequently of late, that a preoccupation with the this year’s water level misses the point about California’s water reality.

“That’s why we’re so concerned when we get the black and white question, ‘Is the drought over,’” he said. “We are in a period of long scarcity in California. We have no idea what next year’s water supply picture will look like. It’s possible we could have two or three more dry years in a row. So we’re trying to get a message out that we need to have a new attitude about how we use water in California, and it shouldn’t depend on this week’s outlook. We need to conserve water just as a way of life.”

If you want to explore the state’s water supply picture for yourself, check out our California Reservoir Watch map, below:

View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map
View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Water, Agriculture, Alpine, Drought, Policy, Sierra Nevada, snow, snow survey, snowpack, state water project, Water
April 29, 2010 | 7:19 PM | By

What’s an Albedo? (And Why You Should Care)

Jeff Dozier approaches the instrument tower on Mammoth Mountain.

Jeff Dozier approaches an instrument tower on Mammoth Mountain. Photo: Molly Samuel

When Jeff Dozier, a hydrologist at UC Santa Barbara, goes to work, he gets to enjoy quite a view. His snow lab is perched halfway up Mammoth Mountain in the central Sierra. We took a gondola to get up there; the other passengers were skiers and snowboarders itching to get out on the freshly fallen snow.

But the instrument platform from which we enjoyed views of the White Mountains is really only half the story. Dozier’s computer lab has much less of a view. In fact, it has no view. It’s buried under the snow, accessible only through what he calls a “Santa Claus entrance” (in the picture above, you can see the entrance–it’s the white tubular “chimney” extending down into the snow from the center of the platform).

The snow lab, operated by both UCSB and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), uploads information about the snowpack to a website every fifteen minutes. You can see nearly real-time readings on, among other things, snow depth, temperature, humidity, and radiation.

Dozier in the computer lab. Photo: Molly Samuel

Dozier in the computer lab. Photo: Molly Samuel

Radiation is an important one. Instruments called radiometers are mounted on the tower. Some point up, measuring the radiation coming from the sun; others point down, measuring how much is reflected back to the sky by the snow.

“Albedo” is the measurement of how reflective the snow is. Something completely white that reflects all of the sun’s energy has an albedo of one; something black, that absorbs all the energy, is zero. Bright, freshly fallen snow has a high albedo, typically above 0.8.

Even if the term is new to you, albedo is probably a familiar concept. As I reported for KQED’s The California Report this morning, Hans Moosmuller of the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute explains it in terms of outfits: on a sunny day, if you wear a black sweater you’ll be warmer than if wear a white one. You may notice it with roofs, too. I grew up in Atlanta, in a house with a black roof. Before my parents got an air conditioner, the upstairs bedrooms were unbearable in the summer. If we’d had a white

These radiometers measure radiation coming from the sun. Photo: Molly Samuel

These radiometers measure radiation coming from the sun. Photo: Molly Samuel

roof, it would have been a little more bearable (though I can’t say it would have helped with Atlanta’s other charming summer attributes, humidity and mosquitoes).

The color sweater you wear has no bearing on the earth’s climate. Roof color could have an effect on a large enough scale. What really matters are the huge swaths of dark and light that cover the globe: ocean and snow.

When warming causes sea ice near the poles to melt faster, areas that had a high albedo (ice is very reflective) become  areas with a very low albedo (the blue ocean absorbs more radiation than forests or plain dirt). Moosmuller says it creates a feedback loop. The more dark spots there are, the more radiation is absorbed. So melting speeds up, and warming increases, exposing even more dark areas, and so on.

Pollution plays an important role that’s coming under increasing scrutiny. Deposits of soot or dust make the snow darker, so it melts faster, exposes more dark ground, and there’s that feedback loop again. In the Himalayas soot, also known as black carbon, from stoves, tailpipes, factories, and fires is having a measurable impact.

In the Rockies, there’s a similar problem caused by dust kicked up from ranches. Tom Painter of the University of Utah says the snow in the Colorado River Basin melts a full month earlier than normal. The difference the dust makes is so drastic, Painter says, that “We’re in an entirely new regime for snow melt…it would be like if we started measuring climate impacts fifty years from now.”

No one has yet done a long-term study on the effects of dust and soot on the Sierra Nevada snow pack. Moosmuller says he’s beginning to look into it now. In the summer, black carbon drifts into the mountains from California’s cities, ports, highways and farms in the Central Valley. Tony Van Curen, in a research project at UC Davis, has found that soot blows over from Asia, too.

There is good news in all of this: Black carbon, unlike most greenhouse gases, lingers in the atmosphere only for a couple of weeks. So reducing emissions could have a relatively quick impact.

Listen to the radio piece.

FILED UNDER: The Science, Water, Air, Alpine, Emissions, positive feedbacks, Sierra Nevada, snowpack, Technology
April 29, 2010 | 8:08 AM | By

Tracking the Changing Glaciers of the West

Yosemite's Dana Glacier, in 2008 and 1883 (photo: Gretchen Weber)

Yosemite's Dana Glacier in 2008, and a photo of it from 1883. Photo: Gretchen Weber

Years of exhaustive (and exhausting) field work out of Portland State University has produced some stunning visual images online.

Not quite two years ago, reporter Sasha Khokha and I joined geologist Hassan Basagic on a long trek to photograph the Dana Glacier, located just inside the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park.  Since 2003, Basagic has been documenting the changes in the glaciers of the Sierra using historic photographs, and we joined him in September of 2008 to see the shrinking glacier for ourselves. We documented the trip with a radio report, an audio slide show, and web videos.

That field work was part of a project called “Glacier Rephotography of the American West” which tracks the retreat of glaciers across the western United States over the last century.

Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee, who has closely followed the project, tells us that it has produced a new online resource. It includes a series of interactive time lines that showcase historic photos as well as more recent ones (including Basagic’s) that, when viewed side by side, offer some startling views of how glaciers in various regions have changed.

For more remarkable images of moving glaciers, explore the “Extreme Ice” episode of the PBS series Nova.

FILED UNDER: The Science, Water, Alpine, Cryosphere, glaciers, Temperature
April 28, 2010 | 5:14 PM | By

East Coast Leads Offshore Wind Derby

The Nysted wind farm off Denmark. Image: Cape Wind Assoc.

The Nysted wind farm off Denmark. Image: Cape Wind Assoc.

The nation’s first offshore utility-scale wind farm has won federal approval but it was no slam dunk. The Dept. of Interior has approved the 130-turbine Cape Wind project, off Nantucket.

The plan launched such an epic debate that at least one book has been written about it. Today’s nod comes just weeks after a federal advisory panel recommended against approval and doesn’t necessarily mean the project will go forward. Opposition groups have already vowed to go to court.

Cape Wind is just one of numerous offshore wind projects under consideration for the East Coast and Great Lakes region.

Permitting for most wind projects in California comes under local jurisdiction but a spokeswoman at the California Energy Commission told me that to her knowledge, no offshore wind projects are currently under review for California. An obstacle often cited is the extreme ocean depths off California, which make construction difficult. Various wave power projects have been proposed for the coastline.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, 33x20, Coastal, DOI, interior, Oceans, Policy, renewable energy, Technology
April 26, 2010 | 7:10 PM | By

A (PDQ) PDO Primer

The term “PDO” is coming up more often in climate discussions. What it is and why it’s being bandied about are explained in this post from our content partners, Climate Central.

Surf along California's Mendocino Coast. Photo: Craig Miller

Surf along California's Mendocino Coast. Photo: Craig Miller

Did Someone Say “PDO”?

By Heidi Cullen, Phil Duffy and Claudia Tebaldi

Earlier this month, The New York Times ran a page-one story looking into why climatologists and TV meteorologists are at odds over global warming.

The article, which quoted one of the authors of this post, pointed out that while climate scientists almost universally agree that human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, are warming up the planet, a significant percentage of TV meteorologists do not. In fact, a recent study from George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin showed that out of 571 TV meteorologists surveyed, only about half believed that global warming was happening and fewer than a third accepted the proposition that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.” The survey also suggested that TV meteorologists view climate change as mostly a natural phenomenon.

Joe Bastardi, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, stands squarely in the natural causes camp, and he offered up his own explanation recently on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. On the comedy show, Bastardi said the global warming trend is just temporary and caused by a mix of volcanic activity, solar cycles, warmer ocean temperatures and specifically a natural climate pattern known as the “PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Bastardi has provided a great opportunity to educate the public about climate change. And as climate scientists, we’d like to take a moment to talk about natural climate variability specifically.

The solar cycle and volcano arguments Bastardi gravitates toward are fascinating. But when it comes to climate change, these natural sources of climate variability are incapable of doing the heavy lifting. In fact, they’ve been raised, tested, and solidly laid to rest by the climate science community. Variations in solar output are too weak, and in any case repeat every 11 years, and so cannot explain a steady warming trend over 40+ years. As for the volcano argument, eruptions are also too puny. Globally,volcanoes, like Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano as well as those under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes (metric tons) of CO2 annually.

That may sound like a lot, but it’s trivial when compared to human activity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes—over 100 times more. Let’s just say human activity can bench press a whole lot more warming than the sun’s variations and volcanoes combined.

Before we move on to the role of the Pacific, we want to first thank Bastardi for daring to mention the phrase P-D-O on television. While geeks like us find the Pacific Decadal Oscillation fascinating, alphabet soup has a tendency to make the public’s eyes glaze over.

The PDO is just one of many natural oscillations in the climate system. It is characterized by a positive or “warm”  phase, and a negative or “cool” phase, which refer to the pattern of anomalies in sea surface temperatures and air pressure between the north central Pacific Ocean and the northeastern Pacific. The El Niño/La Nina cycle, for example, is another natural oscillation. Its period, about three-to-seven years, is shorter than the PDO’s, but in fact, the PDO is often thought of a slower version of El Niño, as some of the manifestations are similar.

Image: NOAA

For example, in the warm phase of the PDO, temperatures in the northwest region of North America tend to be warmer than average, while the southeastern U.S. tends to be cooler than average. Bastardi believes the warming trend (shown below) is only temporary because the phase in which the PDO has predominantly been at the same time, with its warmer than average tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures, is temporarily juicing the system. He forecasts the global temperature trend will dip back down once the PDO shifts back.

blog_monthlyPDOHere’s the problem. First and foremost, while the PDO is important in driving regional climate variations, it has no clear effect on global temperatures. And although the PDO was in its warm phase during the majority of the time from the mid 1970s to the present, it also shifted sharply in multiple instances (see chart), which is inconsistent with the steady global warming trend during the same period. For example, the decade from 2000 to 2009 was the warmest on record globally, but the PDO was not positive throughout that period.

It has been said that the truth is stubborn. This idea gives climate scientists a small sense of relief in that eventually, the stubborn truth will be recognized; that the recent global warming trend is real and caused mostly by human activities.

References for this article are shown in the original post at Climate Central.

FILED UNDER: The Science, Coastal, Ecosystems, Fisheries, meteorologists, Oceans, oscillations, Pacific
April 22, 2010 | 8:31 PM | By

New Solar Manufacturing Plant for Silicon Valley

SunPower CEO Tom Werner and Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar announcing the creation of a new solar manufacturing plant in Milpitas, CA (photo: Gretchen Weber)

SunPower CEO Tom Werner and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Photo: Gretchen Weber

Silicon Valley-based solar cell manufacturer SunPower Corp. announced today that it’s decided to site its newest manufacturing plant in California, a move that CEO Tom Werner says will create hundreds of jobs and may prompt an “economic cluster” that will attract similar projects.

SunPower has partnered with contract manufacturer Flextronics, and plans for the Milipitas-based operation to be up and running by the end of the year, producing high-efficiency solar cells.

Werner and Flextronics CEO E.C. Sykes were joined at the announcement in Milipitas by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sported a green tie and chastised the assembled crowd for not celebrating Earth Day with similar fashion choices.

“I am so excited about this,” said Schwarzenegger about the new project. “This proves that protecting the economy and protecting the environment can be done simultaneously.”

Werner said locating the manufacturing operation in California makes sense both for economic reasons and because California is home to a large solar market, thanks to  the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, requiring 33% renewable energy by 2020, and the Million Solar Roofs Initiative.  Werner added that a record 50 megawatts of rooftop solar power were installed last month in California.

“You want to be close to your customer for logistical reasons, and also because you learn from your customer and you build it back into your product,” Werner told me following the staged media event.  “And by being local you can learn faster than you can if you’re distant.”

Other California selling points were a green manufacturing equipment sales tax exemption, which enabled SunPower to buy equipment for the facility tax-free, and low-interest loans from Recovery Act funds granted through the City of Milpitas, said Werner.

Governor Schwarzenegger used the occasion to warn Californians against taking the state’s environmental laws for granted.

“Right now there are greedy Texas oil companies that want to come in here and spend millions of dollars to roll back AB 32 (the state’s 2006 carbon legislation) and our other environmental laws,” he said. “Why? Because they don’t like that there’s alternative energy being created.  They don’t like what you are doing here.”

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Power, 33x20, Economics, Policy, Schwarzenegger, solar, Technology
April 22, 2010 | 2:12 PM | By

An Earth Day “Natural:” San Francisco’s Tree Census

San Francisco 5th-grader Benton Liang demonstrates how to add a tree to the Urban Forest Map (photo: Gretchen Weber)

San Francisco 5th-grader Benton Liang demonstrates how to add a tree to the Urban Forest Map. Photo: Gretchen Weber

A new online tool launched this week aims to enlist citizens to help catalog San Francisco’s trees.  The Urban Forest Map relies on the public, or “citizen scientists,” to observe their yards and neighborhoods and to add information to an online database that tracks  tree location, species, size, and health, throughout San Francisco.

The project’s creator, Amber Bieg, said that 17 different organizations and agencies in the city manage and track trees, but until now, they had no organized way to share information. “This map provides the ability to aggregate data in a new way,” said Bieg. “And it’s an affordable way to do an inventory because it uses citizen participation.”

Bieg developed the program with funding from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (CAL FIRE). Created in cooperation with Friends of the Urban Forest and the City and County of San Francisco, the Urban Forest Map is designed to serve as a publicly accessible, centralized database that will help urban foresters and city planners better manage trees in specific areas, track and combat tree pests and diseases, and plan future tree plantings.

Creators also hope that climatologists will use to the tool to better understand the effects of urban forests on climate, and that students will get involved and use the map to learn about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem. “If you can’t count it, you can’t manage it,” said CAL FIRE urban forester John Melvin. “If the state is going to adapt to climate change, we’re going to have to expand and better manage our urban forests, and that starts with knowing what we have.”

Urban trees can help cities adapt to climate change by providing shade cover and by both mitigating and purifying storm water runoff, Melvin said. Studies have shown that a robust tree canopy can reduce the “urban heat island” effect by several degrees.

To underscore how easy the tool is to use, on Wednesday morning San Francisco 5th-grader Benton Liang demonstrated how to use to the software for a small crowd gathered in a small park at the foot of the Transamerica Building. In addition to providing an inventory, Bieg said, the map is also an educational tool.  The Urban Tree Key is a related interactive tool that helps citizen scientists identify common Northern California urban trees. The map’s software also allows users to calculate the benefits, such as energy savings and air quality, that a specific tree or category of trees provide using data from the Center for Urban Forests Research, said Bieg.

To learn more about the Urban Forest Map, watch a video from 2007 that KQED’s Quest made about the project.

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, CalFire, Ecosystems, Urban Planning
April 21, 2010 | 6:57 PM | By

States Bridle Against “One-Size” Carbon Rules

Next week the US Senate will take the wraps off a long-awaited national energy and climate bill, which–even before its unveiling–is already making California businesses and regulators nervous.

Though exact language has not been revealed, the compromise bill reportedly includes sections that would nullify state and regional programs to regulate carbon emissions. That does not sit well with Mary Nichols, California’s chief carbon regulator. “When it comes to energy policy and the environment, one size truly does not fit all,” Nichols told reporters in a Tuesday conference call. Nichols chairs the California Air Resources Board, which is the lead agency charged with implementing the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act, passed in 2006.

The state has already invested three years and more than $100 million dollars (approximately $40 million per year, according to a policy brief issued last week by the state’s non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office), laying the groundwork for sweeping new regulations, including a carbon trading scheme with several other Western states. The regional cap-and-trade program known as the Western Climate Initiative could also be jeopardized by the current Senate bill, though from most appearances, the program is already languishing.

Businesses also have much at stake. Jan Smutny-Jones heads the Independent Energy Producers Association, whose members generate almost half the electric power produced in California. “My members are making literally billion-dollar decisions about infrastructure that’s going to be around in California generating electricity or transporting electricity to customers for the next 40-50 years, and they kind of need to know sooner rather than later, in terms of what the actual rules of the road are gonna be,” Smutny-Jones told me in his Sacramento office on Monday. “Having the rules change is disruptive,” he said.

California Senator Barbara Boxer, who co-sponsored the first Senate version of the bill last fall, says she does “not support federal preemption” but also wants to avoid overlap between the state and federal systems. “It depends on how the bill is written,” Boxer told reporters at the recent state Democratic Convention. “I’ve had environmentalists say ‘Well if we do a trading system on the credits, we want one system, we don’t want two systems,’ so there’s some areas where it may make sense.”

Nichols offered little latitude in her remarks on Tuesday.  “We need to put down a marker here and remind the senators that they will not have an effective climate program without the states,” she said. “We don’t want there to be any room for doubt about whether states are permitted to do things that advance their economic and energy agendas.” Nichols cited large amounts of “green” venture capital flowing into California as fruit already borne by the state’s actions toward reducing carbon emissions.

The Senate bill is expected to be rolled out on Monday. Optimists are hoping that a finished bill could reach the Senate floor by June or July, according to a report from Reuters news service.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Assembly Bill 32, California Air Resources Board, climate bill, Economics, Emissions, Nichols, Policy, US Senate
April 20, 2010 | 5:33 PM | By

Spring Comes Sooner, Some Species Suffer

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Spring in the United States comes ten days sooner than it did just 20 years ago, according to scientists on a media call Tuesday.   This phenomenon, known as “spring creep” (or “season creep“), may be good news for flip-flop fans, but it doesn’t always work out well for native species in certain habitats.  According to Reuters, scientists on the call (which was sponsored by the Union of Concerned Scientists) explained that when spring comes earlier, it doesn’t just bring warm weather sooner — it actually throws off the balance of entire ecosystems by encouraging the spread of invasive species, many of which are better able to adapt to the changing conditions than are native plants and animals.  In the American West, warmer weather is already shrinking the habitat of the American pika, and more of it could make wildfires more frequent and intense.

FILED UNDER: The Science, Ecosystems, Invasive species, Temperature, Wildlife
April 20, 2010 | 12:13 PM | By

Stop-AB 32 Drive Draws Money from Farther Afield

87606151Environmentalists have registered much consternation over the fact that out-of-state oil companies have been bankrolling a ballot measure to freeze implementation of AB 32, backbone of the state’s climate strategy.

Today Anthony York updates the situation with the latest intrigue on his Capitol Weekly website.

The latest major contribution–nearly a half-million dollars–reportedly comes from a Missouri foundation with tenuous links to climate policy.

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, Assembly Bill 32, Economics, Emissions, Policy