新澳门六合彩内幕信息

California has given away rights to far more water than it has

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On average, California allocates more than five times the amount of water to users than is available in its rivers and streams.

California has allocated five times more surface water than the state actually has, making it hard for regulators to tell whose supplies should be cut during a drought, University of California researchers reported.

The scientists said California鈥檚 water-rights regulator, the State Water Resources Control Board, needs a systematic overhaul of policies and procedures to bridge the gaping disparity, but lacks the legislative authority and funding to do so.

Ted Grantham, who explored the state鈥檚 water-rights database as a postdoctoral researcher with the 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, said the time is ripe for tightening the water-use accounting.

鈥淕iven the public鈥檚 current attention on drought and California water, we now have an unprecedented opportunity for strengthening the water-rights system,鈥 said Grantham, who conducted the analysis with 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Merced Professor Joshua Viers.

Better information might enable state regulators to better target water cutbacks in times of drought, Grantham said.

Grantham and Viers verified that water-rights allocations exceed the state's actual surface water supply by about 300 million acre-feet, enough to fill Lake Tahoe about 2.5 times.

The state has allocated a total maximum allowable use of 370 million acre-feet of surface water 鈥 more than five times the 70 million acre-feet available in a year of good precipitation, according to the researchers鈥 review of active water rights on record. The analysis was published today (Aug. 19) in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The scientists said the California鈥檚 water-rights allocation system is complicated and backlogged, which contributes to the mismatched accounting. For example, people sometimes take water, apply retroactively for the right to use the water and continue taking it 鈥 sometimes for up to a decade 鈥 while their applications are pending.

Inaccurate reporting by water-rights holders worsens the problem. Some may even deliberately overestimate so they do not lose as much if cutbacks occur. The result is that in most water basins and in most years, far more people hold water rights than there is water. In the San Joaquin River basin, for example, water-rights allocations exceed the river鈥檚 average annual flow by eightfold.

鈥淎ll those allocations mean that in times of drought, it鈥檚 hard to tell who should have to reduce water use, causing delays in issuing curtailments,鈥 said Viers, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society at 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Merced.

During the current drought, the state water board has for some watersheds ordered curtailments for all water users, to protect fish.

Viers and Grantham, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, are working to iron out issues with its database and make the information available to policymakers.

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At 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis, we and our partners are nourishing our state with food, economic activity and better health, playing a for more than 50 years. 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Davis is participating in launched by 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 President Janet Napolitano, harnessing the collective power of 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 to help feed the world and steer it on the path to sustainability.

Media Resources

Kat Kerlin, Research news (emphasis on environmental sciences), 530-750-9195, kekerlin@ucdavis.edu

Ted Grantham, (970) 226-9386, tgrantham@usgs.gov

Lorena Anderson, 新澳门六合彩内幕信息 Merced University Communications, (209) 228-4406, landerson4@ucmerced.edu

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