WaterWired

Mississippi v. Memphis Redux: So Who's Stealing Water From Whom?

Last week I posted an update on the Mississippi v. Memphis groundwater case. I learned from reporter Tom Charlier that folks from the University of Memphis had presented an alternative view on the flow system at a conference last year. A journal article is in preparation. 

Brian Waldron of the University of Memphis was kind enough to send me a PDF of the Power Point he and Daniel Larsen presented at a conference in 2011. He gave me permission to post it (may take a while to download):

Download MS v Memphis Waldron_Larsen

They postulate that under proposed predevelopment conditions (shown below), the amount of groundwater that flowed from Mississippi into Shelby County, Tennessee (Memphis metropolitan area), was 141,725 cubic meters per day (about 37.4 MGD).

Under 2007 conditions, shown below, the amount flowing from Mississippi into Shelby County, Tennessee, was approximately 101,225 cubic meters per day (about 26.7 MGD).

So it looks like development has cost Tennessee groundwater, not Mississippi - about 40, 470 cubic meters per day (10.7 MGD). If this seems odd, remember - there is groundwater pumpage on the Mississippi side of the border.

So who's stealing from whom?

I am not in a position to evaluate their assumptions; I do they know they assumed a constant aquifer thickness (255 m or about 835 feet) and an average transmissivity of 2850 square meters per day (about 30,700 square feet per day). Use of an 'average' transmissivity suggests that spatially variable transmissivities were employed but I am unsure of that. It could simply mean that number is an average of all the values in the aquifer, and that single value was used in the flow calculations.

Curious to see what the blowback will be. 

I will be anxious to see the journal article. 

I think the fat lady has not yet sung - see today's quote.

 "We are still evaluating our options with this." - Jan Schaefer, Mississippi Attorney General's office (email to Tom Charlier, April 2011)

Update: Memphis Sand Groundwater Pumping and Mississippi v. Memphis

It's been over two years since I posted in detail about the Mississippi v. Memphis groundwater pumping case that the Supreme Court declined to hear. That's been the only news - at least, the only news I could find.

I called Tom Charlier of the Memphis Commercial Appeal today and asked him what was happening. He emailed back to say that about a year ago, he wrote a story about  a study by two University of Memphis scientists that demonstrated that groundwater from Mississippi had flowed into Tennessee even before pumping by the MLGW and refuted the claim that Memphis was 'stealing' Mississippi's groundwater. In fact, it looks like pumping in DeSoto County, Mississippi, has 'stolen' (my word) groundwater that would have flowed into Tennessee!

I just learned from Dr. Brian Waldron, one of the study's authors along with Dr. Daniel Larsen (whom I knew as a PhD student at the University of New Mexico)  that the study is being submitted as a journal article, likely this summer. So it probably will not be available until next year. Publication submission was delayed because of the court proceedings. That's too bad; I am anxious to read it. 

Note added on 26 April 2012: see post with the PDF of the Power Point of Waldron and Larsen's presentation.

Will the Mississippi Attorney General file another suit? "We are still evaluating our options with this." said Jan Schaefer of the AG's office in an email to Charlier.

An attorney friend of mine who is familiar with the case told me that he could not see Memphis negotiating with Mississippi; they have no reason to - they 'won'. Besides, a major reason Mississippi likely lost was that the water in the Memphis Sand had not been allocated among the states. So if you don't know how much water you have, how can you claim you have been wronged by someone taking 'your' water?

Here is my latest Power Point (as a PDF). The new material is the above information from Charlier and the Waldron-Larsen PDF.

Download Campana_MEM_GEM_Seminar_17Apr2012

Stay tuned.

"We simply would do nothing to jeopardize God's greatest treasure, and that's the water." – Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton, Memphis Commercial Appeal, 25 January 2010, after learning that the Supreme Court had refused to hear Mississippi's appeal. 

A Bioregional Approach to Adaptive Governance: Assessing the Feasibility of the KBRA

The title of this post is that of Brian C. Chaffin's PhD (Geography) proposal, which he successfully defended today (I am on his committee).

'KBRA' stands for 'Klamath Basin Restoration Agreements'.

Here is a PDF of his excellent Power Point presentation:

Download Chaffinb_proposaldefense_final

His proposal, which he has decided to revise, was one of the best (likely the best) I've ever read. 

The picture shows him in a snow pit measuring SWE (snow water equivalent).

"Whether the measure used is the size of the salmon runs, the state of the Basin's water quality or the amount of water flowing in Klamath River Basin streams and rivers, the 20-year effort to restore the Klamath River and its fisheries has failed. Salmon runs now are at greater risk of extinction, fishing is more restricted and water quality is more degraded than when 'restoration' began in earnest 20 years ago..." -- Klamath Falls Herald and News, 9 November 2006.

Playing Chicken in the Bay-Delta?

I can't take credit for the title of this post; it's from the title of a paper in ASCE's Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management:

 'California's San Joaquin Delta Conflict: from Cooperation to Chicken'

You can freely read the abstract but will have to pay for the article if you are not an ASCE member. Here is a PDF from the senior author's WWW site.  [Note added on 21 December 2011: Here is a 'blog version' of the paper.}

By the way, that's a picture of the Big Chicken in Marietta, GA. Seemed appropriate.

The paper is co-authored by Kaveh Madani and Jay R. Lund. Madani,  creator of Water SISWEB and now an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, is a PhD graduate of UC-Davis and a student of Lund's. Unless you've been living in a hole, you'll know Lund as one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to Bay-Delta issues. 

Here is their abstract [emboldening, italics, and red textare mine]:

California's Sacramento‐San Joaquin Delta is the major hub of California's water supply system and is central to the ecosystem of many native threatened and endangered species. Conflicts over the Delta have evolved over more than a century. This paper traces changes in this conflict in game theoretic terms, with its implications for the region's physical and ecological decline and governance. The Delta is not a zero‐sum problem and win‐win resolutions may exist if stakeholders cooperate. Game theory provides some insights on the potential for win‐win solutions. The Delta problem has had a Prisoner's Dilemma structure, where stakeholder self‐interest makes cooperation unlikely within a reasonable timeframe. However, the core of the Delta conflict is changing as the unsustainable future becomes more widely understood. Today's Delta problem has characteristics of a Chicken game, where cooperation is in everyone's interest, but is unlikely because parties deviating from the status quo are likely to bear more of the costs of a long‐term solution.  The state of California may become the victim (or chicken) of the Delta game, bearing the greatest costs, if it continues to rely on leaving parties to develop voluntary cooperative solutions without a sufficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation.

So why am I posting this now? I had reason to reread this paper over the weekend. I last read it in late spring 2011. It made a much greater impression on me this time. Perhaps it's a matter of knowing more now than I did last spring.

What really made a mark were the Conclusions:

The Delta problem has evolved over time, from cooperation to Chicken. In the early 20th century Delta stakeholders agreed to cooperative solutions. Later fights over water allocations started and parties preferred to compete rather than cooperate. Yet, the Delta problem is not necessarily a zero-sum game. Since Delta stakeholders bargain based on their utilities from water, land, money, and risk over time rather than water shares alone, a cooperative win-win resolution which includes trading across resources and liabilities may be possible. However, the structure of the conflict with many stakeholders leads parties to not cooperate. A cooperative win-win resolution for a static Delta is unlikely in a timely manner, especially with so many stakeholders. This is a structural reason for failure of consensus processes to agree to an available win-win solution and the default tendency to retain the status quo.

Stakeholders' preferred decisions are likely to change with greater understanding of the Delta's unsustainability. The Delta is not a static problem and is worsening with time from almost all perspectives. Such changes transform the core conflict from a Prisoners' Dilemma to a game of Chicken  The Chicken game is particularly devilish given the potentially abrupt transition likely for the Delta. Nevertheless, a cooperative solution is unlikely without external interference. Many parties will prefer keeping the Delta as is until fear of Delta failure rises enough to make the least risk tolerant player adopt an alternative plan. The dominant strategy for the player who will be chickening out is to chicken out today, as its losses can be lower today than after a collapse. However, since no party is willing to be the chicken, they wait, hoping to win the game, either by forcing concessions from other stakeholders or concessions or aid from the state or the courts, with the game perhaps prolonged by expectations of state and federal aid in the event of collapse, in a form of moral hazard.

Including the state of California (or federal government) did not fundamentally alter the game. For the cases examined, the Chicken characteristics remained and cooperation was unlikely. Adding the state to the game suggested that California can be the victim and loser in the conflict, bearing much of the cost of a Delta failure, due to its past failure so far to develop reliable mechanisms to enforce cooperation.

 Whatever plan is adopted to fix the Delta in the coming decades, the Delta's sustainability is not guaranteed without powerful mechanisms which provide incentives for cooperation or penalties for deviation from cooperation. While recent efforts address symptoms of the problem, they have not yet solved a main cause - lack of effective and responsive governing mechanisms. California must 'govern' the Delta or eventually pay for absence of effective governance.

I could have put the entire text in bold italics but that would have been silly. I did put the last few sentences in red because I think Madani and Lund are spot-on with their assessment. I'm not prescient and I don't think I'm telling any Delta wonk what they don't already know.

It's about governance, or lack thereof. 

Note added on 21 December 2011: Here is a shorter version of this paper from the California Water blog (thanks to Jay Lund). And a paper from Kaveh Madani - 'Game Theory and Water Resources'.

 "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government." - Thomas Jefferson 

No More Hydro-Secrets Revisited: GRACE, Groundwater, and Geopolitics

Last 31 January 2011 I posted an item titled, No More Hydro-Secrets? Implications for Transboundary Water Resources Conflict Management. In it, I described a revealing visit to the University of Oklahoma where I saw some amazing work being done by Dr. Yang Hong and his team:

Perhaps the most serendipitous aspect of this visit was my last appointment on Saturday morning with Dr. Yang Hong, another U of AZ hydrology PhD (Soroosh Sorooshian’s student) and his doctoral student, Humberto Vergara. Hong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science (CEES) and is working with NASA developing rainfall-runoff models and other tools and assessing stream discharge using remotely-sensed (satellite) data. 

What Hong and Vergara showed me was quite provocative. I’m not talking so much about the scientific aspects, but the management and political implications. What if you could know your neighbor’s – friend or foe – hydrology: stream discharges, rainfall-runoff characteristics, water balances, groundwater depletion and storage, etc.  And what if your neighbor knew your same information? Transboundarywater management and negotiations might be a little different than they are now. Might be hard to hide data or present faulty information.

Yep. a game-changer, all right! I then mentioned the GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) groundwater information:

We have already seen how GRACE data provided information on the groundwater depletion

in India and the response from some Indian officials (read more about GRACE here).

All the above reminded me  of a situation a decade or so ago when I was involved with three riparians on a surface water project. I naively suggested that we ought to consider groundwater as well. Boy, did the walls go up, especially from one riparian who had plenty of good-quality groundwater and did not want to share data. End of discussion.

We still have a ways to go but I suspect we will get there sooner than we think. Dr. Hong told me that his rainfall-runoff model predictions have an unacceptable level of uncertainty in watersheds with areas under 10,000 square kilometers (about 3900 square miles). And then there is the issue of ground-truthing remotely-sensed data. I can hear someone denigrating remotely-sensed data by saying, "Those aren't real data."

But in the near future, resolving and managing transboundary and other water conflicts might have a different dimension, thanks to our eyes in the sky.

Now comes a post by Dr. James (Jay) Famiglietti, the 'GRACE Guru', at the Ecocentric blog (originally posted at Water 50/50) about the geopolitical implications of GRACE data: Spin Cycle: Will Changing Global Hydrology Throw the Geopolitical Machine Off-Balance?

Here is a video showing how GRACE works:

  

Famiglietti was recently named the 2012 Birdsall-Dreiss Distinguished Lecturer by the Geological Society of America, which honors outstanding achievement in hydrogeology.

Great stuff - give his post a read.

"Consider this my global water challenge. If we don’t start getting our acts together on this today, I truly believe that we will see the emergence of hydropolitics on the world scene as a driving force behind new strategic alliances, economic realignment, and as a key determinant of international security." - Jay Famiglietti