 Well, good morning everyone. Welcome back today too. So welcome back and just as a safety announcement for those of you who went here yesterday, there's two exits from this room. One at the back of the room by the flowers and there's a stairwell that goes in that direction. There's also a stairwell down this end of the corridor that is not an exit at the back of the room. So with that this morning, we're taking a close look at the ecology of the delta. And what I'm going to do is introduce all three speakers for their presentations and then invite them to sit at the front for the Q and a session. So the first speaker will be Louise Conrad. She serves as the California Department of Water Resources lead scientist. She works within the DWR executive team to guide the advancement of applied sciences to inform water resources management and facilitates application of best practices for conducting and communicating science at DWR. She's also a PhD ecologist before entering the lead scientist role in 2022. Louise served as a deputy executive officer for science at the delta stewardship council where she guided science funding processes, public workshops on delta ecology and management and served on the editorial board of the 2022 issue of the state of a delta science. The second speaker will be Dr. Steve Lindley from NOAA. He serves as the director of the National Marine Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center Fisheries Ecology Division and the Santa Cruz Laboratory. He leads the center research program on California demersal and anodromous species. He is also a researcher at UC Santa Cruz Institute of Marine Sciences. His research interests include the ecology of anodromous fish, statistical and numerical modeling of ecological processes, time series analysis and animal telemetry. He's published over 85 articles in the peer reviewed literature. And for those of you who are familiar with Steve's research group, they're literally recognized throughout the world. The third speaker will be Matt from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Matt has over 30 years of state and federal government experience working on central valley fish issues, particularly in the delta. Since 2016, he has been the assistant field supervisor for modeling and water operations in the Fish and Wildlife Services San Francisco Bay Delta Fish and Wildlife Office. In that role, he supervises senior level scientists who work on delta smelt supplementation, quantitative analysis of fish and environmental data and in support of various interagency and regulatory efforts. He also serves as a science advisor to his offices regulatory program, its field supervisor and staff at the services Pacific Southwest Regional Office. So with that, I'd like to thank all three speakers for being here and Dr Conrad, would you like to kick us off? Thank you. Good morning panel and everyone good to be with you today. I'm looking forward to continuing the discussion that started yesterday. It's really glad to be here. So I was asked to present on a bit about present day ecology. This is going to build on talks you received yesterday from Dr. Summer, Josh Israel and Lenny Grimaldo. And before jumping into the slides, I wanted to reflect for a moment on Renee's very important question during the final panel yesterday about whether some of the thoughts that came forward in that panel were really pertinent and relevant to the charge that is before you. And I wanted to note that this talk is in the category of important context. This is context that many of the things we're talking about are loosely or not really in control or controlled by the factors, the management actions that are listed specifically in your charge. However, I do think this is really important information to have about the landscape and habitat and the state of it that is affecting all of these fish that are subjects of those management actions. So, and then last note before jumping into the slides I wanted to acknowledge some DWR colleagues that were very helpful in crafting this presentation, in particular, Dr. Rosemary Hartman, who as I mentioned yesterday leads the interagency ecological program synthesis team and produce some of the graphics that you're going to see. Okay, so when thinking about ecology, it's always helpful to have a conceptual model. This is a simplified, very simplified version of what Josh Israel showed yesterday. It's premises that any species and its ability to survive, grow and reproduce is a product of factors that start with their position on the landscape and moves through environmental drivers such as temperature that then set the stage for the predation risk they experience, the food densities that they experience that then translates into their status and their ability to move through their life cycle. So, all of these, sorry, let's see, getting used to my setup here. I'm going to focus my time on the middle tiers here, because I think you heard a lot about the landscape and how it's shifted and how position on the landscape is really important. You heard about that from Lenny and from Ted Summer. And then the next two speakers are going to speak a lot about species responses. So I'm going to focus on environmental drivers and habitat attributes. So, setting the overall hydrological context, this is a graph that you saw yesterday as well, just a little bit of a different coloring of it. You're going to hear more about the present climate later today, I believe from Dr. Michael Anderson, the state climatologist. But I think this is important to reflect on in the context of Delta Smelt and Salmon too for this presentation. So we have the water year types for the Sacramento Valley Index for the previous six decades. The last two decades have been really marked by drought punctuated by single years of very wet conditions. If 2023 were on this graph, sorry that it's not, you'd see another year of extreme wet on the heels of three years of critical dry conditions. The length of the drought of this 20 years, this hydrological context for 20 years I think is really relevant to species conservation because of the number of generations that the species that we're managing have to contend with this. So for Salmon, which have an average life cycle of about three years. For 20 years that's that's six three year cycles, which is two compliments of three consecutive brood years. So it becomes really hard to bounce back from conditions that are impacts of drought. And then for Delta Smelt an annual life cycle it's really really hard. So you keep getting put down out of year after year one one flashy chance to make it better but that's not even the full compliment of brood years for for Salmon. So let's that's broad hydrological context let's think about let's look at environmental drivers with respect to water quality. One factor is water clarity of direct relevance to Delta Smelt that prefer turbid water. This graph comes from the interagency ecological program seasonal monitoring report you'll get these slides and there's an active link there that you can use to see the full report, which is updated several times a year. This is showing the water quality clarity measured by Secchi depth for fall months and shows a pretty remarkable increase in water clarity starting at the beginning of this century. The change here as has multiple reasons really for it. There has been a change in sediment supply, as you may be aware, the hydraulic mining increased the amount of sediment coming into the system in the late 1800s, but then the supply is cut off by the construction of dams. Such that the erodible sediment supply within the system becomes the main source of suspended sediment. In the late 1990s you saw on the last graph a lot of wet years hypothesized that those wet conditions pushed out a lot of that available sediment, such that we saw a step increase in water clarity at the beginning of the century. But that's not the only reason that we're seeing water clarity increase. We also have seen a dramatic expansion of aquatic vegetation invasive aquatic vegetation and I talk a little bit more about that. Dr. Erin Hester and her colleagues from UC Merced examine trends in declining turbidity, along with the expansion of SAV coverage. And we're able to show statistically that even after accounting for the change in sediment supply, you could explain a lot of the change in water clarity with the expansion of SAV. Sorry, submerged aquatic vegetation. I'll try not to use acronyms. Okay, another really important water quality factor is water temperature. And we talked a little bit yesterday about the availability of quite a bit of data now, because of long standing monitoring programs. A lot of the fisheries monitoring surveys are always putting a thermometer in the water at the same time that they're collecting fish. And Sam Bachevkin and Brian Maharshta, too, who's in the audience here, published this great paper just a few years ago, where they were able to integrate data sets from all these different discrete monitoring surveys that are collecting water temperature data. And with this large data set, we're able to detect a change in water temperature with an average change of 0.17 degrees Celsius per year. There was regional and seasonal variation in this pattern with the highest rates of temperature increase occurring in the North Delta and with the spring months seeing especially some important relatively high rates of increase. So this becomes really important for Delta smelt. And Dr. Larry Brown published another relevant paper here, which where he used downscaled climate models and compared that to the thermal habitat for Delta smelt. And where it's able to show in a really powerful paper how the thermal habitat is being constricted and is projected to decrease quite a bit so that their opportunity for maturing and actually spawning is becoming more limited over time. So let's start talking about some of the biological factors that affect habitat. There's a story of reduced productivity in the Delta that you may have heard of before. I wanted to shine a light on this important paper from Dr. Jim Klern from a few years ago. We heard about how there's been a lot of land reclamation reduction in tidal marshes. This analysis which looked at the estimated primary productivity contributions from different plants existing in different habitat types including phytoplankton and their relative contribution to overall net productivity for the system. This shows that the estimated contribution from tidal marshes is really an outsized part of the total productivity. And with a huge reduction in habitat loss, we've seen this paper estimates that the net primary productivity is reduced from historical conditions by over 90%. The good news is that with tidal wetland restoration, we could start moving things in a more positive direction, but we're a very long way from achieving the historical conditions. And you can't talk about productivity without mentioning invasive clams. So there are two major invasive clam species that occupy the benthos, there's corbicula, which is a long-standing introduced species and occupies more of the freshwater aspect of the system. And Potamacorbula, which was introduced first observed in 1986 and has a more saline distribution. This graph is showing from 1976 to 2022 the concentration of chlorophyll in the system. And you see, again, a post-introduction of the Potamacorbula species, a dramatic decrease in that concentration. Other research has shown that this has impacted also secondary consumers with zooplankton. That's Dr. Kimmer's paper cited there, though I want to note that there are other consumers that may have contributed to this productivity decline, including introduced zooplankton and jellyfish. So getting to zooplankton a little bit more specifically, the assemblage has been one of a shifting assemblage over time. It's large changes from the historical community, which includes mycids and cyclopoid species, which are no longer as prevalent as they were. And overall, we see this reduction in biomass. There's been this proliferation of pseudodioptimus and limnoythona over time. And these, importantly, these are introduced species that have, they're progressively smaller and they have lower nutritional value to fish. Importantly, though, even these three species highlighted here in one of another paper from Dr. Kimmer shows that even what they should be able to grow and produce eggs, they're doing so at a lower rate than would be expected based on their temperature in Bay Delta waters. Okay, I want to mention briefly harmful algae. This is something we can talk more about on the bus tomorrow. Multiple routine monitoring programs now do visual assessments for the presence of microcystis, which is one of the more common harmful algal bloom taxa that we have. And between 2007 and 2021 here we saw an increase in high densities of colony forming events. And this is especially concentrated in the lower part of the system. So continuing more on the story of primary producers. I mentioned aquatic weeds before and I think I just want to go into a tiny bit more detail here. Our invasive aquatic vegetation community is comes in all forms of floating emergent and submerged species. All of those are typically dominated by in by non native species. And we know now from empirical evidence that came from some USGS researchers that submerged aquatic vegetation attenuates the current and trap sediment. This then acts as this giant filter that I've mentioned before. And really importantly, it not only might be clearing the water but also making that sediment unavailable for marsh accretion. This expansion in aquatic vegetation has not gone without attention and investment in control. There is a 40 year program that is still running on on control, but it's very hard, especially for submerged aquatic vegetation to achieve effective treatment. And we've done this looked at this statistically looking at treatment records and the same area over time. And we've done this in selected field sites and shown that it's really hard to treat this and and usually stay as despite a lot of effort at a similar level of coverage. SAV worth noting there's been a aerial imagery that has been collected almost every year since 2003 and between 2008 and 21 we saw an increase in coverage from seven to 21% of all the waterways in the delta. I want to just make a little plug for synthesis which came up yesterday during the panel. One of the things I neglected to mention was the Delta science program support for the state of Bay Delta science and providing leadership in a by annual pattern of issues that summarize the science on a given topic and the 2022 edition was on services and disservices of primary producers. So before closing a few notes about predatory fishes. Increased vegetation along the Delta shoreline has meant important changes for the fish community. And this part of the ecosystem is dominated by non native species and increasingly centric sunfish and bass. These are different electro fishing data sets, one that took place in the early 80s and then in 2009 and 10. And we see this decrease in native fishes and a really big increase in large mouth bass. It's notable that this increase in large mouth bass drives a major recreational fishery and the delta it's known as a world class bass fishery and there's money in it for some people. So I want to give a nod to strike bass as well as an important predator for for native fishes. Matt no brig is really the expert. So he can tell me everything that I get wrong here, but this is a long standing introduction species thought of as a naturalized predator species in in much of the delta by some. The young of the year actually have declined and are part of this larger pelagic organism decline that was mentioned yesterday, but still the older individuals do present a non trivial and important threat to salmon out migrating and these two recent fish on this slide show that this might be a increasing concern over time, as there may be more of a temporal overlap with straight bass, moving into the system earlier than they did previously. And when you reach over 20 degrees, then there's this potential for a multi predator effect to really impact fish as they move through the system. So finally, you've heard this before but I am going to say in terms of the ecology, it's always changing. In addition to some of the things that I've talked about there's a whole host of other changes that are always kind of going on and these monitoring programs do help track it. So increased abundance of Mississippi silver sides which are eating many of the same things as a delta smelt Brian Maharsha's paper showed that this substantial increase in one of his paper in 2016. And then also the presence of wagasaki smelt and the potential now documented for hybridization with delta smelt. And then of course new invaders including a biotic ones in the form of contaminants are our other factors at play within the ecology. So with that that concludes what I was going to talk about and I'll take a seat and hand it over to Steve Lindley, I think. Thank you. Well good morning everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm Steve Lindley. I am a salmon ecologist and oceanographer that works for Noah as Peter told you. I was online yesterday and I really appreciated all the great introductory material that you were bombarded with. And it really reminds me of the allegory of the blind people trying to describe an elephant. Every person that speaks to you has a certain perspective. They're holding the elephant's tail or feeling it's hide or maybe getting stepped on by the hoof. And each one is an incomplete picture of this elephant and I'm going to give you yet another perspective which is an ecological one really from the perspective of salmon or salmon is generally but mostly should examine. Yeah, so we'll start out with something you may have learned in kindergarten the generalized salmon life cycle. Salmon are fascinating. Some people think they're disproportionately the subject of attention of research and management and I'll try to let you give you some understanding of why that actually is because there's so much diversity within and among species of salmon that it's really not just one thing. But you probably all learned that salmon have this epic life cycle and you can start wherever you like, but I'll start with the adults, which spawn in rivers for shrimp salmon relatively large rivers and they like cobble and gravel bedded rivers. And they have very particular places they like to dig in a nest where they lay relatively few very large eggs a few thousand rather than millions like a striped bass might lay. So a lot of maternal investment into those eggs, which they bury in the gravel and they they're really up on the limit of how big you can make a fish egg and have it survive due to the oxygen transport so oxygen is an important variable as well as flow. The female will guard that nest for a while and then as you all publicly learned she will die they only spawn once steelhead. Actually, everything I say there will be an exception that you could point to but I'll try to just talk about the generalities here. So they die after they spawn the eggs live in these gravel pockets for a couple months typically, and then the eggs hatch and there's a the next phase is this Aildon phase where they have a large yolk sack. They hang out in the gravel as they absorb that and grow. And when they run out of yoke they need to come out of the gravel and then begin feeding on benthic invertebrates and things like that. And they may rear there depending on the, the population or species for a few days to maybe a year or even more in northern climes near where they were born or they may move downstream and generally they are going to move downstream over time. Where their habitat preferences change as they develop they prefer deeper swifter water, larger prey, and eventually they will undergo a transformation. Physiological and morphological from something that looks like a little trout to something that looks like a little salmon which we call smolts, and they go from defending territories and being aggressive to one another to starting to school up, and they move out into the ocean. And they, they do this first phase in freshwater it's thought because the risk of dying from predators is relatively low compared to the marine environment, but there's not a lot to eat, which is, you know, the flip side of that coin, the relatively alligatrophic environments compared to the coastal oceans that salmon rivers empty into. So at some point it becomes advantageous to risk being in the ocean because the growth potential is so high, the fish will move out into the coastal ocean. And depending on their species or population they may live in coastal waters, some hundreds of miles from their natal river or make giant ocean migrations throughout the north Pacific. After a year to four years of doing fairly mysterious things in the high seas they will start to mature and they will return to the river, usually where they spawned, and then migrate back up river which could be a few kilometers for something like a pink salmon to many hundreds of kilometers for Chinook salmon to elevations that can be as high as 1500 meters or more, where this cycle is then complete. So, each life stage has also its particular habitat requirements. So, some of the things that we can measure and understand about that and there's a huge literature, a lot of this for going back many decades for the adults they have very particular depth, water velocity substrate and temperature requirements and oxygen is very important element as I mentioned. And the juveniles, they need all of those things too but their preferences do change as I mentioned, as they grow and mature and then in the ocean as well. They are governed by, especially water temperature and food and depending on the species that they have other more complicated requirements or preferences. So, that's the general picture. You cannot understand and you should not think about salmon in the absence of their habitats. This is one of the most important points I want to make. They exist. They have evolved to take advantage of what you can call a shifting habitat mosaic. There's a number of concepts that are useful for this in the stream ecology literature. Also, this idea of habitat templates or habitat filters that there are these requirements that they have are dynamic in in climate space and the opportunities are as well. And what we see salmon doing is governed by the interaction of their requirements which changes they develop and the environments that they use which are reverse estuaries in the ocean, which are also constantly changing. So, you can think about this idea of a habitat filter on the left there where there's a bunch of species salmon and maybe some of their life stages that could be found at any one spot under river. And whether they're there or not depends on these high level climate filters, filters that operate at other scales from the valley to the reach scale down to the micro habitat scale. So, they basically all those conditions have to be met for salmon to be able to persist there. This is also true of their predators and prey. And a lot of the actual metrics that you can use to describe these filters are things that can be modified by the water projects so this is one way of thinking about the impacts as shifting these filters that can then shift the communities and the dynamics that happen at any one place. So that's complicated, but for salmon it's really complicated because these things have to be coherent in space and time as the fish are moving across these landscapes. So another useful kind of conceptual model that I really fond of is on the right here, which is if you imagine every day, you think of your salmon what life stage it's at, and you draw on a map where the habitat conditions are that it could persist in, and then you stack those maps in time. So you wind up with a kind of reticulated structure. In this case it's modeled after the vasculature of a fern stem. But so you have this tangled structure, which represents pathways for salmon to move through space and time. And salmon can move through a variety of paths and salmon biologists love to categorize these paths they call them life history variants and whatnot and people I think can follow you trap thinking each of those as being an adaptation. Where they really may just be an expression of opportunity, and the real adaptation is being able to take advantage of this dynamic environment. So this is also I think a helpful way of thinking about impacts of water projects because you can imagine them, as we learned yesterday, they're shifting these areas in space and time of where salmon can persist. And, you know, things like the dams are lopping off huge sections of that structure, and other ones are expanding and contracting over space and time and this can then preclude or allow the expression of life history diversity within populations among populations and across species, in really important ways. And this diversity of life history expression is one of the keys to salmon productivity, and why natural salmon systems are so productive and resilient, and why ones that are heavily impaired by human development are not. Okay, so you may think of salmon correctly as something of the Arctic or sub Arctic. You can think of Chinook salmon and maybe the Yukon River is the archetypical system. Why do we even have them in California? It's kind of a surprising thing because we're in a Mediterranean climate. It's hotter than Hades here in the summertime. And the reason is through accidents really of geography and geology. So our coastal ocean here, those of you who live along the coast are well aware it's really cold in the summertime, which is a little surprising because similar latitudes on the east coast, it's really, really warm. And that's because of the California current. It's a sub Arctic current that comes along the coast. There are coastal upwelling in the spring and summer that keep conditions that are suitable for salmon off our shore most of the time. Not always there are El Ninos that that wreck all of that. And that climate condition also generates our weather as well, which interacts with the incredibly complex topography of California shown on the right. We have the Sierra Nevada's and the Klamath Mountains, the Pacific storms batter into those that's going to happen today. You'll get to see that. Often there'll be snowfall that then is stored on those mountains and it creates conditions that salmon can use in certain times and places throughout Central and Northern California in spite of what would generally be an inhospitable climate. So there, you can imagine then that there's just an incredible mosaic of habitats that range from small mountain streams gravel bedded cobble bedded boulder streams down through an alluvial valley which was your full of huge and productive marshes out to San Francisco Bay and the coastal ocean and salmon in California evolved to take advantage of that. And people systematically have altered that for our own needs in ways that are generally but not always terrible for salmon. So, that kind of diversity of habitat opportunity has allowed for four different distinct runs of Chinook salmon to exist in California this does not even exist in the Columbia River. Why is a question I've never really seen answered why they don't have winter lunch in a salmon, which is the most endangered one that is really at the heart of the wicked problem that we're all learning about. So these, these have been categorized into these four kind of species for management purposes, they're all part of the same biological species. And they differ according to the timing that they're different life stages, and also the locations of where they occur. So I won't go too much into that because we don't have a lot of time. Another thing about salmon is that they exist really is populations on a landscape, though that's kind of a fundamental unit because of their propensity to return to where they were born. So we had a credible diversity of salmon populations before the modern era. So Sacramento River lunch, winter lunch and look existed as four different populations above Lake Shasta, like Shasta was installed in the 1940s. It was thought winter should go extinct. It is only through the happy accident of it acting like a large spring that winter should have managed to persist to everyone's great surprise. So it works a lot of the time, but not always, which I'll try to talk about a little bit as well. So spring Chinook were much more widely distributed there were maybe 18 or 20 significant populations of those all but three were extirpated by dams and the ones that remain or in pretty rough shape. So, yeah, I should have said here that they're either threatened endangered or a candidate for listing. So five year status review update. I've been involved in these since really they're some of their inception and through a bunch of colleagues we developed a framework for evaluating the viability or extinction risk using some metrics related to IUCN red list criteria. You can trace them back. They have to do with the population size and its trend whether they've been catastrophic collapses. And the thing we added was whether they're heavily influenced by hatcheries or not. Exactly. We do this. And winter Chinook are a weird one because there's just one population left. They can't really be delisted under that circumstances. They don't exist in their native range completely. But you can analyze the status of that extant population. And it is, it went through a period of real recovery. It's kind of a success story for the Dangered Species Act until the drought really started hammering them. And so in 2015 they were starting to decline in their status and the main response to that has been bolstering the conservation hatchery for those. So that ameliorated a lot of the demographic risks to them but now they are driven entirely by hatchery which is a risk unto itself. Spring Chinook generally have been declining in status and we were asked to do an update in 2022 and they're all at high risk of extinction now according to our metrics. There's a decision pending on whether they will be moved from threatened to endangered. Stay tuned for that. So, okay, that's a crash course in salmon biology. Now we'll talk a little bit about how the water projects effects affect them. So in preparing for this talk I was combing through old presentations and realized I gave a talk like this. After the 2009 biological opinion there was also an NRC or National Academy panel for that. And I put together this conceptual model you probably can't really read the boxes but you'll have the slide to look at it. This is really stood up I think. I wouldn't change it too much. If I had a little more time I probably would have a little but anyway, a couple points I want to make with this is the effects are complicated and they interact. And they're not just about water project operations and I know that's the focus of this review, but I don't think you can really understand the impacts, only looking at the operations you need to think about the facilities themselves, which have effects on salmon. Or how you operate them, whether it's a run of the river situation, whatever the dams, the channels changes, and the other structures have impacts as well. Now, at the beginning when people first started worrying about the effects of these projects the focus was really on entrainment. And this I think reflects the fact that we manage what we can measure. And it's easy in fisheries when you have bodies to understand what's going on. So another thing we do at my lab is fisheries management and they bring them on the boat, not all of them, there are other impacts, but it's easy to count and it's easy to see how fisheries impact salmon. Similarly entrainment, you have water that's moving across the delta it has salmon in it, and it ends up at these pumping plants and some of them were going in the canal, and that clearly was not a great thing. A lot of attention was put on improving the screening of that and as they were studying that they found that for all the fish that are actually, you know, heard or taken in by those pumps, many, many more were never getting there. So if they did a tagging study they released some fish a little upstream, a lot of them never show up the pumps and it and it became increasingly appreciated that the interior delta itself was a big problem for salmon, regardless really of what the pumps were doing. It has more probably to do with the delta cross channel and whether fish are getting entrained in there. And this has really stood up a lot of research has been done on this with more advanced tagging and analysis to show that the interior delta is a very bad place for salmon to be as they try to migrate through and this seems to be due to the predators that Louise was talking about predation rates are very high and very localized even its specific places in times. So that remains all true and of interest. What happened in the intervening period it was this focus on water quality and the effects of dams on water temperature. You saw a lot about how flows change. Hydrographs are flattened out and evened out. And the same is true of the thermograph there was a little bit about that yesterday. But the river generally now is much colder in the summer that it would have been historically and warmer in the fall and winter, which is generally a good thing for salmon, or at least for winter engine examine which are spawning in the summer. Their eggs are the most sensitive life stage. And we thought we had this under pretty good control with the, the temperature control structure on Shasta dam and the protection criteria about how cold to keep the river. But then then Martin at our lab at the time he's now at the University of Amsterdam dug into this a bit and he analyzed them. So this was all based on laboratory data. You take eggs into the into a laboratory and you can rear them under different temperatures and look at their survival. And he fit a model to that. On the left, which came up with this idea. Well, supporting an idea that about 15 degrees C or colder should be fine for salmon and that's how the system was operated. And only a few times in the historical record did it get above that. There were clear consequences you could see in the data that especially after the 1977 El Nino when they, the river just got completely hot. And the, the, the winter should have that were in the river that you're all died essentially was thought that was a rare thing. So, Ben then refit this model, not from laboratory data, but using the observed survival that you can get from looking at the production of juveniles by the spawning adults and how many you catch it a trap downstream. And using the model that was estimated from lab data is on the left, basically doesn't explain any of their variability, but if you let that critical temperature parameter be estimated from the field data. You get to fit on the right, which explains a lot of the variability, especially the increasing low survivals in recent years during the drought. And this is he explains this then in the paper there as being a consequence of oxygen limitation really. And in the lab studies, they use high flow rates because you know it's a lab study you want to remove all of their variables and focus on the temperature in the field. That's not the case the actual velocities within salmon reds are lower than that and looking at estimates in the literature on that he basically came up with the conclusion that's what's driving this discrepancy. This led at least in part to a renition re initiation of consultation on the opinion that we were still kind of, I think sorting out. But the temperature criteria is now lower. Okay. The water projects aren't the only other thing going on I was asked I think to say something about the other stressors climate change is a huge one. The drying and warming of California's climate is bad for salmon salmon like it cold and wet. And this is not the fault of the water projects but it's also a challenge for the water projects and the interaction of the two is a increasingly big issue for salmon. There are a lot of other changes in the ecosystem some successes of conservation, recovery of things like the California sea lion, these things eat enormous numbers of salmon, and we don't really have a way yet of managing that very effectively. Fisheries of course are often an issue although they were closed this last season because of drought impacts. There are things like diseases which are also somewhat related to water project operations as well. I didn't even really mention I mentioned the pesticides which may be related to the fact that you can irrigate agriculture. And then a really thing out of left field that's come up that we're studying intensively at our lab is this emerging thiamine deficiency, which is driven by eating a lot of anchovies which are record high levels they produce an enzyme which destroys thiamine. The adult salmon seem to be okay maybe with that but their offspring basically die there's a picture of them. They hatch out and they just flop over and die, unless they're treated. So that's one of the things that we've been working that raises the host of issues itself. So I just want to finish up with a slightly on a tangent here with another conceptual model. This was something I developed in response to the first time the salmon fishery was ever closed back in 2007 and eight when we had a record low level of escapement. And at the time a lot of people wanted to blame that on the water projects we did a careful assessment of all the data on this. It turns out in that case it really was something going on in the ocean delay and upwelling. That was the proximate cause, but the system had experienced that in the past but it seems much more vulnerable to a catastrophic response now, which we think is due to the increasing reliance on hatch reproduction and the narrowing of the diversity so basically almost all the fish arrive at the ocean at the same time. And if the ocean is bad then they're in a lot of trouble, where if they were spread out, you know, some that would have got there later would have been fine and the ones that were there earlier did okay. So, I put this little model together at that time thinking about the systems in general they have a decline in natural production related to human development. The universal response that is at some point we need to build hatcheries to mitigate that and those work for a while, but they there's clear evidence that they suppress the natural productivity fitness of salmon. So we have that decline in the middle graph. And this is then interacting with a climate effect which is both the amplification of climate variability and the sensitivity of salmon populations to that because of this constrained life history diversity. When you add all that up you get the picture at the bottom. And this is mind you is just a cartoon really and I made this figure where we were at time point one there and I basically predicted this cat catastrophe will go away and we would back to something that looks pretty good. But it's going to get even worse after that and the data actually then are on the right and it's kind of bizarre that it almost looks like the cartoon. And the point of all of this is this is not a sustainable situation if we keep operating everything and doing everything the way that we are right now salmon, they're going to go extinct but they're just going down we need to find ways to reverse some of these trends the decline, in particular in natural productivity and fitness of wild salmon and their sensitivity to the climate and that has to do with finding ways of restoring that reticulated structure of habitat in space and time. And that's what I'm urging us to all think about is how how can we reconcile the needs of salmon which need that kind of dynamic environment with the needs of people who are used to trying to control environmental environmental variability as much as possible for their own needs and I think this is a really challenging thing to reconcile and I am really looking forward to some good ideas about that so thank you very much. Good morning everybody. I want to start by thanking my colleagues at reclamation for the invitation to be here and thinking the panel for the same. I've been asked to kind of overview the biology of the two. Listed and in one case nearly listed from the federal perspective anyway, Osmar it smelts in the San Francisco as jewelry. This is going to be pretty simple and straightforward I'm just intending it to be a reference that the panel can use to kind of compare and contrast among the two. And, and, and it's based on things that are not readily synthesizable I guess out of the voluminous literature especially for Delta smelt I'm sure that my computer hard drive has 200 papers that have something to say about one or both of these fish so So some basics the long fence melt is native to the San Francisco as jewelry but it's not constrained to it it's part of a species complex that spans from here to Alaska. The Delta smelt is endemic to the San Francisco as jewelry it presumably evolved from Eastern Pacific surf smelt. Well that part's known that's not presumable but presumably evolved along with the as jewelry in the last 10 or 15,000 years as Ted had talked about. From the federal perspective the long fence melt is currently proposed to be an endangered species that hasn't finalized but probably will sometime this year. Delta smelt is officially threatened has been since 1993, but it's conservation reliant at this point and I will show the panel what that means specifically later in the talk. Neither one of these is a big fish, but long fence melt is bigger, because it's bigger presumably it produces more eggs so higher fecundity. There is possibly a little ghost of competition past for the Joe Connell fans in the audience in their spawning, and that the long fence melt spawns earlier in the year. It's mainly in the winter Delta Smelt's mainly in the spring and the long fence bonding is somewhat C word of the Delta Smelt center of spawning. Those aren't absolutes but they're suitable generalities long fence melts not only bigger it has a bigger mouth so it eats bigger prey. Salt tolerance is higher in long fence melt. It's not confined to the estuary. But if it does leave it may not come back. Delta Smelt is confined to the estuary. It can't really take seawater except in a laboratory where you do things just right. Temperature tolerance however of long fence melt is lower and more in line with what Steve just described for salmon delta smelt can do a little better with warmer water. I mentioned neither of these is a giant in the fish world. A really big long fence melt is 125 millimeters or about five inches long. A really big Delta Smelt is not even four inches long. Generally speaking, so these are as far as we know, historically in the ecology of the system they were little pelagic forage fishes. So offshore oriented food for for bigger things. Pelagic and in the in the use of it for this estuary doesn't mean what it does in the ocean. Where you're talking about a swordfish or a white shark that swims thousands of miles a year. We just mean it generally offshore away from the shoreline and this is a silly plot that I made for this talk just to make this point because it does get debated. So there's a bunch of studies from the literature I can provide them if people want them that are ordered on the X axis depending on how old they are. And studies that I've colored green used offshore sampling gears like trolls or fish salvage in the case of the foremost left one and the ones that are colored brown or near shore things like saints. And so things like Mississippi Silver side large mouth bass if you're in fresh water, you see the big dots. That's their relative abundance relative to these four fish tends to be in the brown colored near shore stuff and the smelts if they're going to hope their head up and be somewhat abundant are going to be that way offshore. So that is their predominant habit for the most part. So getting into life cycle basics hopefully everybody can kind of keep a map in mind these species being pelagic. Do redistribute a fair bit the low salinity zones and important part of their habitat and that can when it's really wet be in San Pablo Bay pretty close. You know to the what you typically think of as a marine environment or in low flow it can get into the river channels of the delta. So meaningful maximum age of longfin smelts to I'm sure there's a three year old around here and there but to for Delta smelt pretty much annual. I mentioned the the earlier spawning hatch success in a lab for longfin smelt starts to decline at 15 Celsius and seems to shut off pretty much for Delta smelt at 20. They can probably but the culture facility likes to keep things at 16 which would not be good for longfin smelt but works just fine for Delta smelt. So there's definitely some temperature difference there. They're both presumed to spawn on sandy substrates or maybe even small cobbly type substrates if any of that exists in the estuary they have little tiny dimersal legs that will smother if they're on fine substrate. So they need to find something that won't smother them. Longfin smelts larvae are pelagic and mostly in the low salinity zone that's not none of these things are intended to be 100% and people will argue every little thing I say probably so just keep in mind we're speaking about a mode in a statistical distribution. Delta smelt larvae are likewise pelagic but mostly landward of what we think of as the low salinity zone so they're in they're in where the tide is but they're in the delta and fresh water when they're very low. Juveniles then the longfin smelt start to move seaward presumably in part at least to avoid warmer water as the season progresses and because they don't have any trouble dealing with higher salinity they moved that way. Delta smelt moved down into the low salinity zone and that's about as far as they seem to be able to go and then they do their best to deal with the summertime. In the fall the longfin smelt start to come back in and they will reoccupy the low salinity zone and other places. And the delta smelt mostly stay there until it really starts to rain and then they'll move back into the tidal fresh water. That's kind of the two life cycles superimposed on each other. Before I get into status type things which is going to be my my next slide, you know the speakers have done a great job of pointing out that the system has changed a lot and this is one more expression of that. And on this little timeline is year since 1850 to today and then a few things on the y axis that are our major changes to the system and you can kind of see how they line up in time. So I don't know that I need to get big into any of that it's there for your reference if you want. I think given the given time constraints and how you've heard this over and over I can just let it be right there. So we'll move into the time series that we have of abundance for these species. This is CDFW's fall midwater trawl data that's a survey that's been going pretty continuously since 1967 so it's getting close to 60 years as a time series. Usually you will see these as bar graphs. I prefer to plot them this way for a couple of reasons when I can plot both species the y axis here doesn't mean anything it's just there to separate the two so I could put pretty pictures of the fish alongside them. The index is a relative abundance index only so numbers are nothing but a distraction. The bubble size is the index. So with long thin smelt you can see pretty dramatic decline over time. If you can try to reconjure the image that Louise had of the flow, water your types that have occurred over time. There was a wet series at the beginning there was a wet series in the early 1980s, and there was a wet series in the middle and late 1990s and there hasn't been one since. So this is mostly an age zero index, meaning a first year production index it's not showing you what's happening with the adult stock. But when, when the fish lives two years tops that adult stock is declining. And after 20 years of non consecutive wet years there's not going to be as many adults and they're not going to be able to produce the egg supply that they did in 1967. In addition Louise mentioned the overbite clam which is most people's best guess for why the 1990s rebound was rather modest compared to the 60s and 70s and 80s. Undoubtedly the panel is going to hear at some point that the flow relationship for long fence melt is declining. It is if you ignore fish population dynamics. That's what's shown in gray bars in this plot. So, the x axis is just how many years since 1967 are included in a linear regression of some flow variable it doesn't really matter if you use outflow averaged over this that or the other or x to over this that or the other they're all pretty linear and do the same thing versus the index. If that's all you do then yes, the relationship is losing explanatory power pretty badly through time. But if you even make the simplest attempt to account for the egg supply effect. It isn't. And so that's what I've done here this figure actually comes out of our species status assessment for long fence melt. I'm not exactly right. No, it's an approximation is a linear regression a good way to do a population dynamic analysis. No, but if a simple model will make a simple point. Let's, you know, that's, that's all I want to say about that I think. Okay delta smell so delta smell. The abundant is long thin smell ever in this time series, I nobody knows historically beyond that. Probably never really was because it didn't have access to marine waters and usually things that can get to a marine environment are going to experience more overall productivity. Yeah, a relatively rare fish the entire time we've been studying it I wrote a paper about that in San Francisco Estuary and watershed science that's pretty controversial a couple years ago. I can read it if you like, but importantly for what I want to get to next is that the fall midwater trawl index has been zero for delta smelt since 2018. And this goes through 2023 so that's six years running that it's been zero. And in response to that index starting to get so small that it didn't really tell people very much from year to year, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to put monitoring on steroids for delta smell and do their do what's called the enhanced delta smelt monitoring program which is sampling pretty substantially it's a humongous field effort every week of the year. And this is the data at least through last October from that study so you have week so basically time within a year on the x axis here abundance estimates on the y axis that are just density expansions. And then each panel is a year starting with 2016. So in 2018, which is the third panel down that's the start of the fall midwater trawl, suggesting delta smelter below the threshold for that survey to detect them anyway but they're clearly still around because the enhanced delta smelt monitoring program which trawls right at the surface best technique we have for detecting delta smelt showed that they could catch them most weeks. But you can see that you can get zeros even when your previous weeks abundance estimate was 100,000 fish or something like that so the San Francisco estuary is a big place these fish are small they're presumably aggregated into shoals. So, you get that kind of thing, when you do enough of it. And you can see that that you know the survey kept detecting kept detecting and then you get down to the third from the bottom panel 2021 and now things are looking pretty bleak even with this intense sampling. And that seemed to really motivate folks to change their tune about supplementing the population. And then discussed for years that hadn't been done there were permitting hurdles there were all kinds of things going on, but in the winter of 2022, which is 2020. The tail end of a 2021 cohort. We put experimental fish out about 50,000 or 60,000 I don't remember the exact number. But lo and behold the next spring, we detected fish at a higher level than they had been detected the year before. Now we don't have the genetics to prove that that was the supplementation that did it but if anybody would like to bet against me I'll go ahead and take it. Because we did it again in 2022 and saw the same pattern and we're doing it again right now and EDSM is catching Delta smell. So, I think this survey has been super duper important, not only for showing that the species wasn't gone but for showing that, at least in principle, even at an experimental release level. We're going to be able to see the response of that in the population and that's I guess the most hopeful conservation thing I've seen in 30 years of Delta Smelt stuff so Thank you, Kerrigan for talking about the ESA yesterday now I don't really have to I will only thing I want to say about this slide is that Longfin Smelt is in that top part of this sort of what you do through time with the ESA flow chart and Delta Smelt has been in that bottom part for a long time. So, I was asked to talk a little bit about Smelt's an ESA so I'm going to do that we're back to this timeline figure when we do a consultation like the one you were asked to review from what we did in 2019 what we're doing again right now. There's an environmental baseline, and that environmental baseline is everything that ever happened which this is kind of a conceptualization of, but it's not what we're consulting on. It's there we have to accept that it happened. And that that's maybe part of the reason or all of the reason that the species is where it is, but it's not what we're consulting on. What we're consulting on is what reclamation and DWR are proposing to do. And there is more to it than flows, obviously. But in terms of what they do that affects pelagic fish in the estuary flows are a major part of that. And so, this is kind of just a schematic of what the major ones are so OMR. As somebody maybe Josh pointed out is the title construct in the South Delta. Correct. It's a title construct in which the flood tide flows more strongly towards the pumps because they're pumping water and the tide doesn't go as far. And so as Lenny did with interpretive dance yesterday, the net effect is what net flow is reflecting and it, if you're plankton, or if you're a fish that's trying to tide surf to go look for a place to spawn. You have a high probability of going towards the pumps if you get into Old Middle River. So that is something we think about when we're thinking about project operations for that reason. Another thing we think about is X to location, and that's because the low salinity zone is important habitat to these fish but it's also because it doesn't function the same way everywhere. And when it gets out into Sassoon Bay, which is these are, you know, these kilometer locations that are shown here are mostly things that come out of the state boards D 1641 regulation, depending on how wet or dry it is in the winter and spring will affect which one of these projects are trying to meet. So we've got into mixes of deeper and shallower habitat. The, the greater amounts of fresh water that's flowing over the salt water that's coming in will intensify vertical mixing and different kinds of currents that help retain sediment which these fish hide in plankton which these are, and especially for the larvae, maybe the fish themselves so longfin smelt having a center of distribution as larvae very near X to suggests that they aren't really doing much except letting aggregation happen because that's also where sediment peaks have historically been and planktonic organism peaks have been delta smell because it's upstream of that must have some different behaviors or it would be in the same place. I don't know what they are, but, but that's kind of the nutshell there and why we, why we pay attention to that and then since the 2019 opinion, which had a new thing a summer use of the Sassoon marsh salinity control gate and an attempt to help delta smelt survive the summer by putting them into a relatively productive place or coax them there I guess by lowering the salinity of it. That's another essentially flow, flow mechanism that we are now paying attention to. And so one, one last thought about water project operations and adaptive management, which the agencies have heard for a long time and tried to implement for a long time it. It does it I mean if I'm a lumber there's lumbers and splitters right I'm a lumber so I'm going to call almost anything adaptive management if people are trying. And that's how I'm going to characterize this but the real world sloppy there's differences of opinion, there's litigation, there's politics administration changes all of that superimposes on top of any scientific effort. And then there's the time it takes for a scientific effort so in 1993 after the delta smelt was listed either the 93 or the 95 biological opinion for delta smelt. Basically said, avoid jeopardy by implementing what became D 1641. And I imagine that, you know that Bay Delta cord had already kind of been worked out everybody was on board with it but that's part of where that comes from then and Ted, Ted summer yesterday mentioned the pelagic organism decline that was a catalyst to re initiate. And so we ended up being a catalyst to change what we were doing from an entrainment perspective to our management because that was a newer way of thinking about it. It catalyzed a look at a fall X to that's been nothing but contentious and problematic because of the mega drought that we've experienced that we didn't recognize at the time, title habitat restoration also came out of that. And then we got far enough into the mega drought to understand what was going on that catalyzed re initiation in part because delta smelt was almost gone by that point. So the the 2019 opinion then had the so the experimental release effort, and also the Sassoon Marsh gate summertime action that I just mentioned so anyway I think point being I think that there has been some adaptive there has been attempts to try pretty significant flow experiments. And we have learned from and we're continuing to learn from them so that's basically what I want to say about that. Like everybody I didn't do this talk by myself I had a lot of help from my fish and wildlife service colleagues both in my office and in Lodi. I also had some help from CDFW Stockton folks. And I do also want to give a shout out to the field crews who do these intensive monitoring programs they're out in the cruddy weather. Well, old guys like me stand here in climate controlled climate controlled circumstances and pretend like this is their stuff as well. Thank you. And those were three great presentations and we do have about 15 minutes so I'd like to open the floor to members from the committee. And Rene should we start with you and then go to Patrick. I think I want to start with the second one. I see experimental release and supplementation efforts as the latest or one of the latest adaptive management experiments. You know what will happen over time we'll have to see lots of people have tried to predict the future and been wrong about it. Other people have done better about it but so I imagine that's not a very satisfactory answer but it's the one that I think I have right now. It's the beginning of another adaptive management experiment. As for the historical system. I guess I would point the panel to a couple of papers that looked did their did their best to recreate the pre gold rush landscape in a three dimensional hydrodynamic model and then the flow regime. One of them is by somebody Andrews and Ed gross and the other ones by Ed gross as first author. But those are pretty interesting things to think about from the fish ecology obviously so. The natural flow regime that longfin smelt would have experienced would have fairly frequently put X2 and San Pablo Bay during their reproductive and reproductive and rearing system, or reproductive and rearing season. Maybe even 50% of the time if my recollection is correct and which is enough for to your fish and theory. That doesn't happen very often anymore so that's a pretty significant change that this species has been trying to deal with. Then delta smelt is much more speculative I personally don't think it was a crazy abundant fish. I think it was in the river channels the title river channels and low salinity eastward of a lot of the plankton feeding fish biomass like anchovies and herrings and longfin smelt that was more marine. I'm confident it was getting a humongous food subsidy out of the title marshes that Louise showed have been taken away just because of the scale of open water to marsh at the time was so different. So I imagine that that that has been a pretty significant change for them. But those are just a couple of opinions like you asked for so. Okay, thanks. I'm going to give everybody a handful of next because we're getting feedback, but the zoom cannot hear either the speakers or the questions from the community members. Well, thanks. Thanks. So, and let's go to Patrick next. I was also to use that is that working any better. I think if you hold it to your mouth that would just be a lot better. Okay, we'll give it a try. Thanks. Speak loudly. Speak loudly. That's a problem for me. Okay. Thanks for the presentations. I really appreciate that. And we've been getting a lot of information. So, let me focus on the, the smelt element of it. And I'm going to throw out a few things and they're a little bit jumbled and really what I'm getting at is, you know, what do we do about the smelt, especially the delta smelt. And in that context, on the east coast, working in the Hudson River Estuary and along the Atlantic, we're seeing fish move. We have a big model that that predicts where summer founder are going to be in the future based on climate change and so on and so forth. Also been working on establishing corridors in the terrestrial system, so that organisms can move to adapt to the changes in temperature that are going on. And the other parts about fish is like looking at lakes in upstate New York, the lake trout are going away and they're being replaced by bass, but fish can't leave the lake. So, so they're basically, they're basically going away. And the other thing that we've noticed with the whole climate change thing and I'm glad you guys are looking at it is that climate affects different parts of the life history in different ways and, and I, you know, I think we were sort of recognizing that here which I appreciate and Steve mentioned it and so forth to. My question I put into our group yesterday was, you know, what's what's the smoking gun or guns for the Delta smelt and you know you Matt you put up the sort of phase of things going on and and for me, I mean you seem to have a long time you know the fish are relatively low through throughout that time series, but it would seem to me that seeing what would happen, like in a quantitative way all the way through there would give us insight as to what was most dramatic in terms of impact and what was less so that when we come down to right now and we're just managing water. And should there be other things and this is part of what I'm feeling in a lot of the presentations that were being given is we're seeing this, you know, we, we heard from from Steve on this. We're looking at temperature, but maybe it's oxygen. We look at oxygen, but maybe it's oxygen temperature together, or maybe it's oxygen temperature and flow or maybe it's oxygen temperature and habitat, or maybe it's habitat affecting the eggs and then temperature affecting the reproductive quantity of the fish and so on. So I'm, I guess I'm asking, are there models out there for all of this kind of stuff. And if so can we see them. It would seem that are really sort of integrated and we were talking about synthesis. Louis even you you're kind of listing all of these things which are really valued seeing that I didn't see any connection between any of them. I mean we can kind of intuitively believe that you know the invasive plants doing something but what exactly is it doing and how is it affecting this was raised by Oppenheimer yesterday to about, you know, can we look at it and sort of integrate away so I'm just kind of, I'm sorry that's a sort of a jumble of a whole bunch of things but my brain goes do we have a model of all of this point points, at least some or, or maybe most of it together in some sense. So thank you. That's still on. Thank you Patrick. So for long been smelt at the moment, there are variations of models like the regression one that I showed you there's pretty simple statistical correlation. Devils in the details so how much, you know, flow is low in one month is correlated to the next month the next month the next month and so what they require really isn't known seems to be, you know, tons and tons of dramatic sort of flow. But beyond that, nobody's too sure. The service the Fish and Wildlife Service has recently been funded, I believe by DWR to develop a lifecycle model for long been smelt as best we can from available data. So that's just getting underway it's a couple years out. So smelt is a whole nother that it's arguably the best studied endangered fish in the country. And I think depending on your tolerance for what constitutes a lifecycle model there's at least four published lifecycle models, maybe six. They are generally statistical but Kenny roses is agent based or individual based. Some published amalgams and variants on those as well that have been used in some other, you know, planning efforts recently so. So yeah there is there is I can I can send you those if you'd like to see them. Thanks Matt and we will be focusing on modeling and the next meeting but I just wondered if sustainable Louise wanted to add to the question about models from your species perspective. Yeah, sure I can I can talk about that for salmon. They probably rival Delta Smelt in terms of how much we know about them, especially when around shook salmon we have a very detailed full lifecycle model for winter Chinook that can connect climate water project operations habitat. All the way through to the population level and it does actually even have some of the kind of dynamics I was talking about about the shifting mosaic of habitats floodplain inundation and things like that it has fisheries. And it's been used in the last couple of biological opinions, I think pretty pretty successfully, and what it tell it tells us a law putting a model like that together and one of the kind of the strange things about winter Russia that I don't really understand ultimately what's going on is their productivity is low, even when everything is good, and they're growing. It's, they don't grow that fast compared to what Pacific salmon populations are able to do. And we don't really know why it could have something to do with this fry stage which we, Kathy, Marc and Kevin alluded to yesterday it's important part of life cycle, too small to put tags in so we don't, we don't really know we know where they are and when but we don't know anything about their survival. And it's quite like we have good information about the the egg survival, and this was alluded to yesterday you can explain a lot of variation due to temperature but there's still a lot of other what it's called background mortality we don't know what causes that it it seems high, compared to a lot of other populations that's part of the productivity issue as well, but the other models are indispensable for understanding and guiding the management and we're in relatively good shape for winter in Chinook, less so for the other other salmon. Luis anything to add. I don't think so I think the main point is there are life cycle models and hopefully that can be a part of the focus at the next meeting for the panel. I think it sounds important. And so the last question before the break we go to Albert, and I know there's a lot of other questions here so during the break it will be an opportunity to check in with the speakers. I think, thanks for this interesting presentations. I have a question on the topic of flow abundance relationships. I think we saw some parallels across presentations on this idea that maybe internal variation in flow seems to be less important now than it used to in the sense that maybe what years are helping less and less and I've been working on this topic and I, I'm interested in your thoughts about whether you think this is real and maybe driven by demographics maybe populations are reaching especially for this list of the species. Maybe they're reaching a size where it's hard for them to bounce back, even if there's a good year, or to what extent you think that it may be a product of the tools we are using, which in many cases assume a stationarity and, or you know, like, you just average a long time series and even if you keep, you know, cutting it later and later, you know, hoping to get that this time varying relationship. It's maybe still not, you know, the way to go about it. So my question is, do you think it's real or should we be embracing other modeling tools that maybe do not assume a single flow abundance relationship but maybe multiple things that are happening on your context or the like? I'll take a stab at it too, but you go first. Okay. It's the one I can think of that's best as a salmon one. No, I can't. So, for long fence melt, yes, I believe low abundance relationship is real. And as several people have pointed out, the wet years are really spread out for the past 20 or more years, now 25 years, which is a long time for a fish that lives one or two years to go without a serious population rebuilding, you know, multiple wet years in a row or nearly in a row. It hasn't really happened since the 1990s. And so, I don't know that the underlying relationship for long fin has changed. I think that they're, you know, what we're not monitoring is, is adults and their eggs apply, and how much that has to have declined. So, it looks like something's changed, but I don't know that anything necessarily mathematically had to change. It's, it's just that you're missing what seems like usually in fisheries population dynamics is a pretty foundational piece of information. How many adults do you have and what's their egg supply? So, yeah, I mean, my personal opinion is it probably hasn't changed what's changed as the weather. Delta smelt, I do think has changed, but this is very opinion based, I think that prior to 2000 or so. My personal opinion is the major limit on Delta smelt was a carrying capacity imposed on them by Stripe Bass. And that could lessen or tighten depending on environmental conditions, but after Stripe Bass had declined enough, and the Delta started changing what seems to have emerged from our life cycle modeling. So, my team's life cycle modeling is that flow in the summer, which is artificially elevated over what it ever was is now the big driver. And we don't agree even within my team about why so I think I'm just not going to say anything about it here because I don't want to overtake the fact that I have the microphone right now. The salmon I think flow abundance relationships are very real. We have direct observations now of survival of smolts as they relate to flow and when it's the flows are high they have 10 fold higher survival I think compared to the lowest flows and that has something to do with their exposure to predators. It is a hard to tease apart though because when we have high flow conditions those are usually cold as well so there are probably conflated temperature effects. There's like a changing a non-story stationary relationship. The one compelling bit of evidence I've seen there is the response at the population level of Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River tributaries which used to have they still exhibit a relationship to flow. You get a lot more fish a couple years after the flows are high, but the slope of that regression seems to have changed over the last decade and a half. And the suspicion is it may be reflecting influences of hatcheries which are the source of much of the fish they go in there and they just seem to be less productive all else equal than they used to, which is what's predicted from domestication selection. It's not that's not been proved but it's consistent with that. Yeah, we'll just leave it at that. I'm good. Thank you. Okay. Okay. And with that I'm going to bring this session to you a close and before thanking speakers. I would like to just mention that the open mic session. We've had several sign ups if you haven't and you're in the room and you wish to address the committee please sign up on the back sheet. And for those of you that have signed up. It will be about five minutes each so please keep your remarks to about five minutes or I'll have to cut you off. And we'll deal with the in person people before lunch we hope, and then we'll take lunch and we'll come back for the people who signed up online through zoom. With that, I'll draw this session to a close but I would like to thank again as we saw yesterday really the leaders behind the science and the ecology for being here today we know you've got a lot of other pressures right now so let's give a hand to the speakers for such a great Welcome back at 1045 something in the air. Well, welcome back and climate change has obviously been a theme in every session so far. And I'm delighted to introduce Dr Mike Anderson, who serves as a state climatologist for California. This is a collaborative position between the state and the National Oceanographic and atmospheric administration to provide climate data services for the state. A state climatologist Dr Anderson has managed the atmospheric river research program and we'd like to thank you for bringing one today with you. And he works extensively with the academic community and local and federal agencies to improve the understanding of these key contributors to flood events in California. He has contributed to the state's climate change assessments which are widely used as a model in many other states and has provided guidance to the Central Valley flood protection plan since its inception in 2012. Currently Dr Anderson works in the executive division of the Department of Water Resources providing technical knowledge and advice for climate resilient resources management in a changing climate. Try and work through this and see if we can tell a tale of mostly the Delta watershed to some degree broader landscapes to understand how we got to where we're at and where we're going next. So anyway, we'll start with some key climate features in the region including some geography because the landscape is really important. And we'll get to recent events, extremes in water and fire. And then we'll talk about the climate change narrative and how it fits into guiding our expectations into how things are evolving. But one of the things I want to focus on here are looking at both time and space scales, both in how we measure things and how things evolve and try and help understand how that fits within the context of how we live and work in this environment. So we'll see if I'm successful in that regard. All right, so let's start with water here because this is really important because we have a really cool way of how our year works hydrologically. We start in the fall. We have a nice long dry summer. And with fall. On average October one up in Crescent City right at the border with Oregon fall precip onset starts there. On average fall precip onset San Diego is Halloween. So the month of October generally is when water year starts we see fall precip onset now. Sometimes that gets delayed into November. Now as we're moving from October to November, remember geophysically the earth is tilting back our days are getting shorter sun angles getting lower. This is really important to understand the landscape that's been dry. Waiting for those first rains to get wet. Warm enough to be wet before the days get short enough cold enough at elevation for snow. So that's why that temperature anomaly is really important as we progress through the fall season. And all of that goes to speak to what's the state of the soil moisture when the snowpack begins to initiate. And part of that is dependent on the geology that underlies that because the southern Cascades in the very northern part of the state is a very different geology than the Sierra Nevada which is mostly a granitic fractured rock environment. Now we get into winter and this is where things get really exciting 90 days December January February. Half our annual precip on average shows up in this 90 day window doesn't happen nice and evenly though. We tend to get punctuated events and we'll get into those are called atmospheric rivers that deliver 46 to 60% of our annual precip comes from these big storms. Well, okay, so we fit those in in a 90 day window and then there's paper in 2011 by Mike Dettinger kind of digging into this and he showed that really it's about 14 to 21 days out of those 90 days that are the active days in between this dry. Now again seasonally we think about it right we've gotten cooler we're into the cold we're into the sleep of winter when it's cold. As though some of us might have noticed over the past week. Not so cold temperatures in the 70s and even in the 60s up in the Sierra very non winter like. Get into spring this is gets exciting right because we had our 90 day winter right did we get it or did we not well if we didn't there's always the March miracle right we had one year. March 91 half the years precip showed up in that month and being the fifth year of a drought. It was very thankful that that showed up that year and really changed the tail. It also kind of set the stage that there's always that chance in March one last chance right before we get to April one why April one April one historically has been the peak. Of the snowpack building season so we're now we're pivoting out of the wet season we're starting into the dry season. Sun angle now is growing again right getting up high enough we're getting enough radiation on to the snowpack. To enable it to transition into a melt state and begin to melt as the days get longer temperatures get warmer. So do we get that late season precip bailout last bit other important element do we get that spring spring precip that helps. Move the melt. And support it. It's only 10% of the. Water your budget but it's a really important 10% just as that first fall onset really important for it to show up. And have the right timing. Then we get into summer and this is a really exciting time. Say why it's just hot and dry. Well it's how it's hot and dry that's really important because that guides how. The water moves. Out of the highlands in the lowlands how the lowlands begin consuming water. And how the landscape begins to dry out how we become the golden state we go from the green of winter into the golden brown of summer. Well there's a little side effect to the golden brown of summer as the landscape really dries out. And it tends to be if you have some convective activity along the crust of the Sierra associated with the North American monsoon. And you don't have enough moisture for rain but you get lightning. And dry vegetation they don't go so well together tends to have fires humans interacting with dry vegetation also tends to have some problems. So we worry about how fast that dries out what scale is it happening at. And understanding then those heat events punctuated heat events now used to be well hey it may or may not have a heat event this year. We're finding more and more that there will be one it's just one in how big and how long. And so really understanding those heat events and then the past couple years we've been introduced into something a little more frequently than we've seen in the past and this is some tropical activity. Now in August and September the winds in the circulation of the middle attitudes they tend to kind of slacken. And this enables then hurricanes that would either out of the specific that move either out towards Hawaii or off into the Four Corners region to wander up Baja. Past couple years they've gotten far enough that they impact Southern California so we had Tropical Storm K and Tropical Storm Hillary. Now this is really interesting with the circulation of a hurricane and their position such that they make the desert side of the mountains in Southern California windward slopes and that orographic precip is really important. It defines a lot of how we are in California. Now we get to the end of the water here right. Yeah. Hey we got there waiting for those fall rains to kick in and we understand how we set up our water management around this scheme. Now we all get taper one there none of snowpack kind of drag what is the first question you often hear well what's next you're going to be like. Well that would be awesome but I'm here to tell you that we struggle to get a 90 day outlook pretty good. So looking ahead a year ahead it would be awesome. Yes. Not quite there yet but now we're going to throw in another twist for you. This last decade did not look like the one before it noticeably. And the question is well then how much different is the next decade going to be. And how do we fold that in to help shape our expectations because it's not just hey by the time we get to mid century hey we'll deal with that when we get to the end of century hey we'll deal with that then. It is a really interesting progression along the way that's going to drive things and we'll talk about that in a little bit. So anyway topography really important we've talked a little bit about it. So Northern California Southern Cascades has a very tall mountain Mount Shasta the rest of the landscape not so tall 95% of the Sacramento Basin is below 7500 feet. So when we have a really warm atmospheric river with a freezing elevation of 10,000 feet the whole watershed is getting rain and we see what a whole watershed contributing can do it's pretty exciting. Just to the south in the San Joaquin Basin though half the watersheds above 7500 feet. It's a snowmelt dominated basin. In other words the biggest flows out of the basin normally happen with a snowmelt. Now we had a really interesting event happen in early April in 2018. Super Typhoon Jell-O-Wat which having a super typhoon in the western Pacific in March is kind of an exciting thing. Usually it takes a summer to build up enough heat to develop that much energy to have strong but we had one. It got caught into a rather strong jet that extended across the Pacific and it came across. Thankfully had to ride over a ridge because that changed the orientation of the storm with respect to the topography and that's a really important piece of the puzzle we'll get to in a little more detail later. But that said 13,000 foot freezing elevation in the Merced River watershed. Albeit a fast hitting storm it still produced a top 10 flood. So there's your glimpse into higher snowlines. In the snowmelt dominated basin that has yet to see rain to the top of the watershed could be an interesting adventure. Now atmospheric river activity the big three. Well one of the reasons the big three are the big three is because our atmospheric river activity peaks late December mid January. And if we think of our historic floods a lot of them happen. Between Christmas. And into the early part of January. Now we have a few late stragglers the February 86 event. February 2019 had some interesting events and we'll talk about those in a little bit as well. And one last piece on topography the Golden Gate is a really important gap in the terrain. Not only because that's where the ocean moves into the bay and in through the Karkina straight into the Delta. But it's also a terrain gap for atmospheric rivers. There's no terrain blocking heavy moisture flowing through that gap. And with the Southwest really flow flow out of the Southwest to the Northeast. It does a beautiful job of lighting up the American Ubin Feather River watersheds. Which is how the Feather River watershed can be massively productive. So it's really important to understand there's the atmosphere. There's the oceans and there's the land. Surface all working together to create what we have here in California. Now let's talk about normals. Good old Noah climate normals 30 years. This is our average conditions to what we're supposed to look like. So in this case I'm using a same simple averaging technique. The challenge with the Noah is each time they do a normal they try out a new statistical technique. So you can't compare one normal to the other because it's a different methodology. A little bit of a challenge but in this case this is just a simple average of statewide average temperature and statewide precip. We have the first 1901 to 1930 20th century getting started. And we see the blues and the blue triangle. There's that normal precepts about 24 inches. Temperature a little warmer than 56 degrees Fahrenheit. We see the circles largely clustered around that triangle. Few extremes evenly on warm and cold. Now let's move to the diamonds. This is our latest normal. Well the diamond is the normal pre-supplies almost 24 inches. Temperature wise though we're past 58 degrees Fahrenheit already. So the world's warming. This is observed data or we're warmer than we were at the start of the 20th century. But look at the variability year to year. The squares have started wandering and really seeing things really move out. Both in the wet cold the two squares that are back with the blue distribution. Then all the ones that are carbon out new territory including 2015 out there near 61 degrees for an average annual temperature for the state. Also the year without a snowpack. Only 5% average on April 1. Well let's talk about that year to year variability and how we look at it scale wise. So here we're going to use a product from West Range and Climate Center the California climate tracker and here we're going to use our climate divisions. Climate divisions back east tend to be small almost county level out here. So I did be a little more economical. We have seven of them. Nicely climate division two is the Sacramento Basin. Climate division five tends to be the San Joaquin and Tulare Lake bed region. We look in 2022 the last year of the latest multi-year drought. One of the warmer on record and we really see a lot of bright oranges there. Almost not far into the distribution but really in the warmest. Ten percent. Now this past year, monster year, one of the coldest in over a decade. And we're right in the middle of the historical distribution. So our coldest years now are only about average. That's kind of an interesting tale but we see it's not always even right. The south coast north of the haunted regions had a little cooler. But now we're going to look at it even differently at a different scale. Now we're going to go back to statewide but we're going to go to a daily time step. And this comes to us from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And the dashed lines are the climatological mean temperature maximum and orange minimum and green. Working our way through the year. And so we can see the minimum annual temperature of December, January maximizing there late July early August. But what we see in 2022 is there were cold extremes one in May. So wait one of the warmest years could have had a cold event that could have impacted ag production in a pretty significant way. So how we measure how warm or cold we are matters. How we aggregate our statistics matters. Then we all have the Labor Day heat wave for those of us that lived out here. We got to experience that and you see it was a really long duration, very extreme event. The little dots on there mean is set new records and that was statewide. Now here in Sacramento we hit 113 and Helzburg and the Russian River just to the west of us hit 115. Temperatures we normally like to leave to the southeast deserts. So really interesting. So now let's look at the big year, right? Because this was really interesting and really important. Very thankfully that spring shows a lot of blues there. Why is that? Because we had one monster snowpack. One of the four largest in our historical record. And very nice when we have a cool spring that helps facilitate a melt that becomes manageable. But for that cold year we still had a pretty hot. Not as many, not as long, but some episodic elements in July where it was definitely not cool year. And so how we articulate the when of the warmer cold and how that wraps together to form the year that forms a dot on the plot that then goes into defining the normal. So how do we roll all of that up? How do we keep track of it all? And which one of these are important for which process you're trying to track? Which one of these are important for which aspect of water management? That's for that day, reacting for that time. And then how does that add up? It's not this nice smooth climatological walk. That's the one thing we almost never see and probably really hard to land on. So if we think about it and we think about our modeling and we think about we use average as our descriptor. And you have a larger variance. Should you be surprised that the predictor is not working as well if you're trying to predict average when it's the one thing you're not getting? Just something that you want there. Now let's talk about atmospheric rivers and maybe not everybody's familiar with these fantastic beasts. Discovered in 1998 with microwave satellite imagery. Got a little bit of a wake up call. What? Moisture in the atmosphere isn't evenly distributed from the tropics to the poles? No, it turns out 90% of the transport happens in 10% of the area. A lot of dry space and a whole lot of excitement and others. Now when we wrap these up and you find that most of it's in that first two and a half kilometers of the atmosphere. There's the Golden Gate importance there. These get wrapped up into the leading edge. So the warm front part of a storm, which we will find out later this afternoon. Hopefully get you down here. Out of here before three when things really get wet, but if not, hopefully have umbrellas. Although the winds might make the umbrella a little less useful. But anyway, these get wrapped up and on the warm edge. Now it's understanding the temperature dynamics of that moisture transport. Relative to the temperature dynamics of the storm. Because it's two pieces working together. Interacting with the land surface that delivers our precipitation tells us where we're rain where we're snow. And how it moves across the landscape because these, as you see in the little animation there, they're not constant. They're very dynamic. And we can actually watch things happen over hours. So we talked about daily data and now we're into hourly data. Or we can watch the freezing elevation go from 10,000 feet to 2000 feet as that cold front moves through. Really exciting if you happen to be driving over a pass during that then. The other element is as you're driving over that pass particularly on I-80 as you're going up and you're going up the uphill part of it. You notice it is really raining hard and that's the orographic effect. You get into the saddle and you get a little break before the next white knuckle ride on the next rise. So where the terrain's lifting is really important. But here's the kicker with atmospheric rivers then. It's important the angle that it impacts the landscape because our landscape isn't just uniformly uphill. The reason the Feather River lights up so beautifully with a southwestern leaf flow is the massive bucks lake in the front of the watershed. Is a huge steep lift right at the front of the watershed. So it's completely not the way we learned how to draw a watershed in a hydrology class. Right where everything just slopes up nicely to the back. No in this basin it's a lot up front there. We have a ridge in the middle and then there's a whole bunch in the back all because of the geology of three mountain ranges coming together. The third one of the Diamond Mountains that are in Nevada to come in. So there's actually a place in the Feather Basin. If you ever get there it's really kind of cool where you can look to the south. You see the Green Negative Formation of the Sierra. You look to the north you see the volcanic formations of the Cascades and you look to the east and you see the Diamond Mountains. One of the few places on earth where that happens. But a really cool part of a really important watershed in the state. Now so why do we care so much about atmospheric rivers? Well it turns out the big ones make a difference. Last three years of the drought 2021 and 22. Not a whole lot of big atmospheric rivers happen. Now we have to describe this a little bit how we size an atmospheric river. We decided to size it by the amount of water vapor being transported. So we call it integrated vapor transport. Now in this case we're integrating over the vertical. Because the satellites are really good at seeing the total depth. Now there's again the devil in the details. It's really important where in the depth that moisture is. And the reason for that is we see how much gets taken out by the coastal range. How much has to free run at the Sierra. But then if it's even deeper than the northern Sierra. Our good friends over in Reno can see what they call a spillover effect. Where the atmospheric river has given free rain to fall on them. And then things get exciting over there. Now we see in 2021 and 22 and notice. And we go from week week is 250 flux units. And I think if you look in there you can read the kilograms meters per square. Element 250 to 500 week. That's our baseline atmospheric river. You have to have that much moisture transport to really get this effect to kick in. There we go to moderate 500 to 750 strong 750 to 1000. We've extreme and then exceptional. Now the exceptional we see one even in the midst of a record setting multi-year drought. We had an exceptional atmospheric river. Guess what we had one in previous multi-year drought too in 2015. So we may not get a lot of them. But they're still there. But it's not enough of them now look at between 2021 and 22. That's three years worth. And then one year worth. But look where they're located. Look how they're angled. And if you read the dates on them, look how close they are together. So we refer to this as the timing, pace and scale of these events. That really matter. That lead to a different preset outcome and the coloring on the graphics there are the preset. Fairly dry year 2021 and 22 but 23 really wet year. But I want you to look closely at that and we'll get into this a little closer. The wetest part of our state is the northern most part of our state. Most of the time last year it was not. So now you might have heard that today we're getting a category three atmospheric river. Really exciting. The media's picked this up. So there's another element to it, not just the strength, but the duration. So we came up with a way to parse between strength and duration and figure out the ones that are kind of the foundation of our water supply. The ones and twos. Those are the ones we like because they come in, they drop a lot of moisture, but it's manageable. And if we get the right freezing elevations, we can build a nice snowpack with them. Now we get into the threes and this is where I think it's kind of interesting because you can get enough water that we start to see high water. So the rivers get high enough we start to see flood impacts manifest. Now we get to the fours and fives. We can be pretty certain we're going to see some at least localized flooding. Now understanding the antecedent conditions, when you have an exceptional atmospheric river, come in after extraordinary dryness as the October 21 event came in. Remember water year 2021 was the second dry single year in over 100 years. Only missed 1924 by a few tenths of an inch. So I mean we are down at the worst of the worst kind of years. Then in October we get this massive storm. Records setting low pressure off of Aberdeen, Washington absolutely monstrous flow through that golden gate. We still got the Sacramento River to come up 15 feet out of that one event. It's just when you're coming up off dry, you don't quite get flood, but if it's coming in when the water rivers are already high, then things get exciting. So understanding time and pace and scale of the storms is really important. So this is how we're trying to do it, how to communicate. And to see, as you can see on these graphics, the variability spatially. It's not the same event everywhere depending on how that moisture transport is hitting the west coast of North America. And for how long those conditions are present leads to how much we get. But not all moisture gets converted to rain. Honestly it's only 25, 30 percent. So really trying to figure out all those things that come together. Now you might ask yourself, you say, well, given all that, how do you make a climatology launch just last week from our friends at Scripps? And this is pretty cool. We call it the atmospheric river catalog. Not really a full climatology yet, but we went through the reanalysis period and analyzed every atmospheric river event in the reanalysis. And categorized it. Where did it rank? Either not on the scale one, two, three, four and five. And we look at it by year. So you see the year-to-year variability in that. Use my pointer here. This one. We look at October, November, December, January, February through July. And so we see the big three tend to be when we get the most. Now this is fun because in other parts of the country, this isn't the pattern. Right, back east. This would be kind of terrifying that you have the wet and then the dry. You kind of have a more evenly defined seasonal behavior with that for those of you on the east because hopefully that's a fair characterization. I mean here we definitely have seasonality. We know when things get exciting. But not only that, we can look at all these events on kind of a windrows, how they come in. Well, we also notice because of the moisture, the way the dynamics work in this part of the planet, there's a certain angle these storms come in. They can come in out of the north. We get the cold air dropping in and they can drop in. We get these ones again kind of coming up and backing in. We can get it out of the southeast. That's a little unusual, but that today's is going to be down here southerly because this thing is pushing against the coast, but it's kind of flattening. So we're getting a lot of southerly. So the winds this evening that you'll notice are out of the south. Then we look at when we do it by scale, where are the big bad beasts? Well, there those south westerly flows because we have the clearest connection down into the tropics where the deep moisture is. And we can really tap into it effectively. Well, this is all good knowledge because we can now learn how to leverage this in recognizing the signs of when the atmosphere is setting up more broadly to be more favorable to an event that provides more water. That helps us with that timing, pace and scale of events. More work to be done. Like I said, this was just launched a few weeks ago, hoping for more. Now, get to the more interesting stuff, right? The rain, snow. Well, we came up with an indicator, right? Something we can track through time to track change year to year. Well, how much of the precip was falling as rain? How much of snow? And here we go year to year and we have a departure plot on average about 74%. Falls is rain because most of California is pretty low elevation. A few times we get cold years and we get snow down to 2,000 feet, occasionally down to Auburn at 1,000 feet. They get a little ephemeral snow. Last year we had a few storms that really got exciting for folks who probably lived where they lived because they don't like snow, but they got to experience it to the extent they had to be dug out because they had no snow removal equipment of their own. But the rain, snow boundaries are extremely complex. Every watershed is its own beast because it has its own topography and it has its own orientation and it interacts with the atmosphere in its own way. And so we figure out, well, with the indicator we see year to year, we can maybe see more rain, less snow. We begin to see seasonally. Well, our springs and our falls are getting less friendly to snow. But every watershed is different. So saying California has, they have to be a little careful with. Really have to understand for the watershed what it's facing, what it's experiencing and where it is because we span 10 degrees of latitude. Entertainingly enough, we span 10 degrees of longitude too. But we really want to think about it. You're flying east when you fly from Reno to LA. It's south-south east, but you are going east because LA is east of Reno if you look at the longitude of the two communities. So our April 1 snowpack, this is the fantastic metric. We all wait in water management, right? This is the magic number. Historically, average peak of the snowpack set a lot of rules by this one. But look at that year to year variability. Holy cow. Another thing to look at is the really, really big years, right? 23 joining 83, 69, 52. And we only go back to 1952 because that's when we had enough measurements to organize and we felt we had a decent sample. If we look at the automated measurements with our snow pillows where we have more of those scattered across the landscape, 83 is the first one. So in this case, we only catch two of them. But you see there in that drought 12 to 16, a four-year run there, if you average those four years, that's an average of a 33% of average snowpack. Keep that number in mind by the time we get to the end of the talk. We're getting there. We're getting there versus average as you see it. It was a fantastic year, but look at the mouth face. It's pretty steep. We still end up getting by the time we get to July. We have a high enough sun angle. We have long enough days. We have enough energy. We will melt that pack. You see the beginning of this year, the dark bold line there off to kind of a slow start picking up over the last month. And certainly after this weekend, we'll jump a little further. The little graphic over there shows you where our snow bearing watersheds are in the state. Everywhere. But with a warmer world, the snow patterns are changing. We have elevations that change. But think about that temperature change over the elevation and think about with a storm, that temperature change. You can warm and go from 22 degrees where it's not productive for snow to 28 degrees and it becomes really productive for snow. So at the higher elevations, we can suddenly get a bigger pack, smaller amount of watershed, but a bigger pack. So if all that's going on and I'm just measuring at a few index points and I'm relying on that relationship, those index points might not be telling the same story each time. And we got caught by that recently. So we decided, hey, let's work. And we had been. I said, we just do this, right? This took 10 years to figure out how to do this, which is fly an airplane over the mountains measuring snow with LIDAR and mass spectrometry. And it's really cool because it tells us where the snow is, how it's distributed, but it also with some modeling helps us understand how ready to melt it is. So it's not the fear of, oh my God, the great warmup is all going to melt. No, because a good chunk of it isn't ready to, it doesn't have enough energy in it to make that phase transition. This helps us describe that. It also tells us where the snow is and isn't and how that's changing. So this is going to be a great way to track it as long as we can keep doing it. This is taking a research idea and trying to pivot it into an ongoing operational activity. That's not an easy transition to make, right? The great divide between research and operations. We're working on it. Really good products. And we'll see how we get there. So anyway, now we get to runoff, right? The water actually gets managed. Sacramento, San Joaquin Rivers, they're a little different. Sacramento River on average has 18 million acre feet of water come out of it each year. Average runoff at least ferry on the Colorado River is what? 12 million? Well, at least they parsed 12 million. So we're wetter than the upper Colorado basin. Now we just flip across the Delta, right? Not too far away. Average runoff, not quite six a third. Wow. That's kind of fascinating. So you have this really interesting space. That's having very different volumes of water come at it from different directions at different times. And you see the year-to-year variability and you see the impact of those extended droughts where it collapses for a while. Now let's look at it from the snowmelt perspective. About a third of the annual runoff out of the Sacramento basin is snowmelt. Two thirds of the San Joaquin. A higher elevation snowmelt dominated basin. Tends to peak it's runoff during the snow out season where a peak runoff in the Sacramento basin tends to be in that winter runoff. A lot of that also we have elevation. We have location north south in terms of latitude before the storm track peaks. Atmospheric river activity peaks. Latitude wise normally between the Bay Area and Point Arena. So north of the San Joaquin basin. We need the deviations south or the storm to sag south to get into it. Now we get one of those variabilities later this weekend. If you happen to be staying around that long Sunday into Monday, it'll be a really exciting storm. Really impacting the center part of the state again. So we'll see some impacts from that event. Anyway, so now we have one last thing and I do need to pick this up a bit. Sea level rise. This is great. This is an open coast though. And as you see, one of those lines isn't going up, but that's up at Crescent City. That's in a different geological part, right? We get to the Mendocino Fraction Zone around Cape Mendocino. That's actually where we shift from tectonic plates sliding by each other into the Cascadia subduction zone where one plate's diving under the other and lifting up the landform until it collapses. And you see these in the sediment records where we have these great subduction quakes. Boom, instant sea level rise versus progressive sea level rise. So a really interesting dynamic on our open coast, but that says nothing about what happens in the bay and the delta because I have two straights that govern how much flow can get in over the tidal cycle. And so sea level rise means you have an incremental addition of flow in through the gate. So a lot of complexity there, a lot of fun and a lot to try and keep track of, but notice we only track it on the open coast. From extreme to common, this is an idea I want to kind of get into your head. No, we went from episodic to rare in terms of big snow packs, but in terms of temperatures, 1934 was a really weird year. Stupid worm stood out. This is the statewide minimum temperatures. Decades, hadn't seen it before, hadn't seen it for decades since till we get to the 80s. So wow, rare event, right? See it once in my lifetime and great, I'm done. So you get to the 90s and it starts happening episodically. Hmm, this could be an interesting situation. Well, in the last decade, every single year is as big or greater than that once freakishly extreme year. I really hope we're ready to deal with a world that looks like this because it's there. And this is how climate change happens. We start with something we see as an extreme. 2015, the year without a snowpack is still an extreme. Those four years averaging 33% of what we would normally get. That was an extreme. But our expectations are it will become episodic, it will become commonplace. The climate change narrative is about what is commonplace in the future. Getting there is going to be an interesting ride. A little more on our decade of extremes and want to talk a little bit about. Yep, I'll be wrapping up real quick. Talk about extremes. This is a different way of looking at it from kind of expected. Our water management was really good when the water years land here. In the anomalous category, we have to make some changes. We have to use some of our tools to deal when things aren't right. And then when we're in an extreme condition, really have to have emergency measures kicked in. Well, if people are kind of wondering why we're having to utilize those emergency measures and go into about when things aren't in the expected category, it's because they haven't found their way there in the past decade. We only had one year where it all worked out great. The monster year, monster El Nino year of 2016. We finally got an average snowpack and average preset. Otherwise we're really in that warmer, drier, low snowpack world, often in the extremes. That's led to some really exciting fire behavior that's changed entirely. Largest fires there, this is the top 10. If you look at the dates on those, most of them are 2020 or 2015 and afterward. Our biggest fires are what we're experiencing. And some of these are pretty frightful. Feather River watershed, for those of you wondering, hey, why is the watershed different? Well, in the past five years, burned a good chunk of the watershed. It is a different watershed than it was from the drought of 2012 to 2015. It's a different place now. Understanding how this works, how this changes the watershed dynamics is really going to be important. Because the other thing, again, an extreme condition becoming episodic. And then in this case, really hoping normal doesn't happen because it's going to be pretty hard. So there's that one last word on warmer, why are warmer droughts worse? Well, again, winter, we don't go to sleep anymore. Plants, if it's warm, they will transpire. And in elevation bands where it's not getting cold enough for those plants to go to sleep, they don't go to sleep. They continue to transpire. So they continue to dry the landscape. So on the dry days, if it's not wetting with rain, it's drying from warm. And how, again, manifests itself across the landscape where the elevation bands are important really defines how drought manifests itself in California. Within your variability, there's just beginning of December 2022, fourth year of drought really starting to kick in. All of a sudden, wow, entertaining left starting on my birthday. Winter in three weeks, instead of 90 days, 18 days, 86% of a snowpack formed and 46% of annual precip showed up. And you see central California was the widest. That's a pattern very similar to 1969, by the way. March events brought the Tulare Lake back last seen in 83, then fed by Snowmelt. So finishing up here, really just want to talk about then a more dynamic water management framework. Working with our research partners, better understanding the state of the watershed and observations. Lead time with forecasts to have a better sense of what we can do with the water when to move it where. And that decision support to take really awesome observations, really cool forecasts. But until you get them to where they're informing a decision, they're just you with science. If we do all that, we increase our managed water capability, we're mitigating our hazard, we're hopefully getting more out of our benefit. But to do this, you need communication, collaboration and coordination, a whole lot to do. This is what it looked like last year where we actually tried to get some of that abundant surface water back into the ground through some managed aquifer recharge. We have some really cool monitoring assets, some really cool forecasting assets in place now, trying to put them all together. Tracking change, have an annual report, sent you the link, hopefully you enjoyed them. The indicators report done by CalEPA, fourth one just came out. That's how they divide it now, tribes perspectives being included for the first time. And our assessments that we talked about were on number five right now that we're beginning. We want data, CalADAPT, really cool work going on here to make the data more discoverable, accessible with some really cool tools. And this is the projection information, so climate change projection information lives here. For those end of century expectations, mean temperature, another five to eight degrees Fahrenheit warmer. So that we're going to keep moving down the chart, but no strong single and precept. We're going to be all over the place, but the average probably going to hang out about the same. But we're going to lose about two thirds of the seasonal snowpack. Well, we've already seen that. You got your extreme, it's going to become common. You had to practice round, you'll have more coming soon. Those will lead to runoff timing changes and that will depend on geology, particularly in the southern Cascades that rely on a charging of the aquifers to generate runoff. And about 20 inches of sea level rise on the open coast. Warming world and new extremes, more of them. How will you understand how all this fits together, the ability to manage those extremes, doing now flood and drought together, maintaining supply reliability, mitigating flood risk. To do that, more spatially explicit data, more frequent time intervals. Really important to understand, but that takes a lot of effort. And then working on that forecast improvement, longer lead time, greater clarity in your available flexibility. Flexibility is what's needed in water management to make this work. Trying to meet multiple management criteria with that. There's my email address if you ever want to ask me questions. There's the storm from 2021 in October. A really brilliant thing. All right. Thank you for your time. Sorry to run over. Are you going to be with us after lunch? No, I've got to go deal with the storm. One of my side gigs is I worked on my emergency response. Okay. So I think what we'll do is hold questions, but put them in the shared document and perhaps we could get them out. Yes, if you send them to me and happy to go through and answer them and get information back to you. Okay, great. Because we've got a few folks stacked up for this next time. But let's thank Dr. Anderson once more. And we're particularly appreciative of course of the data sources that you included in the presentation. So now we're going to go to the open mic session. And I'd like to thank the presenters we've had over the last two days who've agreed to hang around until the end of the open mic session because there were many committee questions which we didn't get to. So they've agreed to stick around for another half hour or so. So we'll try and get to many of those questions as possible. And so we're now moving to the open mic session. And we'd like to ask as you're speaking, I'll call your name. If you'd like to come up to the podium so you can see the committee. And as I say, it's about five minutes each. Yeah, the first speaker is Ashley overhouse with the defenders of wildlife. Thank you so much for having me. Ashley overhouse, I'm the water policy advisor with defenders of wildlife, their California program. Defenders of wildlife is a national conservation organization founded in 1947 and dedicated to protecting all wild animals and plants in their natural communities. To this end, we employ science, public education and participation legislative action. And we're also going to talk about the national conservation organization where we're working to help increase science, public education and participation, legislative advocacy, litigation and proactive on the ground solutions to impede the accelerating rate of extinction of species, associated loss of biological diversity, and habitat alteration and destruction. Defenders has over 2.1 million members and supporters nationwide with more than 316,000 in California. As water policy advisor, I work on a variety of issues statewide. of environmental laws to protect wildlife that rely on a healthy Bay Delta estuary and Central Valley wetlands. I have a background in water law and policy, and I hold a JD from UC Los Avertisco and an LLM international water law from the University of London. I've worked on water policy in California for six years. So like the panel yesterday, my public comment will be structured to answer the three questions that were posed by the National Academy staff. So first, what is the role of defenders in the CVP and Delta more generally? As you all have gathered from yesterday and today's great presentations, the San Francisco Bay Delta is a unique, biodiverse ecosystem. Several species of native fish that live in or migrate through the estuary are listed as threatened or endangered under the Federal Endangered Species Act or the California Endangered Species Act. Federally listed species and state listed species have been enumerated for you many times today, so I will not repeat those. And operation of Federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project operations result in take of all of these species, and reclamation and the Department of Water Resources need incidental take coverage under the Endangered Species Act and State Endangered Species Act to operate the projects. The rules for operation, how much water can be pumped for the Delta at certain times, for example, or temperatures below Shasta Dam, etc, are enormously consequential for imperiled Bay Delta species. That is why defenders have been very involved in efforts to ensure that Endangered Species Act and State Endangered Species Act protections are adequate to safeguard listed Bay Delta species. The protections defenders have sought to benefit listed species improve conditions for a myriad of other native species in the estuary, including Fall Run Chinook salmon, which are important for the salmon fishing industry. One such form where I spend a great deal of time is with the Bureau of Reclamation on the development of the long term coordinated operations as part of the re-initiation of consultation process for the new biological opinions on the projects as an interested party. So that's why I'm up here before you today. Overall, I believe the Bureau has done a great job of informing interested parties in this technically complex process and I'm personally grateful. I look forward to continuing to engage the other agencies in this important process over this coming year. That being said, there are a number of other issues that I would like to raise for this committee now in order to give members time to solicit additional information over the course of this process. So the second question, what would your organization like the committee to accomplish in terms of injecting the best science into CBP or state water project operations? First and foremost, despite some of the messages you heard yesterday, I would urge the committee to please adhere to the statement of task outlined before you, which is still robust and may be very informative for all the agencies involved to ensure they are meeting their legal obligations. In other words, we would really first and foremost like to see you accomplish the statement of task. As Mr. Gramaldo referenced yesterday, the National Academy's previous study in 2012 did not stick to the statement of task and consequently published three different reports over the course of many years. The silver lining in my opinion is that through that process, much of the necessary background has been done for you. In fact, there is even overlap with these committee members and those that reviewed those draft reports before publication. In other words, your problem statement, the underlying issues, gaps in information and needs for integrating science into effective water management have been examined by this entity already in published literature. While it is disappointing to admit, most of that 12-year-old paper and reports are still very much relevant to this committee. And for example, the underlying issue of that the Bay Delta plan has still not been updated. That all being said, as a reminder, Professor Burke outlined in great detail yesterday the legal landscape for you. That is really the goal here to ensure that coordinated operations of these projects fulfill their legal obligations is critically important to do, regardless of other competing interests or even taking into account other important factors like social science, important communications and improved communications between agencies, for example. Those are outside the scope, in my opinion, of this study and this committee. In order for you to be successful and actually produce a report that would be helpful, I urge you to stick to the statement of task and be aware of legal requirements the agency are tasked with addressing. Just one that was mentioned yesterday in great detail and again this morning briefly are the Endangered Species Act compliance. I don't think it can be overstated that ESA protections are critical when agencies are discussing the functional extinction of at least one of those species and today hearing that the other will possibly be moved to Endangered Status. Examining the state of science for even just two species within the operational context will be useful and defining numeric achievable biological objectives for species recovery. Second, defenders would also urge the committee to critically review the voluntary agreement as it pertains to your statement of task. A 2022 memorandum of understanding between a group of water districts, state agencies and the Bureau of Acclamation proposes a Bay Delta voluntary agreement. A process that defenders was once engaged in and is the latest attempt to undermine the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plant update process by the state water board as you heard from yesterday. The VA is intended in our opinion to replace existing standards and circumvent increased state board protections for the Bay Delta and Central Valley Rivers. In short, the VA proposal is incomplete, unenforceable, inequitable, inadequate and lacks a scientific foundation and unfortunately it is integrated into this re-consultation process. This is just one of the many concerns we have as an interested party and I'm more than happy to provide this committee with more materials on this issue and many others such as the continuing reliance on temporary urgency change petitions, adhering to the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, mandate for refuge water supply, how flow is the master variable, etc. I know there is quite a bit to review and there are still more meetings to come. Finally due to time constraints, I want to let others speak. For the second cycle of the study, defenders would recommend this committee consider including the state of science for other listed species impacted by project operations including the pending listings for longfin smelts like you heard about this morning under the ESA and White Sturgeon that is pending listings under the Federal Endangered Species Act and the State Endangered Species Act. Finally, the third question, how can your organization contribute to the work of the committee? Well I am here and offer and promise to be here at future meetings and engage where it is appropriate and I wanted to thank you for your time today, engagement in this process, consideration of our viewpoints and defenders very much looks forward to the results. Thank you so much. Okay thank you Ashley and of course any of those notes or all parts if you'd like to submit those so the committee can reflect in them more than just a presentation please forward them to the staff. Absolutely we'll do thank you. No we don't have time for that. The second speaker is Cindy Meyer who's with the state of water contractors. Sorry Cindy. Hi good morning everyone. Just take a second to introduce myself. My name is Cindy Meyer. I've had some interesting experiences. I've worked for NIMPS. I've worked for Reclamation. I now work for the Water Authority. I've been on the water doing research. I survived doing a marine biology degree from my undergrad and then continued to survive through the process of getting a master's and a PhD and I was very excited by the presentation this morning because my PhD dissertation work was actually in vulnerability assessment climate change in the near shore habitat so that was nice to see some of that science again. I want to thank you so much for being here and being part of this process. It has been about three years that we've been looking forward to this moment to get everybody together in the NAS review. It's been a lot of dedication and work from the staff at Reclamation from NAS and also the Delta Science program to make sure we could get you all here and really appreciate your time and effort that's going to be contributed throughout this process. So I just want to start with one quick note. As we were talking about the atmospheric rivers in the last presentation just for those of you who aren't from here because this was new and different for me is they're also referred to as the pineapple express if they're all coming from that southwest side so if you hear pineapple express that is actually an atmospheric river. So as you've deduced the LTO is a bit complicated however we're hopeful to continue improving the LTO to create a sustainable and resilient water supply for the communities and the environment. As I mentioned I am with the San Luis Delton Mandoda Water Authority. I transitioned over there after abandoning Mario and I am the special programs manager and very excited to be also the science coordinator. So the San Luis Delton Mandoda Water Authority was established in 1992. It consists of 27 member agencies providing water service to approximately 1.2 million acres of irrigated agriculture, about 2 million people and 130 acres of wetlands. So we have a pretty big area to service. One of the primary purposes of the authority was to also assume the operation and maintenance responsibilities for certain CVP facilities for USBR including the Jones Pumping Plant that you'll be visiting on the field trip tomorrow so we hope you enjoy that. In addition as you take the drive down to that area you'll also see the Delta Mandoda Canal which delivers 3 million acre feet of water within the authority service area. So broken down that's about 2.5 million acre feet delivered to agricultural lands about 150 to 200,000 acre feet for MNI and about 250 to 300,000 acre feet for wildlife refuges and habitat. The Water Authority we also serve our 27 member agencies by providing information representation needs to our members including facilitating water transfers. While some of the member agencies have riparian and appropriative water rights, additional water is needed to support the communities especially during drought conditions and we also have a lot of disadvantaged communities that we try to help out as well. So in addition the Water Authority is dedicated to working with the agencies, the water contractors and interested parties through coordination groups. As Reclamation mentioned yesterday there are a lot of coordination groups. Some of these include science forums, real-time monitoring, adaptive management and many many more. The Water Authority also recently established a science program to support the science needs of our community and continue building capacity in anticipation of the future needs in our area. The Water Authority looks forward to providing support to this NAS review by providing information of course tours and our expertise. As our hopes of what to accomplish through this NAS review, really the scope was really well thought out and we appreciate your input on that as well as looking and considering the current usage of the science and modeling and how it's being applied to management and if there's potential to improve, where are we missing opportunities to improve and make this better and more confident? As the former project leader for the LTO, the 2020 version, I greatly empathize with you and the challenge to understand this incredibly complicated CVP and SWP system. Just as a side note, the 2020 final document for the LTO was about 14,000 pages of appendices that printed out in my office. So chances are you're going to have a heavy lift in front of you to understand this but we're all here to support you and help out and answer questions. So thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity and sending you all the best for a successful review. Great. Thank you, Cindy. And also for keeping to time, the next speaker is Regina Chichizola who is with the Save California Salmon. Is Regina with us? Oh, okay. So we'll shift her to the virtual. The next speaker is Scott Hamilton with the Center for California Water Resources Policy and Management. Scott, good to see you. You too, Peter. Good to see you again. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Scott Hamilton. I am a senior scientist with the Center for California Water Resources Policy and Management. The operators of the state and federal water projects are in a very difficult position. While they have articulated a charge to you, I suspect there is much behind their request. They are mandated to meet a number of important and often conflicting objectives, including water supply and environmental enhancement. In trying to operate to meet one competing objective, they have two big problems. One is identifying trustworthy science. The second is sociological. You heard several times yesterday references to combat science, studies from one group with one agenda presenting one result and a different group often using the same data but with a different agenda presenting contradictory results. What is the Bureau to do? The quality of science employed on delta issues varies. Errors are too frequent. Use of univariate analysis that emit more relevant covariates, compelling conceptual models but with elements not supported by the data, confounding misuse of conventional terminology and incomplete use of the scientific process. All of these errors can lead to implementation of inappropriate measures. As noted, there is much at stake. Survival of species, jobs and water supplies to support the hopes and dreams of literally tens of millions of people and one of the largest economies in the world. On both sides, people are passionate and rightly so. The Bureau is stuck in the middle. Whatever they do, some people are going to be unhappy. Passion turns into rage and you can't negotiate with rage. What we have been doing has obviously not been working. CVPIA goals have not been met. Numerous listed species are in serious decline and water supplies are half of what people have been promised and paid for. And so the Bureau has turned to you. The intent here is not to lay blame. What we need is to understand how we can do things better. Clear and unambiguous direction would be very helpful. In answering the specific questions to which the Bureau seeks answers, we look to you to demonstrate better ways to use available data and to get results we can trust. In doing so, perhaps you could address some of the following troubling questions. Number one, when competing scientific conclusions exist, how do we recognize the best available science? Number two, in complex ecosystems, how do we identify what factors are limiting species abundance and when are they limiting? Number three, how do we know if we have correctly identified the mechanisms influencing growth and reproduction of a species when data are lacking? For example, is long finned smelt abundance higher in wet years because there is increased outflow or because the increased precipitation led to improved flows in streams enhancing the quality and quantitative spawning habitat? Number four, should science engage in controversial issues? We have heard some of the main problems with the current system, vulnerability to floods and earthquakes, water quality declines due to sea level rise, fish strain due to unnatural flows, and entrainment of fish at water diversions. Ironically, a peripheral canal combined with newer technology would address all of those problems, but fears that might what happened to the delta would totally prevent consideration of that or any similar solution despite the effect inverse of new misregulated project protections. Should scientists evaluate and present their findings on such options? Number five, has our implementation of adaptive management met your standards? And if not, what should we do better? Number six, why has it been so difficult to determine if actions that have been implemented such as the fall outflow actions for delta smelt have actually been effective and met their goals? Number seven, how does the bureau fairly and offensively allocate resources among competing needs? And number eight, if by some miracle they can do that, how do they get people that don't agree with their decision, including state and federal agencies with narrow mandates to respect the decision? So finally, let me end with a quote. The truth is, California has been much overrated and much overdone. She has been pressed beyond her limits and capacities. Her managers have been rash, prodigal and incompetent, and they have embarrassed her beyond hope of relief. These harsh words were penned by Hinton Helper in 1855. The point is, it seems it's time we did better. We hope you can help us. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. The next speaker is Solomon Vimal from Cornell Tech. Ready to go, Solomon? Good to meet you all. So I'm a recent PhD graduate from UCLA. I finished my doctoral degree in water and climate. So specifically, I studied the use of remote sensing imagery over a 30, 40-year period over millions of lakes in the Arctic. And I developed innovative data science tools. So some of the breakthrough technologies that I've developed as a result of my work is related to non-stationarity, the term that we use a lot in hydrological literature. But really, the work in non-stationarity in the econometrics world is far advanced by seven or eight decades. And still today in hydrology, we use very simple descriptive statistics, and we really don't know how to incorporate non-stationarity. So some of that IP, the technology that I developed, is protected by patents. And now, my technology is incubated through Cornell University's incubator for a two-year deep tech program. So my question to the committee is, as with this life cycle of the salmon, right, there are baby salmons and big ones. How do big baby ideas like in a startup contribute to this committee's work? And how can innovative technologies also be taken to the eventual long-term plans? So that's my question to the committee. And I would like maybe a little bit of discussion. And I would use like maybe two, three minutes of my time for that. Actually, the rules we set for this was not to engage directly, but I think the point you've raised is absolutely center to the second question we've been posed. You want technologies, as you say, it's the emergence of AI and many other tools will certainly be part of what we're considering. So thank you for raising the issue. And I saw several of the committee members nodding. But we have to treat everyone equally. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. The next speaker is Keiko Mertz, who's with the Friends of the River. I know she's here. Yes. Is this good? Okay. Great. Good. I think almost afternoon now. My name is Keiko Mertz and I'm the policy director of Friends of the River. I wanted to start by expressing my gratitude to all the members of this committee for taking on this colossal task and to all of the agency scientists that we've heard from yesterday and today who are deeply committed to solving this very complex problem. So I'll start by telling you a little bit about Friends of the River. I might also refer to us as FOR. We work to protect and restore California rivers through hydropower reform, restoring flows, advocating for sustainable water storage solutions, flood management, and legal protection. We have a long history of work on rivers impacted by long-term operations of the CVP and SWP. For example, FOR was actually the first to highlight dam safety issues at Oroville in 2005. FOR was also instrumental in achieving wild and scenic protections for the McLeod River above Shasta Dam and led efforts to prevent the illegal Shasta Dam Rays, which would have violated the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. On the American River, FOR worked to designate the lower American as wild and scenic and continues to work to improve public values on the American River as a senior member of the Collaborative Water Forum. The CVP and SWP directly impact our body of work, our values, and those of there are thousands of members across the state. As we saw yesterday, there is a serious potential for scope creep on this review. So with that in mind, we tried to tailor our list of asks to be as in scope as we could. So as it relates to the topics of this review, I asked that the committee might consider including species that are candidate for listing, mostly because this could help reduce the need to repeat this sort of exercise in the near future and, alternately, the committee could consider candidate species in the second cycle of this study. Regarding Shasta Cold Water Pool Management, recent research by Willis et al. published in 2021 has suggested that reservoirs actually have pretty limited effectiveness in managing cold water pools. It identified Shasta as the only reservoir that could produce a cool regime at its outlet, but even with Shasta, Anne Willis' research noted some issues including that cold water regimes transition to warm water regimes as a function of distance from the dam. Considering this and potentially other more recent research that I'm not aware of, we would like to know how this might change with climate change and would like to see recommendations from this committee on how that might change objections and actions for preserving cold water species. The Willis paper also notes that fish passage or dam removal are probably best to conserve cold water species. So we asked this committee to evaluate opportunities for fish passage at Shasta Dam. I know this is a big ask and possibly a little bit out of scope, but achieving species recovery will really require thinking outside the box and the brain trust in this room has the potential to truly move the needle on this. This evaluation could also help reclamation meet its legal obligations under numerous, the numerous federal and state laws outlined by Professor Burke yesterday. I will provide to this committee the citation for the Willis paper and other papers that I reference in the rest of my comments. Regarding summer fall delta smelt habitat and old and mid-river flow management, we would love to see this committee delve into the species flow abundance relationships mentioned by Eric Oppenheimer also yesterday, specifically and we're feasible to identify key flow thresholds of biological significance and to couple these with specific locations, timing and the frequency needed to achieve population growth of the species in this review. We also request that this committee analyze the voluntary agreement proposal, which you heard a little bit about earlier and which implicates operations of the CVP and state water project, but only where it overlaps with the scope of this review to determine if it aligns with best available science. There were some requests made yesterday by some panelists that were probably definitely out of scope for this review. However, should this committee choose to dive into some of those topics, I have a couple additional requests. First, if the committee dives into social studies and governance, I think it should include in its review research published by UC Davis professor Mark Lubell. He studies governance and social ecological systems in the delta as it relates to complex decision making conflict and science. For example, his most recent paper currently under peer review is titled, governing science colon, learning adaptive management in the California delta. Further yesterday, this committee was asked to calculate emissions from lost hydropower production. However, although claims have been made that hydropower is carbon free energy, emerging research has indicated that hydropower and reservoirs emit a significant amount of methane. This is an issue the US EPA has actually recently taken up by reporting dam and reservoir emissions to the UN starting in 2022 and also initiating a research program. If this committee undertakes any emissions analyses, I would ask that it also includes in it this research, this recent research and analyzes reservoir and hydropower emissions from the projects. I know that's a huge ask, it's only if they take up that first ask. Lastly, we ask that the recommendations from this committee avoid the monitoring trap. More data and better understanding is certainly always helpful, but we really hope this committee will also provide concrete and actionable recommendations to help achieve species recovery. Friends of the river would be pleased to attend future meetings, provide additional feedback and resources and we are committed to future engagement in this process wherever it's useful for this committee. Thank you so much for your time and consideration today and thank you again for your incredibly important work on this. Thank you Keiko. The next speaker we're not sure is Lisa Marie Wyndham Myers with us. I don't see her so I assume she's going to join us virtually after lunch. Okay, she is on the sign-up list. So the next speaker will be Sarah Pyramoon with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. My statement is very short so hopefully you all can get to lunch soon. My name is Sarah Pyramoon. I work for the Santa Clara Valley Water District as a senior water resource specialist and I just wanted to come in front of you to kind of represent you know what it what it looks like to be an interested party. Santa Clara Valley Water District is a unique player because it it receives water from both the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project and those supplies make up about 50% of the water supply for the Silicon Valley. So and not only just for the two million residents but the businesses and we also have agricultural interests and a robust groundwater recharge program. So a lot of those imported water sources go straight back into the groundwater. So it's pretty important for us to have some sense of where these these consultations are are going and not trying to influence anything but but what you're doing here is really important and we really do appreciate USBR for taking the initiative to convene this committee and and be a part of a transparent process to build up the the available best available science. So I did just want to mention let's see we are doing our part to reduce reliance on Delta sources. I know that that is is a continual theme here and I just want to let you know that while we are doing everything we can those changes don't happen overnight and so we still are very reliant on the water that comes through those two projects and we're we're eager to see that this consultation is concluded in 2024. I know that that's a little bit different on the timing of your all your work with the reports not being available until next year but we do think that it's still important to build up that that body of best available science and continually improve it and I think equally important the committee's recommendations may identify new tools that potentially could lead to a more flexible adaptive management program and we'd like to see that kind of effort um well you know after that climate change talk I think that the need for flexibility into the future is going to become more and more important um so I just want to thank you and and still express some hope that we can do better in this next term this next phase of the long term operations um in the face of climate change um thank you all for taking on this challenge that's it thank you so much and the next speaker is Deanna Serino from the Contra Costa Water District Deanna you meeting yesterday I decided that my comments would be easier if you could follow slides so my name is Deanna Serino I am the science and policy manager for Contra Costa Water District while she's bringing out my slides I just mentioned that I'm very happy to see uh faces that I recognize around the table um also happy to see Cal represented around the table I came out to California um to do my PhD at Berkeley and I've now been studying hydronomics in the Delta for over 25 years so um as science and policy manager for Contra Costa Water District my role today is is to make sure that we communicate science to inform policy and so I want to bring in an issue to your attention that's related to something on your scope regarding old and middle river flow but I want to start first with just a little background on Contra Costa Water District and where we are every water district agency who speaks to you today is going to tell you they're you they are unique so um we are um an urban water supplier within the delta and then immediately adjacent to the delta um our surface area is shaded green in the map which is maybe difficult to see projected here but you'll get the slides I understand as well um we operate under so we divert water under pre-1914 water rights that are held by a irrigation district that overlaps with our service area we divert water under post-1914 appropriative rights that we hold and we are a CVP contractor so all the water rights that you learned yesterday or we're reminded of yesterday lots of colors of water going on here um we also divert from four intakes um that are not the CVP and SWP export pumps that are the subject of the biological opinions you are reviewing now the intakes we use are the four diamonds that are on the map in front of you um we do not receive any water from the CVP and SWP export pumps that you're going to visit on your tour tomorrow um they are in the orange circles on the map in front of you okay so because we have different intakes um because we have multiple sources of water we have independent biological opinions and an incidental take permit from the state so we have different requirements that govern us than what you're reviewing today but we are a CVP contractor and uh and uh integrate operations with them so I have our our four intakes named on the map with our diversion capacities I just wanted to point out that we don't operate at capacity at all times as a delta diverter we're chasing water quality so we move our diversions around based on water quality where water quality is good and when it's good for fish and so we have in our permits that govern our operations guidelines on when we take water from different locations to to make sure we avoid impacts to fish I should also mention that all four of our intakes have positive barrier fish screens and so we're talking about fish screens that have very small meshes so that we're protective of anything larger than about 20 millimeters for most of our intakes um 30 millimeters at at our earliest built intake we built the very first fish screen in the delta in 1997 so um we've been and that has a slightly larger opening so it's protected to maybe 30 millimeters instead of 20 milliliters so of the species we we talk about today really the only ones that our district has effects on are the larval stages of the smelts um no real effects on the salmonids or the sturdies anyways on OMR it is I wanted to make sure we're understanding what it is and what it isn't old and middle river flow is um measured at two locations on two channels in the delta on this map they're on the the purple um squares square circle squares um our diversions are too small to be measured by OMR we have about 320 cfs at those locations our maximum diversion would be 0.0016 feet per second it's actually below the calibration error at this instruments um but we're in the but we're in the area right I mean you see some of the green diamonds between those gauges and the CVP and SWP gauges so um reclamation and along reclamation DWR don't operate to measured flow they operate to an index and that that calculation of old and middle river flow does include us so we need to coordinate with them on a routine basis on how we operate so that we don't get in their way on on meeting OMR and I flag this for you because when they first got old and middle river flow requirements keep in mind we're regulated by separate permits they're initially there was a little bit of a conflict where we could hurt them they could hurt us we worked really well together and we operate really well now on a good coordinated weekly meetings to make sure that we are operating both within our own permits but as the new consultation goes forward and OMR might get expanded and it might control more often there there is that potential for a conflict um because of that wanted to just refocus briefly on what is this OMR because it's been over a decade since we did it so OMR is a Eulerian indicator so it's fixed locations keep in mind organisms are going to experience Lagrangian they move around with the flows they experience what what is where they are so um and and fish that's more on the western side of the delta is not going to be experienced with seeing what's happening on those purple squares right so um this is stuff I pulled from presentation I did 15 years ago so forgive me um here I just I'm going to show you a particle animation because you know that's I don't know that you got any animation yesterday so these are two time periods with similar OMR values so OMR on the left side of minus 4600 on the right side of minus 4800 um we're going to be releasing particles where the red dot is it's on the San Joaquin River at about where it meets uh oh where old river dives into the San Joaquin River um because the particles will leave the scope of the frame I'm going to be tracking the particles that exited the bay to pass Martinez which is on the western side going towards the ocean and then those that are entrained in agricultural diversions at CVP and SWP so I'm just going to start the animation um Lenny did a wonderful interpretive dance to show us tides here we have the particles showing us tides and of course Josh also showed us the huge tidal range of velocities at these sensors um so these are two time periods that have very similar net flow in Old and Middle River over these three time over these three weeks I'm showing you this for three weeks and what we're seeing is that the movement of the particles where things really go um is quite a bit different so OMR is not a master variable that's going to explain transport it is an indicator and we're going to see in a minute where how exactly uh it is a great indicator but it's not entirely perfect right so looking at the results the OMR that was actually slightly more positive um ended up with more entrainment at CVP and SWP the OMR that was more negative more of those particles actually exited these two OMRs differ by 250 CFS but I don't know that that is within the ability to be predicting on transport um so if we look at this and we did this 150 times again change the animation here we did this 150 times and we just plotted the results and here we're looking at um on the bottom left plot that's the USGS OMR gauges so the actual measured flow in the river um and the percent entrainment based on the modeling simulation at that time it is a great indication right that you get more negative flow um more negative OMR you get more entrainment great indication lots to scatter now because we're in the same range of OMR um and we have separate permits it it is something we're interested in and getting an index an entrainment index that represents entrainment at the projects without having the bycatch of including water users that are not in training fish so we developed back in 2012 a flow index that we could look at to say okay can we can we mimic can we have a different metric that looks at the predicts entrainment that doesn't have the bycatch of including water users that don't entrain fish um so that's what you're seeing on the right um so just in summary uh yeah that's this so in summary the Old River River is the Eulerian metric um and it generally it does a good job representing regional hydronomics but it may not be the best indicator of entrainment um and use of it as a regulatory metric has unintentional impacts on species and what those impacts on species are is right now we work really well with DWR and Reclamation to to be able to work to both sets of our permits um if OMR requires more often what happens is Reclamation or DWR DWR more likely would call us and say hey we need you to turn down your diversions at fish screens where you're not in training fish so that we can divert more so we turned down by 100 CFS at fish screened intakes so they could turn up 100 CFS at unfish screened intakes so um that's not happening now but in the future with the state board looking at having new requirements for OMR and as this becomes more of a regulatory metric it has that greater potential for conflict and it does not benefit species to turn down diversions at intakes that don't impact the species to turn them up where they do um so we've been evaluated an alternative entrainment index we've been using established tools such as the Delta spelt life cycle model with the entrainment side that's the LCME um we'd welcome the opportunity to discuss that with the panel and our ask for you today is really that as you review the science that's supporting OMR which is one of your charges that you consider the bycatch of using um such a regulatory index and see if you'd have any feedback on any something that might be a more targeted regulatory metric looking directly at the exports for instance instead of looking at at something that catches those in the area so that's all I have for you thank you thank you Deanna that was very helpful Maya can we bring in Dr. Gartrell now so Dr. Gartrell was a formerly Contra Costa Water District and one of the early and most influential hydrodynamic modelers of the system so Greg thanks for joining us like a good morning thing here or good afternoon now yes we we can hear you Greg okay great thanks uh Peter uh for coordinating my uh my schedule and thank you to the committee for the work you're doing I just want to um go over two points I think that are important when you consider any of these things the first one relates to water use your types for regulatory purposes and for presenting results it's time to get rid of them um the water your types were invented when spreadsheets were done with a sheet of paper a pencil a big eraser in the slide rule and now that I've said slide rule I'm sure there are a couple of people in the audience are going for their phones to do what the hell that is um the the current ones that are in use now were made with pre 1990 data we did this uh around 1992 and the world's changed a lot they're no longer valid for the kind of uh uh hydrology that we have now they were designed they're brought it up into approximately 25 to 20 25 percent of the years for each year type um x2 actually when we did that in 1994 was the first shift uh to relating regulatory requirements to recent hydrologic conditions and not water your types and it's time to do that with all requirements for example it makes no sense to require a fish well in april based on a water your type that includes flows from last year and forecasted flows from mid june and july that have nothing to do with flows in in april so what i'm suggesting is uh it's time to move away from a water your type to for all uh requirements to sliding scales based on the important hydrology that relates to that regulatory requirement same thing for presenting results we find that in in uh water your types even in a critically dry year as which shown today we can have uh big storms uh it it doesn't make sense to classify all political years or dry years or right years the same the second item is caution on when you're considering summer and fall clothes the data that have been used to and analyses they show relationships with abundance in the summer and fall clothes have failed so far to consider auto correlation of clothes for example if you do an auto correlation of flows uh september august july you'll find they're highly auto correlated with flows earlier in the year that it's just a way the hydrology works in the state um it doesn't work on a on a um an annual basis but it does work on months but highly high correlations for example to flow in april and flow in july and paris that means that this you get the same result using april flows as you can with shall I flows relating it to uh abundance levels and in fact you do if you do that analysis so one is a caution on that to make sure you're relating that and if you get really big deep into it you find out in both the summer and fall flows that wet years are great the other years are bad for official limits not really just summer flows let's see other flows all through on fall x2 if you look at the data that were used to initially develop that you find that it's really driven by four years four or five years four or five wet years and they were all wet years in the 95 to 2000 era and they're all wet years that were followed by wet years they're back to back what years so the the fish experience not just the wet flow in the fall also in the winter and spring that's a second thing to and then second part on that through the fall x2 it should not be related to water your type it needs to be related to something more if you're going to continue it more consistent with what you're doing for example summer and fall runoff and a trigger with with recent storms and I want to thank you for again for accommodating my schedule and those are the only comments I had to make thanks worry of that for the committee several points in there that would be very helpful to submit it in writing to yeah yeah I can do that I have an analysis that forward I know that sounds great well thanks for joining us Greg we're going to take a break for lunch now and we would ask that if folks could be back by 115 um so that we can take advantage of the agency presenters who've agreed to stick around for a while this afternoon so feel free to bring your lunch back into the room and we'll get going again at 115 I'd like to invite Darcy Austin with the state water contractors and good to see you Darcy hello hello all right thank you um Peter and um the committee thank you for allowing us to come and speak in person this afternoon I had a doctor's appointment so I could not avoid that so it's really nice to be able to be here anyway in the afternoon even though you're taking uh the online folks my name is Darcy Austin I am the science manager for the state water contractors you may have heard in the past of the state and federal contractors water agency SWFCA science program so we kind of take over where SWFCA left off so you may be surprised that there's a science program at the state water contractors but it's very recent the state water contractors themselves we are an association of 27 public water agencies and you will hear from one of our member agencies very soon and we represent the legal policy and regulatory interests of those contractors we also work very closely with department of water resources and other agencies and I'll talk a little bit about that um you've already heard a lot about the high stakes and the big impacts that um we're talking about today so the biop and the ITP they have significant water supply and economic impacts to our members you've already heard two-thirds of Californians receive water from the state water project that's um that is 27 million Californians and Lenny mentioned yesterday that's one in 12 Americans that's like a huge number of people I also wanted to mention that about seven million folks from disadvantaged communities also rely on water supply from the state water project so the stakes are high not just for the people but also for the fish our science program has a big focus on how to manage water supply but also figure out ways to help the ecosystem and the fish in particular we spend about two million dollars annually in science projects that are intended to understand mechanisms and processes that underpin those relationships we also host science symposia and some of them have been in this very room so uh it's kind of nice that it feels like home a little bit our mission of the science program is to collaboratively collaboratively fund and facilitate objective relevant and rigorous science that advances the understanding of factors affecting water supply reliability and habitat restoration for improved decision making and um one of the things is so I'm the science manager I have a counterpart at SWC but we rely on our technical experts at our member agencies so that expertise is available to you as the committee and we would also be interested in providing relevant literature to the committee as necessary we are also very strong proponents of collaborative science as I mentioned so we uh participate in the collaborative science and adaptive management program CSAMP and in in that arena we are looking beyond the impacts of the water projects and looking towards how to recover species both delta smelt and Chinook salmon we collaborate with other science programs including the delta science program that was my previous job I worked for the delta spans program to fund relevant science and we also helped to fund their delta science fellows we sit on some of the other groups we heard a little bit um in passing really about the healthy rivers and landscape landscapes agreements which is aka the voluntary agreement and that really is seeking to increase flows and habitat and seeks to understand the relationship between those two things and then finally um we are also part of a salmon recovery project called reorienting to recovery and again we're looking beyond the impacts of the water project to how do we help recover species in these efforts we want to be a partner in science so that's what we're here to do we're obviously a part of the puzzle and when it comes to water supply so we want to be part of the solution as well we heard a little bit about disagreements so Matt mentioned that there's disagreements even within his own office I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised there's disagreements among the water contractors as well but I think we are moving away from combat science which Eric Oppenheimer mentioned yesterday I feel like this is a little bit of a new age and um the thing is the disagreements persist and so I will give you one little example so Dr Conrad was here today she mentioned a paper by Sam Bachev skin and Brian Maharsha uh regarding temperature in the delta so we actually think that that um comparison between instantaneous discrete temperature measurements and monthly inflows you can't um you can't ignore the physical drivers that affect that instantaneous water temperature so this is just a very small example of course there's much bigger examples of areas where we disagree and this is where we can use your help so we're very glad that you're here and again we already know we've talked about it very high impact um there's a lot of impacts to people to California to water supply but also to the fish and that's something that believe it or not we care very deeply about so how do we do that and that is using best available science so we urge the panel I have three points that um we urge the panel to weigh in on and hopefully that does not expand your scope because you have plenty on your plates so the biops and the itp include constraints on project operations to minimize take of species and typically these are individuals we would like uh if you could also take a look at and provide guidance on how to frame operational constraints when you're taking into consideration population level effects so that's one thing another topic that uh we want to encourage the panel to weigh in on is scientific uncertainty and framing of operational constraints and then finally it's about flexibility and optimizing so the need to use criteria to protect both fish and move water when it's safe to do so so that operational flexibility that um that allows us to ramp up water supply when it's safe to do so but then dial it back down when it is not safe to do so and with that that concludes my comments thank you very much for this important work that you are all doing and thank you very much peter for allowing me to speak thank you Darcy and our next in-person speaker is brian shinstock with rosewell electric utility good afternoon um i'm brian shinstock i'm representing rozo electric um it's customers and our fellow power customers here today uh rozo electric we're a publicly on utility so we're not for profit we have elected council members so in short we're very community focused a quarter of our energy comes from hydroelectric resources some of that is the cvp it's a very important resource for us it helps meet our pillars of reliability affordability environmental compliance um for for reliability uh like i spoke energy but also capacity not too long ago just september 22 we had capacity constraints nearly blacked out california the cvp stepped up and provided the needed energy and ancillary services to keep the grid stable and then environmental compliance um electric utilities uh have mandates now to be 60 percent renewable by 2030 and the remainder to be zero carbon by 2045 that's a very steep goal and we really have to work together to do that hydro is a very important resource because it's dispatchable it's green it's really the only utility scale sized resource that can generate that kind of power um like batteries they can only shift power hydro actually produces power so we need that to meet again affordability reliability and compliance we understand that there's many competing interests but i would argue that we all have in common we want to meet affordability reliability and compliance um and we want to do that for our customers for all power customers which are nearly a hundred power customers and one thing that we really want to look at and study is the the emissions profile with it not only on reduced volumes but also the timing so depending on the time of day certain resources are online or offline there's a different emission profile so um with that if changes in operations happen it's going to affect emissions which then turns around and affects everything that we heard this morning with fish um global warming everything else so we're here to help um for everything that we can do please reach out me and the rest of my team um thank you for the time and consideration thanks great thank you Brian now i'm transitioning to the uh online contributors but i just ask if there's looking far enough down the list so the next speaker is i hope i pronounce this correctly case or willy with save california salmon i apologize if i mispronounced your name and just for all the speakers if you went around this morning uh we are asking people to restrict your remarks to about five to six minutes uh good afternoon my name is kasso willy i am pomo payu went to and while if you tribal person and i'm a staff attorney for save california salmon for those unfamiliar with our organization save california salmon is dedicated to policy change and community advocacy for northern california's salmon and fish dependent people we support the fisheries and water protection work for the local communities and advocate for effective policy change for clean water restored fisheries and vibrant communities we are focused on ensuring tribal voices tribal knowledge and traditional cultural resources are considered and integrated into policies regulations and project development in northern california we aim to support tribes and the general public and engaging with issues related to water water pollution fisheries and beneficial use issues with that in mind i would like to discuss a few ideas that were mentioned yesterday first i would like to encourage the community to consider traditional ecological knowledge also known as indigenous knowledge as a scientific source i'll be using both of those terms interchangeably throughout my comments the definition for traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge provided by the federal government is a body of observations oral and written knowledge innovations practices and beliefs that promote sustainability and the responsible stewardship of cultural and natural resources through relationships between humans and their environment in december of 2022 the white house office of science and technology policy and the council on environmental quality released guidance for the federal department and agencies on indigenous knowledge this guidance recognized that in order to make the best scientific and policy decisions possible the federal government should value and as appropriate respectfully include indigenous knowledge this knowledge has application in social cultural and spiritual systems but also in physical and biological systems indigenous people have developed these knowledge systems over millennia and continue to do so based on evidence acquired through direct contact with the environment long-term experiences extensive observations lessons and skills and this indigenous knowledge is a valuable component of being able to face climate change and preservation and protection of all resources including water and aquatic native aquatic species california has also taken action to integrate traditional ecological knowledge state agencies including the department of water resources and the state water board have policies that encourage integration of traditional ecological knowledge into their work bringing in this knowledge bringing this knowledge into review of the central valley and state water projects is important because they were built and operate on the traditional lands many tribes tribes that are still here today some tribes have traditional ecological knowledge departments and have scientific data that could be invaluable especially when it comes to culturally significant species like salmon salmon are salmon species are extremely important to many tribes in california including the when i'm a went to tribe whose creation story includes salmon and whose traditional villages were flooded by the chastor reservoir tribes have lived within and depended on california's water system since time immemorial and they have unique knowledge and scientific data gathered outside of modern scientific methodologies next i would like to briefly mention tribal beneficial uses which were mentioned yesterday that have been adopted by the state water board and are in the process of being implemented implemented by the regional water boards and their basin plans and by the state water board in the bay delta plan in 2017 two newer beneficial uses were adopted tribal traditional and cultural use and tribal subsistence fishing use like i said before the traditional tribal lands expand the state the adoption of tribal beneficial uses is an effort to acknowledge and recognize the areas that still have importance to tribes and is important to keep in mind and i just wanted to raise awareness on this issue for potential impacts to areas that may be designated in the future lastly i wanted to draw attention to a point brought up yesterday regarding water rights uh tribal water rights are relevant to this to this discussion because there are federally recognized water rights for the trinity river which partially feeds the central valley project any decisions made related to the central valley central valley project have impacts on the trinity river and would impact tribes and their reserve water rights and i'd ask the community to keep those tribal impacts in mind when conducting your review the central valley and state water project have great impacts to tribal and other environmental justice communities again i request that the committee expand its scope of science to integrate traditional ecological knowledge for the most inclusive and holistic collection of data for its review and i encourage the committee to consider tribal conditions concerns including tribal beneficial uses and tribal water rights to promote an equitable review save california salmon appreciates the work of the committee and thank you for hearing my comments today thank you kazel the next speaker is barry nelson with the golden state salmon association thank you very much for the opportunity to speak before you today and for undertaking this really important task my name is barry nelson representing the golden state salmon association it's appropriate that you're hearing from kaseel's organization and then ours because one of the things i want to talk about is the human impact of the ecosystem decline we're facing california salmon fishing industry when it's healthy which is supported by central valley almost all of the salmon caught in california and in coastal oregon come from the sacrament obey delta system it's a when healthy more than a 1.4 billion dollar industry 23 000 jobs uh and the future of that entire industry is very much at risk the salmon fishing season is shut down this year none there no one is catching and keeping salmon in the state of california this year it's only happened twice before in state history it's clearly happening because of bad water management during a drop um very shortly we'll see the population counts for the 2023 spawning season um we know based on a whole host of of incomplete information that those numbers are going to be bad we don't know yet if we're going to be able to fish at all next year it's also going to be very clear that some of the listed runs for example the spring run um you know has suffered truly catastrophic losses um in the last several years um we fish for the unlisted fall run um but we're we're our our our fall run is affected by the inadequate protections for the listed species and the listed species as they decline also produce more restrictions on the salmon fishing industry we have an enormous amount um uh at stake uh fishing families fishing communities um from the central coast from roughly morrow bay until northern oregon are almost entirely dependent right now on whether we maintain healthy bay delta salmon runs um so i urge you to keep uh keep that in mind um the work you're doing addresses the health of the ecosystem that's enormously important but it's also important for the people tribal people and um um fishing people and there's overlap one of the seals board members is also on our board um um there's an enormous amount at stake there so so i just wanted to make sure i provided that context second thing one of your speakers earlier talked about dueling science and there's no doubt that that's an issue but there's another issue that has been increasingly a problem in recent years and that is just not bothering the science uh ignoring science is increasingly a very serious problem couple of speakers previously have talked about the voluntary agreements uh you'll find if you dive into those agreements there is remarkably little scientific support for for the effectiveness of those agreements i'd urge you all mention a few things epa recently wrote to the state water board about those uh brookley law recently came out with a report on voluntary agreements 2020 national wing fisheries service issued a peer review on two of the models used on the to all the river voluntary agreement um and then our community submitted joint comments to the water board that summarize the the science from our perspective um this is not really a case of dueling science this is a case of a voluntary agreement that's built enormous political support that honestly hasn't really bothered to make a serious of case for itself it raises a real question about the role of science in policymaking this is not dueling science this is a question of whether science is relevant um so we urge you to take that very seriously and since your 2020 2012 review we have an enormous amount of additional science about flows and temperature and habitat um and we urge you to take a look at that uh i'll forward our comments to the state water board which summarizes a lot of that new science we think there's a really robust scientific evidence for dramatically stronger um um dramatically stronger protections um i will mention that i was disappointed to a certain extent when i saw your agenda because the NGO community has some very strong um um scientists i wish they had been part of the presentations to you i think you can get benefit from some of those scientists through our comments to the state water board but i urge you to make sure you seek those folks out i'm not a scientist um last thing i'd like to talk about briefly is delay um and just very briefly um the current Bay Delta standards were adopted 1995 they were updated in 2018 for the San Joaquin side of the system those standards have still not been implemented um the bait of triennial reviews are supposed to require under the clean water act a review of water quality standards every three years it's been 30 years since the Bay Delta standards have been updated um 2008 and 2009 we had um smelt and salmon biological opinions that were found by the administration to be inadequate they need to be stronger they were succeeded in 2019 by politically driven science free biological opinions it's one of the reasons you're here today um it was clear a decade ago that we need stronger protections than we had in 2008 and 2009 um and frankly right now it's not at all clear to us if that's being that need is being taken seriously and your review will play an enormously important role in future consultations the last thing i'll just mention here is that the volunteer agreements which have been mentioned a few times uh those that effort has been underway since 2011 um that process has set eight deadlines for a complete package that process has missed eight deadlines for a complete package um delay is deadly for tribal interests for fishing interests for the ecosystem for listed species um and the final point i wanted to make is that is not just urging you to talk about the need to make sure that our policies are grounded in relevant science but to make sure that the science um with your help makes a solid case for urgent science-based action now um there's always a need for more science there's always a need for more monitoring we have a robust we have an ecosystem crisis and we have a robust body of scientific evidence that points in um in a clear direction about the the critical need for strong flow and temperature protections so i'd urge you in your deliberations to think about that about the strength of the science and the state of the crisis and make sure that your recommendations do more than just urge decision makers to value science and ground policy in science but also give a sense of the urgency for taking that action now thank you thank you very the next speaker is craig wallace from the county water agency thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today my name is craig wallace i'm the state water project manager for current county water agency uh current county water agency is a public agency created in 1961 by an act of the california legislature the agency serves as the local contracting entity in current county for the state water project uh agency water deliveries serve over 800 000 californians and over 650 000 acres of irrigated farmland we own and operate infrastructure in current county to deliver state water project water to residents businesses and agricultural operations we receive about 30 of our water supply from the state water project and those state water project supplies are critical uh not only to all of those previous operations but also critical to our groundwater recharge operations therefore the agency has a vital interest in the operation of the state water project the past quarter century the state water project has been subjected to increasingly stringent operational restrictions to protected list listed fish species over the same period we've seen little or no evidence of changes in species trends in fact the populations of delta smelt and winter run chinook salmon are at precarious lows despite such restrictions just this past fall the federal and state agencies implemented an outflow action at a cost of 600 000 acre feet of water for the state water project with a value in excess of a quarter billion dollars purportedly to benefit delta smelt although it is highly uncertain whether this costly action yielded any biological benefits for the species lack of understanding and confirmation bias have contributed to the combination of costly restrictions on operations a lack of conservation benefits and failure to introduce resource optimization into the decision-making process that said efforts are taking place to change the way we do business in the delta one example is through the collaborative science and adaptive management program or CSAN there efforts are being made to utilize structured decision-making to inform efforts to contribute to the conservation of delta smelt a second example is through the healthy rivers and landscapes agreements there flow and non-flow actions are being proposed to benefit native fish and metrics for success of those actions together with monitoring to collect necessary data which are being developed before their implementation and to inform adaptive management given its breadth of expertise this committee can play a critical role in identifying a roadmap from emerging efforts and good intentions to successful implementation of the above examples and others there are three ways we think you might be able to help do so one provide an honest appraisal of existing management actions including an assessment of the extent to which they were developed such as success criteria to evaluate evaluate their efficacy and whether they were informed by consideration of costs and benefits relative to alternative actions two review existing monitoring efforts and how they can be reimagined to inform our understanding of the status and trend of the listed species as well as the efficacy of alternative management actions and third provide recommendations for best practices to both communicate uncertainty attendant to management actions and regulatory determinations and how to reduce uncertainty over time the cvp and sw con swp contractors are public agencies that fund the operation and maintenance of the two projects we have a substantial interest and expertise in the focus of this committee's work and we hope in the future you will include us in your efforts thank you very much for your time in your service thank you great i think there was a couple of other hands in the audience is anyone else yeah that's just you're not on my list you could at least uh introduce yourself to the audience i'm sorry about that my name's lisa casner i am uh the manager of the long-term resource planning division at the city of redding's electric utility and i'll just provide a little bit of background context for you redding electric utility is a publicly owned utility we're in shasta county we're a designated low income area and we have 13 disadvantaged community census tracts in our area that we serve of the 44 000 customers that we provide power to over 17 000 of the meters are located in disadvantaged areas the cvp hydro power accounts for around 33 of our power mix depending on the hydro year redding heavily depends on cvp hydro power deliveries during summer months when customer demand is the highest when hydro deliveries are lower than forecasted redding has to purchase replacement power there are real quantifiable environmental impacts that i'll break down into three main areas reliability emissions and affordability during the summer of 2022 as brian mentioned earlier the state was in a crisis there was a power shortage we were rolling blackouts and issuing flex alerts and urging customers to conserve energy the cvp provides critical capacity to utilities during times like that in redding we received the lowest cvp deliveries ever we only received about 60 of what was forecasted to be delivered to us we had to then go and try to find replacement power we were paying around 800 a megawatt and we were unable to find power to completely fill our position to be able to serve load so we went into that day not fully resource which is something that severely impacts reliability for us with emissions um as some of you probably know when we don't receive deliveries during those critical load times we have to go and replace that power and that's typically replaced with carbon emitting resources so that significantly impacts our carbon emissions and impacts what that looks like for us so in 2021 we were about 80 carbon free and we had normal deliveries from cvp generation during that year the following year in 2022 we were about 55 carbon free so it totally impacts our carbon portfolio and as brian mentioned earlier we have clean energy mandates that we're trying to meet we're really focused on those it's one of the things that's most important to us in our integrated resource planning so the cvp plays a strong part in meeting those energy compliance targets um additionally the low income and disadvantage areas are primarily the ones that are most impacted by carbon emissions and poor air quality in those areas where the generators are located um as a power customer we pay the same amount for our share of the cvp power regardless of whether it's a strong hydro year or whether it's not as abundant precipitation with 33 percent of our portfolio coming from cvp hydro power variability and deliveries exposes us to a risk of increased power supply costs um during that event in 2022 it cost us around four million dollars to replace the power that we expected to receive from the cvp but did not and those costs are um eventually passed down to our low income and disadvantage customers creating disproportionate impacts for them any change in seasonality of the flows or allocations to Sacramento diversion would significantly impact not only redding's emission profile but the state's emission profile its ability to reliably serve load and disproportionately burden the state's most vulnerable customers we're urging this committee to consider the wide-ranging environmental impacts um and the benefits from cvp power generation including the critical role in supporting carbon reduction for the state and um consider all of those impacts when evaluating the operations of the cvp thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today thank you i think we had two other in-person speakers good afternoon um i'll keep my remarks brief my name is lina perkins i um i'm here representing city of palo alto electric utility uh we date to 1896 so we have roseville beat um but uh we're a public agency and you know i just want to thank everyone here for their commitment to their public service um through being in this process all the knowledge that i see in this room on this committee is incredibly appreciated and as you can tell you know i don't think there's a single actor in this room that isn't and of the customers and the and the involved parties that isn't in in a crisis the the fisheries are collapsing tribal interests um and water rights haven't been respected water customers um are struggling like never before in the face of new challenges and as a power customer um this is an unprecedented crisis um probably in the last or transition you know crisis an unprecedented change for at least the last 50 years that we're looking at um and you know i i want to keep my comments really focused to the second point of the first cycle of the study oh and and as an aside i have a phd from sanford and engineering and so i'm a modeler in a form of life so i don't envy you your your job but but i there is so much knowledge here and the bureau of reclamation cary fox i'm going to give a shout out he has made he has made this project so much more dynamic and there's an incredible amount of um knowledge so don't underestimate the staff members that you have in the bureau of reclamation that operate this as well as you know how how quickly wapa can tap dance to try to capture the most value from the cvp um power as possible so um you know when you have questions about how it's really going to work they know and they're nuclear engineers you know that are now running these things since they're really really smart um so you know to the second point how can we use um better modeling to for decision making for operations you know i think that the current as one of the prior speakers before lunch mentioned you know the current prescriptive course buckets of this is this water year this is that water year thou shalt do this it hasn't worked for species and it hasn't worked for the other folks either and so i would really urge you to not underestimate the capabilities of the staff that will be implementing um what what this committee and other public process decide because they have shown me um incredible um ability to be nimble and adapt um and specifically carry fox again at usbr but you know i would urge flexible carefully designed flexible um guidance for operators because it's not just that the course buckets didn't work then for the type of water year and and for species survival it's that our hydrology and our temperatures are different and tougher coming forward and so even if it had worked then it wasn't going to work going forward so you have that you have incredible research days for going into weather forecasting for better more granular weather forecasting there's a lot of people interested in that you're you're not alone on that front there's incredible resources there as well um and you know lastly i'll just say for city of Palo Alto electric utilities i should have said this first i guess but we have been carbon free since 2013 we have a deep commitment to um the environment carbon neutrality we carbon free electricity and we have been um accounting for our hourly emissions since um 2018 you know back when nobody cared um and so you know we you know so there is a there's a deep commitment there and we we recognize that um that this project has to serve a lot of purposes but um anything that you can do to um preserve the interests that need to be preserved um through your science process but also that the within the day flexibility that hourly flexibility because projections are or there to be negative power prices in the middle of the day in december and january going forward you know and that also means you know gas plants are going to run all day long just to cover the evening ramp um and things like that so just huge environmental impacts and the the financial viability of these systems to do anything going forward it is is really you know at risk because these are old projects um and we haven't invested in infrastructure you know in a big way in several decades so thank you thank you so much for those comments i think we have a couple of other speakers at the back thank you for the opportunity speak um my name is paul hooser i'm the um general manager for trinity public utilities district we're an area of a virgin for trinity river previous speakers uh for trinity river water mentioned trinity um and i'd like to kind of encourage you as other speakers have to including your analysis impacts on hydro power generation and by extension carbon emissions and i'd like to share a real world example about why that's important and i guess to back crack a little bit at the risk of stating the obvious i don't think that entails a massive analysis of emissions from reservoirs because you're really only looking at impacts of changes to operations so um but like other speakers have talked about and alluded to even if the changes you recommend don't result in a net change in hydro generation the timing of that generation could have huge impacts on carbon emissions and to go back to a real world emission that might not or example that might not be popular but is accurate so i've been in california for 18 years over 18 years and certainly following restoration efforts in the northern part of the state for that long particularly on the trinity river i've been the general manager for trinity pud for over 12 years the salmon fishery actually used to be as small and rural as we are it was a considerable economic driver um in our area uh candidly it no longer is because there really is no salmon fishery any longer uh in fairness the steelhead fishery still provides some economic benefit in our area but even that is declining but i'd like to go back as an example and the 2000 record of decision that dramatically changed flows on the trinity um you know at the time uh diversions to the central valley were much higher um in round numbers it um almost doubled or actually more than doubled uh flows to the trinity river again on these five water year types that i agree with other speakers are really outdated given um our modern technology now but the expectation was more than doubling flows down the trinity versus diverting it to the sacramento would result in considerably better fish returns the reality is fish returns are lower now than before those uh higher flows were implemented you know while it was a 2000 record of decision litigation unsurprisingly kind of delayed those flow changes but since 2005 that has been the case we have a lot of history not just of a lot more water down the trinity but more than 300 million and direct expenditures on habitat and when i say direct expenditures that ignores the considerable value of that water and power that could have been delivered and the carbon aspects of that are important right so if just in case you don't understand the plumbing of the trinity because we're kind of an afterthought in the cvp that we consider ourselves pretty important um the you know trinity reservoirs are roughly two million acre foot watershed it's located at uh well full pond is 2370 feet above sea level so it's the most efficient generation hydro generation on the cvp because of the the drop so there's two tunnels 17 and a half feet in diameter around 11 miles through the mountains come out into whiskey town lake and then more tunnels that come into the keswick after bay for shasta so when you divert the water every acre foot that's diverted generates 1170 kilowatt hours more than if it just flowed through the trinity power plants so if you think of that example i haven't gone back into the math it wouldn't be hard to do but around numbers it's probably it's certainly in excess of 10 million additional acre feet that didn't generate hydro power and it wouldn't be a difficult exercise to determine the increase in carbon emissions that resulted from that now obviously if someone living in trinity had that resulted in a restoration or even improvement in the fishery it might be reasonable to say okay yes here was the cost of the action um and it was worth it but as i mentioned fish returns are lower than before those flows started so as you look at potentially doing things like that again i think it's imperative that you look at the impact on hydro power production its timing and by extension it's the carbon impact of that because you could argue i mean it's a it's a big globe but in aggregate certainly that record of decision dramatically at least well it increased carbon emissions uh from you know as a result of changes in the operation of the central valley project for no benefit in terms of the fishery so um just example i'd like to leave you with and and i hope very much that you'll consider hydro power and by extension carbon emissions in your analysis thanks for allowing me to speak thank you any other speakers from in the room i think we got everyone yeah we've asked and everyone uh speaking to us today if they have information or the power points please send them to the academies absolutely so we're now going to the virtual audience and let's see just going down through my list here uh did Lisa Marie join us so Lisa Marie Wyndham Myers is with the Delta Stewardship Council okay thank you see is did Regina join us so on the list here we have Brett Baker from the Central Delta Water Agency Dipangia Manik with the West Bengal Pollution Control Board so is Dr. Manik with us this is getting easier uh Mark with the Western Area Power Administration yes welcome Eric so perhaps as we're waiting for Eric i'll then go to Glen Spain after Eric followed by Heinrich Albert so is Eric with us with Glen Spain so what we'll do we go down the list and then we'll have a call if we happen to miss anyone Glen Spain yes i'm here can you hear me Pacific Coke Federation of Fisherman's Associations and the Institute of Fisheries Resources uh thank you Glen good to see you thank you panelists uh and thanks for the opportunity uh a little bit about our organization specific us Federation of Fisherman's Associations is the largest trade association of commercial fishing families in the west coast many of our folks make their livelihoods in whole or in part from salmon fishing which is of course closed now not only here but in most of the rest of the coast for various reasons we will discuss i'm also the program director and northwest regional director for Institute for Fisheries Resources which is the science arm of the fishing industry dealing with issues like this and uh you will be hearing more from us and we will participate as much as we can in this process we've also assigned one of our contractors Deidre Deidre Jadon Deidre is with California Water Research Association and she will be also providing some services to the committee as a modeler she's done a lot of wonderful stuff on those lines to put it into perspective our industry that is the salmon fishing industry are people who need water in the river they need that water to provide for the salmon runs that have been a billion dollar industry in the past in this state and provide tens of thousands of jobs or support those jobs up and down the coast and inland this year we are closed that means no fishery and the reason we are closed is because of water decisions that were deliberately made during the drought in year 2000 and year 2020 I mean based on a biological opinion from the prior administration that would have essentially resulted in the extinction of their salmon runs the reason is primarily and I want to bring your attention to this because this will be under discussion um for a while and that is because the current status uh and the protection standards um that were written into and frozen into the 2019 salmon biological opinion which was began implemented in 2020 allow water temperatures at least two and a half degrees higher than what could be considered protective water temperatures that is it allowed water temperatures to go up to and even above 56 degrees Fahrenheit for people who speak centigrade that's 13.33 centigrade when the best available science now says that that water threshold that hot water threshold for salmonines should be about 53.5 Fahrenheit or 11.94 degrees centigrade in other words we are basing our management of the California Central Valley on water standards that are fatal to fish um it turns out that if you keep the water temperatures at that 56 degree Fahrenheit limit which is what's allowed by law under water right order 90-05 that is 30 years old doesn't reflect any of the better science if you keep temperatures that way you wind up with more than a 70 mortality rate of eggs and that's what was done in 2020 as a result it killed a great number of the eggs and a great number of the juvenile before they could be fry and move out to the ocean as you know there's a three-year lag time so the fish that did not come in and could not be captured because they don't exist missing in action in 2023 were the same year class of the juveniles that went out through that hot water curtain in 2020 one measure of the success of that run would be what's called the egg to fry survival rate the usual 16-year average of egg to fry survival rate is about 25 to 30 percent in 2020 we reached near record lows of 11.46 percent that means only about one and ten fish made it to the ocean from the from the eggs in 2021 the same standards were applied we hit a record low then record low of 2.56 percent survival rate that's about one in 50 in 2022 we hit a 2.17 percent egg to fry survival rate this is for the wind rushing up the most threatened or actually endangered since it's endangered under these a stop in the central valley now these are not numbers for spring round but they're comparable and they're not numbers for the fall round but those were comparable in terms of that same kind of precipitous decline all because a deliberate water decision was made under the 2019 buy-up to maximize quote unquote maximize diversions at the expense of salmon this is not a mistake this is not this is not just climate change this is not just drought issues yes there was a drought during that period of time but all the impacts of drought were deliberately exacerbated for the salmon run in order to feed too much water to too many people in what was a record drought so that I want to bring that to your attention I also am providing you a letter from the Pacific possibly wrap up in the next minute I'm doing doing that yes I'm also providing you a letter dated September 12th 2022 from the Pacific fishery management council which is you know it's a federal body that manages our west coast salmon fisheries pleading with the agencies to change that standard to what is the best most protective standard in accordance with the best available science there was an earlier presentation I forget the gentleman's name but he talked about the Martin et al studies the in-site studies on egg survival under temperature standards that's where we need to go those need to be the standards or we will continue the march toward extinction less than a three percent survival rate is a an extinction level and we've done it two out of three and there are only three years and three cohorts and a life cycle so we are on the verge of extinction for most of the salmon in the california central valley which by the way I want to emphasize includes the trinity the trinity is part of the central valley project because that's where a good portion of the water in the northern part of the state comes from so with that I will close and thank you for kicking this on we will certainly continue to engage and provide whatever information we can on fisheries impacts we look forward to receiving that letter and a summary of what you've just given us so thank you moving on through the list is honey culbert with the sierra club with us virtually so we have two more speak to last speakers or just let's go with the first of all so if you'd like to go ahead and introduce yourself asking people to restrict their comments hello this is dirgera deja down with california water research and I'm a consultant with institute for fisheries resources on pacific coast federation of fishermen's associations and my research background is in non-linear dynamics and complex systems theory and I did research at the center for non-linear studies at was almost and the sanofa institute and I worked on climate adaptation in the california water sector since 20 you could check you may have hit mute unintentionally at your end can you hear hear me now now we can yes great okay thank you in 2022 I make comments to the water board that the department of water resources snow runoff forecast had fatal flaws in that they were based on analog years in the historic hydrology the first half of 2022 turned out to be the driest six months on record and the california legislature requested an audit of dwr snow runoff forecasting based in part on my comments there has since been research by the us forest service that indicates the source of the snow runoff forecast errors is related to increased sierra forest root zone deficits which are going to continue in late 2022 I began a comprehensive literature review on the effects of climate change on pacific ocean atmosphere dynamics in california precipitation and temperature the more I looked at the literature the more I realized we're in the middle of climate change there was a regime shift and pacific ocean in 1977 and there was a warmer wetter period from 1977 to the next regime shift after the 1997 98 El Nino and these were both associated the shift after 97 to 98 we saw a shift to a more La Nina like pattern of a tropical pacific and a cold pacific decadal oscillation pattern and it's was associated with a reduction of precipitation in january and february across western north america and developing mega drought in the southwest the reduction in precipitation accelerated in 2013 and there was also a step increase in temperatures that is associated with hot droughts and I've been doing extensive analysis of the NOAA climate division data and it's really clear we're no longer in the 20th century high hydroclimate the precipitation distribution has flattened out there are more very dry and very wet years and the dry years are much drier due to increased atmospheric thirst there's been intense research on the pattern effect of cool sea surface temperatures in the eastern pacific and climate models experiments are showing La Nina like trend is likely to be caused by a slow recovery from anthropogenic aerosols and if so this La Nina like pattern will last for decades and that will have major effects on precipitation in the southwest and in california research also shows that this pattern effect may have masked higher climate sensitivity and and we could see more warming for a given increase in CO2 and this has been the subject of a major international research effort through the clivar program which is coordinated through the world meteorological organization this is the best available climate science and it's cutting edge and I'll be providing a summary and some information to the panel and as far as climate adaptation I would say water projects have been using a greedy strategy that tries to optimize operations to move as much water as possible in any given year to the San Luis reservoir and reservoirs in southern california but that in our changed hydroclimate this creates major risks of draining northern california reservoirs to near-dead cool and we have to move to much more risk-based management for both the reservoirs and water supply and for ecosystems and we also need to recognize that human systems have a much greater capacity to adapt than ecosystems so thank you very much we look forward to getting you further information and we look forward to receiving that information so I think that concludes the open mic one more yeah please do so Kevin please introduce yourself and try and keep your remarks to just five or six minutes please hello can you hear me uh can you can you hear me now yep we hear you very well hello this is Kevin uh can can you hear me we hear you very well hello okay so it looks like you can hear me uh well well thanks a lot for the opportunity to provide input and offer support to the committee I'm Kevin Howard the federal power program at manager for the northern california power agency or ncpa and ncpa is a joint powers authority serving 16 municipal utilities within the state of california who serve over 700 000 in-use electricity customers these customers can seem approximately 12 of the electrical loads served by the california independent system operator representing a significant percentage of california residents and businesses the central valley project hydro generation facilities provide a large component of ncpa's generation resources since ncpa members hold the rights to over 40 of the press preference power generated by the bureau of reclamation and delivered by the western area power administration my comments covered two main topics first a request to consider the hydropower operations component of the cvp and state water projects and second an offer to partner with the committee to help explore the science related to managing environmental and economic impacts related to any changes to operational practices within the cvp which limit the volume and timing of hydropower generation any further limitations to the flexibility of hydropower operations will almost certainly increase greenhouse gas emissions which goes against california's goal to be carbon neutral by 2045 this is an area of study that should be added to the current evaluation long-term operations of the central valley project and state water project hydropower is a defined purpose of the cvp which provides a large amount of renewable very low carbon energy to the state of california given the current and environmental goals of the state to limit emissions and emissions related climate change one of the strategies is to electrify most of the energy used within the state by incorporating electric vehicles heat pumps etc along with the integration of large amounts of renewable energy into the electric grid this will ultimately result in an increase in the overall electrical load on the already strained system within the state in order to charge vehicles and meet heating cooling and industrial loads this will exacerbate the issue which led to rolling blackouts in california during the summer of 2020 as well as energy emergencies which nearly led to rolling blackouts in more recent years these events tend to occur during extreme weather events in these cases extreme heat events which are becoming more and more common as climate changes continue these energy emergencies almost always occur during net peak loading times of the year and are caused by significantly increased loads that begin during early evening hours in california when consumer loads ramp up with increased cooling and other activities at the end of the workday this also corresponds with the time of day when california's large solar generation capacity is ramping down as the sun sets vehicle charging and increasing electrification will accelerate this issue in order to maintain grid reliability and prevent blackouts all other sources of generation that are dispatchable or called upon to fill the gap as solar generation drops off during these peak loading times if hydro power is unavailable during these times due to lack of water or other operational limitations natural gas fire generation will be called upon to fill that void for example during recent stress conditions on july 20th 2023 when the cal iso declared in ea1 60% of load was served with natural gas resources which is clear evidence the state is dependent on the gas fleet which will likely continue for many years any decrease in hydropower availability will increase the utilization of natural gas generation increasing greenhouse gases and other harmful chemical emissions another simple example of a factor that can have substantial air quality impacts is that the green hydropower production from each acre foot of water diverted from the trinity river division to the sacramental river results in approximately three times as much hydropower generation due to being routed through additional hydro turbines these divergence can also supplement and conserve the shasta cold water pool to support seasonal and annual biological protection requirements maintaining the availability of clean affordable hydropower is also in alignment with the current federal administration's environmental justice initiative as you saw in an earlier presentation over the last decade cvp power has been dangerously close and has sometimes exceeded market prices the reduction of cvp generation availability or the restriction of system flexibility further increases the cost of the federal hydropower resource which disproportionately impacts the economically challenged communities that are prevalent among ncpa members service territories if changes to system operations cause additional cost increases the state is at risk of losing these clean hydropower resources i recognize the challenge of adding hydropower and emissions considerations to an already complex set of issues associated with water quality water deliveries and the biodiversity of the system but believe there are very important issues that need to be considered by utilizing science and data to develop appropriate tools we believe that power and emissions interests can be optimized while honoring other environmental and water goals ncpa and our members have been working closely with the western area power administration to explore an approach to modeling and evaluating these areas of concern and we have developed an initial emissions model as a starting point for consideration we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas on this model we also offer our support as a resource to the committee to identify expertise as well as helping to identify datasets that can inform modeling and analysis thanks for your time and effort on this and and for the opportunity to speak with you those comments and again as with many of the other speakers please do forward that information or a summary where that information could be found to the national academy staff so with that my uh i think we are done with the open mic session and perhaps what i'll ask is that we really appreciate some of the uh staff folks who have agreed to stay on this afternoon because we didn't get to everyone's questions earlier and we can take about 20 minutes or so uh to uh address some of those questions so i know dr conrad uh acclimation uh noa steve do you want to come sit sit at the front from the world so in particular if you had questions for the fisheries discussion this morning uh tea them up because they're all here and then josh and lenny from yesterday are also here as mario with us no no okay um but i know there were a number of questions that we were compiling in david's uh google document if and if you'd have would like to ask one of your questions follow renai's example and just tilt your check card please okay should we start should we start with renai and then go to denise um i have a question for you josh from yesterday on the the x2 plot that you showed the red and the blue line and then also the um the one with uh temperature uh below chasta that was similar the run of river will you explain to us what that actually is yeah so real in both cases yeah so real briefly and there is a slide that sort of describes them but the run of the river is an exploratory modeling cal sim 3 run that basically has flows moving through the reservoirs except for those that are limited by army core of engineer flood control rules and there's no cvp diversions and the only diversions in there are senior water rights diverters that are allowed and can divert off of run of the river so there's no releases being made for uh senior water rights diversions effectively you can sort of think of it like the dams being left open except for making sure that um flooding does copy in the case of shasta the shasta one though there's still a reservoir there with reservoir temperature effects it's not like the reservoir wasn't there and it was actually the temperature coming into shasta you know what i mean yeah so the run of the river temperature run uh would reflect the water the temperatures of the water coming out uh just based on the reservoir storage that's in there due to um trying to think through why there would be might be a little bit of water in there due to flood control in white years in may or april or something like that that's being stored instead of release due to flood control curves okay thank you can we come across to denise okay denise then we go to steve okay do you want me to use this one hey denise i'll just say one more thing we can you know i think we're gonna talk more about modeling at the next workshop too so if this is something that's interesting you know let laura know and we can make sure to have modelers here who can talk more about the specifics sorry denise thanks i had two questions um one for josh and one for steve um for josh um we had some good presentations on operations yesterday and a lot of it was fairly kind of immediate weekly decisions so this led me to think about our statement that talks is about long-term operations what does long-term operations mean as opposed to short-term operations or some other kind so that's the question for josh and the question for steve is um you had a very elegant diagram you know of the life cycle right and um you talked about temperature and oxygen and at what point and what do we know about food being a limiting factor in those early life stages because she kind of it's on the diagram but you didn't really talk about that so that's one of my questions okay so real quickly thanks for the question denise so long-term probably is more of uh art than the science so i think uh we tend to call our consultations long-term operations i think probably the best way to think about it could be um between years so because i think they're storing as one of our actions and storing tends to happen across years so that we have old water resources uh the next year uh with some of that's some some of the approaches that are being considered and have been used have been trying to link across years uh stored water for releasing and diverting in future years so um that's probably the best i can do when it comes to long-term so does that mean that we don't need to worry about um operating the pumps in response to local conditions on a fairly immediate time frame because that's not really into year right so yeah and i think just the other point is you know on the slides that i gave you i gave you some ideas on sort of the real-time tools we have for sort of interseason or weekly or monthly approaches to operating but you know our consultations and our thoughts about the operations of the project span and include things like what's going to happen over many decades of time so in that context it's long-term but Lenny wants to add to this so maybe i could add just i removed long-term operations from the title of my slide the way that i see it it's a jargon term to describe the permit period for the consultation long-term that's that's very helpful thank you that's good i got it it's independent of real-time operations it's just a jargon term thank you yeah but we i think it is important for you all to be thinking about inter-annual operational choices so thank you Denise for that question that that was uh one of the many things i did skip over very quickly or not touch on a poll touch upon at all uh food is very important for juvenile salmon their growth depends on the food supply and the water temperature and both of those things can be influenced by the water project in different ways in different environments so below reservoirs um at least certain times of the year those can provide a subsidy of high-quality food to streamvillings cell monitors in terms of like daftia and whatnot coming out from reservoirs but i think more of the effects are uh negative the disconnection of floodplains in particular those are areas of very high quality for juvenile salmon or rearing because of incredible invertebrate production that you get in flooded wetlands and uh there's much less access to that now because of of levees and reduced flooding in general because of this water storage during the wet period and then the delta itself has been as you saw from some of the maps radically transformed from a title marsh that probably had from if i recall from jim clerns work maybe two orders of magnitude more production coming from from marshes through a tritle food web that would have been supporting salmon um most salmon bearing river estuaries uh the estuary is an area of growth for juvenile salmon and it's not so much in ours the fish just migrate through and they don't really grow at all okay maybe we can talk about this at another meeting thank you steve um i think i wasn't very specific in my in my um question i was reflecting on some of the comments we got during the open mic session about about egg to fry survival and sorry it's really at the much earlier life oh okay so we can talk about it uh another time but okay yeah sorry so uh perhaps we can now go to steve steve online steve brand well uh welcome everyone sorry i can't be there and i seems to me we all just got together about a month ago to talk about food webs so i won't ask about that the uh this may be diving into the weeds a bit and but i want to target it towards uh steve and matt maybe is you both talked about the uh complete lifecycle models and i think for both salmon and and smelt and as as sort of the uh i want to say a shining example of of a of a modeling approach for those fishes but i'm really having a difficult time understanding how in fact they're actually applied uh to cvp operations you know because of what we've seen with the cvp is clearly uh uh it's geographic there's there's diversity and where flows change and temperatures and so forth like that and and the model as far as i'm aware doesn't have a spatial component to it so i'm just wondering how do you apply those in terms of a space spatially to cvp operations are they actually used in any kind of an operational sense or sort of post facto sort of or pre facto kind of analysis and um and i guess what are what are what are the drivers in that case and what are what's the output you're actually looking for now maybe this is something we can tell you for the next meeting together but go ahead have a shot yeah so i uh steve thanks for that i'd be happy to come back and talk to the committee it probably would warrant if you're interested in that i can give you an overview of the winter ocean of life cycle model it is indeed spatial in a kind of a course sense uh it is driven by inputs uh that come from things like cal sim 2 it uses other models like hecras which describe the depth and velocity changes according to the hydrology so we can look at habitat suitability in large areas like the upper river the lower river the yellow bypass in the delta and the model accounts for movements among those habitats during the rearing phase so it captures really a lot of the dynamics that i was trying to tell you about today in a simple way but in a way that i think is helpful it has been used in a couple of the biological opinions basically because there are so many effects is what i was trying to get across to you today um some positive many negative and to be able to integrate that over the whole life cycle is the necessary task and the model is capable of doing that i think fairly successfully there's always a tension between realism uh and tractability uh connecting it to data and all of that there's a huge technical challenges but i'd be happy to come back and tell you about the progress we've made there has in the last in several now yeah and it will be it's being used right now in the planning oh and i should say that the analysis generally um comes to us in the form of a few scenarios there's like a baseline and a couple alternatives and that is what we analyze so we'll get the calcium runs from our colleagues at the bureau and we run that through a complex set of models and come out uh the outputs are things like projected uh trends in abundance and survival through different life stages uh the the production of a fish into the ocean and things like that that are pretty diagnostic for understanding what what's going on overall with population dynamics right yeah did you want to add i'm sorry well yeah did you have something to add on the yeah i can add to steve's question so thank you for it um i think in one of the earlier q and a as i did mention there's there's multiple delta smelt life cycle models that are now in existence um what i can say about the 2019 opinions is that at that time there was one published individual based model kenny rose at all we didn't have access to it and we didn't um so all we could do is read the paper and report what the paper said basically um we were working on our own life cycle models other people were working on some um but but we got very clear direction from washington dc that we were not to use uh life cycle models that hadn't been peer reviewed in that consultation so we weren't able to use anything in development at the time uh the reason is actually not a bad one you heard today how much controversy there is with everything we do and so um there was concern about um basing decisions on something that might be preliminary might get changed um so that's that um we do now have them and they were used in the biological assessment that we got from reclamation recently so um but it and to your second part of your questions steve kenny's model is spatial um the statistical models that we developed with our load eye office are not um we have variants that are hybrids of individual based and statistical that are spatial but they don't do space well so yeah we we are where we are with with that part but they are being used this time okay thanks a lot so um i think you know we are we did use the delta smelt life cycle model uh we've also as part of our central valley project improvement act been working to develop decision support models for the different runs of shinook salmon and working now on sturgeon and steelhead models as well to do sort of multi objective multi species uh modeling of different scenarios and slightly differently we've used those tools sort of in two ways one for running through what the experts around the central valley think are sort of the best restoration opportunities and then running that through the model to see how much it influences the objectives of increasing uh shinook salmon populations and then we've actually done competitive solicitations focusing on the candidate scenarios that are prioritized as most likely to achieve the outcomes that we're interested in then we've also used it to do sensitivity analysis to look at what parameters influence the outcome the greatest and are doing competitive solicitations for research to try to focus our research efforts in that direction so that we can improve the models and improve our decision-making over time so we're hoping to talk about that during the second meeting some too with the other life cycle model discussions right thanks uh and david coming to david next we'll work our way back along the line so i had a question about groundwater surface water interactions and it's really i think three the general question is how much those factor into the analyses you're doing but then to be more specific how much do they affect the relationship between what comes out of the reservoirs and what gets to the delta and i guess the second part is how important are they for temperature and the third part just more general is how how important do you see them for the species conditions that you're studying like to take that first i think we could provide a general response to that and we'd like to table that for the next meeting when we'll have our modelers here that can tell you how they incorporate that into calcium in different ways so i think yeah they'll have a better response than you would yeah uh joe so i have a question from steve i mean this this may be a little bit too detailed so in the in the morning you showed this beautiful graph between the survival rate versus temperature and then it basically comes down and drops down at about 15 from 75 to about three four percent and it really struck me because usually the fish data are a little bit scattered here and there not like you know when we teach aerodynamics you know lift coefficient versus Reynolds number they fall in one or another all the time for your blades but anyway so it struck me but then one of the speakers one of the the open mic speakers guns pain he basically uh probably you heard that he said that when the biops were changed from 11 point 13.33 to 11.6 also 11.6 to 13.33 there were completely annihilation of of eggs and they don't have after three years everything disappeared so but 13.33 is within your limits so there must be uncertainty on these things which or maybe i'm going to detail here but it's really a issue i think yeah it's science-based and your your stuff is science-based it looks like biops is science-based but he claims that it is not science-based so it's a little bit of an issue maybe you can you can i i'll try to untangle this so i can there are a number of things that this is pretty complicated so that the the figure i showed with the such the beautiful data those were from laboratory studies so when you you can estimate a model very precisely from that and when that model is that estimated from the field data it comes up with a lower temperature which is below 13.3 uh the biological opinion then changed to reflect that and someone else can probably help me out with exactly the timing and the criteria and all and then that was relaxed somewhat in a revision to the biological opinion it's not really clear in a multi-year drought whether those targets even if we were committed to meeting them are physically achievable you have to reduce the flows so much that the habitat for the salmon constrict and then there may be issues going on with actually the water velocities i alluded to the importance of oxygen the salmon spawn in very deep areas now which is not what they did evolutionarily or you know 100 years ago um and there's some new studies coming out now that suggest there there could be a velocity component to this as well as well um i'm not sure if that helped uh okay so yeah a laboratory data pretty nice agreement but a lot of complexities maybe your your thermal stress model might be the one which you should be using for the biops because then that will take care of the depth of the water and the temperatures and the operation and stuff so that i mean it's so much science to be done it looks like yes yeah like in everything you know you you find a new result and it shed some insight but it raises a number of new questions and there's so much attention to all this too it's a little bit ironic maybe in some of these things where i think we we know more are some of the most controversial areas because they're so impactful other things we know nothing really about and there's probably a lot going on there because we can't measure it we kind of ignore that it's a weird dynamic patrick thank you guys for sticking around i appreciate that so if you were here you heard michael anderson's talk frankly i was a little disappointed in it i uh in in statistics in albert i were talking about this earlier uh stationarity often is viewed as changes in the mean but we think of it as changes in variation as well and that's so important to keep track of and people often forget about it so the message i got from michael's talk was that it's complicated but clearly there's patterns going on especially with the variability and i've had the opportunity to use oceanographic and atmospheric data in as in estimation to see where fish go and how they survive and so on and so forth and it seems like we could be much more advanced than what we're we're doing now and so my question is uh are you using michael's input at all in anything and uh and if so at what scale and uh is it is it helpful this was indirectly included in one of my questions about climate change and maybe this goes back denise to your clarification on long trip operations this is a consultation period that we're dealing with now and we keep hearing well we're in climate change yeah we agree with that but we don't want to kick the can down the road on what may change in the next consultation period on the state side it's a 10-year permit it's not defined on the federal side but given that we want to be aligned guessing that we would do this every 10 years um and that's where we would like some feedback there because when you sit in our seat and you're developing the rules for what you need to do today you don't really integrate what michael was showing in the way that you you know need to start thinking about it for the future that's just the nature of the work it's government work right you got to get this done today but we know it's there and we would love impact i mean love feedback on how we could start integrating what you all see in our rules that will help us get to a better place in the future knowing that this is on the horizon and even things that we could do now you know on the science side looking at our adaptive management side did we miss a question or two in our adaptive management plan um are there other things we need to consider so that goes into that box of uncertainty that i was talking about that we framed as questions um there's just different ways of looking at that so it's not being used directly now at the moment um yeah well calcine yeah so yeah and calcine we actually yeah yeah good thank you matt so we do have a way to model that right and we have calcine runs that evaluate the out that the outcome of that climate change prediction and you could do the biological models that have some prediction but in terms of the the real-time rules and the scope here yeah not in that sort of way but we could look at it at a at a larger view so yeah thank you thank you very much that makes sense so if we can go to baidwa and then back to michelle for the last word i'm not a hundred percent sure this um question is appropriate necessarily to this group because i think not everybody was here but a lot of people ended their talks yesterday by saying that coordination was critical and so i would be curious to hear your opinions about what is what are limiting factors for coordination interesting question i there's some biologists who are still in the audience here who meet you know on a weekly basis and talk more frequently uh with their colleagues on technical teams related to real-time operations uh you know i contrast that maybe with some of the long-term planning that we do in consultation where i also think that there is weekly coordination on a multi-year consultation process and uh so there's a lot of coordination going on there we do have a lot of science partnerships also where we get together to talk about some of these topics um i think typically all the agencies are there but at the same time people are really busy because they're getting pulled into consultation or they're getting pulled into real-time operations so there's let those things take away from our ability to advance and coordinate on the science that's necessary um and so i think uh you know we have to sort of balance how we staff and resource those three areas long-term planning real-time operations and sort of coordination of the science that's advancing and helping us adapt over time with new tools that are going to help us evaluate and approach potentially the next information and consultation or better understand what we're seeing on the ground i think uh that's probably the place that i think may suffer the most is just being able to allow staff the time to go because they're getting pulled in these other directions sure thanks that's a great response i i think several of us have been wondering about the mechanics of coordination at different time scales with respect to operations and one thing i was wondering about is do you guys are there internal mechanisms to evaluate how coordination is functioning is that part of the coordination is sort of this meta analysis of how coordination is working i could take a stab at that again and i'm mostly going to reference what we're talking about in the consultation for how we do coordinated ops under the new permits we spent a lot of time talking about governance because one of the items that we recognize over the last few years is there's there's often not been a clear path if staff have a disagreement on what they're seeing how that gets elevated up so we spent a lot of time thinking about that elevation process how the groups coordinate and then thinking of a decision team that's between the staff folks and the directors to help sort it all out and then maybe that decision that's we call it the sub directors could come to some sort of resolution on whatever got elevated as a general matter we would love the staff folks to figure this out but it's not always perfect and i think you know one item one word that we like to use here is consensus but as design when you're in a group consensus it's hard to be the individual that disagrees in that you know in that dynamic and because of that we know we want to make sure that all the individual agency members have an opportunity to weigh in if they don't feel comfortable they can elevate it up so if you look and we could provide this at the new governance that we have described in our consultation that's a verbatim between the biological assessment and itp application there's a very clear structure not only among the staff but then the different committees that make decisions on water ops and the modelers the sub director team and the directors and include there's actually a language about how the directors go about decision making too and then there's even a nuance piece on the state and feds have different ways in which they approach governance and who has ultimate decision authority we even address that in some indirect way too so yeah we've we've been thinking about this a lot because this is part of the lessons learned since 2008 thanks all right please do thanks for the question what I wanted to add is and I think that as Lenny and Josh talked about there's a quite a bit of coordination among the agencies but I think as you hear from the public comments in the open mic session there's also a need for coordination and communication with external parties and that's one of the things that will be great to get your input on because it's so important that the science that we're using is transparent and it's clear how it's being used because there isn't always a shared understanding of what we are doing so your input on how to achieve that effectively would be would be great I had one more thought and it's escaping me right now but but I I yeah that was the other point is that's one of the things I was trying to emphasize yesterday in my comments about adaptive management that's one of the pieces that we'd like to solve is a strong word but get to a better space in terms of coordination with interested parties thanks who is so again to go to Michelle for the last question and then we'll turn to the agency folks if you would like a parting shot at the committee on your way out the door um great well thank y'all all for your time today and I had a two-part question that really followed up on Patrick's comments around climate information and the first is we've heard a lot about various adaptive management plans over the last couple days and I'm curious kind of to what extent those consider climate change and y'all sort of started to answer that question I just wanted to probe it a little bit more um or is adaptive management defined slightly differently here and climate not climate change I should say not not a large component um and then kind of as a part of that I wanted to understand a little bit more about kind of consensus around climate sensitivities within the larger system um and do you you know people in the open mic session and kind of throughout have talked about various aspects of management which are sensitive to climate change I'm sure we could all rattle off off many right now but do you feel like there's a general consensus or feeling of maybe completeness is not the right word here but around which key aspects of operations um or key metrics are most sensitive to climate change and where where it really needs to play a bigger role in decision making I think I I do have one point that I think is relevant to this that I didn't get to make um and that is when you look at the biology of the animals that I'm most familiar with the salmon their responses to things like temperature are highly non-linear and as as we manage the system more towards those thresholds and the uncertainty around those relationships becomes more important and the opportunity for exceeding them and having really bad things happen rises and rises and that's the kind of trajectory we've been on is going right up to the edge uh and maybe over it sometimes and I think that's gonna be an increasing risk and you know some of these these are cold water fish they're gonna uh just be under more and more pressure like this and that's what I'm just trying to get at with the last slide is can we find ways to get get them away from and ourselves away from those edges where we have a little more room for error because there's almost no margin anymore I don't know if that really doesn't answer I think your question entirely but no it's okay so I mean climate change impacts on the water projects themselves are pretty profound I think we've heard about that for the last couple days um the projects rely on snow to be there to help them store water over lengthier lengthier periods of time in the spring if that's not there um then they're you know the as that cycles through time the storage levels will be lower on average the flood flows will be higher but shorter on average that's going to affect how much they can export that's going to affect how how much and when outflow leaves the delta so it's completely integrated um from the perspective of the my I'm not saying myopic as a bad thing here but when you work for the Fish and Wildlife Service and you're consulting on something in this case water project operations and you're consulting for fish we're certainly looking at the predictions of climate change but Lenny mentioned that permits maybe got a 10-year shelf life and that's if something doesn't change so profoundly that we have to re-consult and open it all back up again um the 2019 opinions were re-consulted in part because of chronic drought in the 21st century and what was happening to fishes as a result of that so in that sense climate changes is causing us to do something and we're trying to do something but also that longer view of long-term strategy as much you know the Fish and Wildlife Service I'm sure it's the same in NOAA have think tanks in places but but in a consultation like this that's not where that really can happen we're sort of looking at a limited range of time and what we're presented with so so on the adaptive management just underscore what Matt said I think that you said it really well Matt that not yet it seems but that's one of the things we're trying to do is understand at what time cycle is it appropriate and what factors need to be considered when evaluating any of these management actions and I think that your question plays into that the other thing I just offer is that one of the materials and that's relevant to your question that we could provide to the panel is the state water project has produced a new delivery capability report that adopts a new approach in the 2023 report it's a believe a biennial report that then this this approach that is new this past year is underestimating the risk involved in not meeting what are the what's the risk profile for the the state water project to be able to provide its deliveries and takes a climate approach to that so we could provide that for additional context to the panel that would be great thank you so actually Louise you do have the the mic do you have any parting message um let's see I wanted to not be the first to do this but I sat in the wrong spot so well I am I'm glad this isn't the last meeting there's obviously so much more to talk about I I keep finding myself gravitating towards the question of what is the charge for for the panel and of course it's written down but exactly how you take in all the information that may or may not be directly relevant to what's listed on that page and consider it I think that's going to be a real challenge um I I so I'm reserving the right to say more tomorrow after I've had a night of sleep and I'm on the bus with you and I have more thoughts um so but I do want to note that one of the things that I heard quite a bit during the open mic session was an encouragement for you all to review parts of the voluntary agreements that's um voluntary agreements are something that the Department of Water Resources is heavily engaged in and is a signatory for on the MOU and the memorandum and understanding and one of the things that I just think would be really helpful to provide to you is that there is a separate scientific basis report on the voluntary agreement proposal that is being separately peer reviewed and we expect comments next week so I would love the panel to be able to consider that and as you consider your charge and the urging to also review the voluntary agreements please look at all the relevant materials there there is as Eric Oppenheimer said a big process that's going on and while there may be a nexus important to keep your charge to what is what is reasonable and consider all the other materials that have been provided separately in a separate venue for those voluntary agreements so um let's see I guess the last thing I'd say is it's reflecting on some of the life cycle modeling there's been several discussions on that and I think that the real the person I want to point to is Renee Henry who's actually leading one of the leads for a reorienting to recovery effort that considers and is and is expanding on life cycle models and how they can be used to prioritize different investments in the salmon life restoring habitat and opportunities for for salmon to complete their life cycle and so there's the in addition to the life cycle models and their use for operations which is really the scope for this panel be aware that there are other supplementary efforts going on that that have take a really broad approach and get a lot of valuable input into the improvement of available models and think broadly about how they can be used that might be really good fodder for thinking about how we approach adaptive management for the water project operations is that there's other examples even within this system that you can look at for for thinking about that piece and thank you for your time looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow I would just add what I've already told you that I am at your service for any kind of information that you need about an adorbous fish salmon steelhead sturgeon I lead a laboratory of about a hundred people that have been a lot of whom have been working for the last 15 years to try to improve the scientific basis for all of this water management related to the adorbous fish and I'm happy to connect you to them or I can present in their stead and if you want me to come back at any time I'm available to do that well I will second things that Steve just said and Louise thank you to all of you and to everybody who's participated and all of the talks that proceeded mine to make mine a lot easier because I didn't have to do so much background I I have been asked to provide some lifecycle model references by Patrick but like Steve I'm available to provide information to the panel I guess I have to provide that through Laura so we'll do it that way but and then I just wanted to give everybody a heads up I won't be on the field trip tomorrow Jana Afonso who's my endangered species colleague in my office and the expert for our office on that will be and I do feel like there's probably you've got plenty of great scientists that can talk about biology I think it it will be actually better for the panel to have that regulatory expertise available so thanks again and I will pass this along all right thanks Matt um and the other panelists here and the national academy staff science or national academy science staff who helped us uh get this underway with all of you so really appreciate this we're just jumping in right now and I think maybe at the next meeting we'll give you a life vest or something like that and I don't know if I can finish my presentation right now Peter probably not okay um but if you look back at it um I think what's interesting is you know there's been a lot of really I feel like great discussion and dialogue and people providing a lot of information to you and you can see that there's a lot of opportunity to do something uh else given the needs to adapt for climate change needed to address flexibility with water supply and and hydropower and all of that is hinged on having tools that help us make choices and the three large issues around diverting water and storing water and releasing water and blending water are all really critical decisions that a reclamation has to make choices about and we can't decide if the voluntary agreements or some other proposed action or something else that someone else might decide to want us to implement is better or worse unless we have good tools and so um I really appreciate the hard work you're starting to think about what those tools are that will help us evaluate uh the trade-offs uh biological hydropower and and water supply uh and I'm really looking forward to the to the field trip because I really don't get out in the field very much and I'm really looking forward to additional workshops where we'll be able to talk about some of the monitoring and modeling here from other interested parties uh around the state uh this spring and this winter and so thank you very