UWMP Training Module 7 – Considering Climate Change
Good morning, everyone, thanks for joining us for the training workshop in the series to support water suppliers in their water management plans planning. Today's topic is incorporation of climate change considerations into the plan. Looks like people are still joining, but I'm just going to get started with some of the logistical things that we do to just make sure everybody has all the technical support that they need to be able to participate today. If you have any questions, actually, Sophie, who is usually joining us is not going to be here. Instead my colleague Danaka DeBow will provide any technical support should you have any questions feel free to use the chat panel to request or ask questions.
If you want to ask questions of presenters today, please use the Q&A panel, or alternatively please use the hand raising the participant panel if you want to ask a question in person and join the discussion. Just a quick reminder on the Q&A panel, you can ask a question at the bottom. If you see a question that is particularly important, you can vote it up to let us know that this is important. Or if you have comments or questions or want to build on a question posed by another participant you can use the comment as well.
So please remember that we're really going to be focusing on the Q&A panel for the discussion with the presenters today. We'd like you to ask to help provide the plan from the information you'll see today. From the chart we have quite a few participants who have already had some experience with the plan and so we're really focusing on the updates and changes to the plan. Some of you are doing it for the first time. Mostly with some support. But some of you this is their first time,
and we hope that these training modules we'll creating and reporting are helpful to all of you. For our workshop today, our purpose today is to present information, some ideas, recommendations and how you might consider incorporating climate change into the plan in terms of water demands, supply and reliability. We're going to start the workshop with Julia Ekstrom, who is going to really just orient us around the plan and where climate change might fit in. And then we have three different presenters today who are going to provide information that really represent a range of resources and capacities that suppliers may have in terms of data and information to support their climate change considerations.
So we'll give you an opportunity to see what it looks like at different levels. We're going to take a quick short break in the middle of the workshop to just take our eyes away from the screen for a little bit and we'll plan on wrapping up at noon. One thing that we added here, given that this is a new requirement, is to the extent that we have time, we would love to hear from you how you're thinking about incorporating climate change resources. So we'll come back to that at the end of the workshop.
We want to find out what is your overall experience working with climate change data. And the emphasis that your management, your leadership may place in climate change inclusion, just in general. This will help our presenters. So please help us by answering
the introductory poll. You should be able to see that. You can use the gray bar on the right side to just scroll down to the second question. There are two questions here that we're asking. So I'll wait a few seconds to give everybody an opportunity to respond to the poll. As you're responding, looks like there's quite a range. So hopefully everybody who wanted to has been able to respond to the poll. I'm going to end it.
And just share, you can see that we have a real range of experience joining us today. And for the second question many of you are expressing the fact that this is becoming an emphasis that you've already been thinking about climate change inclusion in your work, which is terrific. So, we're looking forward to hearing from everyone today. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Julia Ekstrom, who is a Senior Environmental Scientist supervisor with DWR's water use efficiency branch. Go ahead, Julia. >> Great, thanks Orit. Give me a thumbs up you can hear me okay. >> Yes, you're good.
>> Great. So thank you all for joining us today. And welcome back for those of you that participated in yesterday's webinar. So I'm just going to go quickly over where does climate change fit in terms of preparing your urban water management plan. And then we'll get to our three fantastic speakers, and I'm very excited that we have them today. We'll go to the next slide, Orit. So these are essentially the core substance of the Urban Water Management Plan. I tinkered with it a little bit since yesterday. In the middle we have characterizing supplies
and your demand. And then assessing your reliability. And the main, the big plans are the assessments that come out of that. And then on the left hand side we have compliance with SBX seven 7. We've had webinars including yesterday about that.
And so that's about complying with your water use targets. Next. So there are other important pieces related to the core. And for each of these we've offered training sessions. And so we have I put here climate change at the bottom and how that overlaps with assessing your supply and your demand and reliability. And also can be incorporated into a drought risk assessment looking forward. But if you go to the next slide, we have all these purple arrows are all the webinars, the training sessions for those preparing Urban Water Management Plans. The lighter purple are the ones we've already held. And they're recorded and posted on YouTube. And the darker purple ones are upcoming.
So today is on climate change but if you're interested in other topics that you need to cover in your Urban Water Management Plan, a lot of these webinars go in detail about these topics. And so people have been saying that this has been helpful so far. So we will have three upcoming after this and we'll talk more about that at the end.
Now, in terms of the building blocks of the Urban Water Management Plan, just wanted to relate climate change to this. So the Urban Water Management Planning act requires demonstration activity ability for supplier to meet customer demands under various supply conditions. And so this focus on reliability is important. And this is useful over several planning horizons.
Next slide. So we have you characterize the supply. You characterize your demand, and then from that you're able to assess your reliability. Next slide. So this involves assessments on an annual basis, near term and also long term. So for each of these bubbles here, the supply demand characterization and reliability. And the long term requirement is where climate change considerations clearly are relevant. Supply and demand characterizations
also have to include this long term assessment. So they have to do it by normal water year, a single dry year and then also of a drought of five consecutive dry years. So this is all over increments of five years, looking out 20 to 25 years. And so that's the big connection. And I just wanted to show you briefly, you can go to the next slide, some of the
legal language. I'm not going to go exhaustive through this, but I just wanted to point out that really in the Water Code relevant to the Urban Water Management Planning act, there are code sections that And these are all listed out in appendix I, by the way, that has been drafted and is not changing much for the final guidebook. So we'll post the link to that in case you haven't looked at that. But I think that's a step farther
along than was provided in 2015 in terms of guidance. Hopefully you'll find it helpful. We have it all listed out in appendix I. So first climate change, the premise of the Urban Water Management Plan act, it mentions climate change twice right up front T climate change is one of a bundle of factors to consider for why we need to manage resources, water resources efficiently. Our growing population. Climate change. The economy. The environment. And then, next slide, there's another declaration from the Legislature in the Water Code that highlights that climate change is important to include in planning for long term water resources reliability.
Okay. So that's the kind of, this is the premise. And then in your next slide in Water Code section 10631, it gets into the substance of what is required. And that's the need to consider climate change and the assessment of each supply.
So that's what is I believe chapter four in the guidebook is that you need to assess or characterize your supplies, each supply. And then in the next slide, it points to section Water Code section 10635. And that's the drought risk assessment. That again states the requirement to incorporate climate change considerations into both the characterization of projected supply and projected water demand. So that's over the 20, up to 25 years
outlook. And the reliability assessment is also as part of the drought risk assessment. So in terms of where the requirements are, this is where the this is the essentially the core. And that is the extent to which it is described in law of what the requirements are. So that leaves it flexible for how you pursue this and deem it useful for your own assessment. Which is great but it also probably begs the question okay what's next, what do we do, what should we do. And that's why we are excited to have our next three speakers
go into what can you do and where is information available. Because California has invested a lot into understanding and developing projections and understanding how climate change is going to affect our state and also in different regions. And so there's a lot to, a lot of path paved already. But it really depends on a lot depends on the supplier and their needs and what their supplies look like, what their demand looks like. Then the next slide that I just wanted to show quickly, and flagging it, that there are particular tables that they're not climate change tables, but there are areas where you could incorporate it. So in chapter of the guidebook chapter 4 we have the water use characterization. First, I didn't mention you can incorporate it in your system description in the narrative.
That would be an appropriate place how climate change could affect it just generally and water use characterization, looking at tables for tables 4 2 and 4 3. And the next slide. We have the water supply characterization, tables 6 4 and 6 9 go out in five year increments over 20, 25 years. Next slide. And then the water reliability evaluations, table 7 2. Seven 3. 7 4. If you want to include it in the tables, this is where you would incorporate it. And of course you would describe what you did and how you incorporate it in your narrative portions of your plan. And so I think that's all I wanted to go through before we get to our main panelists.
>> Thanks, Julia. Let's see if there are any questions. I don't see any in the Q&A. I'll give it a few seconds to see if somebody wants to type in or hand raise, use the hand raise function. In this case, since there are no questions, we'll move forward. I want to introduce Jennifer Morales, a Senior Environmental Scientist working in the DWR climate change program since 2011. And has been with the department for 11 years. She's DWR Central Valley regional climate change specialist and acting specialist for Southern California. Jennifer graduated with a degree in orginismal biology and lives in California with her husband and three kids. >> Welcome, thanks for being here with us today.
I'm going to be representing today a water supplier that would be on the smaller side, might have limited resources, really maybe hasn't done a whole lot of climate change investigation yet. Hasn't done a lot of analysis or maybe hasn't maybe I'm part of the 32% in the poll who said I really have no experience with this. I'm just kind of starting out and I want to see what's out there. So that's the approach I'm going to take today and you'll see as we go through our next speakers that the bar keeps moving up from me because we want to make sure that we're accommodating everybody who is here today and accommodating everybody's capacity for doing climate change analysis. So what I've done as a smaller supplier,
I have went and read the handbook, the guidebook, the Urban Water Management Planning guidebook. I glean from it that these are steps I need to start with. It says I need to do a vulnerability assessment which they provided in the guidebook. I believe it's section 1.6. I did it with my water supplies I identified and now I need to start gathering some projections climate change impact projections for my water supplies and then after that I need to go look at what are some potential adaptations and mitigation strategies I can take I've taken on the fictional persona of Jennville California small agricultural community on the inland central coast moderate amount of ecouture rism and we have groundwater riparian rights, avocados.
We have a very well portfolio of water. We definitely rely heavily on. We rely on groundwater and riparian rights on a local stream and we get a small a lotment from the State Water Project. Now, just remember everybody this is completely fictional. I didn't want to call out any particular area. So this is not a real place. I just want to make that abundantly clear. So I know because I've been working for my local water supply agency lived in the area for a while in Jennville for a while.
And just hearing through the grapevine. I know of resources. People talk about this went called CalAdapt. That's really easy to use they say you can go there get climate change projection. I've never used it before, but I do know that it exists. I've heard about it. I also know that we have a really active RWM group in my area
Santa Barbara county integrated regional group. I've never gone to their meetings but I've heard about them they're active that's something I think I probably am going to look into. We are part of a groundwater sustainability agency obviously six sigma came out. But we're a very, rated as a low priority groundwater basin. So we don't have a groundwater sustainability plan
yet. We are right next to an adjudicated basin so I know I can go there get some information, but that's kind of where I'm at with the groundwater stuff. I also know that my local county has a hazard mitigation plan that I'm pretty sure there's climate information in there and we have a general plan which I also know there's some climate change information in there.
I've never looked at those sections before but I know these are just some kind of the resources I pulled from my head if I'm starting to thinking about climate change in my area. So first place I went to is CalAdapt. What is this CalAdapt thing? I went right to the website. And these 12 kind of tools popped up, these 12 links popped up.
And I was like wow this is a lot of stuff. So what do I want to I'm assuming I can look at all these I can look at my areas from all these different angles. It says local climate change snapshot that sounds interesting, annual averages. Maps of projected change. There's a lot of stuff here. What caught my eye was the extended drought
scenarios. That's where I think I'm going to start exploring climate change impacts for Jennville. And so I went in there and I selected where my community is. Said change location. I put it right in the center of my little community. And it provided some future climate change impacts for my area. And I had a lot of options kind of for where I wanted to see in these projections, and I told it I wanted to see obviously like I said this is an extended drought scenario. I'm concerned about drought in my area. We suffered through
the five year drought area that affected us, our riparian stream kind of dried up. Our agriculture, we were starting to get worried about our agriculture and our groundwater tables kind of dropped. And so I know like drought is really like something I'm concerned about. That's why I picked this. And I had the option to pick early 21st century drought or late century drought. And I picked early because I noticed that happened to coincide really well with the timing requirements for urban water management planning. Go out to about 2045 somewhere around there. That
really coincides well. So I went ahead and took a look at what they're saying my future might look like during an extended drought period. And I could see that I can really expect that there might be some serious impacts from a drought into the future. And I could see that I can expect temperatures might increase by several degrees into the future. I see that my minimum temperatures, overnight temperatures are going to increase because we grow after cad does.
Grow things that require overnight chilling, and I know that will require me watering more if the temperatures overnight are not dropping as much. I notice we can expect a decline in precipitation over an extended drought period. So this is helping me to kind of plan for a range of possible increases in those temperatures and decreases in precipitation. And I only chose those three to look at.
But if you look at the options on the left hand side, I also could have looked at evapotranspiration and changes in base load and run off, very important to me. I'm just starting this exploration so this stuff is really interesting to know the ranges of my possible future on climate change. So my next step. I apologize we can't look at everything. We can't look at all the resources in the time that we have allotted today but this is just kind of to get everybody started a little bit. And so the next thing I want to look at is that let me say one more thing about CalAdapt. That was only one of the 12 tools available to me
on CalAdapt. So when I have some more time, I'm going to go back and explore the rest of these tools and see what else I come up with. I really appreciate the fact that all the data resources are listed there with the tools so I know exactly where that data came from. I could cite it easily. I could choose which data I want to use. So if I know in particular one of the maybe my, I found out that my county has done a climate change adaptation plan and they have identified that particular dataset works better for my area than others, I can choose those datasets while using CalAdapt just because I know they work better for my area. So I'm going to go explore some of these other 11 tools later on and also see what kind of what's going to help me prepare my urban water management plan. So the next thing I go to look at is my
IRWM plan. It was updated in 2019. I'm lucky to live in a area with a robust IRWM. They have a big chapter on climate change that's so helpful. I'm going to read through this and glean what I can about the impacts to my area from climate change. And as I'm going through here, I find these really, really helpful charts. So like I said, I was really concerned about the impacts that are going to from climate change that are going to come to my area and I want to know the ranges I can expect.
Within my IRWM plan there's a chart here that lists out all the ranges that we can expect in the region from temperature, precipitation, sea level rise I'm inland we have Groundwater. I'm worried about Groundwater intrusion. As well it's telling me what I can expect from my long term delivery averages from the allotment. I'm in the Santa Barbara region like I said. And so we have an allocation. And so it's kind of telling me there I can expect up to about a third
less water into the future under climate change. That's something I really need to prepare for for the supplies I've identified in my plan. In some other charts that I found really convenient like I said I did feel like a vulnerability assessment for Jennville that was provided in the Urban Water Management Plan, but then I also find that my IRWM has done a very robust vulnerability assessment for the region where they have not only identified the impact. But they've prioritized them. And prioritized them both based on not just the impact but what our vulnerabilities are. They've really identified that Groundwater
it's going to be impacted by saltwater intrusion, rising sea levels from climate change. And that we need to be concerned about constituents in the water and then it kind of goes down from there. So this is really helpful for me. Lastly which was helpful I realized my IRWM provided adaptation strategies for the area. So
now that I've identified what the vulnerabilities are, now what are we going to do about it? And so they have a whole list here of mitigation adaptation strategies that are customized to my region. And not only that, but within the IRWM plan they also have projects that they've identified that will help us achieve our mitigation adaptation strategies. So I know that this is just a beginning for me exploring climate change in my area and I know now that I probably want to get a little more involved in the IRWM. I'll go continue exploring those features on CalAdapt. I'm going to look at some of the other resources, see how their mitigation plan, my general plan for my area and then I really am going to kind of have an internal discussion with the decision makers at my agency to see what the next steps are I'm going to show them what I've come up with. We really need to do an internal assessment about our next steps.
And maybe assess what kind of internal capacity we have. Do we have staff on hand who might be able to explore these impacts a little further and could we generate the climate change section of our Urban Water Management Plan in house? Or do we have possibly the resources that we could hire outside of our agency to have that done? Or are there some grants we can apply for that can help us do a climate change assessment? We really need to look inward and find out what our next steps are going to be, because this for me was just the beginning, just the tip of the iceberg in looking at what my climate change impacts could be into the future. With that, I think we'll go into Q&A. >> Thank you Jennifer, I'm waiting to see if there's any questions in the Q&A panel or if anyone wants to raise their hand. I see one hand raised. We'll take that while we're waiting for other people to type in their questions.
So you should be able to unmute and speak now. >> Good morning, Jennifer, how are you? >> Good morning. >> So I like your presentation about climate change and I'm representing Jacobs and my name is Rajesh from Simi valley.
The question is about you showed about the average and temperature average. But here when we analyzed something using some model we looked at it most important part is IDF, intention density frequency. So the density would be higher. But many modelers say about it. But are as concerned about the intensity of all the averages otherwise may be low but intensity would be lower, the models would say. Do you see this as some impact on the analysis? >> Yeah. So I think I understand what Raja is asking is that what the models, and I'm sorry this is very simplified my summary here. But are you saying that is it a concern that what the models are showing
versus what might be the reality is that the reality might be much more severe than what the models are showing; is that kind of what I'm >> Yes, that is correct. Look at the returned period, some would see, I'm giving sample numbers. Like in two years compared to in other times maybe those things would see like five years interval. So instead of five year interval you see two years. So the return period reduced with a new climate change impact. So
do you see some way that thing is important? >> Yes, I think it's definitely very important. And it's really important that we know and can try to prepare to the best of our abilities for the absolute worst case. The thing, though, is that with this presentation where we were at here this is really for a person or for an agency who was just starting out who was just kind of exploring what the basic climate change impacts might be. But Rajesh brings up a valid point that it's not just with precipitation. It's with temperature. It's with extreme events. It's with so many things we've been seeing is that the models are not, are underpredicting the extremeness of climate change in some cases. And so what you're saying is very valid.
It might not be something that a person at my level of planning for this exercise that is can be concerned about yet. But it's definitely something that is an issue. It's valid and probably would come up in one of our other two speakers where they go to a higher level, a deeper degree of planning, where I think that they might touch on that a little bit more. Thank you, Jennifer. >> Thank you, both. There's just one other comment and question from Kelsey who says CalAdapt is really useful, thanks. Is there
a default, best recommended GCAM to use? >> You know what, I am going to let Wyatt answer that question, because he's probably more familiar with those than I would be. >> Okay. >> Yes, there are actually four that there are four GCMs that were identified through the California climate change statewide assessment, the fourth assessment that was done, I think it completed and published in 2018. There are four that represent essentially the four most common projected conditions so that would be wet and moderate warming, dry and very, very warm cooler and dry and what may call the compliment, the one's different from the others. Now, that's not one model. So it's very hard to get to a single model that
would represent the range of potential futures. Now, the other way to come at this, and I'll get at this in my talk you've basically take an ensemble average of all the models. You construct a scenario out of that and you can use that as sort of a central tendency, your most likely condition out of all of those projected futures. >> Thank you, Wyatt. It's a nice segue into your presentation give us a little preview of what's to come. So we're going to move forward. Thanks, Jennifer, for your presentation and
for introducing us to Jennville. And I'm going to introduce Wyatt as he's getting ready to share his screen. Wyatt Arnold joined the Department of Water Resources in 2015 and currently works as a water resource engineer in DWR's climate change program. Wyatt has contributed to multiple efforts including this California water plan, sustainable Groundwater management and the department's climate action plan. He holds a BS in civil engineering from California State University Sacramento and is currently pursuing a masters in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California Davis. So welcome, Wyatt, and looking forward to your presentation. >> Thank you, Orit. Great. So I'm going to
push us into maybe the next tier of what you might be able to accomplish for projecting water supply exposure and vulnerability using some statewide datasets that the department has released. There's many ways to come at this problem. I'm going to present a dataset that is sort of our best available information that synthesizes a lot of the information out there.
And it might be more familiar to a lot of the planning frameworks that agencies are familiar with. And is being used as the recommended dataset for sustainable Groundwater management planning. There's a good alignment there if you were to use this kind of information. So I'm going to start with I'm going to keep this in this view because I want you to be able to maybe I can switch it to be as clear as possible. Background of scenarios, what these datasets contain. So you might be able to draw some connections on where you might input this information into your planning models. And then I'll just show live what the data look like and where you can access them.
So the big assumption here, though, is that you have a water system model that your organization agency uses to simulate water supply under daily, monthly, annual varying conditions. So these data are for input to those models. We're not necessarily providing your water supply future these climate data and other information simulated through the state projects are basically used as the bounded conditions to run your model with.
Background development of scenarios. This is sort of getting at those questions that maybe on some of your minds around, well, there's a lot of actually a lot of models and they project very different things. So what are you actually providing us out of all of that information? Here's just a kind of brief picture of the uncertainty that we face, when we model climate change. These are the concentration pathways for different concentrations for greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere throughout the century. RP 2.6, 2.6, 4.5, 6, 8.5. They all correspond to an amount of radiated forcing that per square meter that the surface of the planet will have by that time.
Under that concentration scenario. Now the climate responds to that concentration of greenhouse gasses in a very complex way. We don't understand all the mechanisms and feedback mechanisms and we don't have all those mechanisms in these global climate models. Some are poorly represented. So we end up having an uncertain projection of the future and that's the distribution on the right. We have many temperature even for one, even for RCP 4.5 you will have temperature and precipitation scenarios which overlap with RCP 8.5 because there's a tremendous amount of variability in how our climate models respond or suggest the climate would respond to these increased greenhouse gas concentrations. So for California, we can take a sample of
those triangles and pluses are different models. RCP8.5 and .4.5. This is the changes on average. That those models project over a historical period for that red outlined region in California. So essentially the Central Valley everything draining into the delta. You can see by 2050 here, we have one degree to four degrees of warming on an average annual basis or negative 15% to positive, an additional 25% average annual precipitation. So that's an incredible amount of spread and can result in completely different water supply conditions, flood conditions, water quality conditions and it goes on and on. All of that is actually happening on top of what I mean obviously in our climate there's already a tremendous amount of variability even with the shock of climate change due to increased greenhouse gas emissions. So what we have here is a record based on tree
rings of the hydrologic variability based on the past 1100 years in California's climate. And you can see there's three periods there which have extended lengths of below normal or below average run off in the Sacramento river flow. Jennifer just showed you for the drought scenario 20 year period with about eight to 20% of less annual precip than the historical 1961 to 1990 average. It's not unprecedented. In California's internal climate variability, we have already seen these kinds of extended 20 to 30 year periods of below average precip. They're rare. It's maybe a five to 8% chance of occurring in the next 50
years. But it's definitely there. Out of all of that information, there's a need to synthesis and use it for planning and using it to make decisions. That's one of the reasons why this type of dataset that I'll share with you has been prepared. Basically we synthesize that large archive of information into a few scenarios which indicates the central tendency, the ensemble mean, all the models, average them together. And/or the bookends. We have a very dry and warm model and we also have a less warm weather model,
pretty far into the future. But you can still use those as bookends for any future period that kind of represent your range of maybe the kind of conditions you would be potentially subjected to. So just looking on that plot again, there's all the models in terms of changing temperature and precipitation. We take all of that information and synthesize down to four scenarios.
You can see we have the 2030, so the historical is right there at 0 0 on the plot. And then if you go up 2.5 degrees, in changing temperature and to the right about 3% additional average annual precip, that's the 2030 ensemble mean. And then if you go up to almost six degrees, this is in Fahrenheit, of warming, and a little over 5% additional precip, there's the 2070 ensemble mean. And those two individual models that are to the far left in terms of negative change in precipitation and quite high in terms of projected warming, that's the dry extreme warming, and then to the far right all the way up to over 20% additional precipitation and still quite warm, of course we would still be facing the impacts of declining snowpack and all other types of impacts associated with warming. However, in terms of maybe water supply, we'd
have, we wouldn't have as much shortage. On the other hand, we'd be facing some really difficult flood problems with that type of scenario. DWR climate datasets developing the central tendency of GCM modeled projected change and scaling the projections water supply impacts.
And it's showing the umbrella how they're formed, started with a technical advisory group that the department chaired. 10 models were selected out of an archive of over 30 or 40 models to RCPs. Those models were actually reviewed and summarized to create these four scenarios that I just presented for the water storage investment program. And then they were further repurposed for sustainable Groundwater management program. Now, even within this umbrella, the delivery capability
report, which many of you in the urban water management planning are very familiar with, that actually uses most recently. That actually uses most recently those models uses an ensemble mean of CC tag scenarios to create a 2040 period based future. So there's kind of the layout of the lineage of these datasets.
Now, I'm going to go into what is contained in these datasets. Remember, all of this information we're expecting you would feed this into some sort of water supply model that you have. You may be able to do some other statistical analysis on it to bound certain conditions. You may not have to physically simulate all of this information but you may be able to use it in other ways. So I'm going to call it the WSIP SGMA data, the act. And we're suggesting it's a fine dataset to use also for Urban Water Management Planning.
So what's contained? Number one climate data. Things like temperature. Precipitation. And then other kinds of well temperature precipitation on a daily or monthly scale. Then these are fed to hydrologic model to simulate the energy balance in watersheds. So we get things like run off, snowpack, soil moisture, right for the entire state. And that kind of information particularly run off feeds water separations. And we all know that we rely on a very extensive network of water supply operations we have a model for that CalSim. And also we're very set the network is
very sensitive to what happens in the delta. And so there's modeling that happens in the delta to constrain and assimilate what would happen under those change climate conditions in terms of environmental objectives water supply in the delta. So all of that information produces projected deliveries and things like that. For those data
for those four scenarios. We provide extensive guidance on how all this information was prepared. Basically the model sequence, what specific models were used and some tutorials and railings how what output variables come from which model. Basically all the necessary data is there to incorporate in things like integrated water surface models if you have that advanced of a planning team or surface and reservoir simulation models which maybe folks who aren't very groundwater dependent are more familiar with.
Going into a little more detail. Climate data. What it is essentially a monthly time series data from 1915 to 2011. What does it mean in we're taking the future schedule signalling. Change the monthly precipitation or temperature and we are stamping that signal on top of a historical record. So we're basically shifting the climate conditions of the sequence of wet and dry years that we've already experienced. This actually can be really convenient in that we're all familiar with what happened from maybe 87 to 92 drought. And so now we can
see what that same sequence of years would look like with two degrees of warming and a little bit more precip. So we can see those conditions play out and compare those things to things we've already witnessed. Again in detail, 16th degree resolution, daily statewide precipitation temperatures available. That would be for the most advanced raw granular data that you could use here. But then we also summarize that down to monthly change factors for precipitation reference evapotranspiration and reference to input in models. Reference data the inflows that are simulated based on that precipitation and temperature.
We do that through Vic for the major agreement flows to the big project models by CalSim. But also we have that same Vic information summarize for all hydrologic units in the state. If you're looking to see what might happen in a watershed outside the Central Valley, we have that information. It does need a second order correction
using local observational data for some gauge record over some time period can be used to construct as a more full record based on the modeling data that we provide. So there's a process I can show you the spreadsheet, that you can use to see what stream flow conditions might be in that watershed anywhere in the state. Of course the SWP/CVP water supply. You'll have the tables neatly to read off of. If you're a contractor directly dependent on that information some agencies obviously are depending on agencies who get water from the State Water Project. I'm not sure where you are in that hierarchy. But this kind of information you still may want to draw on in a little more detail that's contained in the delivery report. So there's that information. Access and download. Basically two access points. The first is the sigma data viewer. And this is
possibly the easiest way to get at this data and do some spatial selection if you have a very specific output that you want. But you can also go on the natural resources agency open data site and get the bulk downloads of this information in addition to the guidance and some other technical details on how this was prepared. To know essentially how to better use the information. I'll show you that in a second. Additional sources include the capability report.
And then as I had a slide at the very beginning, the payor information. That information is also hosted on open data along with a very good guidebook which talks through how those conditions are, what is the expected reoccurrence of those historical conditions. I might use that information in Urban Water Management Planning. So there's a guidebook for that, as well as all the raw data. And so those things are there. So now I'm. For that as well as all the raw data. And so those things are there. So now I'm going to show
10:50. How am I on time. >> I think you're okay, Wyatt. >> Now I'm going to show the sigma data view. So here's the state. And here's the viewer. And over here on the left you have these various groundwater. But the data you could find useful is located in the water budget category here. And the first thing I'll show you is gridded precipitation in ET. And you can see that that's
covering the entire state in 16th degree. You can do a user defined selection of that information by extent polygon or even uploading your own shape file. Select tiles. Download that information from that large archive. And again that would be monthly information you would be inputting to your models. You can also download that information by county. And so I've actually done that for Monterey
right here. And I will show you that. That's the Monterrey information in terms of monthly evapotranspiration and precipitation change factors. When I say change factor, that means you have a historical observed climate from 1915 to 2011 and what you're expected to do is use these change factors to perturb, to change that information to reflect the future climate signal. And the reason it's precip and ET is mainly this is meant to force an integrated groundwater surface model that simulates land surface processes. You may be interested in the monthly precip
if you're not necessarily putting it into that type of model. Now, if we go to stream flow change factors, this is the kind of information that you may use if you are relying on local streams and you want to know what the signal change might be in those local streams according to those climate conditions. I've downloaded this hydrologic unit. You can see that all these purple outlines represent all the different summarized hydrologic units in terms of stream flow that we have based on this information. I've downloaded this one in the Salinas valley.
That's what this looks like. We have annual change factors and monthly change factors. And so the annual change factors are basically summarized. For each future, 2030, 2070, extreme, dry, wet warming, and plot the series to see what this information is.
There's one, no change from the historical value and then you have like something like a very wet future here where you have months that go up to as much as four times stream flow in that hydrologic unit. As above historical. That could mean good things for water supply. Or potentially bad things because too much stream flow could cause flooding, compromise your treatment plants. Compromise other types of infrastructure that your water supply is integrated with. >> Excuse me, Wyatt, I don't think that we
can see the plots that you are speaking of. We're still looking at the SGMA data viewer. Do you want to switch. I think you have to reshare that. And we have a couple more minutes for you to go over these then there are several questions. That we're going to have want to have time for. There we go. Thank you. >> Sorry about that. I'll move quickly through these last two spreadsheets. There's the annual flow factors I described the very wet model. You'll see up to four times of a change. On average maybe twice,
twice the stream flow on an annual basis. But that's a very extreme case. We also have the 2030, which is maybe slightly more than average. We have a dry extreme warming which does show that in certain months you would have stream flow that's almost twice as high.
But you would also have months that are actually much dryer. So you have more variable signal in your stream flow that can actually have very dry conditions. But that information needs to be corrected. And the way you get, we've provided these full dataset download links as well as if you go to the open data site you'll see this sigma second order change factor correction tool. I'll show you now
guidance on how to use it. But basically you need to input your own observed unimpaired stream flow for that hydrologic area for any period of time. And so that's the only local information that you need to put here on a monthly basis. And the monthly change factors are basically copied and pasted out of that information you downloaded for that hydrologic unit and basically the output does the bias correction based on local observational data. So you can have bias corrected future stream flow that you could base some run off projections on that you might need for your water supply planning. And finally here in the CVP and SWVP delivery tables that's the kind of information that's already been simulated through CalSim and provide this range of annual delivery conditions that the projects are expected to meet under those future conditions. And so I'll show that here.
Output time series for different contractors every month in thousand acre feet for different contract entitlements. I pulled out information for Santa Clara valley and summarized it by the annual level. The annual level, plotted it as time series maybe that's not so helpful, but you can also then do the exceedence plot to see, okay, well under the base condition, the historical condition I mean, obviously there's a range of variability in what kind of deliveries we can expect from the State Water Project. And then under these different projected features, what is the change in volume for a given exceedence level that we might be relying on in our water supply portfolio or the average and so forth. And so this kind of information can also
help you navigate what kind of supply might be available to the wholesalers or if they're a contractor directly on that. And you probably are already aware of that. But that information is summarized for those. I'll stop there. Please don't hesitate to contact me later if you want more information. >> Thanks, Wyatt. We have several questions. Some have to do with how to take this information and use it with Urban Water Management Plan. So maybe some of these questions are for both Wyatt and Julie to tag team in terms of responding to.
And this was obviously a lot of information condensed into a short presentation. There's a lot more to explore there. One question with regard to that is wanting to know if DWR has some kind of a document or language standard language that sufficiently succinctly describes the input assumptions and range of outputs for a lay person audience. Yes, that's a great question. I don't think we have a two pager or even,
better, a one pager that would lay that out. That's a great ask. However, I can think of two key documents that I think would summarize and you would find the kind of lay person targeted language that describes that type of information. The first is actually the I mentioned the climate change technical advisory group the group that selected those ten models based on different metrics and considerations for California's climate and water planning. They produced a document called the perspectives and guidance for climate change might be another word in that title. But basically they break down a lot in a digestible form. It's not an academic paper. It's meant for managers
to understand climate change information and the way we went about synthesizing that information and selecting models. And it talks a lot about what kind of changes are expected how to pars the information in the best way possible. The second document is the sustainable management document as presented and some of that information may not be in any way focused on because it's on sustainable water management planning and that kind of regulatory guidance that they needed to provide in that. But in terms of the dataset, how it was prepared and how it might be used, that guidance document covers that in detail. >> Great. Thanks Wyatt. Is that something that we can provide a link in the chat. >> I will post that right now. >> Great. Thank you. So we have several questions and maybe we can be succinct in responding.
If a retail agency imports all of its water from the wholesaler analyzing climate models and analyzing impacts on the water supply availability, what practical local climate change elements and impacts should retail agency including using in their 2020 plan? >> You want to answer it Wyatt? >> Go ahead, Julie. >> I would suggest that if you have access to different scenarios of how climate change affects a supply, that for the local, your local assessment in your Urban Water Management Plan that you could look maybe more at the demand and how projections might affect your demands into the future, which Ben is going to talk a little bit about. >> This is another question for you probably Julie. Is narrative language sufficient for climate considerations or specific adjustment made from in calculations required to appear within the plan to meet these requirements? >> We go by what the Water Code specifies. So a narrative language would be sufficient. We would recommend that you could I see another related question, but you might want to take some of the tables and if you don't want to include the numbers around climate change scenarios in those submission tables or submittal tables, you could also do paste them as you do in your plan.
You could do say here's what this table looks like under this climate change scenario. This is what it looks like underneath this climate change scenario. And then address it in the narrative of how your water supplier is thinking about mitigating these impacts that's what we would recommend. >> And this is more of an analysis question
can you discuss how to reconcile incorporating ranges of climate change possibilities into required drought risk and water supply assessments, how can ranges of future conditions be presented in the required tabular format? >> Okay. So this is a question so you could put so in your plan itself, you may you could take you have your Excel tables and maybe it's, I don't know I can't remember what that table numbers are, but let's say it's 6 9 or something, could you do multiple iterations of that and say here it is without incorporating climate change projections. And maybe that's what you choose to submit into the electronic data portal, the data portal that we have. But you also include those tables in your plan itself, whether you use screen shots or you copy and paste them into your plan. And then you just talk about them in the narrative. So you could have three you could have two different versions of 6 9 table so that says this is under assumptions without climate change. This is with these are the assumptions of climate
change. This is another scenario of climate change so that you can so you have everything in one place for your own analysis of, okay, these are the kinds of questions we're thinking of that we need to deal with. That we need to ask our own, ourselves for planning into the future and investing in possible other sources or other approaches that could mitigate these impacts. >> Essentially the narrative is there to explain
how you fill in the tables and that's something that you've mentioned throughout the workshops that you can use the narrative to explain the process that you're going through in the decisions? >> Yes. >> Looks like the models are more for wholesale use and asking about tools, elements that are available for retail agencies receiving all their water from wholesalers. What is the minimum information required to submit in the 2020 plan for climate change from retail agencies? >> Again, we point back to the Water Code of what is required and it's not specified in the Water Code of how it must be submitted and analyzed how climate change, what that means to incorporate it or to consider it.
So I mean it's up to your discretion, really, and Sabrina's on the participating right now. She might want to chime in or clarify if needed. >> Keep in mind that this is your plan for your planning purposes for understanding how reliable your water will be in the future. Are you going to have enough supplies? Do you need to do something before it comes up to that point that you're out of water. And so it's really important to look at this climate change assessment, because it's going to affect your water service reliability in the future. And how you best look at that will depend on your situation because it depends on what supplies you've got, what supplies you might be able to get, where you are.
How complex your system is or not or things like that. So there's flexibility allowed for you to do a climate change analysis that best fits the situation for your planning purposes so that when it comes to 2030, 2040, you're okay. Or you know what's coming up so you've planned for it, instead of just being caught unawares. So that's the flexibility is there for you to
do what works best for your situation. >> Thanks Sabrina. I think that answers all the questions that have been posted. Thanks, Wyatt, for your presentation. And we'll take five minutes just a quick break and we'll come back to our third presentation at 11:21. Thanks everyone. >> Welcome back, everyone. Hoping everybody's back. Checking in to make sure that Benjamin is with us,
since he's our third presenter. >> Hi, everybody. >> Welcome. All right. So let me just introduce you as you're getting ready with your presentation. Ben Hatchett studies the hydrology of regions time scales from the past present and future regional Climatologist at the western regional climate center in Reno, Nevada.
The majority of his work has focused on California and the western U.S., but has recently expanded to South America. Benjamin has conducted climate change analysis to support water planning in California, including for the watershed which he'll be speaking about as part of his presentation. So I'll turn it over to you. >> Thank you guys for inviting me to come speak about some of our work. And what I'm hoping to do is really expand on what Jennifer Wyatt have talked about and kind of show you some examples of how you can take available climate change projection information and really try to squeeze it and leverage it in ways that may additionally inform your water management planning. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about
data availability and some considerations that hopefully will sort of maybe expand your mind in terms of better ways to address your problems and kind of think about is the data available to ask and answer questions of interest. Are there certain processes that you would like more information about because from the research side, it's really valuable for us to know what we can make available to you. Because oftentimes there's a ton more information produced by whether and climate models that are run into the future that may not necessarily be readily available. But if there are things that would help you, it's
very good to know that so we can make those things available. So that first consideration is really what processes or problems are you aiming to address in your management planning. And like Julie mentioned there's the demand versus the supply side and the connection of those two things into reliability. But I also want to bring in the idea of dealing with hazards sort of peripherally related to that flooding and other hazards that may impact communities or water resources infrastructure or other types of transportation infrastructure such as debris flows and landslides. How can some of the infrastructure you're planning for hope to not only mitigate these hazards but perhaps leverage them into becoming a little bit more beneficial such as in the case of urban runoff storage using it for Groundwater recharge or other beneficial uses.
In terms of the spatial scale of projections, typically data is made available in either a point sense. So just a single location, or spatially distributed. And that's what the CalAdapt website will also provide are these gridded outputs of climate projections. A big question to ask yourself is what scale do you need to achieve your objectives? Spatial grids do you need on the order of meters? Do you need hundreds of meters? Four kilometers, 10, 50 kilometers, what scale do you need? Because if the data is available it can always interpolate to those levels, but at some point whether or not the interpolation is actually useful is an important question to ask. And there are ways to produce higher resolution outputs that are still physically meaningful in terms of the model correctly resolving terrain or other land surface factors. So that's an important consideration to have. Then we have the temporal scales, which really gets into the processes and the problems. I know there's a question about returns and management and natural
hazards high intensity short duration duration how will subdaily, subhourly say ten minute rainfalls change and how does it tie into the reliability drought planning. So there's many scales from annual to decadal, hourly subhourly time scales. Knowing which are important is really valuable for us. Another question and something we've
experienced is do you need a range of outcomes or a suite of realization to create this envelope of possibilities that Wyatt was showing a nice example of. Is it helpful to know what 30 projections are suggesting so you can bound what you expect as the best case and the worst case scenario and where, say, 75% of the models agree on some amount of change. And then the last question to ask yourself, which is kind of hard perhaps because it's hard to see if there are known unknowns but you don't know what they are that can be challenging, but are there unforeseen issues that we call blind spots may not be an issue historically even now but later could become an issue. That's a way to sit back and think deeply and philosophically about what's going on in your area I'm going to talk about our experience with Ventura County. Putting together their urban plan. It was a multiyear process we started in 2017. It was very iterative which I found extremely helpful.
Included many different meetings with stakeholders from various agencies. Basically across the board from the GSAs to the water providers, agriculture, flood control, fisheries, all kinds of people. It was extremely helpful to identify issues with the stakeholders, try to address them with relevant metrics that we developed. Revisit with them what we came up with and continue to improve them to make these useful. And we largely used the CalAdapt products to do so. But there's a lot you can do with those. I'll show a couple examples of this.
The report was released in 2019. A link at the bottom. It was intended to support the urban and Urban Water Management Planning processes. Maybe there could be some helpful ideas in there and I'm happy to work with anyone who is interested on incorporating this information. One approach, spatial approach, working in Ventura County. There's several of the rivers, the Ventura river on the south side and the Santa Clara river in the center and Los Angeles county on the right. Starting with the daily calculations, we went through a number of thresholds of interest. And here we're using the CalAdapt
extreme heat threshold as an example. Which is the number of days that exceed the 98th percentile minimum or maximum temperature, and so we calculate this at each grid point and what we show here is the minimum amount of change that 75% of the 32 models have. So this kind of gives you an idea that three quarters of the model outputs are suggesting at least this much change in terms of the number of days exceeding this 98th percentile minimum temperature between the two time periods of interest in the future. And the other thing we can do with this we found to be helpful forgiven points on the right hand side there's several different locations and show the distribution of what all the models are suggesting. So you can have the
75th percentile the top of the box or the median the centerline in the box there's a pretty large amount of spread between the models. This gives you an idea of wh
2021-01-20 13:15
