Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas State Climatologist
Climate change has entered the discussion on water availability once again. “The same amount of water won’t go as far as it used to,” says John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas State Climatologist at Texas A&M University. Nielsen-Gammon shed some light on the relationship between climate change and water availability at the 2012 Texas Water Summit held by the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science last week.
Nielsen-Gammon and a team of researchers have built climate change models using data derived from the short term climate fluctuations known as La Niña. “We can use short-term issues as a window to understanding what we have to deal with in the long-term,” he says.
While a La Niña year may be predicted several months in advance, long-term climate fluctuation is a tougher nut to crack. Many factors feed long-term climate change, Nielsen-Gammon said, including variations in solar intensity, large volcanic events, greenhouse gases, the orbit of the earth, particulate matter, land cover, variations in oceanic conditions, and atmospheric chaos. Unfortunately, the bulk of these variables are, on average, quite difficult to predict.
But here’s where attention directed toward short-term climate variation pays off. Continue Reading →
Texas is now at the same reservoir capacity levels it was during the drought of record in the 1950s.
While the recent drought was no honeymoon, the drought of record in the 1950s stands as a stark reminder of what could come to pass, said Todd Votteler, the Executive Manager of Science, Intergovernmental Relations, and Policy at the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. (You can read his presentation here.). Unlike the experience of the past year, the drought of record was the culmination of six to nine very dry years, he said. Emerging from the 1950s, authorities went to great lengths to increase the state’s surface water resources.
Unfortunately, this resource cushion has been all but depleted by the most recent drought experience and a growing population, Votteler said, leaving Texas at the same reservoir storage capacity per capita of 1953, the year that marked the beginning of the drought of record.
The Australian drought forced the country to make some tough decisions. Will Texas follow suit?
Stockman Gordon Litchfield from Wilpoorinna sheep and cattle station surveys the bottom of a dry dam on his property on June 7, 2005 in Leigh Creek, Australia.
Stockman Gordon Litchfield from Wilpoorinna sheep and cattle station holds a handful of bull dust on his property June 7, 2005 in Leigh Creek, Australia.
A Country Fire Authority (CFA) staff monitor a giant fire raging in the Bunyip State Park near Labertouche, some 125 kilometres west of Melbourne, on February 7, 2009. More than 40 blazes raged across two states as a once-in-a-century heatwave pushed the mercury as high as 46 degrees Celsius (115 Fahrenheit) with fire bans in place across much of the south-east, with conditions said to be the worst since the Ash Wednesday wildfires of 1983, which killed 75 people and razed 2,500 homes.
A dead kangaroo lies beside a burnt-out section of the Hume Highway near Seymour, some 100 kilometres north of Melbourne on February 9, 2009 as raging Australian wildfires left at least 131 people dead amid a landscape of charred homes, bodies and devastated communities. The wildfires have become the deadliest in Australia’s history, destroying entire towns and wiping out families and amid the heartache there was also anger as police revealed they suspected some of the fires were started by arsonists, whom Prime Minister Kevin Rudd accused of “mass murder.”
Farmer Marshall Rodda inspects an empty dam, leaving him with fields of stunted wheat stalks, normally thigh high, and which have only managed only a few inches growth in the parched earth of the Australian wheat belt in the fall of 2006.
An emaciated sheep standing in a field June 13, 2005 near Port Augusta, Australia.
This photo taken 16 November, 2006 shows a warning sign for boats sitting on the bottom of the empty Green Hill Lake outside the small rural town of Ararat, some 170 kms west of Melbourne.
A man shelters from the rain under his umbrella as he passes a giant mural showing the drought-affected Australian outback which is blocking public view of a fountain, turned off to conserve water in Melbourne’s CBD, 18 May 2007.
The remains of a fish lies on cracked ground at Wivenhoe Dam on April 10, 2007 in Queensland, Australia.
Cracked earth is seen at Wivenhoe Dam on April 10, 2007 in Brisbane, Australia.
An outdoor tap has cobwebs from lack of use May 11, 2005 in Goulburn, Australia.
One question that comes up when looking at the Texas drought is, are there any examples of other droughts the state could look to? Texas isn’t alone dealing with the issues of water and drought, and one of the most recent examples of a large population dealing with drought comes from Australia. (You can see a slideshow of the Australian drought above.)
“Australia is the biggest drama that has recently played out in the world of water,” said Ralph Eberts, the Executive Vice President of Black & Veatch Water, at the Texas Water Summit at the University of Texas Monday. Australia is just now emerging from a severe decade-long drought. At the peak South East Queensland hung on with less than fifteen percent of its water supplies remaining. Aussie wildlife and agriculture took a considerable blow. And failed rice and grain crops threatened to unhinge the global food supply.
A parallel can be drawn between Australia’s drought experience and that of Texas. Australia, like Texas, was caught in a bind with no warning. The drought experience across Australia varied considerably, with different regions undergoing various levels of stress. Texas has witnessed this variability with West Texas drawing the shorter straw.
But the duration of the Australian drought led to markedly different results. Continue Reading →
David Maidment says new data tools can help us better prepare for drought
Tracking the changes in water availability across the state using a variety of tools is an integral component of predicting and responding to drought. That’s what David R. Maidment of the Center of Research in Water Resources at UT had to say at the Texas Water Summit held Monday. As a member of the innovative Drought Technology Steering Committee at UT, Maidment presented a set of data that showed the impact of the drought.
Let’s just say that the picture Maidment’s painted wasn’t comforting. “It’s possible to quantify a very important impact of the drought on our state – the loss of vegetation,” said Maidment. A satellite image of the state taken before the drought revealed a lush green landscape. Seconds later, the newest satellite image of Texas was revealed – bone dry, yellowed, accented with the thin, wispy trails of remaining vegetation.
Researchers have increasingly turned to satellite imaging to gain a better handle on the situation. GRACE satellites, which measure the alterations in the force of gravity relative to water volume fluctuations, have indicated that over 100 cubic kilometers of water statewide was lost due to the 2011 drought. This figure amounts to the disappearance of approximately seventy Lake Travis’. Shallow groundwater reserves faired no better – over nine cubic kilometers were lost. Continue Reading →
Water conservation was the foundation for the city’s efforts, Puente says. The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) now serves over 1.6 million people, but despite a sixty-seven percent increase in population, the city has witnessed little to no increase in water use. How? Puente largely credits this feat to an arsenal of conservation programs. San Antonio has relied on what Puente calls “the three-legged stool”: education and outreach, reasonable regulation through effective city ordinances, and healthy financial investment towards conservation efforts.
“Our business model is to convince our customers to buy less of our product,” says Puente. Like the Plumbers to People program, an initiative to retrofit toilets. The cumulative effect of these conservation efforts was the conservation of more than 120,000 acre-feet of water – an $84 million savings over the course of last summer.
The efforts of the San Antonio Water System, however, haven’t stopped at improving the efficiency of bathrooms. Continue Reading →
Photo by Flickr user GrungeTextures/Creative Commons
The Texas drought has killed an estimated 5.6 million urban trees and 500 million forest trees, roughly 10 percent of the trees in Texas.
The Texas Forest Service plans to take a long look at Texas’ trees to see how much damage the ongoing drought has done.
Last December, the forest service released a preliminary estimate of between 100 and 500 million trees killed by the drought. A later estimate of tree losses in urban areas of Texas have been pegged at more than five million. Both of those surveys relied on satellite imagery of trees in Texas.
$208 million of those losses were due to firefighting costs, most of it spent by the Texas Forest Service. But that estimate excludes the losses due to the Bastrop country Labor Day wildfires, as the analysis only looks at Fiscal Year 2011, which ended on August 31 of that year.
Other costs include groundskeeping and infrastructure, which were valued around $36 million. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) spent nearly $32 million toward pavement maintenance, and the Texas Youth Commission expended a million dollars for upkeep related to foundation, structure, and road repairs. Among the sixteen universities surveyed, landscaping, irrigation costs, and sports field repairs totaled nearly two million dollars.
These figures compound the monetary blow dealt by the drought. An earlier study by the Texas AgriLife Extension Service stated that total agricultural losses, including declines in livestock, cotton, hay, corn, wheat, and sorghum production, amounted to $7.6 billion. Cattle ranchers shipped 26 percent more cattle outside of Texas due to scarce hay and water supplies, and subsequent declines in beef cow production resulted in the smallest cow herd since 1960. You can learn more about the drought and water issues in Texas at our interactive webpage, Dried Out: Confronting the Texas Drought.
Sheyda Aboii is an intern with StateImpact Texas.
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