January 6th and 16th storms compared

The weekend of January 5-6, 2019 was a very wet one, and San Geronimo Creek reached 1,000 cfs for the first time since February 2017. 2018's peak flow was 753 cfs in March.

About a week and a half later, on January 16, 2019, there was another big storm--more well-advertised than the first, and windier, but not necessarily wetter. The storms were similar in many ways, but San Geronimo Creek peaked higher during the second storm, at 1,304 cfs.

Jan 6th storm, with day.hour on the x-axis.

Jan 16th storm, using the same day.hour as the Jan 6th storm, lining up
both peak flows between hours 17 and 18 on day 2. The Jan 6th peak was
at 5:30 pm and the Jan 16th peak was at 9:15 pm.

The graphs show the different patterns of rainfall and creek flow. The January 6th peak was broader, with a longer duration at high flows (over 400 cfs), however the January 16th peak had a longer duration at about 200 cfs. The antecedent conditions were wetter on the 16th--36 cfs 16 hours before the peak, vs. only 7 cfs 16 hours before the Jan 6th peak.

How do the total volumes compare? The typical pattern in San Geronimo Valley is for the Woodacre precipitation station (to the east) to be wetter than Mt. Barnabe (to the west), and that pattern held on the 6th. It was reversed on the 16th--Barnabe was wetter than Woodacre. Although the volume of runoff during the 16 hours prior to the peak was only 3% higher on the 16th, the magnitude of the peak flow on the 16th was 23% higher than on the 6th. The table below shows well how similar the storms were. Note the 6th was wetter in Woodacre, and the 16th was wetter on Mt. Barnabe.

Shadows of Rain

We have all heard of "rain shadows," where precipitation declines "precipitously" in the lee of a mountain range. California has many examples--you'll see the phenomenon eastward of any major mountain range.

The Mono Basin has a classic rain shadow--over forty inches of annual precipitation at Tioga Pass, on the crest of the Sierra, and about seven inches on the east side of Mono Lake. Those two locations are separated by an elevation difference of 3,500 vertical feet and a distance of 15 miles.

Isohyetal map of the Mono Basin from Vorster, 1985. Red line depicts the
precipitation gradient discussed in this blog.

Cannibal Water, Part 3

So how do we wean water users off cheap, addictive Cannibal Water?

Cannibal Fork, brought back from the South Pacific by a friend, Mike Klapp.

For urban users, it is not a problem. Urban water use has been declining for decades. Continue investing in efficiency, water recycling, stormwater capture, and groundwater recharge. Don't invest in expensive, carbon-intensive, fish-killing, polluting desalination unless you are a small isolated coastal community with no other options. Brackish groundwater desalination is okay. Avoid growth, which makes every problem worse, and eats up any water savings you achieve. But if you do plan to grow forever, then you need to make sure your long-term water strategy continues to cut water use to the point where kids will grow up not knowing what a water fight is. Not just squirt guns, I mean a really good one, with hoses and buckets. And growing forever would also require suspending some physical laws of nature, so we might as well stop growth now, while some parts of California are still nice places to live.

Cannibal Water, Part 2

So what is "Cannibal Water"? Cannibal Water is water that when diverted, pumped, used, or disposed of after use, destroys the system itself.

Gartrell et al. describe "System Water" as the portion of water going to the ecosystem that is "required to protect the quality of diversions by farms and cities that rely on exports from the Delta or use water locally." (PPIC 2017) What would happen if people started diverting System Water? Salinity would intrude into the Delta, and diversions for agriculture, municipal, and industrial purposes would have to be shut down. The underground parallel is overpumping of an aquifer, allowing salinity intrusion, which then prevents the use of that aquifer.

The water diverted that would result in these negative effects is Cannibal Water, since it consists of water diverters destroying themselves by using water that destroys the system upon which they depend.

Cannibal Water, Part 1

Everyone loves freedom. People should be able to do whatever they want, unless it negatively impacts someone else. Being a good neighbor, kind, and respectful towards others, comes first. If you behave that way, then fine, do whatever you want. I am a libertarian at heart. Everyone should get what they want, and everyone should want what is best for everyone else. Yeah, that would be a perfect world, huh?

Property rights activists are on the other end of the spectrum--they want their own interests to come first, before everyone else. They often sound like a deadbeat dad/mom, shirking their responsibilities, doing only what they want, ignoring their impacts on others.

"The necessity of pursuing happiness is the foundation of liberty. ...The pursuit of happiness, therefore, is not merely a matter of achieving individual pleasure. That is why Alexander Hamilton and other founders referred to 'social happiness.'" (Hamilton, 2008)

"The necessity of pursuing happiness [is] the foundation of liberty."

Navigable in Fact

I love this Outside article (Drawing a line in the sand over river rights, by Chris Colin)--I love that someone did this. Raising awareness of when public rights are being usurped by private interests is always a good thing. And this one is close to my heart--for a while I made it a hobby to float any and all navigable waters (the smaller the better). And when you spend a lot of time outside off the beaten track, you run into private property obstacles and questions all the time.

Sometimes you have to combine skiing and
kayaking to get where you want to go. Stumps
in the distance are below the high water line of
Grant Lake Reservoir.

Easement Etiquette
As much as I like the article, I don't approve of how the author went about exercising his rights. It made for a good article, but there needs to be some etiquette when exercising the right to use prescriptive easements and navigability easements and sovereign lands:
     1. Be courteous - respect wildlife, other recreationists, the privacy of adjacent property owners, and avoid dwellings
     2. Leave no trace
     3. Be invisible, if possible - if they don't know you are there you won't get hassled
     4. Contact property owners and agencies when the public is being bullied, and bring wire cutters (e.g. look up the East Walker River from the Hwy 395 bridge--if you wanted to float it, you would need them).

Essentially, behave like you are in a campground. Respect the campers in the campsites you are next to (or you are taking a shortcut through if no one is home).

Special Cases
The problem is that the Russian River situation is rare. Where the public's rights are clear, and the property owners are clearly violating them, that is a good place to write an article to raise awareness. But those situations (in California) are the exception. Here grey areas are the rule. The following are categories of grey areas I've encountered.

Avalanches, Ticks, and Delta Smelt Salvage

I joke that when I go for a run on the trails around my home in San Geronimo Valley, I'm doing tick surveys. Which is essentially true--one method of catching ticks for study is to drag fabric through grass, and the ticks latch on. That is what I do when my legs brush past grass and twigs.

I don't keep formal track of the ticks I find--or more accurately, the ticks that find me. Which is unfortunate, because there is a nice dataset there. But from my memory, what has struck me is the variability. Just when I think I see a pattern, and understand what is going on, and formulate a hypothesis, I observe ticks in places that confound that pattern. Or I hear about others' observations that don't match my mental model.

Take this year for example. I had not seen a tick until last week, yet word on the street (or fire road?) was it was a bad tick season. So I began putting together a hypothesis about the cold December, dry winter, and very wet March: that prior to March, ticks were scarce (at least, scarce in my surveys) in grassy areas where I was running because of the low growth and short grass. Since March the heavy rain impacted the ticks in these areas in some way, possibly washing them out of the grass and drowning them.