 Good morning, everyone. I'll give you a second to find your seats. All right, I'd like to welcome everyone to our first joint meeting of the Board of Earth Sciences and Resources that I chair, Ms. Abel Montañez, and the Water Science and Technology Board, which my partner in crime here, Catherine Kling chairs. We would also like to, of course, thank all of our speakers and panelists and guests for taking the time out of your schedules to join us. So doing joint efforts like this of the two boards permits us to address really cross-disciplinary issues and critical issues, such as the one that is the focus of today, how to be evolving challenges in managing large river basins in the United States. And this particular topic is borne out of a growing appreciation for the cumulative impacts that these river systems are seeing on their natural and engineered functions in response to our use of these rivers and managing of the rivers of the last century. So today we hope that guided by our expert speakers and panelists through group discussions that we'll be able to address what are the multifaceted aspects or services and operations of these rivers that we depend on, how will we optimize our management strategies? And I think we could consider this in the context that if you look into the future, we may be able to ask ourselves, are these major river systems reaching a system threshold? That is, are we ushering in a new Anthropocene-like river system, one that would have a very different needs and approaches to management, in particular under changing climate conditions? So we will start with some introductions. We'll go around the table, starting with the chair of WSTB board. I'd like to mention that we have a series of speakers this morning. Two, we will hold questions because we would like to get through the first two speakers and there'll be a 15 minute break, another speaker, and then there'll be a half an hour for opportunities for group and open session questions. We'd also like you to keep in mind that one of the goals of the boards at the Academy is to be thinking about ways that we can contribute to the agencies and to other groups represented by our guests today. So we'd like you to be thinking about that and we welcome any sorts of ideas or seeds that might grow into bigger things. So welcome again and I'll pass the microphone to thank you Isabel. Welcome everybody, it's a delight to see everybody here bright and early and we're gonna have a really packed day with really broad suites of lots of fascinating issues and two incredibly important river systems. I'm gonna stop there so we can get a move on here. We'd like everybody to do a very quick round of introductions, name, university or affiliation and what board you're on. My name is Kathy Kling, I chair of the WSTB and I'm at Cornell University. Laura Ailers, I'm a senior staff officer with the Water Science and Technology Board. Stephanie Johnson, staff with the Water Science and Technology Board. Rod Ewing, Stanford University where I'm in the Department of Geological Sciences and I'm co-director of the Center for International Security and I'm on Beezer. Hi, I'm Brenda Bowen. I'm at the University of Utah and part of Beezer. I'm Nelia Dunbar, I'm the state geologist of New Mexico and I'm also part of Beezer. I'm Thorn Lay, I'm at UC Santa Cruz. I'm a seismologist on Beezer. I'm Wendy Graham from the University of Florida. I'm a hydrologist on the Water Science and Technology Board. I'm Shaolin Wong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, Beezer board member. Carol Hardin, University of Tennessee, Beezer board. Mark Leshevaille, I'm a drinking water microbiologist, retired and I'm on the Water Science and Technology Board. Scott Cameron, consultant, geologist on Beezer. Michael Manga, University of California Berkeley with Beezer. Dave Wagner, Water Science and Technology Board, semi-retired, Woolbird Engineering. Dave Duzanbeck, Professor and Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and I'm with the Water Science and Technology Board. I'm Bill Hammond, University of Nevada Reno, BESR. Hi, I'm Jeff Rubin, semi-retired, emergency manager from Oregon on Beezer. Elizabeth Wilson, Dartmouth, Beezer. Robert Kleinberg, Boston University and Columbia University, Beezer. Kay Whitlock, Christopher Engineering in Chicago, Water Science and Technology Board. Estella Atiquana, University of Delaware, Beezer. John Arthur, State Geologist of Florida, Florida Geological Survey, Hydrogeology, Water Science and Technology Board. Maybe I weren't supposed to speak. Selma Jackson, Attended University of Washington, Hydrogeologist, Nuclear Scientist, Hanford. Morty McCann, Jack Benjamin Associates and Stanford University, a member of Beezer. Nisha Jami, Stanford University, Water Science and Technology Board. Morning everyone, Elizabeth Ada and I'm with the Board on our Sciences and Resources and the Water Science and Technology Board. Mr. Isabel Montanis, University of California, Davis and again I'm the chair of the Beezer Board. And we are going to, Brendan's there at the end of the room with a microphone and we'd like our guests to briefly introduce themselves as well. Mary Molesky, National Weather Service. I'm Kate Boss, I'm the AGU Congressional Science Fellow and Senator Tom Udall's office, Hydrologist by Training. Leanne Ball, US Geological Survey, Ecosystems Mission Area. Dan Mueller, Environmental Defense Fund. Anna Norman, Congressional Research Service covering Water Resources and Geoscience. Brian Wee, Consultant. Katrina Kessler, I'm with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Reed Benson with the University of New Mexico School of Law. Gretchen Benjamin with the Nature Conservancy, Large River Specialist. Mike Fening, Institute of Water versus Army Corps of Engineers. Fred Phillips with the Hydrology Program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Jack Schmidt, I'm on the faculty, Utah State University. Jeff Hauser, I'm with USGS, the Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Good morning, I'm Dagmar Lou Allen from the Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Andrea Coelho from Researcher on Water and Sustainable Development. Steve Buen, NOAA National Weather Service, North Central River Forecast Center in Minneapolis, St. Paul. Good morning, I'm gonna stand up. My name is Melanie Stansbury and I'm a consultant. I work on science and natural resources policy issues and my other day job is I'm a state legislator in the New Mexico State House. Justin Lawrence, National Science Foundation, Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics Program. Tom Knudson, NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Climate Change Detection and Attribution. I'm Katherine Arreard, I'm with the Ecological Society of America in Washington. Lainey George-ism with the NASDA. Courtney Devane, NASDAF. Brendan McEvern, NASDAF. Sam Exino, BESER staff. Deb Glickson, BESER staff. Mindy Simmons, Army Corps of Engineers, Senior Policy Advisor. Chandra Patek with the US Army Corps of Engineers, hydrology and hydraulics communities of practice. And I'm Nick Rogers, I'm staff with the economies as well. And everyone, this is Elizabeth Ada. I wanted to just make a couple of short announcements, housekeeping items before we get started. The first one is with regard to everyone's safety here. We're all in a foreign building. None of us are in this building typically during any course of any day. And so I wanted to make note of the fact that the exit, if the fire alarm should sound here, is exactly the way you came in. That is the stairwell to get out of the building. So proceed out these doors to your right and just make your way as quickly and calmly as you can down the stairs and out the building until we're told what we should do to return. The other aspect is that the restrooms are on the third floor. We are on the fourth floor. So just keep that in mind. There's a little trek to get there. And then the other aspect is that, as I've all mentioned, there'll be some organized breaks, but obviously if you have a need to refresh coffee, get some water, what have you. Please, the beverages are back behind us here, so don't hesitate to help yourselves during the course of the meeting here. And above all, enjoy one another's company and exchange ideas and contribute during the day today. Thank you. Okay, we're gonna introduce our first speaker, but I do wanna give a quick shout out to our fearless leaders here, Elizabeth Eld and Laura Ellers on our two sides, who really are the intellectual power behind and actual manpower behind or womanpower, behind pulling off this joint effort. We were working with a very short timeframe and some across a broad spectrum of top ideas that we wanted to incorporate, and they really pulled together, along with their staff, a phenomenal program for today. So thank you. I'm gonna give a round of applause. Okay, so I haven't had yet the pleasure to meet Dagmar Llewellyn, but you're ready up there? She's our first speaker, and she is actually, I believe, giving two talks, perhaps integrated into one. Dagmar is a hydrologist and civil engineer in the Water Management Division of the Bureau of Reconciliation Office in Albuquerque, where she leads projects related to the impacts of climate change and works with stakeholders to build resilience into the management of these river systems, with an emphasis on the Rio Grande and Pecos River watersheds. She's also an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico, and if I'm correct, I think in three or four different departments. So Dagmar. Good morning. The mighty Rio Grande and Rio Bravo. It's a centerpiece of folklore and music in the American Southwest. No, that didn't work. Now we're back on it, okay, sorry. It's also an ancient river. It's been an ancient source of life to humans in the Southwest. The history of human habitation and dependence on the Rio Grande for life runs very deep. It's also a multinational river. It's part of several countries now and has been part of even more, and along it are numerous independent nations of the Native American people. It's a culturally distinct place. It's also a highly altered river system. We've done all kinds of things to it, to change it from the way that it was for those Native people who have lived there for thousands of years, constructing dams, channelizing and over-appropriating the waters and allowing for the invasion of non-Natives to change the geomorphology and form of the river. It has a complex hydrology and management as it would for a water short river. There's a myriad of jurisdictions. It's a multinational river system, as I said, and it's fought over, as we'll talk about. Overall, it's a water short system and its flows are highly variable. So, from year to year, we're not sure how it's gonna behave, what we have in store. Some recent literature, this is with the Michael Dedenger and Brad Udall. They say, the Rio Grande offers the best example of how climate change induced flow declines might sink a major system into permanent drought. So there's reason to be concerned about the system as the New York Times pointed out in an article last fall. The Rio Grande is dying, does anybody care? Good morning, I'm Dag Marlowe and from the Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And today I've been asked to give you an overview of the Rio Grande system, how we've altered it, how we manage it, what values we get from the system to set up for a discussion about what science is needed in the system. Yes, I understand, are the two systems that we're gonna be talking to today, although I understand that it's only the upper portion of the Mississippi that we'll be talking about. One thing that the two have in common is that both drain to the Gulf of Mexico, but maybe the similarities in there, we'll see today. This is a map of annual average precipitation across the United States. And what's clear here is that they drain systems that have very different hydrologies. We're down in the desert Southwest here on the Rio Grande and we've got some cold wet places that we're draining the upper Mississippi. So we'll be doing some comparing and contrasting in those systems and how climate change is affecting both of them. The management challenges that we have on the Rio Grande are emblematic of the kinds of challenges that we're having in all of the rivers in the Southwestern United States. Water scarcity plays a big role in water management. Water supplies are variable, but declining as the climate warms. Groundwater mining has decreased the ability of the river to convey water and is depleting our drought buffer. The water that we have in reserve, our bank account, as you might say. Tribal water rights have not been fully defined, but they're considered senior to everybody else's use. And so that's a major challenge in figuring out what's left for other uses. And then of course, the requirements to support listed endangered species adds what people think of as a new constraint on an old system that actually has had these species for millions of years. So we hear a lot in the news about the Colorado and in the Rio Grande, whoa, we say, whoa, is us. Who are Colorado? They might not have a complete full supply below Lake Mead. They've never been shorted there. So I'll put out there that the Rio Grande can also be, you might say, a cautionary tale, but an example of the kinds of things that might happen when the water supplies decline enough that there are shortages below the major reservoirs and the users there have to figure out how to get by with less. So this is the system. You can see it is in the US extending from Colorado through New Mexico down through Texas, includes the Pecos River as a major tributary and also includes inflow from the Republic of Mexico. We also have a lot of infrastructure along the full system that's dams for water supply, dams for flood control and a number of diversions for irrigation. So the Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, so we include the perspective that the Mexicans have on it, they call it the Rio Bravo, it's really three rivers and the upper portion where I work could even be subdivided into two itself. So the headwaters up in Colorado in the San Luis Valley are a snowmelt dominated system and the water supplies direct run of the river water supply. Down in central New Mexico, we have Elephant Butte Reservoir and from there we distribute water from the reservoir. So shortages are delayed a year really. And then below that, that water's gone and we're in something called the forgotten reach. There hasn't been water in the forgotten reach in years. And then below there down near Big Bend, if you've ever been to that national park, a river comes in, the Rio Conchos comes in from Mexico and near the river forms again, but really you could call it the Rio Conchos and that is what then continues from Big Bend down to the Gulf as the southern border of the United States. This is the forgotten reach. Here's what's happened to it with no water in it for all of these years. It's come overgrown with non-native vegetation, it's a thicket that we wonder if it really could pass water if we were to put it there. One other thing I wanted to point out is that, so this here is the map that John Wesley Powell created of his vision for the divisions into states of the Western United States and his proposal was to do it by watersheds. And I find it really interesting that he also ends the Rio Grande at the forgotten reach. So it could be that this is something that's been happening for a long time. Back in geologic history, actually these were two rivers, what we call the Rio Grande in the United States actually was a closed basin and eventually was captured by what we call the Rio Bravo which became I think the Rio Conchos through a geologic stream capture process. So this has been true for quite a long time. As I said, the Rio Grande is a multinational system that's true today. There's also a multinational history to it. So historically, the region was the land of the Anasazi Pueblo people, then became part of Spain. And then from that part of Mexico, and then with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 became a territory of the United States. Also in that process, it was accepted that the Rio Grande would become the southern boundary of the United States. Just a little anecdote. This Mexican history is really sort of relevant to our lives in New Mexico. I'm thinking of a friend who was trying to get a variance on putting a fence around his house or something and they said, well, the zoning rules say this and he said that this house was built in Mexico. Those rules didn't apply then. The river also has a highly complex management and allocation system with all kinds of overlapping jurisdictions, as you might imagine from what I've said already. We've got two nations today, three U.S. states, four Mexican states, and then we import water from the Colorado Basin as well and supplement the supplies in the Rio Grande. So the Colorado Basin Compact as well as the Rio Grande and Pecos Compact applies to the apportionment in the United States. Mexico has its own system. And then of course, the tribes are independent nations and in New Mexico, there's 18 just in that state that are independent and many either along the Rio Grande or along its tributaries. Each one of them has an independent government and sets of laws. And so all of those jurisdictions overlap within this highly complex system. And then these states that in the United States that the river runs through, they're the ones in charge of the allocation of water, the distribution of water rights. And of course, each one does it differently. Colorado practices a prior appropriation. That's the system that we practice throughout much of the Western United States that you'll hear more about in the policy discussions this afternoon where the first person to say they're gonna put that water to beneficial use, that's used for humans, generally consumptive, has a right to that water into perpetuity. And we set up priorities based on that the water user expressed that intention. In New Mexico, our constitution says that we're gonna practice priority administration, but we call it the nuclear option. We really don't do it and I'll contend that the reason for that really isn't laziness that we don't wanna do the legal process so that we can do it, but really that it's counter to the culture, one that governance itself, not just governance of water, but governance was structured around shorted sharing of water and has been for thousands of years. So these kinds of things need to be a consideration and New Mexico has some reckoning it's doing on that topic and I believe that Fred Phillips will be talking about that this afternoon. Colorado and New Mexico consider surface water and groundwater to be interconnected and of course physically they are. Texas has a system called rule of capture shown here where basically if you can get at the water then you can have it. So you can't make any generalizations across all the states on how these kinds of actually physical hydrologic considerations are gonna be managed. And then on top of all that, we have a network of federal projects. These projects are for water storage or for drainage or they're for flood control. They're run by a number of different agencies including Reclamation, the one that I work for, also the Army Corps of Engineers and then of course since the Rio Grande forms the Southern border of the United States, the International Boundary and Water Commission who runs the ones lowest down in the system. So Laura had asked me to talk about the services that are the valued services that are provided by this river and this river system. The first among them is that it provides water in the desert and that's a big deal in the desert. That's of course where all the life is because that's where the water is. From the headwater systems in the mountains of Colorado down through the deserts of New Mexico and Texas then even into the more humid side of Texas. There's national parks and wildlife refuges and all kinds of things celebrating what water does in the desert. Another value is agriculture. And there's certainly plenty of diversion for agriculture through federal projects and otherwise along the entire system. Up in the headwaters in Colorado in the San Luis Valley there's a high value but short season. The barley for Coors beer is made there. Also potatoes, lots of grass-fed beef. Then we move down into New Mexico. There's a lot of alfalfa and pasture grown in New Mexico. It's agriculture with a very high cultural value although a low economic value. But that cultural value is not to be underestimated. It's very important to the people there. I'll also say that it would also be high value. I mean it would also be high cultural value if the crops were chilies and melons and beans and the things that they were historically. But I'll also put out there that a lot of the reason that it isn't is because of the unreliability of the water supply. And so alfalfa, if you abandon it halfway through the season you still get something out of it. It grows it back again the next year. The same thing for pasture. Over on the Pecos basin there's a fascinating system of groundwater dominated agriculture. There's actually four or five times as much agriculture for which the water supply is groundwater than there is from surface water. It's a system where the water comes off the Sierra Blanca Mountains in central New Mexico and then falls underground into a karst system that feeds an artesian system. So it's really fascinating place. They also are growing starting to convert to some higher value crops over there. In the back on the Rio Grande here this is the Macia Valley. This is the place where your hatch chilies come from. It's also the place that's the focus of the Texas v. New Mexico Supreme Court lawsuit right now. The irrigated agriculture continues down into Mexico along the Rio Conchos and then in 29 independent irrigation district in the eastern part of Texas including citrus, cotton, vegetables. So that's an important part of how the river is used. It's also used for cities. And there's a number of cities including Albuquerque, where I live. Las Cruces, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, one of the largest that are getting water for life in these systems primarily from converting from agricultural water rights into their urban uses. Another value service provided by the river is flood risk management and drainage. Actually the irrigation system in central New Mexico was created to allow the creation of Albuquerque which used to flood widely and the irrigation network was created to drain those lands so that the city could be expanded. The Corps of Engineers runs most of the big flood control dams up away from the border. And reclamation has water storage facilities. Those actually convert to the jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers when we have floods so that we actually pass management over to them. The IBWC plays both roles lower down within the system. In the irrigation districts, as I was saying, provide drainage. Hydro power is another benefit that's provided. It's provided through these dams at least in the upper system because there isn't a lot of water. It's not huge mega wattage. It's not huge amounts of energy but it is important in the local community. This is the hydropower generation at Elephant Butte Dam. This was put in with hydropower early in the 20th century. And then recreation. Recreation is also important, particularly important in the desert. Some research that I've done shows that as the temperatures rise in a particular place, they're the rare grand basin, the importance of that water-based recreation goes up even higher. There's some world-class rafting on the Rio Grande, the Chama and also on the Pecos River. There's birdwatching, as we've seen in the previous slides, some really great birdwatching, boating, sailing, swimming, fishing, all of these ways that people can get to the water in the desert. So Laura also asked me to talk about the interconnected hydrologic, geomorphic and biotic systems and how we've altered those over the history of the river. We put in dams, those have altered the hydrology and the sediment balances. We've diverted the water for agriculture and municipal use. These put barriers into the river, they divert the flows and they decrease the flow overall. We channelized the river from a big, wide system into a very single-channel contained system. We imported water from the Colorado River Basin. We've changed the riparian conditions, particularly because of the changes I discussed above with dams and diversions. Remind the groundwater, that's changed the surface water, groundwater interaction. So here's what we have today. And I ask the question, you can float down the Rio Grande in Albuquerque and it feels like, wow, I'm not even anywhere near a city. It feels like a natural system, but really it's nothing close. So here's the first thing we did. Starting early in the previous century, we started putting in dams along the river. This is Elephant Butte Dam, which was closed in 1916. It's in central New Mexico. And that of course changes the hydrology and the sediment balance considerably. We reduce the flood peaks and then we increase the duration of those peaks or the duration of the flows in the river. We reduce sediment, we tend to trap it behind those dams. We simplify and narrow the channel. There's agridation, generally upstream of the dams and degradation downstream of the dams. So the geomorphology of the system gets changed considerably. And I believe Jack Schmidt will be talking more about that this afternoon. Just, it's an example of how this plays out, both the top one Rio Grande at Albuquerque and then Rio Chama at Elvato here. We see its documentation of exactly what I was just talking about. The change in the peaks is downward, but the duration of flows is upward. And that makes perfect sense. That's how we operate dams. Then also the sediment goes way down. Now on the Rio Grande, 90% decrease in the fine sediment load. So most of it gets trapped in the reservoirs. The Rio Chama, the system passes a lot of the fine sediment and so it's a lot less and you'd see that that's a pretty muddy river. Another implication of this is that these kinds of changes that take scalping off the disturbance events, the flood peaks and making continuous flow all through the year, favors non-native species over the species that grew up there, the cottonwoods and willows and the things that traditionally formed the riparian systems in the Southwest. Here's a couple of the particular culprits, tamarisk, which I have heard that you have had a lot of discussions about here at the National Academies. And then also Russian olive, both introduced species, the tamarisk was actually sewed into the channels of the Rio Grande in order to stabilize it as we altered it in the previous century and it has really liked the conditions and spread wildly. We'll talk a little bit later about some recent changes to that species. Another thing that we did was we developed agriculture. Historically, it was a very, it was a simple process, but it evolved over time and now we have some pretty complicated groundwater and surface water-based irrigation systems within the basin. This is just a diagram of the irrigation canals around Albuquerque, just south of Albuquerque. And you can see it's a pretty complicated network. It's a pretty complicated system, the way that we get water to all of the farmers. I will say this is all gravity-based. It's quite cleverly designed, but it's certainly complicated. And then the municipal growth has also had an effect. And to a large degree, that's because it transfers water rights from the agriculture system. Those are the ones that were using this water first and changes the operations of those irrigation networks and perhaps ultimately their viability. So here's what we wind up with. I took this from a talk of Fred Phillips. I know Jack Schmidt has something very similar in a recent publication that he's put out, but it shows what the, just diagrammatically shows the volume of flow in the Rio Grande historically and what we have today. And we can see that these changes, diversions for putting in of the dams and then the diversions for agriculture and for urban and industrial use have significantly changed that flow. And then with that less flow, we've also channelized the river. And this is how we did it in central New Mexico. We put in these, we call them jetty jacks. They really look like jacks. And what happens when the system floods is that that traps all kinds of debris and basically builds up the flood plain allowing the river itself to cut down in between. And it worked. What we set out to achieve in central New Mexico, we did achieve. This is a diagram of it from the Army Corps of Engineers. You can see you start with this big wide plain of riverbed and ultimately build up this riparian system and then you cut down the riverbed itself. So here's how this has played out over time with all of these changes, including the dams and the simplification from the channelization process. This is what we used to have a big wide braided to anastomosing system to what we have today, which is generally a single thread. It's a single thread that runs through a widespread riparian system that really didn't use to exist. So an aerial image, a rare one, but back in 1935, showing an area about 100 miles south of Albuquerque where there's a major wildlife refuge. And here's what we have today. You can see that's really a quite different system. Now this Bosque, the riparian system that's grown up in this floodplain that we've created has become a treasured ecosystem. And I think that this is something, as we manage the river that we need to think about, these novel ecosystems that may or may not be stable are something that we should look at through a resilience lens to see if there's ways that we can preserve them because as our climate changes, I will contend that what we need to do is preserve what's working. Another implication of that change from the Jetty Jacks particularly and also the dams is that we have very high riverbank walls now. So we had this big wide flat system and today you have some of these enormous banks. This is probably a six foot guy, 10 foot banks here. So you think about what would that do to your floodplain connection? What would that do to the ways that you get nutrients off of the riparian corridor in the floodplain into the river and vice versa? What would it do to species that live in the river that are dependent on overbank for their annual reproduction? So just a couple more pictures to really highlight this point and the changes in the system. This is the Rio Grande at Central Avenue in the middle of Albuquerque back in 1933. And here it is today. This is the same, the circle shows the same location which is the control tower at the airport. You can see that this system has changed dramatically. And then we added water from the Colorado River Basin. Now in some sense that mitigates the changes that we made in diverting some of the river. It provides something else for us to work with. Also provides some additional management complexity. We get this water from the headwaters of the San Juan system. We pipe it through a network, 26 miles of concrete tunnel that goes underneath the continental divide and brings water that would go to the Pacific Ocean. And we bring it back to where it should be for today's forum draining towards the Gulf of Mexico whether or not it gets there. Another way that we've altered the system is through groundwater mining. And I'm sure most of you understand how this works. You live here in a place like Washington DC and generally you're gonna have water infiltrating when it rains and it runs down to the river. If you're an arid system where you have less of that recharge and you're pumping these groundwater wells, you can reverse that. And so water that's in the river is actually what's recharging the groundwater. This term, you hear a lot about this term base flow. Base flow is water that flows from the groundwater into the river and a lot of the Rio Grande doesn't have that. Instead it loses water to the groundwater or it recharges the groundwater depending on your perspective. So here's a beautiful system that we have today. Still beautiful, but obviously water short. Oh, right, and there's one other thing. The ecosystem. So we did all this and it worked. In Albuquerque we had irrigation and we had our city built and the lands were drained and the channel wasn't out of control. And the native species didn't really appreciate that because this isn't the system that they grew up in, that they were used to, to key of the endangered species who have been a focal point for a lot of the changes that we've made in our operations in central New Mexico are the Rio Grande silvery minnow and the Southwestern willow flycatcher. So a riverian species and a riparian species. And I think it's important to point out that what doesn't work for them is this lack of connection between the river and its floodplain that really helps human societies, but it hasn't worked for these native species who are dependent on that interconnection for their nutrients and their spawning, their entire life cycle. So we do a lot of crazy things now to try to support these endangered species. The river dries and we scoop up all the silvery minnow and a net and we bring them to some portion of the river where it's actually flowing. But obviously this isn't a long-term solution, especially as conditions get more challenging in the basin. I plotted these from the NOAA website just the other day. These are data, these are not projections and these are the temperature changes experienced in the three U.S. basin states of the Rio Grande. Colorado, you see temperatures and degrees Fahrenheit going from about 43 up to 48, 52 to 56 in New Mexico, 63 to 68 in Texas. These are average annual temperatures, but I was, I work in this area and I was really surprised by how dramatic these are. There's a lot of implications in a water short basin for that kind of temperature rise. The first thing that's obvious is that it's harder to maintain a snowpack and that's where we get our water supply from. The snow packs in the Rio Grande system or the upper Rio Grande system are marginal to begin with in that the temperature of the snow is pretty close to the freezing point. So this is some work that Reclamation's done. This is an older slide, but the newer ones aren't actually any different and they show a whole lot of red. This is Colorado, New Mexico, and these are our mountains where we keep our water supply for the summertime in form of snow and there's an awful lot of red which is looking like a sort of 70 to 100% decline by the 2070s. So that's a challenge for us in terms of storing water. It leads to changes in when the water is available further downstream. So this is a location on the Rio Chama, the place where we keep our reservoirs that serve the upper Rio Grande system. You can see that because we can't keep that water in the snowpack, projections are that our wintertime flows in the river would increase. But again, that's water that we're not able to store any longer. The biggest implication of course of these temperatures has to do with this Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. Probably many of you are familiar with this. What it shows is that small changes in temperature can lead to large changes in the demand for water out of the atmosphere, right? The amount of moisture the air can hold. And we all know how this works. Whether we work in this field or not, that's why our dryer works. That's why our hair dryer works, right? Because there's an exponential relationship between the temperature and the amount of moisture air can hold. And it really gets pretty steep in these areas where we're seeing these changes. So we've taken this information. We've incorporated into models. Reclamation has been the agency that's been doing most of the hydroclimate projection work in the Western US in the basins that we serve. Mostly as a result of the 2009 Secure Water Act. So we take in the general circulation models, the whole planet and give us temperature and precipitation projections. We've run them through hydrologic models locally and then through operations models where we simulate all of our dams, our diversions, groundwater impact, all of those kinds of things to come up with a picture of how this might play out in our basins. So this was from some work I did back in 2013, the upper-rear-grand impact assessment, which was the first study like this where we actually looked at what the future of the rear-grand might look like. And I don't have to go into the details of each one of these graphs. They're different places along the rear-grand, but what's obvious is if you look at the median trend of all of these projections, the trend is downward and it's downward in a pretty considerable way. And the structure of the rear-grand compact actually makes water deliveries to the next downstream state lower when there's lower water supply. And so because of that and because of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, these things compound as we work our way downstream. And so the water supply we just established is declining. At the same time, that same Clausius-Clapeyron relationship makes it so that the demand for agriculture, for Iperian consumption, all of those are going up as well. More water is required to maintain those crops and those riparian systems. And they're going up pretty steeply as well for the same reason. So here's something from the Reclamation Secure Report to Congress that we produce every five years since the Secure Water Act was passed. I'm sorry, I'm gonna sneeze. Sorry about that. So this is how this plays out in terms of our reservoir storage. And again, this makes sense based on what I've been saying that we're not gonna have a lot of water left to store in our reservoirs, right? We're not storing them in our snowpack anymore and we don't have the water to store in our reservoirs either because we'll be using it. If you look here, you see this is central New Mexico. This is Texas. Everybody else seems to have a little blue blob in the projection part where some of the projections and some of the systems, the amount of water that can be stored in those reservoirs increases, but not for us. Another implication of that same relationship is that there'll be less moisture in our soils, right? So well moisture will go down and we will probably continue to graze on some of these desert lands. And so what that does is it exposes a lot of soil to the windy springs that we have in the desert Southwest. And when you put dust on snow and snow that's exposed to sunlight, what happens is it sublimates. It goes up into the atmosphere. And I think this is a cool image here. This little piece right there doesn't have any dust on it. And you see that that isn't sublimating like the rest of the snowpack is. We can lose our entire winter snowpack in a matter of a few days from one of these windstorms. And so this is an area that I believe requires a lot what would benefit from a lot of additional research. So we're losing that snowpack. We're also losing our forests. This is an image of some beetle killed areas, some pine beetles killing the forests and part of the Rocky Mountains. So the reason for these losses is that same relationship that I was talking about. Here's some work done by Park Williams who's currently at La Montdority Observatory. And what he shows is that for a four degrees Celsius increase in temperature here, there's an 83% increase in the vapor pressure deficit. So the difference between what the trees need in terms of moisture in the air and also the soil and what they actually get. So this leads to some pretty severe consequences. This is Santa Fe in 2002 when we lost our pinion pines. And again, it's a really culturally relevant species in central New Mexico. Certainly more prior to 2002, but still if you get up in the mountains, you'll see trucks pulled over with it selling you pinion nuts. It's a very important species, but it really didn't grow back here in the Santa Fe area. And another consequence of that is fire, is catastrophic wildfire. And if we combine our concerns about bark beetle and temperature and overgrowth of the forests over the last 100 years when we've had a fire suppression sort of approach to forest management, it can lead to some wildfires that are much larger than we've had historically. Now these are fire adapted landscapes. They want fire, but when the fire goes into these overgrown forests, when they're so dry because it's so hot, then these can be catastrophic. This is the lost conscious fire in the Hamas Mountains of New Mexico. And that was an enormous fire. Can't even remember the rates, some incredible rates of taking 50 acres a second or something like that. It was an amazing thing to behold, but also catastrophic. So back to Park Williams' work, he used the climate models to project how these kinds of impacts on our forest are likely to change into the future. And you can see this forest drought stress index getting more and more stressful over the course of the coming century. The conclusions from his work are that if the climate models are correct, the average drought stress by the 2050s, that's not very far away, will match the worst years during the worst mega droughts of the last 1,000 years. So what that means is we're losing our forests. And that is where we have always kept our snowpack in the forests, in the mountains, in snowpack. The impacts of these changes cascade down into other systems. So this is the lost conscious fire burning in a watershed just downstream from it that basically got completely washed out. 200 year old trees all falling down because of debris flows and then below them, landscape scour that occurred because of a fairly small, less than a half inch of rain that fell on that burn scar. So there's a real danger of those as well. In addition, Albuquerque and Santa Fe have treatment plants that are designed to deal with contaminants that sink but not contaminants that float, couldn't deal with the ash, so they had to turn off the treatment plants, there were fish kills in the river. So there's a whole lot of consequences throughout the system. Groundwater, so we talked a little bit about the mining of groundwater previously and that's already gone on in the system. I will say there's been some recovery in some sections, certainly in central New Mexico because of increased use of surface water for urban supply. The problem with having this system that buffers the annual variations in surface water supply already mined is that then it isn't there for us when we really need it. It also doesn't work well as a long-term supply. So in terms of the impacts of climate change on our groundwater system, and we think, oh, it's great, this is, it's away from the heat, it's not, can't be directly evaporated by the sun, but the primary impact of climate change in the desert system on groundwater is that when humans don't have surface water, they rely on the groundwater. And I think this is, for example, what we're seeing play out in the Mesilla Valley and is in the Las Cruces El Paso area, which is a big focal point in the discussions in the Supreme Court lawsuit. And it's for this reason. Summer monsoons. So in this, in the area of the Rio Grande, we have a bimodal weather system. We get funnel systems that come in that provide snow, at least it has been snow, through the, into the mountain systems in the wintertime. And then in the summertime, if there's a big contrast between the ocean temperatures and the land temperatures, that sucks moisture in off the ocean and creates what is actually a true monsoon. Each year, generally, we call it a crapshoot. That's the official terminology from the National Weather Service on what our monsoon is gonna look like. So we're just now trying to get a handle on, on how that, how we project that or how we forecast that in a given year, nevermind in the long-term. And we've long said these general circulation models don't actually resolve the components of the monsoon system so that we can't really figure that out. But we've done some, I've done some work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research using weather typing, which looks at the way that the sea level pressure and moisture and winds set up across the whole continental United States and figured out which of those are associated with, with monsoon systems. And this is some really interesting results that we've had. Is weather type four? Is your classic monsoonal system? You see, it's all blue all over New Mexico here. And what this fairly robust signal from the models are showing us is that there's potential for that to increase pretty dramatically towards the end of the century. So that gives us something to work with actually. So this isn't all doom and gloom, but what it says is we really need to figure out how to change the way we manage water from what used to be a snowmelt dominated system in the upper rear grand to something that takes advantage of the moisture that apparently will be available potentially from the monsoons. One complication of that, of course, is that we talked about the fires and the stress on the forests. Now, if we have monsoons increasing at about the same time, then we're gonna be experiencing more of this kind of thing. This happened in 2013. After that lost conscious fire, one of the tributaries had a large debris flow on it that actually went to blocking the Rio Grande. We were not able to convey water through the system anymore. Put a lot of people back to work during a government shutdown. And we were able to clear it, but it should give us pause as these, when we see the confluence of these two things, potential increase in the intensity of monsoons and the potential for catastrophic forest fire. So I'm gonna summarize here with some summary slides of the physical challenges for water management in the system. And then as we get into the discussion, I'll talk a little bit more about my recommendations for science and physical improvements that might help us address those. So we've heard this before, just reiterating that the physical challenges include water scarcity as we've always had, and then climate change induced eridification, which is making it even more challenging. Also along with that comes increasing hydrologic variability and therefore decreasing predictability. And of course to scientists that says we need work in forecasting. Risk to upland forests from predators, that's the beetles that we've been talking about and also catastrophic wildfire. This is associated with a loss of our ability to store water as snow and there's also risk of debris flow. We have challenges with perching of the riverbed in areas, especially upstream of our reservoirs where we have the base levels been coming up and we have, we have plugging issues where again we can't convey water down the Rio Grande because we have too much sediment and too little water. Endangered species are an indicator of the loss of the ecological resilience of the system. So maybe the concern isn't necessarily the species themselves, but what they say about everything that's lived in this river historically and how well they do in the altered system. And then aging infrastructure. And maybe that isn't a terrible thing that we have aging infrastructure in that it could be inappropriate for the system of the future as we change from a snowmelt dominated system to say potentially a monsoon dominated system. Maybe it's different infrastructure that we need. So this afternoon we'll have Reed Benson and Melanie Stansbury talking about some legal and policy challenges. I'm just throwing out some examples in the overview here and things that come to my mind and I believe they'll talk to these in much more detail. Rigidity of the operating rules for rivers and reservoirs. That's certainly one I know well in that I worked for a Water Management Federal Agency and we're confronting these constraints all the time, especially as we try to find ways to meet the needs of endangered species. There's also rigidity in the Priority Administration System and as I said, Fred Phillips will be talking about that this afternoon. And the fact that in New Mexico, we have an inability or an unwillingness or both to actually apply this method of distribution of our water. And that could, I'm just throwing out there that could be because of some inconsistency between the Priority Administration and the local culture and history. There's absolutely a need for the federal government to continue with its efforts to settle tribal water rights settlements because these are the senior rights and the non-Indians get what's left. And we haven't, in many cases, we haven't figured out what those are. We just write compacts and things like that in ways that say, oh, we're gonna, nothing we're doing here is going to affect the tribes, the independent nations that get the first water, but it's hard to figure out how much is left. And then as I noted in an earlier slide, there's a lack of consistent accounting of the impacts of groundwater pumping on surface water supplies. And there's conflict over the Rio Grande Compact in the Supreme Court of the United States. A couple of unknowns. What is gonna be the outcome of that this Texas v. New Mexico lawsuit? And how is that gonna affect the economy, the water distribution, the agricultural system in that region between Texas, New Mexico and Republic of Mexico? The impact of the Tamarisk beetle. So it's funny, I'm lamenting the beetles that are killing our upland forests, but we also introduced one that is a native predatory from Asia of the Tamarisk, the salt cedar that is growing along the riparian system, really taking over the riparian system. And we've complained for decades about this three-mile-wide swaths of salt cedar in the area above Elephant Butte Reservoir. And now you take a look at it in the summertime and it's just standing brown. Most of these aren't dead yet, but they might become so. And I've seen in the Green River, further north areas where the salt cedar have actually been killed by this predator. They move in packs, and so they love these monotopic stands. And I hear that by the time they passed about three times, the Tamarisk might actually be killed. And maybe the natives, if we can set up the system right, maybe the native willows can move in and take over some of that habitat. But there's a major landscape transformation underway, and we're really not sure where it's gonna go. Tribal water rights settlements, as I just said, are another major unknown and constraint on the use of the water system by non-Indians, because the Indian tribes have the first right. So with that, I finished the primary overview presentation, but it looks like I might have 10 minutes left. So what I'm gonna do is just flip quickly through second set of presentations that I've put together. We sort of restructured this today's events a few times, and originally I was on the science panel. So I created a presentation on what I believe are some of the science needs in the basin, what we're doing, and then what we need to do. Scientists through the rescue. There's a lot going on in the basin now, in terms of science, improving monitoring and accessibility to data. Shout out to Melanie Stansbury, who passed a bill to increase that, to improve that in New Mexico. We're collecting more data on crop and riparian of apotranspiration, working with NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory on some of that. We've got some instruments to look at reservoir evaporation so we can better understand where that water is going. A tremendous amount of our water supply is lost to reservoir evaporation. We're trying to improve our forecasting, both the spring snow melt and the summer monsoons. And also if we can, the tropical systems that come in the fall, though so far that's kind of eluded us. We've been developing projections of future water supply and demand, and I've shown some of the results of that work here. Reclamation also has a brackish water desalination research laboratory. So the salty water that's in our ground could also be a potential backup water supply in these desert regions. Research into snow processes and changes in the interaction between snow and the forest. There's a lot of research going on at the USGS on that topic, also University of New Mexico. And then research into the endangered species and their needs so that we can find ways to let the altered system meet them better. Conservation and planning. We've got a lot of federal programs that support the irrigation districts in improving their operations, finding ways to get more out of every drop. We also, there are also a lot of municipal conservation programs. The city's doing the same sort of thing, incentives for the urban dwellers to use less water. There's a lot of drought contingency planning work going on. You've heard that term thrown around a lot in Colorado. Reclamation also was a program where we support local institutions to develop these plans and also figure out what infrastructure that they might need in the future to help implement that plan. Another study that was done in central New Mexico looked at transportation and land use planning. If we don't understand what a 200 year flood is anymore because of the changing intensity of our events, then how do we figure out where we can draw the line where people can't live around the river? Those kinds of decisions need to be made. Shout out for the programs that I work in, the WaterSmart programs. These are outgrowths of the Secure Water Act. They're programs where we provide grants to local entities who are trying to improve their water conservation and efficiency and also their energy use. We support the development of watershed groups where community members come together to try to address some of these problems. And also our basin study program where we work with reclamation and all the major entities within a basin to try to use the modeling tools that we have available in our projections of future water supply and demand to work together to model ways that we might adapt our system. We've got a major basin study just kicking off now in the upper-rear grand system. And so I think that that's gonna provide a lot of food for thought on how the community wants to move forward in this changing basin. Okay, I just said that. There's also a lot of physical system improvements going on. There's habitat restoration to improve the connectivity. We talked about how the flood plains become disconnected from the river. We've got a river realignment going on in a perched section of the river. We've got corrective action. Scott Cameron was asking me this morning, I guess what word has gotten around about this improvement to Elvato Dam that we're doing. The Nature Conservancy, the next speaker is from the Nature Conservancy, has done amazing things in the Rio Grande through the Rio Grande Water Fund. What they've done is created this acknowledgement in the users downstream in central New Mexico that they need to help to protect the headwater areas. So they've been collecting, the Nature Conservancy has been collecting money from the central New Mexico water users, irrigation cities, and then using that water to thin the forests and make it so that non-catastrophic wildfires can move through the system. And then we, reclamation does, river maintenance activities to prove safety and conveyance. This is some of the hydraulic reconnection that we talked about going on in the Albuquerque reach. And this is a channel realignment that, gosh, I think I first started working on this in 2003. And finally, this year, this past year when we had enough water in the system, we actually got the river to move. And you can see it just starting here, comes out of the river here, works across that system. And by now the water is fully moved into a lower section so it isn't as perched. Now, this is of course what rivers want to do, especially in a deltaic system. This is just upstream of Elephant-Pute Reservoir. And it wants to move across the delta, but we've been preventing it. So in this case, we had a success. We were able to move it to a lower area and get better conveyance. This is the spillway at Elvato Dam. I remember being, you can walked along this section here and it goes boom, boom, boom. When you walk on it, it doesn't even touch the ground. So there obviously needs to be some work on that before we actually put any water on it. The dam itself also, it's a really unique design from 100 years ago where the actual barrier between the water and the dam and the river is a sheet of metal. And this side, our side, is a landslide that's been creeping downward and pushing its way into that. And so there's definitely some work that needs to be done on that and on the landslide to stabilize it. So reclamation has that work going on as well. Three minutes for my science recommendations. Though I think we'll be having a discussion about this after the talk on the upper Mississippi. So I'll just, in these three minutes, talk about the sort of topics and categories where I think that there's additional science needs and we'll discuss this further then. The first is in the area of data, data collection, data organization, data accessibility, and then use of that data to develop better modeling tools. That's ultimately that the models are the place where we put all of our understanding of different physical interactions together into a system where we can play what if games. This is some work that we're doing on better measurement of reservoir evaporation. So this is part of that effort. Another thing is to bring in the social scientists. I've been to so many of these innovation work and climate change-based innovation working groups and we talk all about the science and how the systems are changing and the weather of the future. And then at the end, we say, where are the social scientists? These people are, it's humanity we're talking about going into this new paradigm and the needs of the people, the desires of the people, the kind of system that they can live in is a critical part of the equation. Forecasting, if you have to get by with less, it's really important to have some understanding of what we're gonna have in any given year. We've gotten better as a people in weather forecasts and then in some of the sort of long-term predictions out here, but in this sub-seasonal to seasonal area, we're lacking. There's been a major research effort in the last several years, but this is an area where a great need for us. Forecasting of snow and dust on snow is certainly a need for us as our snow declines, but also because we have risks, when we think we have a great year, can all be wiped out by a single dust event. So this is something that we need to understand better. We most certainly need to continue our work using general circulation models, also more localized models and hydrology models that those link to to get an understanding of what we're looking at in the future, how rapidly things are gonna change, and also how they're gonna change and where the opportunities might be, like we've talked about for the monsoon. And then I'm a very strong advocate of looking at all of these questions through a resilience lens. So rather than saying is this what we used to have? How can we restore what we used to have instead of saying what systems are working? Where are the thresholds? And where's our operating room for having functional ecosystems and linked social ecological systems into the future? And I think this needs to carry forward into our engineering practices where we build new infrastructure, can we use this resilience thinking to find a way to have systems that are appropriate for a non-stationary world? And one of the things that we talk a lot about is planning for graceful failure. Engineers, we've always said no, systems must not fail, we'll put a safety factor on, and maybe we should start thinking differently, saying where will the system fail and how can we make it so that failure isn't catastrophic? And that opens up a lot of possibilities for us. And then this was my final one. Reclamation has a program through the America competes act of, I think it's 2010, right? We had these prize competitions and it's a way of accessing solver communities who work in completely different areas of science and application, maybe technology tools and things. But we found that in things like forecasting or fish management or quagga mussels, a whole lot of things that we as the federal government have concerns about, that these solver communities can come up with new and innovative ideas that we just spinning in our own gerbil cage don't come up with. So this has been tremendously successful and I recommend building on that kind of thing. Thank you all very much for your time and attention today. That was excellent, thank you very much. We are gonna take a very short break, five minutes, five minutes. Be back here and then we will move to another amazing, interesting river system. Thank you, Dagmar, five minutes. We're now gonna turn to a different river system, the Mississippi River, but we're gonna focus only on the upper mist given the size of the river. We have two speakers that are gonna cover material related to the upper Mississippi. We're gonna start with Gretchen Benjamin and then we're gonna have a little bit longer break. So if you can hang in there, we'll give you maybe like eight minutes instead of five. And then Steve Bois will follow up after that. Gretchen works at the Nature Conservancy, TNC, in the Upper Midwest Division where is a river specialist works on the Mississippi River, North American River Restoration in general. I'm super excited to have her here in, no small part because I grew up on the river. I'm from the Quad Cities area, so I lived a mile off the river and no one ever said the words of the Mississippi River, it was just the river. So literally on Sunday afternoons we'd go watch the barge traffic. So this is what it's like to grow up and watch them go through the lock and dams. And so in any event, I've had a long interest and so really delighted to have Gretchen here and also wanna give a shout out to TNC. Not only is it really interesting, we've done a lot of great work in the Rio Grande but they've really been leaders in much of the upper mist on water quality and quantity ecosystem restoration issues. So Gretchen, thank you, take it away. Alrighty, thank you so much. I'm gonna do a fairly broad overview of the Upper Mississippi River and then Steve will follow on and we'll be talking more about weather and climate change and that sort of thing. And then we hope to have some time where we can just interact with you and have questions and comments after we get done. So I'm here to talk about the Upper Mississippi River. I will be talking about kind of the development that brought us to our current conditions, a bit about the future and really thinking about it in terms of the natural and human assets that this portion of America's largest river is part of. I have gotten information from a lot of sources and a lot of people, but the three people that I am acknowledging on this slide are very important in terms of photos and content. So I wanna bring your attention to their names. As I go through my talk, I will do a bit about location. I'll talk about governance. I'll talk about the economy and then I'll get into the development of the river and what has happened over time. So in terms of location, we have a 2,300 mile river, 2,300 miles that starts in the boreal forest, ends in the Cyprus Tupelo swamps in the south. And as you can imagine, when we're talking about climate change, there's probably gonna be a lot of resilience in there. There probably was a lot of resilience when the glaciers were advancing and retreating and we may need to use that same resilience again. I'm going to be talking primarily about the Upper Mississippi River. There's the basin picture over on your right. There's the main stem picture on your left. It's about 1,300, 1,400 miles of river. It is a large river and it's very diverse from even the top to the bottom. The bottom is considered where the Cairo River, excuse me, the Ohio River comes in at Cairo, Illinois. So that is the delineating mark between the Upper and the Lower Mississippi. And the Lower Mississippi is an alluvial fan essentially an alluvial plane. So it is a very different river than the Upper River. In talking about governance, there's three different ways to think about it. There is basin wide. The Mississippi River basin covers six sub basins. The Upper Miss just being one of those. And it is 41% of the lower 48 states. It touches 31 states. It is a major basin, 1.25 million square mile area. But early on, believe it's 1879, the Mississippi River Commission was established. The commission is a group of four engineers from the Corps of Engineers and three civilian engineers. Those are appointed by the president. And they, as they started in 1879, were primarily interested in commercial navigation and setting up that system to get people in and out of the middle portion of America and move commodities. Over time, and especially with the advent of the 1927 flood, the Mississippi River Commission has turned more of their attention to the Lower Mississippi River and flood risk management in the lower portion of the river, but they do have outreach to the entire basin. Another group that's newer, much newer, is America's Watershed Initiative. This really got going in 2010. General Walsh is here. He was an important part of that original group. And these are very diverse people from commercial navigation to energy to environmental agencies and NGOs and that sort of thing, working together to figure out how do we, from a social, economic, and environmental perspective, create a more sustainable river and bring more attention to the river. And they were really, initially, and General Walsh helped to define this, thinking about a 200-year vision. How do we move in that direction and get there and have a river that's still functional 200 years from now? And I'll be talking more about some of the work that they're doing in a minute here. The Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative is the mayor's up and down the Mississippi River along that main stem. There's 86 of them that are actively involved in that. And they're really thinking about how do they make their cities more resilient? How do they connect those cities to the river and, again, bring that attention from the federal government to the Mississippi River to help them accomplish that? In terms of federal agencies on the Mississippi River, certainly the Corps of Engineers is the dominant authority, if you will. In 1997, the Corps reorganized and created the Mississippi Valley Division. And the division actually runs from the north to the south, the entire main stem of the Mississippi. So they're the most consistent federal agency with authority up and down the river. They have six districts and those six districts work together fairly well to manage the navigation system, the flood risk management, and then also ecosystem restoration. Fish and Wildlife Service has numerous refuges and they're managing the trust species up and down the river, but they have several different regions that touch on that Mississippi River. So they aren't perhaps as well coordinated as the Corps is. The same with USGS. USGS, we get all of our gauging information from a lot of the water resource information. But again, they have multiple regions that touch on that big Mississippi River border. We do have with USGS, they are running our long-term resource monitoring program on the upper Mississippi River and Jeff will be talking about that later on. So they have a very important role. Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency is more linked in with each of the states providing funds and that sort of thing for those folks. And also the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, I'll talk about here in a second. But they are, other than the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, generally not linked up and down the system. When we're talking about upper Mississippi River governance in particular, there's two organizations that are extremely important here. The first is the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee. These are conservation biologists that started in 1943 because the locks and dams had just gone into place in the upper river. And these biologists were concerned about what would happen to the fishery. Would it remain sustainable? The locks and dams disconnected that longitudinal connection on the river. And so they were very concerned about that and what would happen. That group is still around today. They've been around for over 75 years, but they broaden their perspective on the things that they work on. And these are really the science experts in terms of the state and the federal agencies. And they're a very important group in terms of thinking about the natural resources in those five basin states. And just to be clear, the five basin states are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. And those five states actually work together quite well. The other really important group for the Upper Mississippi River is the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. And it was originally a commission. It was a commission for about 10 years until 1980 when a number of commissions were decommissioned. And the states felt it was such an important organization in terms of balancing the natural resources and water management of the Upper Mississippi River that they decided to continue on with the group Paydos and have been organized in that way since 1980, basically. And the governor appoints the representatives and those representatives are representing agriculture, transportation, and natural resources. So they have a diverse interest in the way that they represent things. The basin association is key to getting some of the comprehensive work that's been done on the river, something known as the Great Studies that looked at bridging and disposal issues and also the comprehensive master plan. And I'll get into that in a while here. The basin association still continues to work on legislative work for the Upper Mississippi River. In terms of the economy of the Upper Mississippi, about five years ago, the Nature Conservancy, the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, and the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative decided we wanted to know more about the economy of the Upper River, and they had just gotten done doing a economic profile of the Lower Mississippi River. So we decided to replicate that so then we could have a system-wide perspective of the economy. And we worked with the Division of Economics at the Fish and Wildlife Service and using the in-plan model to find an area that basically is two counties out from the main stem of the River to kind of give us an idea what is the basis of the economy that's tied to the river. And in so doing, we found that there are three major economic drivers on the river, first of which is manufacturing, and that's probably true in almost any economic study you would do is manufacturing would come out much higher than anything else. About 280 billion plus is associated with manufacturing and over 560,000 jobs. Agriculture comes in second, but quite a ways down from manufacturing, about 25 billion a year, employing about 138,000 people. And in third place is tourism, which is very important to the Upper Mississippi River at over $20 billion a year and 358,000 jobs. If you look at the other six sectors, they collectively don't even add up to what tourism adds up to. But they're all very important services that help to support the top three economic drivers on the Upper Mississippi River. Just for instance, commercial navigation is extremely important for agriculture, for mining, for energy production and manufacturing, as well as tourism is an important part of our, or outdoor recreation is an important part of our tourism. So all of these together is really kind of the base of our economics in the Upper Miss. There is another way that we look at what's important to create a sustainable system on the Upper Mississippi River. And America's Watershed Initiative is who kind of put this piece together. And what they did was, we've got this diverse group of stakeholders that are working together. And they want to have a metric for how they think about, how are we actually improving the system by working together and trying to change the dynamics for the Mississippi River basin. And so they created a report card. And that report card was done as a composite for all six of the basins of the Mississippi River, but also individually for each basin. And in this case, they looked at the ecosystems, flood control and risk production, transportation, water supply, the economy and recreation. Overall, the grade was a D plus. There's a lot of areas we can improve upon in order to create a better system. And there's a mix, this is actually a paddle wheel. I thought that was a wonderful way to display the report card. But as you look at the different pieces within that paddle wheel, you see yellows and oranges and greens and even some reds. And that's really giving you an idea where the sectors need the most improvement. When we look at the upper Mississippi River in particular, we see, for instance, under ecosystems, in terms of the living resources and the stream side habitat, we're in pretty good shape. But when we think about our water quality, we have some of the highest nutrient pollution in our watershed of any of the six basins. Additionally, we've lost a lot of our wetlands, the states of Iowa and Illinois have lost 90% of their wetlands. So the dynamics of the basin have changed there. And in terms of transportation, our infrastructure is very old. The dams that went in had a 50 year life expectancy. They're about 85 years old at this point in time. So there's a lot of things that you'll see on that paddle wheel that really kind of give you an idea of what is going on within our basin. Yes, yes, thank you. So to think about the upper Mississippi River and think about it in terms of where we are today, we have to go back a bit and think about where we were prior to settlers coming to the middle part of the country and look at what it might have looked like, especially for the upper Mississippi River, the glaciers and the retreat of the last glacier 12,000 years ago is really what has formed for the most part, what that river looks like. Certainly there's five million year old rocks underneath that, but when you're talking about the geomorphology of the river, it really has a lot to do with that last glacial leaving the area. And as Glacial Lake Agassiz and Glacial River War and carved out the valley, the valley was probably 250 feet deeper than it is today, but as those melt waters receded, that deep valley was filled in with sediment and we essentially have an inatomosing braided channel river throughout that upper Mississippi River and it has a gradient across that whole flood plain that can be three or four miles wide up north to 20 miles wide in the more southern portion of the river. And across that gradient you see flowing channels, main channels, off channel areas, backwater lakes, sluice and deep and shallow marshes and you see a gradient throughout that whole flood plain that would have been there. And you would see seasonal changes, the hydrograph that would have been a part of the upper Mississippi River, say 1,000 years ago would have showed us that in the spring, we would have the snow melting, we would have spring rains and we would have a flood pulse come through the system and that flood pulse would drop off into the summer months and we would have low water conditions and then typically in the fall, we might see another small flood bump from fall rains and then go back into that low water connection. So that pattern of dynamics of the hydrology is really what led to the diversity within the upper Mississippi River. And what you would see on the upper Mississippi and most of these species are still out there today. We're really in pretty good shape. You would see the diverse habitats as you see in this middle picture here that show everything from a marsh to a flood plain forest to deep water to shallow water and every change in between that whole scenario. We have a lot of water birds that use the river, the raptors, for instance, we have a National Wildlife Refuge on the upper Miss that's 260 miles long. In 1974, there was one bald eagle nest. There's now over 300 bald eagle nests in that same area. So we have a lot of raptors, waterfall are abundant, reptiles and amphibians the fish can go from dependent on flows to those who are more backwater, lacustrian in their nature. And so we have a very diverse group. But one of the interesting fauna of the upper river is the native mussel populations. There were well over 50 different species up there historically. And if you read some of the old accounts of what like the first kernel that came to the St. Paul the district wrote about in 1864 was that the mussel beds were two and three feet deep. Today, if you found five per square meter, you'd be doing darn good. So that has definitely changed a lot but most of the species are still there. Along the river, there's been a lot of work to look at the encampments that are on the flood plains. And most of these flood plains show that the people used the area seasonally was an important place to harvest and gather bounty for the rest of the year when conditions might be a little bit more difficult. There was also a lot of artifacts from the river that they could use to help them build tools and objects of beauty and that sort of thing. So the indigenous people were certainly very connected to the Mississippi River, but on a seasonal nature they kind of used it the same way that our wildlife would be using it. And when we look at where the more permanent settlements were, even like Cahokia, which we believe had about 20,000 people at it, which is just close to St. Louis, Missouri, that was always on a higher terraced area where they could access the flood plain but then retreat up there when the water levels would change. So they were very, the river was very important to them as we find all of these different encampments up and down the river. As settlers first came to the river, initially they were looking at the resources that the area provided. We had incredible pine forests in the north. We had incredible hardwoods in Southern Illinois and Indiana. And most of those forests are gone. They were used to help settle the areas and provide products to the people that were moving into the areas. And our prairies were a great place to start doing agriculture. And so the millions of acres of prairies that were once a part of the upper mess were converted primarily to agricultural areas. And that certainly changed the dynamics of the land and the way that the water flowed off of that land, how much quicker it would come off and how it would bring in sediments and other nutrients and that sort of thing. The river was also looked at as a transportation corridor. And we went through a successional stage of how deep a draft of vessel we wanted to float on that river going from a four-foot navigation channel all the way up to what is the present day nine-foot navigation channel. And along the way, we had to do different things to the channel in order to create that channel. With a four-foot channel, you pretty much only need to remove the snags and maybe do a little bit of dredging. As you move into a deeper draft channel, you have to constrict the channel. As you were talking about with the Rio Grande, they also have to constrict the channel, get the river to do some self-scouring by doing that. And continue to do dredging. But by the time we decided to have a nine-foot navigation channel, we had to have locks and dams in the river. So there are 29 locks and dams on the main stem of the Mississippi River. And those dams were built for navigation. They don't have a flood risk management purpose. Four of the 29 locks have hydropower at them. And those are mostly managed by private companies. But for the most part, they are really just there to keep that navigation channel out there. And as I mentioned before, during the low water time of the summer, they keep the water levels high and alter the way of the landscape with permanent inundation. The final thing that really changed the complexion of the upper Mississippi River was the idea that as people came to this area and saw the floodplains and the rich soils that were sitting in those floodplains, they wanted to be able to farm them and reliably be able to farm them. And so they put in intense levee systems up and down the river. On the upper Mississippi River, the levee systems were kind of a mix of private and public levees. And our different levels and heights and the amount of strength that each one of these levees has is different depending on who put them in. As all of this is happening, there were some people, people are, it's important to note that on the upper Mississippi River, people are very connected to the river. They use the river on a regular basis. They get down, they hunt the fish, they go out in their boats. But even back at the turn of the century, people were realizing that all of the river was going to be levied off so that lateral connection of the river would be completely lost. And they realized that a lot of the diversity associated with the river was with that connection. And so one gentleman in particular, his name is Will Dild. He went on a crusade to try and figure out if there was a way that we could protect at least a portion of the upper Mississippi River from having it levied off. And he was successful in doing this in 1924 by creating a National Wildlife Refuge. And that National Wildlife Refuge, as you see, hopefully you can see that in the map, goes from about Wabashaw, Minnesota, down almost to Devonport, Iowa. And that whole stretch that 261 miles of river is not levied off. And that floodplain is still connected to the river. And I would sort of suggest that it's probably one of the healthiest parts of the river. And Jeff may be touching on some of that later on, but certainly the river is in relatively good shape in that portion of the river. So that's a unique stretch of the river that's important to the diversity of the system. That still remains out there. So as we look at the river and what it is today, we sort of see the accumulation of all that that has happened, that we've converted our prairies and our forests into farmland. And I'm sure maybe some of you flew here and you flew over that patch, those patches of field after field after field for miles and miles and miles. And they're dotted with urban areas. And there's a few larger cities along the Upper Mississippi, but really not that many. It's just really Minneapolis, the Quad Cities, and St. Louis are really the only big cities on the Upper Mississippi. So we've got that going on in the landscape, changing the hydrology, coming in from the tributaries, the amount of nutrients, the amount of sediment, and the rate at which the water comes off the land. We are still managing the river for commercial navigation. It's an important part of the Upper River. It is the way that we move bulk commodities and we are an agricultural area of the country and we need this particular transportation system. But again, to have it where we have locks and dams that disconnect the river from a longitudinal perspective, we're always dredging, we're putting in channel training structures continually. And so we're altering that river on a regular basis to maintain that navigation channel. And then finally, in terms of the levees, if you get south of the Quad Cities below that National Wildlife Refuge, about 80% of the river's floodplain is behind the levees and only about 20% of it is within that active river channel. So it's a very changed system, especially as you get further down. So I mentioned before there's a group called the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee and they started in 1943. And they were very interested in figuring out how do we balance the uses of commercial navigation, flood risk management, all of those sorts of multiple uses that the river has. And they were oftentimes fighting with the Corps of Engineers. It was kind of a regular thing. And it really wasn't until we had environmental laws that they actually had something, mechanism that they could start to work towards that balance of using the river for multiple uses. And almost immediately, they did start doing that. The state of Wisconsin sued the Corps over dredging and disposal in the St. Paul District. And that was in 1973 and 74. That led to Congress having the Basin Association bring together both the Corps in the Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the states to figure out how we could continue to dredge, manage that dredge material in a way that was least cost, but also environmentally acceptable. And work towards that end to minimize the impact on wetlands and spawning areas and things like that. At a similar point in time, they're also starting to talk about the aging infrastructure of the locks and dams and wanting to replace the lowest dam on the system, Lock and Dam 26. And so Congress authorizes the replacement of that. But in order to do that and some of the lawsuits that followed after that, they said, you've got that somebody's gotta come forward and take charge and have a comprehensive master plan for the Upper Mississippi River. And the Basin Association, again, was tasked with that particular item. And what is really historic about all of this is that we went from a system of conflict and fighting to consensus on the way to move forward. We created tremendous partnerships between the states and the federal government, the NGOs, the public, and those groups that were formed back then still remain together today. And in the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, we actually designated the river as a nationally significant ecosystem and a nationally significant commercial navigation channel. And with that, we created a dual purpose mandate, if you will, for that upper river so that one couldn't take precedence over the other. And so that's a very important piece of legislation and it really still kind of creates an arrow for us to work on together. With this, the lock at, it's called Mel Price now, but Lockendam 26 was rebuilt and we started a river restoration program. That river restoration program is now known as the Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program, was originally the Environmental Management Program. And the folks that put this together were brilliant in what they did. They said, we've got to restore the river, we've lost our islands, we've lost some of our backwater channels, the deep water areas in the backwaters. We have to figure out how to put that structure back in the river. But we also, we don't even know that much about the status of a lot of our biota or our habitats out in the river and we need to monitor that. So it's a two prong program with restoration and long-term resource monitoring. It's been in place since 1988. That was one of my first jobs was doing water quality at the long-term resource monitoring station. And there's six sites that we monitor up and down the river in Minnesota. All five of the states have at least one monitoring station and I believe it's Illinois that has two. So they're collecting data on all of these things I have listed here. Jeff is gonna talk about that a little bit more later on. And so I'll let him go ahead with that. But the important thing is here, it was authorized in 86, it needed to be reauthorized. It was reauthorized in 2000. It is a continuing authority program. It's funded at $33.17 million. We've only gotten that funding, that's the authorized funding. We've only gotten that funding for the last five years, but because of that funding, we have restored over 100,000 acres of river flood plain up and down. This is 1200 miles of river we're doing restoration on. But in the areas where we're doing this, we have really seen tremendous improvement in terms of habitat and biota. It's very clear that there is a change as a result of this work that we're doing. So this is a real success story for the Upper Mississippi River and the partners that are the Upper Mississippi River. And I just say that there is life beyond that in terms of there are many other things that we also coordinate on in terms of the channel maintenance work. We still work with the Corps on dredging and disposal. Again, trying to do it in the most environmentally friendly, least cost way. When we're looking at channel training structures in the river, today we're looking at channel training structures that are innovative, that actually create habitat as well as help to maintain the navigation channel. And in some cases, they're actually literally taking some of the old structures that might've been built in the 1850s. They're taking some of those out or notching them so that we have better habitat out on the river. So we're working along those line in terms of dam operation. We've been working with the Corps for over 25 years to look at managing the dams for, of course, project purpose, which is navigation, but also can we do some things with the flexibility in dam operation to also create better conditions ecologically. And we've done what we call drawdowns in the St. Paul district. And also we manage the water levels a little bit different in the St. Louis district. And what we're trying to do in the summer months when the water level would have been low historically and naturally is to get that water level low enough so that we can get the mud flats exposed. We get chemical processing and we get the aquatic vegetation to come back. We're also finding that we believe that it helps our flood plain for us, which right now are in a condition of stress. So we're working on those sorts of things. And then finally, flood risk management has kind of really reached ahead on the upper Mississippi River. We have been dealing with high water repetitively for probably the last 20 years, but especially in the last five. And as I mentioned before, some of these dams are public and some of them are private. And we're starting to get some back and forth between the levee districts about what is the right way to manage the levees during a flood fight. And so the Basin Association and the Corps of Engineers are working with stakeholders to figure out what we need for a comprehensive plan and then figure out how to implement that. And one of the things the Basin Association did this summer was conduct six public stakeholder meetings throughout the Basin. So this was a big effort for them to really get people to come and talk about what their needs are in terms of flood risk management. And as you can imagine, there's a very diverse perspective on what that might be. So this is some great stuff that continues to happen because we are fairly well set up to work together. Moving forward, the challenges we have, and this is at a very, very high level scale. There's a lot of depth we can get into from here. But certainly the navigation infrastructure is well beyond its design life and funding seems to be stalled in terms of modernizing that. From the natural resource community, we don't expect navigation to go away anytime soon, but we would like to be able to make sure that we balance those uses. So we work with the folks in the navigation industry, so that's why I would put a bullet like that up there. Flood risk management, as I just mentioned, is we don't have it set up as a system on the upper river. We need to start thinking about it from that perspective. And so that's another piece that we need to keep working on. After like in the 70s, 80s and 90s, we had a fair amount of flexibility about how we could balance the various uses on the river, and we're finding some retraction from some of that work that we've been doing. We need to be able to continue to have that flexibility and to continue to advance towards a more balanced use of the upper river. You'll be hearing from Katrina later on about the fact that we probably have the highest levels of nutrient pollution in the upper Mississippi River, which of course pollutes the upper Mississippi River, but also the lower Mississippi River and all to the Gulf. And just in general, the river, whether you're talking about the basin or the upper Mississippi River is in the Midwest. We don't necessarily get the same kind of attention from the federal government and that that other like coastal areas or areas with higher population. So trying to get attention to the things that we believe are issues is a little bit more difficult. And finally, I would say, and Steve will get into this, we have certainly seen a change in the climate. It is a different place. I've lived on the river since I was three years old and it is not the river I grew up on. And for the last two years, we've hardly had any summer months where the water level got low. It's been very high, very high flows. And so it's a very different river than it was historically. And we are seeing that in real time at this point. And with that, I just say that, I do think the upper Mississippi River has is in a strong point that we have found some good solutions in the past. We tend to work together fairly well, but there's still a lot of work we need to do. And we're now dealing with the climate changes as the real grandest. So I don't know if you want me to give the mic to Steve and let him go ahead. We're going to take a break. So thank you very much. Let's give Gretchen a little bit longer of a break this time, but we really want to start at 1120 to get us right back on schedule with Steve. So what time is it? So you have 14 minutes. We're a little bit late. I'm going to say a C minus, but there might be extra credit later if you hurry up. All right, thanks everybody for getting back promptly. We are going to finish our conversation about the upper Miss. Steve, Juan is here from the North Central River Forecast Center for the National Weather Service at NOAA. So we're going to learn a little bit about climate and what's coming weather-wise. And then we'll have our panel, all three will ask to sit up front and we'll have a nice long time for Q&A. So Steve, thank you and have at it. Thank you. Okay, here we go. So as we heard a little bit from Gretchen where it's a little different world when you get into the Mississippi drainage when it comes to water and hopefully we don't all be scared and run for the hills when we're done here. So leaning heavily on the global, the climate reporting that comes out to NCA for a lot of words, but the key things in the Mississippi basin in general in the upper Mississippi in particular that it's not just that we're seeing the amounts of precipitation increase on annual basis. That's not pro rata over the entire calendar year is that one thing in particular, the mesoscale convective systems, that's a fancy meteorological word, but these large thunderstorm complexes in the summer that drive flash flooding and even river and flooding. And I got an illustration to show how that's changed coming up here. That's a really big one. And the predictability of those things is down on the third floor. It's not even here. So that's driving a big problem. And we'll get a little bit in the science challenges. I'll intermix them a little bit here, but since I got to go twice, you'll just have to tolerate me again this afternoon. We'll catch up with some of that. And then in a little bit, the Northern United States getting more precipitation than when in the spring. Again, that's the normal pulse. You'd want to see the precipitation then and that, but when you combine that with the first bullet, then that's the problem. So those extreme snowfall years have increased and projected to in the Northern, but then they're also saying that that rains and snow in the cold, more rain than snow in the cold season for parts of central and Eastern. Well, where's the dividing line there? And what we saw this year in Nebraska and then what didn't get news was the extension of that storm over into across the Upper Mississippi Basin into Southern Wisconsin was catastrophic rain on snow, frozen ground, saturated ground, record flooding in Southern Wisconsin that got no press whatsoever. So these climate events, these weather and climate events, it's just like one-upmanship. You don't hear about a lot of them that are drastic because they're local. You don't hear about them. So this is going to be a big issue for the Mississippi River Basin is these climate events that we haven't experienced before and how to deal with it. And evidence of the case out in Nebraska is our infrastructure ready to handle it or we see catastrophic results that we just can't recover from. So just from NCA4, the most recent publication, you all know this, you see these blotchy graphs and yeah, the pretty pictures green, green is wet, brown is drier and that and this is just kind of where we've been to 2015. And we see kind of the, we're in the multicolored greens here. We're not just in the light green. We're up there in that 10 to 15% in patches. And we'll see, it actually comes out, I'll just let the cat out of the bag now. It's about an 11% increase over the long-term average. So far. And then again, the NCA4 again details it. This is all published information. Again, that spring, pretty solid dark green over the up in Mississippi, winter kind of a mixed bag. And then summer, this doesn't really do justice to the mesoscale convective system problem and issue that we're having. Not quite sure why that doesn't indicate something that's a little bit more, but maybe it's just that the, well, I don't know, I can't say that because I lived there. I lived in the, with the exception of two years in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I've lived in the upper Midwest my entire life and you never talked about eight 10 inch rainfalls growing up, nobody talked about them. My grandparents didn't talk about them. They're regular now. So let's just break this down to something that hopefully we can understand here in the next couple of minutes. This would be, this is from the NOAA, the source of all the meteorological data. They keep it great records, area-weighted upper Mississippi River basin, annual precipitation. So I've gone on here and stuck a couple of things on here. Linear trend line, you all understand, but this darker line here is a 30 year moving average. We do our climate normals 30 years. If you were living in the upper Mississippi River basin from 1800 to 1930, you probably didn't see a lot of difference. Yeah, it rained a little more some years than others. Didn't matter. And it was that way for your children all the way up through 1960 into 1970. The 30 year moving average doesn't really move at all. You have some up and down. You have the drought years. You have the 30s where you have several years in a row of mostly down precipitation. You have the 50s drought. Well then what happened? It just took off and it's been nothing but up ever since the line just goes up and up and up and up with just a couple blips down. We get like the 2012. We get a rapid decline in precipitation in the summer months, flash drought they call it. But it doesn't really even come close to the drying out that you see back here. In fact, there's only been five years since 1990 that have seen an average, the precipitation for the year, five years out of the last 30 years were below the long-term average. Only five out of 30 years, quite remarkable. Gotta make sure I hit all my points. Excuse me. Yeah. Oh, in 1942, just remember that. I'm gonna refer back to it here in the next slide, but 1942 was the highest precipitation year in the kind of before 1970. So what does that mean for the runoff and water that gets into the river? And so runoff isn't the water that's immediately in the river. So we see a lot of pictures about the river. We never see pictures of the uplands or the tributary rivers that come into it. It's a basin as a whole. We gotta drive that into the lexicon that it's not a river, it's a watershed. It's everything about the watershed. And that's what we'll detail a little bit in the science challenges this afternoon. It's watershed, watershed, watershed. So the first thing is to jump out on you here is this orange line, gray line and green line are 25, 50 and 75th percentile. And so it should jump out pretty quickly that runoff's non-linear at some point, at some point it accelerates beyond and you get more runoff than rainfall. The top line is last year record amount of runoff in the basin. The blue line right below that was 1993. So you have, which was the second, previous highest, radically different in look. The 93 runoff came much later in the year. And the purple lines in 1942. 1942 was 39 inches of precipitation over the basin. 2019 was not even the highest runoff year. It was the third highest, about 45 inches. So the runoff in 1942 was 10.4 inches. The runoff in 2019 was 20 inches. So it's six inches difference in precipitation, six inches greater precipitation, but 10 inches greater runoff. How did the basin do that? How did the basin do that? That's a science question we'll look at this afternoon. But how did the basin do that? So we'll get it. Here's the mesoscape convective problem. State climate office in Minnesota, it's done a really good job of cataloging flash flood events over the state of Minnesota. So I took out a typical one from July of 1978. And those are isohyates. We didn't have color graphics stuff back then. So we just were stuck with that. But what's remarkable here is that the six inch isohyate, which inside here is basically the largest inner one here. Not that there's a seven inch here, but six inch. It doesn't even cover the, it doesn't even cover the area of one typical county. A lot of the counties in the Midwest are about the same size. So that's about, they estimated that was about 5,000 or 500, 500 square miles, the six inch contour. The six inch contour for the September of 2010 storm, about 5,000 square miles. What is so different about the climate, the meteorology, the atmospheric circulation that can drive that much moisture into the center of the continent and dump it out in a 24 to 30 hour period? That's a big question. And we see these events all the time, at least in my lifetime. So this is a raster hydrograph of the flow at the St. Louis Stream Gauge. So that includes the Missouri River, but they experience a lot of the same impacts that we do. So it's for a proxy, it's the same deal. Red colors being low flow, blue colors being high flow. What strikes you here is that in 1860s at the bottom, 2019s at the top. And what strikes you here is the rhythm of it. So the center, the high flows, being predominantly here in the center and the low flows in the fall months. It used to be that the low flows would go for decades, literally, in the fall. And then you might get a wet fall. And then you go decades again and then you might get a wet fall and decades again. In the last 30 years that's flipped and it's all wet falls and just a few dry ones. It never takes a break. And as Gretchen said, it's not the same river. It never takes a break. The water's flowing there at high load nearly all the time. It never gets a chance to reset. So that, again, that's the question is how can the uplands retain, how can they retain any more water if they're just constantly getting water? So something to think about. So when I started forecast, I don't know how much time I got because it doesn't look like it's, I don't have 58 minutes. When I started, 1989, the old timers that have been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, one of them gave me a firehouse analogy. We get a big snow melt, flood or a big rain. We forecast for a little bit, we're done. We analyze what we're doing, try to improve on what we're doing. That's just polish the fire truck, fix the hoses and all that. And wait for the next fire to come. Well, I'm telling you right now, the town's burned down. We've been out there so many times trying to battle the fire that it's gone. We're just constantly forecasting. We forecast the river flooding. We're constantly, it just goes from one to the next to the next that we hardly ever have downtime anymore. It's remarkable. As illustrated by the flood history at St. Louis, you see one flood, 1785, one big flood, 1844. And we had none in 47. You don't see 1942 on here. And then 73. And then the rest of them have all occurred in the last few years. I don't think it's me, most of these are in my career. I have actively participated in every one of those in the green box and trying to predict that. And the association with that we'll get, again, we'll get a little bit into the science of that. But literally the basin was developed for a different climate. We're fighting, we are fighting the weather to exist in the basin all the time now. It was the big development, basically a major development from the 1850s after the Civil War through about 1960 when you're talking major infrastructure, flood control reservoirs, locks and dams, all that. There was done on science, engineering and science based on the records they had at the time. Can they handle even where the climate we're at? So, or the climate we are heading to. So can they handle it even today? The challenge might be no, but it could get worse. And again, going back to the US Global Change research program, is it in the upper Midwest, even under the low scenario of emissions, looking out here towards the end of the decade, you're probably in this 10 to 19 to 20 to 29% increase or even higher under the high scenario. We've already gone up 11%. Can we go up another 10 to 20, 30%? That's the question. Especially can we go and keep compounding the problem and make it even higher? And the projections are pretty solid for the winter and spring scenario. That those months will increase. It shows a little bit drier in the summer, but I think that might be because typically these weather models, which are going to develop the climate models, if they can't predict the mesoscale convective systems, now they're not predicting them in the climate outlook. They don't just kind of magically appear in the climate outlook. So I'd be a little bit skeptical on this. This is personal. This is me talking just from the 30 years of experience. This is maybe not the company line, but 30 years of experience predicting mesoscale convective complexes that drop billions of gallons of water on the landscape in 24 to 30 hours. That's not included in there. So what we don't know, now this is right out of that same report, global US report, potential surprises, large scale shifts, hitting tipping points, compound extremes. This 2019 flood was a compound extreme. Gretchen talked about the sub basins, the Ohio river, the upper Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, white and the lower red. Four out of those six basins experienced extreme flooding this past year. Not all at the same time, started with the Ohio, then the Mississippi, upper Mississippi and Missouri kicked in with the first bomb cyclone, started the runoff. And we started to get heavy precipitation up in the upper Missouri. And then in the summer, down in the Arkansas, kicked it all together, longest flood in history, over 200 in some days, down at Red River Landing, down in Mississippi and New Orleans area. Were we one more climate tipping point away from a catastrophic event? Just a question. So if we combine all these together, if we had the longest flood in history, it wasn't record flooding, as far as level goes on, except at Davenport, on the Mississippi, but the duration, stressing the system. Again, we're getting the science of the whole levees. Can these levee systems make it? A lot of them can't, they're breaking. Every year we're breaking new levees of these levees in Illinois and Missouri. And I just want to throw in drought. I came after the 87, 88 drought, so I didn't get to experience that in my working career. The flash drought occurred in 2012. We could still have these droughts. And they're interesting science experiments. We'll just touch on that a little bit here. And again, this afternoon, is that the soil is, the soils I think are the key. Understanding how our soils are working right now is a key. One thing we found in the 2012 drought, because it was followed by a heavy precipitation, winter precipitation year, with a very heavy accumulation of snow, especially just north and west of the upper Mississippi basin and the Red River Valley, border between Minnesota and North Dakota. And we over-predicted the amount of runoff that spring. And on what reanalysis we could do, we actually found videos of these huge lakes of water going into the ground and bubbles coming out, water going in macro pores, created by the shrinking the soils, clay soils shrinking and cracking. So that's just a teasing on the science for this afternoon is that, are we creating macro pores at all in the soil? Something to think about over lunch so that the soil can take water. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that. And that's it. Thank you very much. Great. Okay, I'm gonna ask now that our three panelists sit at the table. And we have a nice amount of time here for Q and A. In order to keep this organized, please, if you'd like to ask a question, pick up your tent and do this. I will do my best with help up here of keeping order of the order in which you put up your tent. And then you can ask questions for those online. If you have questions, there is a chat room or something chat thingy that you can ask questions of. So please feel free to do that as well as anybody. Yeah, if you're sitting out, if you don't have a tent wave at me and we'll add you to the list. I might need you to tell me your name or something, but we'll do our best here. Okay, so Nisha, I saw you. Why don't you start and I'll start collecting names. Thank you so much for all this great presentations. Really interesting and informative. I have two questions. One is for our first speaker about the any efforts on groundwater recharge as the precipitation patterns and also snow capacities changing. And for our second speaker, you spoke about modernization of the infrastructure and as we are replacing the existing aging infrastructure. I was wondering how does that modernization looks like and are we incorporating some of the changing patterns? Again, in climate patterns that we have into this process of designing future infrastructure, are we still considering the same type of dams and levees and all sort of infrastructure we had in the past century or are we considering something that would last 100 years and make us more resilient? Thank you. Water recharge, this doesn't seem good. Hello? Okay, all right, great. Again, thanks for that question about groundwater recharge. Absolutely, groundwater recharge is changing as our precipitation changes, soil moisture changes, the patterns and the timing. The difficulty with answering that question is that it's very site specific, exactly how the recharge will change. Mountainfront recharge will change differently from recharge that comes from the river bottom, which I showed in one of my slides. So it requires site specific studies to figure out how these systems are changing. In some places, the recharge could increase and I think that's a potential in the Pecos basin, which is sort of the eastern and tributary in New Mexico to the Rio Grande, where I think I mentioned that what has been snow and is becoming more rain comes off the Sierra Blanca in central New Mexico and then falls off underground into a network of caves. Now, if we have a more flashy system, there's to some degree that network of caves can absorb a larger, faster runoff in a way that if you required infiltration, wouldn't be able to accommodate that increased flashiness, right? So it requires the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and others to do a lot of site-specific research into those changes. But the big change to groundwater is the one that I pointed out in my talk and that is the fact that when our surface water supplies are low in the desert southwest, we turn to groundwater and we tend to deplete that source and then that in turn feeds back to our surface water system and more of that seeps into the ground. It recharges the groundwater but probably has a diminishing capability to actually effectively recharge it because there's less surface water. Actually, can I follow up? So what I meant, sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant manage recharge, so sort of using groundwater. So aquifer storage and recovery. Yes. Got it. And that is something that is being practiced in quite a few areas in the desert southwest. Arizona is making great use of that. New Mexico is actually challenged by the structure of the Rio Grande Compact. So maybe Eric could put up the last slide from my presentation. I think it's the very or second to very last. The structure of the Compact I mentioned has a lower proportion of the water going downstream when there's lower supplies. But when we have say a big snow melt runoff or lots of spring rains or something like that, a whole lot of water that rings the bell, thank you, in terms of compact delivery obligations. When we have those big years, we actually get to the point in New Mexico where the delivery obligation is actually larger than the actual allocation of the river to that state. So in this case, I looked at 10 and 25% losses through the system as the waters conveyed through New Mexico. And we find that if we were to have say a really big water year of 3 million, that's the top number put into the Rio Grande Compact, the allocation to central New Mexico would be negative 245,000 acre feet. So basically in New Mexico, we take our big water years, that's when we get compact debits and we have to make up for them in our drier years. And so it's challenging to find ways to implement aquifer storage and recovery in that kind of system. But I will say that it's being done by the city of Albuquerque using the imported San Juan Chama water which isn't subject to that restriction. So there's a lot of potential there and it's being used by Albuquerque and in more indirect ways also by Santa Fe. Great, thank you. Next, I have Robert. Sorry. Let me just quickly respond to the modernization question. There's a couple of different responses here. In terms of the locks and dams, we went through a very extensive study, a navigation study that started in 1993 and was completed in 2004. And what we ended up with through that process was taking existing locks and dams and taking the lock itself and changing it from a 600 foot lock to a 1200 foot lock. So it's just a function of creating more capacity as opposed to changing that structure that may or may not be able to handle more water in the system on a regular basis. So with that, that's kind of one glimpse at it. In terms of thinking about the levee system and moving forward and kind of the comprehensive look that I believe we're gonna undertake here very soon, my hope is that we will look at the levee systems, figure out where we need to raise the levees, where we need to lower the levees, where we need to set back the levees and where we need to disconnect those levees and create more flood storage capacity again in that river. Because right now, as I mentioned, about 80% of the river floodplain is behind those levees and when you have that continual flow a whole year's worth of high water levels working on those levees, they start to weaken and you're probably going to need to have more storage capacity, natural storage capacity. So I look at it as a green and a gray and variations in between there and what we're going to have to do and at least we, I think we have that choice right now as we go forward and put together this comprehensive plan. Great, thank you. Sorry for the interruptions. Can I say, sorry, one more thing on the groundwater recharge question. The state of Colorado, actually I mentioned in my talk the way that they implement priority administration on a daily basis, they don't have water storage or significant water storage reservoirs up in the San Luis Valley. So what they do is they allocate water according to priority, everybody has a year of their initiation on 10 day rotating cycles. And when irrigators get water that they can't use, they take, we saw that picture of their big circular irrigation systems. In the corners of those, they use those to recharge the groundwater, which then they can pump again in equal amounts later in the season when the water supplies are lower. And so they practice this sort of aquifer storage and recovery as part of their normal operations every year. Okay, thanks. I have Robert, then David, then Shaowen, then a gentleman over here and another gentleman over there in that order. Robert. Yeah, I'd just like to follow up on the last question. Gretchen described very well the compensation that's gonna be needed for more rainfall on the upper Mississippi River. We all agree that we're way behind on infrastructure anyway, it has to be upgraded. And clearly we need to right size that upgrading if an infrastructure plan ever happens comes out of the federal government. My question is, isn't this really a kind of, in the long-term sense, isn't this a luxury problem? I mean, isn't it great to have more rainfall? I mean, assuming you're gonna build your right-sized infrastructure, I'm much more sympathetic to the Rio Grande droughts. That sounds worse. So, I mean, I'm not a hydrologist, but can somebody give me a perspective in the long-term sense, is this a bad thing to have more rainfall? Wow, that's an interesting question. And actually, I have thought about that, that it is a luxury when I talk to my colleagues out west and I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't have to deal with that problem. It's a water quality problem on the Mississippi. It's a water quantity problem when you get out west. And so, depending on what's going on, I think a lot of our infrastructure is built within that floodplain and is susceptible and vulnerable to these increased water levels. So, if we wanna move our cities back away from the river and spend those billions or trillions of dollars to do that, then it's not a problem. But I think it's going to be a very expensive proposition to move all of that up and out of there. So, is it easier probably to have lots of water? I'm not sure. I think that the takeaway that I got from all three of our talks is that our systems are maladapted to what we're expecting in the future. And whether it's too much water or too little water, there's gonna be consequences for the facts that it doesn't match. And if we can have our crops withering on the field down in the Rio Grande Valley, there might be crops rotting in the field up in the upper Mississippi. So, okay, exactly. So, there's challenges to both. Yeah, I'd just like to summarize that the too much water problem is that, yes, it is a problem, because you have 60% of the watershed wants to get rid of it now. The minority of the watershed being along the river doesn't want that water. It's a fight. The last question opens up the topic of more opportunities for inter-basin transfer, but that's a topic for another discussion. My question relates to spatial variability and climate, the changing climate. Steve mentioned the need to think about the entire watershed. He just mentioned, again, thinking about the small streams and creeks that feed the main rivers and how they're impacted, different management, considerations for them versus the large rivers. And Dagmar mentioned the site specificity of recharge. So, to the panel, I ask for the climate is changing, but it's changing in different ways in different places. And there is a lot of spatial variability. A lot of those maps show the whole northeast is plus X% precipitation, but there's actually a lot of variability in there. And maybe we'll start with you, Steve, what you've observed and does that lend itself to prioritizing different areas of the upper Mississippi watershed, for example. So, if I think I got the question right, is that, yeah, there are priority areas that are probably a little, that can't handle the increased precipitation or may not be as participatory. It's been, the focus of it really has been in the agricultural, not so much the forest and region in the north. So, basically north of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul and say north of, and then extending over towards the Great Lakes and the forest, more of the forested region is not as much of an issue with the heavy precipitation. In fact, they've probably in the last 30 years had the least amount of precipitation in excess problems as you move further south, it magnifies. I think the old adage applies, not old or the wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier and those are the forecasts that we have for the different parts of our climate system. I think I'll just add to that, that certainly there's spatial variability in the changes. There's also temporal variability in the changes and I believe that the big thing that we need to keep in mind is something I brought up in the final slides that I presented that we're going, we're stepping into a place where there is no normal. People talk a lot about the new normal but the challenge that we have for science and engineering and management is that we're stepping into a place where we have constantly changing systems. We don't know exactly how they're gonna change primarily because we don't know how humans are going to behave, but we know that we're in a system where things will always be changing. So we can't just say, okay, well, now let's make those levies and navigation systems fit the conditions we pay. That change is gonna continue. So if it spatial varies temporarily and it's not gonna stop. So that's where I think, thinking within the resilience lens is really helpful. What kind of systems are stable in the systems that we're operating now and where are the thresholds of that stability? Which ones can we rely on? Which ones need help? And that is in sort of social ecological systems that are the same as we had in the past or new ones that are functioning. But if we start to categorize things that way, then we might have a better understanding of how to move forward. And real quick, I'll pick up on that as well. In terms of talking about the temporal changes and we're seeing the water come, not just in the spring as it traditionally did, but we're seeing it throughout the summer and we have certain habitats that were under stress, under past conditions. But as we move forward, especially our floodplain forests, we have over 300,000 acres of floodplain forests in the Upper Mississippi River. And those floodplain forests were aging, they were mature forests, they were stressed out. And now they're inundated all summer long and they don't like that. And so we were already concerned about these forests because of pest invasions and other plant invasions and that sort of thing. So now we've got one more thing to worry about, can they handle this kind of inundation? And also our aquatic plant communities along the edge of the river, if the water is always up, they aren't doing well either. So, and that's sort of the base of the ecosystem out there. You start to pull those pieces out, then the biotic community starts to decline as well. So we have concerns from those perspectives. Great, thank you, Shao-Anne. Well, greatly enjoyed the three fascinating talks. Thank you very much. One keyword jumped out of many interesting aspects was change from your talks as was your responses so far. And there's one slide that really impressed me. I think from the first talk, you had a map depicting two river channels and banks. You know, one is decades ago and one is right now. And dramatic change, right, from those two maps. But I wonder, there are certainly evolution, right, between a while back and what do we currently have based on what you presented. So I have a question slash comment that is for such complex systems involving the natural processes and the human environment interactions in the social ecological systems, we seem to be at a point really require holistic approaches, particularly for predictions we need to make and we would benefit from more detailed capturing of what has happened to get us better predictive power, particularly for spatial prediction, meaning where these things are gonna happen, where tipping points are going to occur across these complex systems. So I know we'll be learning more sciences this afternoon, but I wanna ask you at this stage for better predicting power, what do you see we need to improve for getting us better equipped, for instance, through better knowledge coming from the past events. This could be, for instance, including better data, better models and so on. But this predictive power at this stage, at this sort of almost to me across roads as you were alluded to, we're seeing so abnormal patterns we're not familiar with. So how do we approach this from the prediction point of view and also from holistic system point of view? I know it's a long comment question, but. Yeah, and I'm not sure that I can add that much to what you said in a sense you've answered it. I can see that you're on board with the resilience thinking approach. We have to use all of the information that we have. What is the current system? How did we get there? What were past weather conditions? How to defect it? What's the natural ways the system wants to react? And then use that, I think, in incorporating into modeling tools that understand physical processes to try to play what if games, to try to see how we can, in resilience thinking, how we can break the system. Where are the thresholds? And we need to incorporate all of that, all of those pieces of information, tree ring information in terms of past variability of the climate, geomorphology, in terms of the understanding of the river systems, foresters, in terms of the understanding of the watershed health in the forest system, and then integrate those into a whole to try to get our best understanding of what the future might look like. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. The paradigm of observation, resolution, to what we want to predict. I don't think those are jived right now, and I'll get into that this afternoon. The complexity of modeling, the landscape and the soils is much larger than modeling the atmosphere. There are a lot of things that can be assumed that are valid for modeling the atmosphere that when you try to translate broad-scale assumptions in trying to do landscape modeling, especially in hydrology, really start to break down as you try to, as you get small, you're trying to get your resolution down. So you can do something at 300 square miles that you can't do at 50. So I think there's a gap there, and I'll try to get into that more this afternoon, but I think there needs to be a revolution in when it comes to that kind of modeling. Not to belabor this too much, but on the Upper Mississippi River, we have a long-term database. It goes back to 1986, which in the grand scheme of things is not that long. But when you think about rivers, whether it's nationally or internationally, there are very few of them that have the kind of database we have on the Upper Mississippi River. And the USGS does a status and trends report about every 10 years, and they're about to put together another status and trends report. And this won't provide everything we want to know, but it's just an illustration of what, if you do have a long-term database, you can start to figure out what changes are happening to the system. And in the last status and trends report, the invasion of the Asian carp to the Mississippi River was one of the big takeaways from that particular status and trends report. I'm assuming that, and I'm looking at Jeff a little bit here, that as we talk about the next status and trends report, it might have a lot more about what climate change and what it means to habitats and how we create resilience and that sort of thing. And we're lucky we have that. Now, that's just one small microcosm of talking about the upper Mississippi River because the other big piece is obviously what Steve is alluding to in that that we've got to start thinking about from a landscape, from a watershed perspective, how we put the wetlands back on there, how we have healthier soils so that they're holding the soil moisture and it's not all running through and running off and thinking about some of those kinds of mechanisms as well. So we don't have rainfall that just comes right off and goes right into the rivers and has this incredible scouring impact because there's so much water so quickly. So there's a complex of things but I do wanna say that the idea that we have some long-term data sets will help us to kind of start to figure some of this out. It won't be perfect but it will help to answer some of those questions. And we'll hear from Melanie Sandsbury this afternoon in the policy discussion a little bit more about in the Rio Grande system how we're working towards better data management. Great, thank you. I have Isabel next and then I've got a couple across the back, someone online, Scott and I, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see your thing yet. So I put you in before Scott and then we'll keep the list going. Okay, so Gretchen, you actually addressed my question. That was initially, I meant to address to Dagmar but it's sort of build on what you just said. And Dagmar, you described the Rio Grande as a system that is doing that typical shift from the historical river structure to what we're seeing now in the modern rivers, right? The narrowing of the channels, the loss of the connection with the flood plains and then the impact on the vegetation. So I wanted to bring up that component of vegetation and vegetation feedbacks primarily on all these topics, right? But specifically for the basin you're talking about, you also mentioned increased monsoonal frequency and perhaps duration or intensity of those storms and the ability to capture that water. So I wanted to, if you could comment on, and actually this is true for where there's too much water as well, right? Given that we know from study of vegetation climate feedbacks that when the vegetation is stressed or we lose it, we lose its ability, well, we end up seeing greater surface water runoff, right? That's a typical response, whether there's too much or too little water. So what does that mean? Because in fact, in terms of capturing water, we're probably looking at potentially more erosion, more runoff, how easily are we gonna, even with cave systems, be able to actually capture that? So the question I guess is, how much are we thinking about those vegetation feedbacks with regard to the future in these systems? Certainly quite a bit in the Rio Grande system, both in the upland forests and the changes in those, and then also in the riparian forests, where I talked about the tamarisk and the landscape transformation that's going on there. I mentioned in my talk the work that the Nature Conservancy's Rio Grande Water Fund has been doing in trying to implement forest treatments in the upland watersheds and trying to find in particular places, and there's a lot of research and various entities going on about this, what's the optimal sort of density of trees that's gonna allow us to maintain our snow packs and our soils? The thing that will lead to the greatest amount of erosion and even loss of soil into the atmosphere as we've seen our catastrophic wildfires. And when that happens, they showed a slide of the ways that debris flows that come off of that kind of an event can even block the entire channel so that we can't convey any water downstream. So it's complicated, but it's an area where there's a lot of work going on recognizing that potential for erosion and trying to keep the biggest trigger of it, the wildfire from becoming the dominant process in those landscapes. It's also important, the vegetation is also critically important in the riparian system. Oh, in the Rio Grande, we really have those two things, we don't have sort of trees all along the way in between we have moisture up in the mountains and then we have moisture down in the river valleys. And there's an important relationship between the river and the riparian system which we've talked about is changing. We need the connection between the river and the flood plain. And these trees, especially these monotypic stands of salt seater and these thickets of Russian olive have continued to do the same thing that those jetty jacks did back when we installed those in the 1950s to trap that channel in place and prevent that erosion that we're actually looking for that allows the geomorphic processes to go on in the river. So I'm not sure if that answered your question. This is Chandrapathak with the US Army Corps of Engineers at headquarters. So they're not necessarily questions but they are more additional information and probably comments. So one of the idea was about the research and specifically about the operation rule curves what we call it for water management purposes are pretty rigid. And to alleviate that, Corps of Engineers is doing a research project. And the research project is titled as Forecast in Farm Reservoir Operations. Currently we have two sites specifically Lake Mendocino on Russian River and the second one is Prado Dam in Orange County, California. So those two we are continuing to work through it and we have a process that determine as how they can be applied in other situations. So that's piece of information for everyone to share. The second part, so I have total of three. So second part is about sedimentation. Many of our reservoirs are filling up because of sedimentation. And this is also due to the changes in the atmospheric conditions and so on. And that we currently have a database which has out of about 350 closer to reservoirs. We have about one third of that. The data's are available and we find out of that about five or six are beyond the dead storage area. So they are filling up in the areas where we have a conservation of water is being reduced as well as flood control spaces reduced. So that's something we are concerned about and we do not have adequate data in other reservoirs because sedimentation data collection where it comes from is a fairly expensive process to go through and it takes several years of data. So that's something you got to know about. That's one of the challenges we are worrying about. Subsequently, we need to figure it out how to remove economically the sediment deposits behind the dams. That's a challenge. That's a research or potential research work we are currently looking into to pursuing it. And the third and the last part is which was brought up before and that was about the forest fires because of the forest fires and this relates with the second part because of the forest fires, we have subsequent rainfall which produces significant only not the quantity of runoff but the sediment load generated from that forest fire which again increases sediment movement into our reservoirs. So that is one of the major concern which we need to address in our discussions. So that's all those three things I have, thank you. I have a comment to the forecast informed reservoir operations is real, it does work. There's an excellent example of that in the, it's not in the Upper Mississippi Basin, it's actually in the Lake Superior Basin but a privately owned storage reservoir by Minnesota Power. The state of Minnesota and Minnesota Power came to the Weather Service because of huge conflict with how people that lived on the lake lived on the downstream river about how that was being managed over the winter to prepare for spring runoff and then subsequently too much runoff and not causing flooding, not enough runoff, the lake doesn't fill up and they started working with us in the tools that we do have to look at past climate and project what likely based on how things were progressing through the winter, what it was likely and then they could adjust the reservoir drawdown based on that. That's a great area of research to see where that can apply, where that can be successful. These are privately owned, a lot of the dams that are hydropower in the Upper Mississippi Basin are privately owned and to encourage that type of operation to mitigate local problems would be an excellent area of research to really quantify where this has been going on, how it works, where it will work and where it won't work. And I think this is something that the boards here could look further into. Thanks Dr. Patek for that, for pointing out those two great areas of research by the core. Reclamation's also been involved in this forecast informed reservoir operation work particularly on Lake Bendicino and I see it as a great indicator of a path forward that's critical between our two agencies which is to use the reservoirs as best we can to balance the storing of water that we need for supply downstream with the need to maintain storage space for flood management operations and balancing those two is really tricky and the forecasting is giving us a tool to figure out when those larger storms are likely to happen and so therefore we need that storage space and when we can actually store. We helped fund that under our Reservoir Operations Pilot Initiative and we've also been doing some work in the Rio Grande Basin on the reservoirs on the Rio Chama along those same lines trying to follow the lead of Lake Bendicino. I'd also like to comment on this reservoir sedimentation. The core has done some work on that in the out of their Albuquerque district on some local reservoirs in New Mexico and it's fascinating to me to see how that sedimentation doesn't necessarily fill the reservoirs. When we installed these reservoirs back 50 years ago or whatever that's what we expected to happen is that the sedimentation would come down right up to the dam and the reservoirs would fill and then not be useful anymore and what we're seeing is that how that sedimentation affects the system depends very strongly on how we operate those reservoirs and so in the Cochini Reservoir I think we saw some pictures of there where we had the lost conscious fire and the debris flows come down and it filled that reservoir. The Corps of Engineers as part of this work did a bathymetric survey of that reservoir and you can still see the haul roads on the bottom of that reservoir. Like there's no sediment in the reservoir itself but in the channel upstream in the canyon upstream that feeds that reservoir there are 88 feet of sediment accumulation and so we think about it as oh well then our reservoirs will be gone we can't use those anymore and we have to find a channel through or take the dam out but we think about it as actually it's blocking in some ways of operating it's blocking the river system that brings the water to the reservoir in the first place then our response is really different. Other systems where we tend to rather than have a steady recreation pool we tend to drain the water on a regular basis then we wind up having sediment build up around the outlet works and then a lot of it wind up going through our hydropower and outlet systems and have a really different challenge. So it says to us that we can use our management to change how that sediment and the problems associated with the sediment play out in the system and I'm sure Jack Schmidt will talk more about that this afternoon. Okay great I have we have nine minutes left and I have five people on my list. So my list is there was a believed gentleman back here that wanted to ask a question? No. And then I have an online visitor Dave, Scott, and Elizabeth. Just a brief comment in the detection and attribution of climate change we try to understand why we're seeing the trends we're seeing so we've done some work on detection and attribution of regional precipitation trends so we can actually use Steve showed the future projections as well as the observed trends if you look at historical forcing run trends then that tests our understanding of why we're actually seeing these trends and what that shows is that these trends in the upper Midwest are detectable they're unusual compared to expected natural variability they're consistent with anthropogenic forcing in some sense so we detect an anthropogenic influence in those basins but also the magnitude of the trends that we're seeing in the upper Mississippi River Basin are exceeding the historical run trends by a considerable amount so the models in run in historical mode are actually underestimating the increase of precipitation we're seeing in that basin so I think that's a cautionary note for using such models for future projections we have to understand why these models are underestimating these changes so maybe we can discuss this more in the science session but I just want to raise that issue at this point thank you. Quick response or should you have it? Yeah. I think I said that before that it may be that we're seeing that in that convective that hardest to predict element of the atmosphere is that convection and that is one of the challenges and we will get into it a little bit more in the science section about what Noah's proposing to do about some of that. This is important information in the arid regions as well I'll note we are experiencing and projecting projected to experience increases in extreme precipitation events even if overall our amount of water available both from precipitation and leftover after evaporation is projected to decrease and a place where this matters to us is related to the discussion that we had on the forecast informed reservoir operations is how do we balance our water supply that we can store in those reservoirs with our need for flood control if we don't understand how those larger events are occurring so that support that it's valuable in both basins. From an online question Ingrid Padilla from the Karst Waters Institute there is quite amount of state-of-the-art research being conducted on these issues how is this research being integrated into the needs talked about? Is academic research such as that supported by NSF becoming well integrated with these needs and uses by stakeholders? I mean we hope so I think we're all working as scientists and as scientists do we tend forums like this we read the literature we try to try to gain an understanding as best we can of all of the research that's going on so that we can so for each science project that we have everything that we propose we can build on what else is being done and hopefully science is working as it should towards that Yeah speaking from the operational water prediction side surface water prediction side of the federal government in some sense remember my firehouse analogy is that we're not getting to improve the fire trucks look back what we're doing we're just trying to keep up so we are trying to implement technology as it comes along but again I'll get into the science part of it I think we have hit a little bit of a roadblock and we need a little jarring in that part of the hydrology researched operations we need a little and it's not just the hydrology part it's the precipitation too so we'll hit that up this afternoon Thanks I have Dave Scott and then Elizabeth remember lunch is between Yeah yeah yeah you keep reminding when you say that to me Cathy's first off thanks all three of you you've done a great job this morning trying to characterize this complex integrated approach that we need to look at our river basins I have a and I want to shift my question is not based so much on science but it's on the governance and policy piece of this clearly we built a plumbing system whether it's the Mississippi the Rio Grande the Colorado the Columbia that was built on a certain set of hydraulic information in Colorado we had a very limited amount of information that set the stage for building dams and reservoirs and clearly that's changed Steve your comments specifically told us things are changing and they're changing fast in some of our river basins the complex nature of our river basins though do require cooperation collaboration and a flexible approach to water management my question is for both the Rio Grande and the Mississippi in your opinion because I know you can't necessarily speak for the agencies etc but do we have the proper policies and governances in place to allow us to embrace this new hydrologic regime whether it's too much or too little that we are facing and simply do we have the right things in place to implement these no all right give me your answer what do we how do we fix it and I would say pretty much the same thing you know there are good cooperative relationships on the upper Mississippi River but then so often there are specific laws or specific policies that hamper the way we can think about how we can adjust to the system and so you know every time we take a step forward it seems like there's something pulling us back again and so I you know I just thinking about some of the levy policies and that sort of thing that right now are are hampering the way that we can look at the system and that there needs to be some tweaking of that and probably in a pretty major way if we're going to deal with these extremes that that are at our door right now and we don't have a lot of time to change them so and I talked a little bit on their on the Rio Grande about the rigidity both of our reservoir operations protocols and that's something that we've had a lot of discussion about in the in the last year looking at working on that reservoir operations pilot program like we worked on Lake Mendocino and um I'm sorry I was wondering about compacts certainly we've yes thank you we've hit on quite a bit today you know we're in the lawsuit in the lawsuit in the Supreme Court over the Rio Grande compact and you know we'll see if that leads to changes but you know I showed one example of the way that the logic of it doesn't really make sense another place that I mentioned was in the prior appropriation system there's an incentive for use the water or lose it and even if we don't mostly the states don't take away the water rights there is that threat and people act as if there is that threat so it's an incentive to use more water so there's certainly a lot of ways where we need people like Melanie Stansbury to to help us to find ways to tweak and modify those systems but then also there's ways that legal decisions might help help us have the impetus to change them and they'll I think I think the focus of this afternoon's policy discussion will be exactly on that topic thank you Scott so again thanks for great talks and really enjoyed it I want to build a little bit on what David asked which is we've clearly both these basins are sub basins within a much larger system that's focused on the Mississippi for a moment here Gretchen you said I think you said there are maybe six sub basins involved in the total system and as Steve pointed out what happens in one has impacts on the others downstream some really challenging ways are there any examples where we're actually doing something right in terms of cross sub basin management I'm thinking of looking ahead to this afternoon's discussion but I'm wondering if there's any are any best practices out there we can look to to give us some hope that there there is potential to resolve these challenges particularly across the bigger mega basins one particular example that in what I've been doing with with the restoration program on the upper Mississippi River that's been in place for 33 years and is an incredible example of restoration and monitoring I'd sure like to see that on the lower Mississippi River and export that down there actually I'd like to export it to all the other five basins because it hasn't moved on to those other places I do think that there are some some good examples that being one that that's primary in my head in terms of what has gone really well and and should be an example for others the lower Mississippi River is dictated well that's not the right word anyways it is managed for flood risk management there is an incredible system of levees floodways and it has been able to weather for the most part these big floods that have happened over the last whether it's 2011 or it's 2018 2019 all of these big floods that have happened it's it's a it's a well engineered system I'd like to see that well engineered system fluffy with a little bit of green stuff in there too and then I'd be really comfortable with thinking about the system in that sort of way so I think there's some exchanges that can certainly go from the upper miss to the lower miss I'm excited about the about reclamation's basin study program which I work on and believe that it's a really powerful tool to bring together all of the stakeholders in the basin to start to work together to play what if game games about what the future might look like and about what we can do in the future together one of the things that's really powerful about them is that we bring basin stakeholders and water managers together in a way that doesn't have a hierarchy because decisions aren't made in that program but they can be they can be played out in models so that we can all see the consequences but people can maybe take a step back from their sort of holding their armor up to protect their use of water to actually work together collaboratively to see what how different kinds of changes might play out and how different kinds of responses might play out so that collectively in an environment that isn't part of the decision making process we can help inform those decisions I'd say the best example of inner basin working together to come out is in the flood risk management in that the operation of whatever storage is available in doing that in concert whether it's on the Ohio on the middle Mississippi on the Missouri side in doing that in concert whether it be the 2011 flood where which was basin wide or in 2019 didn't quite have the same quite of the same because Ohio wasn't participating as much but they do work together the divisions work together on the core work with the weather service the forecasts to use the best available information for the best possible outcome but you know I'd be remiss not to say that there aren't aren't downsides to some of that and this year with the operation of the Bonnie Kerry spillway to push the water over to Lake Pontchartrain if you hadn't read the news on that ecological and economic issues so there are it's not all pretty but but again again the holistic approach of looking at the entire basin there's some cooperation there's some there's some positives it's not all the negative Elizabeth final question I'll be quick I thank you so much for really wonderful and very disturbing morning um I I have appreciated that all of you have talked about your personal experiences and how in your relatively short from a geologic time frame anyway lifetimes this is really kind of different how do we think about trillions of dollars of infrastructure investment and kind of training the future workforce what skills do they need to have to be able to engage with the system where we don't know what's going to happen and and you're locked into legal and regulatory and social systems that are based on a world that no longer exists one young millennial colleague who works with us now I challenged her about that question and she said well we're raised to be scrappy you know we this is what we've been hearing about through our entire lives and so we don't they don't inherently haven't adopted that stationarity way of thinking that people of my generation have and so they're willing to think differently I also love the I had a slide up about this this prize competition approach under the America competes act where we can get different kinds of brains and different kinds of thinking people from different communities to address problems that we've normally sort of kept within the water management community for example and see if we could get some different ways of thinking and some new ideas but yeah I've I it's the this is why I love all my engagement with the University of New Mexico because it is these younger people who are who are giving me hope that we can we can begin to tackle these problems they seem like they're ready yeah and I I agree with all that and I think the only thing I would maybe add to it is this whole idea of thinking about whole systems and because we have a whole system dynamic change in any one of these river systems and to kind of understand how they all integrate together and if we're going to put something back together that works for people and for nature we need to think about that whole system so to you know and that goes you know whole system policy thinking whole system from a a natural resource standpoint from a geomorphology geomorphology perspective all these different perspectives but to really think about how it all fits together because we're there's going to have to be lots of different places we're we're we're going to have to touch down to create the change wrap it up before lunch here to come back to the social scientists nothing happens without human sacrifice people are somebody's going to have to give up their paradigm so that that you know for the quote common good or whatever and I think that'll be touched on a little bit this afternoon and some of the other talks not mine but that's what I've experienced in in dealing with this and in whether it's been flood-flighting who's inside the line who's outside the line when they're going to put up a temporary levy you know who's going who's going to not have enough water in their reservoir to vote next summer things like someone's going to sacrifice that's where the social scientists have to be part of the equation and and when coming up with with policies and things going forward when it comes to water and if we work more holistically and in more sort of community-minded approach then it doesn't seem so much like win-lose but it feels like we're all contributing to the success of the larger system thank you everybody for a really amazing morning really interesting lots of great questions so let's thank thank our speakers one more time we now have about 40 minutes for lunch 50 minutes guess we we ate a little into our lunch so the food is out there help yourself come back bring it here or wherever you want and we will reconvene at 130 thank you thank you I'm going to just turn it over to Michael Manga who's going to run the show for the next section we are very short we're very tightly scheduled so just please keep in mind that speakers to really stick to your 13 to 15 minutes and try to transition quickly between thank you yeah taser so welcome back from lunch everyone we're beginning beginning this afternoon with our science panel discussion on the theme of what are the greatest scientific challenges for understanding the dynamics of large river basins and understanding the changes in space and time and so we will begin with the upper Mississippi river basin followed by the Rio Grande basin and we'll begin with Steve Buen and quick introductions to Steve Buen for those joining us who were not here this morning Steve Buen is a hydrologist in charge of the north central river forecast center for the national weather service at the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration thank you and you're going to give me the time quick okay all right oh it's right there okay all right so he's queuing up the presentation here I'll read you the slides not good at not good at stand-up comedy so we'll stick here okay so let's get right to it if the clicker is going to work over this far kind of be that far away now my time is running I lost 30 seconds okay so I want to I want to thank Dr. Pedro Restrepo former NOAA hydrologic science coordinator and actually my predecessor that's a hydrologist in charge and Dr. Drew Gronwald who's at the University of Michigan for helping me pull some of this together especially kind of how to get this over the top and that really we're I'm going to talk about four things here the foundational observations understanding the physical processes I'm sure you all get these slides so you can read read these things understand the anthropogenic process anthropogenic process are huge and then a little bit of models and forecasting so let's start in that you know we may not be observing what we need to observe I'm just going to throw that out there there's a lot of times when you're working in operational water prediction is that do we know this do we not know what do we want to know and we're not we're not sure on that do we get things at the adequate resolution that we want that's another big question is observing the streamflow network at the huck eight or huck 12 level sufficient and we'll talk a little bit about that in greater detail I'd say that it's not Doppler radar was great for tornado prediction but where's the magic observation tool for science soil science in hydrology I don't if you got it bring it out let's go but soil observations we're I don't think we observe the soil like we should there's very actually very few observations the universities have soil measuring some states like Iowa wants to put some soil measuring at every county I just think we take it for granted we're not observing that enough but can satellites we say well we got satellites up there but is it fine enough resolution for the detail that we want right now hydrologic river forecasting we're producing a forecast of streamflow at about the huck eight level about 350 square miles the base at that basin level well there's people that say well that's not good enough what about my neighborhood well we'll get a little bit of the challenge of that of why we're not doing that right now cold season observations cold season observations are very difficult difficult to do it in remote sensing difficult to do it in situ and there's getting to be less and less people that want to live in the cold observations cold climate streamflow scale I said said that before I don't think we're we're just starting to look at things happening at the field scale or something that the small small watershed level and we'll talk a little bit about that et cetera goes on so environmental conditions leading up to these climate events is that there's something that we need to observe and know what's local but we also need to know global global circulation and that's a huge challenge especially when you're in the mid continent we're going to the very one of the very last slides I have shows the complexity of looking at at the circulation that drives the weather in the middle of this continent because you're sitting out in California in the Sierras you got a pretty good idea with a strong El Nino that you're going to get atmospheric river conditions in the winter and you're going to drive snowfall I don't have any of those corollaries I don't have anything like that in my area where I can tell people what what we're going to be able to expect climate-wise out there it's just too complicated all right this is a big one this is from University of Minnesota Jeff Strock Michelle Dietz the Mississippi watershed is a working watershed 60% of the land use is agriculture that agriculture has been changing dramatically over time but it especially changed in the 1970s when it was cold war we're going fence road to fence road we're going to outproduce everybody in the entire world we're going to win the agricultural war we took pasture land we converted most farms from past year from growing animals livestock over to row crop agriculture what does that do what does that do and are we measuring these things they'll say maybe not it affects everything evaporation and transpiration that cycle can on 60% of the landscape if you got a year like this year and all the crops are going in late you changed the ET cycle how it was that is that predictable how do we put that in the long-term models that impact things here's the biggest elephant I consider in the room right here drainage plumbing system vast areas of the upper Mississippi watershed are a plumbing system and they've been that way since the turn of the last century tile everybody know what tile drainage is tile drainage it was literally clay tiles that were 12 inches long put in the ground by hand or by machine digging it out with small separations between them to allow the water to get in there then they invented plastic tile and it can go in very easily there's no science on that the science there's no science on how that works in each soil type what it does to actually oh the water goes out now it's going to go in the hydrolyzed cycle anyway you get drainage when how can I predict it we did we can't predict it it's on probably if this if the landscape 60 percent it might be 50 percent tiled right now so we went from tiles pre 1970 which were just big pipes in the ground draining some low lens so the cattle wouldn't break their legs to a pattern tile which is literally almost like quasi-paving landscape so we need research on that infiltration a working soil my challenge I challenge that a working soil is not like a scientific soil a working soil that's being tilled doing whatever to it growing things in it is not healthy for infiltration getting that water down there it's efficient at growing something for an annual crop and and from the research I've seen from the USDA natural resource conservation service a healthy soil creates biotic macro pores through through root masses through bugs worms whatever that allow infiltration to go in there the only macro pores I get to work with that help infiltration is if I get a drought and it cracks the soils and allows the water to go in very very difficult then to look at that when we're calibrating a model we're basing it on history so calibrating okay we have this much stream flow in that 300 square miles we twist some knobs change our percolation choose this change our storage of the soil and we can represent that stream flow well that's that's not taking into account exactly what's happening in every square mile or every square kilometer of that basin which we're going to get into here and why things are breaking down so we have a very much a working watershed that's got only a small amount of quote undisturbed where you got forested regions or some grasslands that are undisturbed most of it's disturbed and I challenge that for modeling it we don't understand it we don't have the observations so drainage it's a moving target I was just out in Indiana last week and and we were out of of of demonstration of some project for for water quality and that and there's coils and coils of tile ready to go into ground as soon as the corn crops taken off the coils of tile are going in so as the precipitation increases the farmers just keep putting it in even though corn is less than $4 a bushel urbanization and the issues of groundwater stormwater wastewater management and how that impacts the stream flow because all of this adds up so we're trying to model of what the flow at St. Louis it's not just what's happening in Minneapolis and wherever it's at every one of those cities and how they're working with their water so that we can model it levees they can hardly stay ahead of this nonlinear increase in runoff as what Gretchen talked about these levees are breaching and we see the water leave the hydrograph when a levee breaches then that's storage here's a potential potential not solution but a way to mitigate some of the flooding is paid storage you you take some of the water off the river strategically as you move down through the system and take it off at various places and people get compensated they actually probably shouldn't get compensated they probably should pay the pay the farmers who did drainage because they got the nutrients when they put the water off dams don't always follow the rules rule curve they need to be they adapt on the fly humans humans touch it agriculture again agricultural practice thousands of people work the soil how are those soils reacting how are we making measurements there is a project going on through the Great Lakes restoration initiative that is looking at observing field scale runoff observing field soils and looking at year after year after year and seeing how that changes based on agricultural practices and how that regulates the runoff at a 40 acre 20 acre 60 acre field groundbreaking research but only being done at a very small scale so how do we model right now we model water our hydrologic models are on lumped lumped scale we're trying to get to that distributed scale I was sitting in class in 1990 the University of Minnesota the professor says well we teaching you this stuff about you know catchment scale modeling but it's all going to this grid based modeling sorry 30 years later we're not there yet they're there they run that do not give us the answers to beat how the lump model works the National Weather Service did two distributed model in a comparison projects about eight ten years ago the distributed models could not beat the lumped scale models that's all published literature we need we need to figure out why that's not working the way it's working in order to make the advancements which I'm going to talk about here in the middle we got great digital elevation models through LiDAR of what the landscape looks like what about in the rivers maybe we need to put channel mapping instruments on all those commercial boats that are going traversing the river to give us an idea of what the river actually looks like so we can model that with our hydraulic models one thing that Noah and several other agencies are taking on in the national water model working at modeling in that grid based environment one kilometer across the landscape groundbreaking got to the super computer it's on the same super computer now that run the atmospheric models we can tie it in to output from the atmospheric models but then you're tying into that what they can't do which is the precipitation but this is groundbreaking and we're working at making this a sandbox environment to where you can work at a local problem where you can look at things in a local environment and think of it as Linux how Linux got built from the ground up through a bunch of people working on it this is envisioned to be that way so as we can build and test these things because hydrology it's all local there's all local issues in hydrology all over the country how do you an only way to bring that to bear what happens in Madison, Wisconsin down to what's how that impacts ultimately what happens at St. Louis is by doing it through some large integrated modeling system precipitation I got this slide from Dr. Eucalini the head of the Weather Service and Dr. David DeWitt the head of Climate Prediction Center that the precipitation grand challenge it's going to take this is going to take a global effort they say is that none of the models none of the models are actually doing an adequate job of predicting that graph there in order to actually have skill true skill you'd have to be above what the over the top of the graph so it just doesn't have it and so there's a huge grand challenge here to increase the predictability of precipitation at all scales of time okay and the atmospheric it's the atmospheric circulation at the middle knowing at the middle attitudes it's not there we've seen it and maybe in the in the prediction of the of the precipitation the Midwest is at the center of about five different ways of getting moisture into the system unlike when you're at the coast it's pretty much driven right by what's at the coast you've got the pineapple express coming off of the southwest pacific maritime polar you've got the off of mexico various times of the year these are important drivers of the precipitation is the research and understanding how that interacts and brings about this precipitation in the center of the north american continent is a huge challenge so and I think that's my slide and I got done so and then it just summarized was on the humans touch and manipulate the water on and within the landscape how do we figure that out how do we figure the science of human manipulation of the water in order to be able to predict it that's the that's the process problem going forward and five four three two one fantastic we're going to save all the questions and discussion for a panel discussion when all four panel members will come up to the front and we'll do like we did before asking questions next up we have Jeff Houser who's a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center and he's also an adjunct with the Department of Biology at the University of Wisconsin across okay good afternoon I appreciate the opportunity to to speak here today I'm going to touch on four things and each of them pretty briefly I want to give you a little more background on the upper Mississippi River restoration program because my presentation is is to a large extent based on my experiences within that program and I want to give a short overview of the various ways we've seen the river change over the last couple of decades and I want to touch on a few points from an ongoing assessment of the ecological resilience of the Upper Mississippi River that we're working on and then close with some challenges posed by changing changing climate and discharge and some of the related science questions so Gretchen introduced this program in her presentation this morning it is called the Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program it's got two major parts a habitat rehabilitation and enhancement project part which is largely what it says it's it's restoring habitats that have been lost for various reasons throughout the system and then a long-term resource monitoring part which is what I'm more directly affiliated with in these these habitat projects generally focus on restoring some aspect of the geomorphology of the river or geomorphological processes to recreate certain biotic and chemical conditions in various places in the river so they involve things like rebuilding islands that have been lost to erosion dredging backwaters that have filled in altering hydrologic connections between channels and off-channel areas to create certain kinds of habitat conditions I do want to point out this this is an unusual program I think in the breadth of the partnership that's involved the program is an Army Corps of Engineers program the funding's a line item in the federal budget that goes to the core and it's then distributed to the various partner agencies that are involved so USGS provides leadership for the long-term monitoring the actual data collection in the field is done by state agencies in each of the upper Mississippi river states Fish and Wildlife Service obviously is the owner of the refuge and has a big role in what goes on in that part of the river so most of the data I'm going to talk about today comes from the long-term resource monitoring element of that program and I'm going to not spend very much time on this at all but we have six study reaches five on the upper Mississippi river going from from north to south one on the Illinois river on an annual basis we do relatively intensive monitoring of water quality aquatic vegetation and the fish populations in those in those reaches we also have a systemic bathymetry coverage so water depth at various discharges and flood plain elevation data as well as land cover data at various points in time my historical coverage from the 1890s and then to cattle data layers since about 1990 and one use of that data is to look at how for example flood plain forests have been changing over time so a few examples of actually I want to say one other thing about this all the data from that is is available online both in raw formats and also in various summarizing graphical format so it's actually a really great resource for folks working on the river or just interested in the river so um I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the changes that have occurred in addition to some of the kinds of changes we already been spending a lot of time today thinking about so when the locks and dams went in mostly in the 30s there were some immediate changes the biggest effect was to sort of remove the low end of the hydrograph so a certain below a certain level of river stage just wasn't seen anymore because the locks and dams were put in to sustain navigation and to prevent those low water periods but the effects of those locks and dams sort of accrued over over time so this is 1938 this is uh lower pool four near Stoddard, Wisconsin which just is a little way little way south of La Crosse this picture is a little hard to see but this is sort of the old what used to be the river and you can see the shiny stuff here and here this is a recently flooded flood plain as a result of the locks and dams going in and then if you look at this think about this upper right quadrant here this is 1961 so 25 years or so later you can see there's still a lot of this island structure left from that when that flooding occurred you know another 30 years later those islands are basically gone so there's been a very long slow response to those locks and dams that is ongoing so this is this is a moving river even in the absence of the changes we've been talking about today there's been some biological changes that have been really evident in parts of the river so in the late 1980s in early 1990s there was a dramatic decline in vegetation aquatic vegetation throughout the system and associated with that was a substantial increase in turbidity and especially in these large open water and pounded areas are really big flood plain backwaters beginning in sort of the early 2000s here depending on where you are in the river there was a substantial recovery of vegetation that began and has sustained itself since and associated with that is a substantial decline in turbidity so less turbid means more clear and the causes for those dynamics over time aren't super well understood there's a lot of things that have been shown to contribute at various points there was a period of low discharge in the early to mid 2000s there has been a substantial decline in common carp in the upper Mississippi River which can through bioturbation have a negative effect on vegetation there's been a variety of management actions including a restoration of islands to break up fetch some I think Gretchen briefly mentioned some water level management type efforts that have gone on to try to encourage vegetation to recover all of these things have been shown at various times and places to have an effect and what has sort of happened is the upper part of the upper Mississippi River has had a pretty strong recovery of vegetation and the lower part has not and this was just another way to visualize that data this is pool eight this is the results of the long-term vegetation monitoring from 1998 so you can see sort of green is more of edge blue is less of edge and how it changed between then and 2010 another change that is really evident more in the southern reaches is the proliferation of Asian carp in the river and so blue is silver carp increasing over time during that and this is just mass per unit effort of electrofishing and concurrent with that is a decline in native species biomass so some food web changes and some connections through the plankton populations in the river and then the last thing I want to mention in terms of some of the biology is the flood plain forests so as you know flood plain forests are tolerant of flooding but they grow on the flood plain and not in the river for a reason and so as there's more flooding more often you have more tree mortality associated with that historically that tree mortality would sort of reset a trajectory from an initial standard initiation through old growth but there's been some invasive species present in the river now reed canary grass is one of them that as soon as the forest if you have a mortality event and the reed canary gas gets really established it's very difficult for flood plain forest to re-establish and so that invasive species plus more water more of the time is creating a system where there's a lot of concern about what the future holds for the forests on the flood plain so we've spent some time thinking generally about the ecological resilience of the upper Mississippi river and what might contribute to it and so this slide is just some basic characteristics so the river is oriented to north south direction maybe this is really obvious but this means that over the course of really long periods of time we have some really ancient fish species because they've been able to go north and south as conditions change it's harder for them to go north and south now because of the lock and dam system most of those locks and dams are open part of the year and aren't a complete barrier migration a few of them are pretty close to that and fish passage was a big topic of conversation for a long time but that conversation got a lot more complicated when asian carp became a concern and so there was an interest in inhibiting some kinds of migration and the details of that conversation are ongoing there's a lot of lateral diversity in the river and connections among those areas and so that lateral diversity creates a whole bunch of hydrologic conditions depth, water velocity that accommodates a lot of different kinds of species sort of regardless of what the overall discharge conditions are and then there's for especially the upper part of the river there's an extremely diverse fish community an extremely diverse vegetation community which likely provides some redundancy and some diverse redundancy in the face of changes but there's some caveats to that for example in the vegetation community there's a few species that are particularly critical as waterfowl food a wild celery is one of them and arrowhead is another one and there are not a lot of species that do what that species does and so that's sort of a potentially a point of vulnerability in the system because it's a critically important flyway now as much of the other places where those migrating waterfowl used to use have been converted to their land uses the river is sort of the last remaining highway for many of those birds and so we sort of took those ideas and I'm not going to have time to talk about this in any detail but I'm just going to mention that it's there and you can ask me about it later we took some of these general ideas and tried to convert them into some indicators of general resilience and then tried to scale them in such a way that we could visualize them with on these various plots so here's a whole bunch of indicators that I'm not going to tell you about and each of these axes is one of those indicators and closer to the middle is associated with less resilience further out more resilience so if you see more color that's at least in theory supporting this idea of more resilience and this gets back to something I think Gretchen said earlier this is the upper impounded reach the more northern part it's the lower impounded reach this is what's called the open river below the last lock and dam in the Illinois River and so you can sort of see some of the implications of that we also tried as part of that assessment to just do a really simple description of the ecosystem starting with the valued uses and ecosystem services so we had some workshops and discussions and identifying what were the major ecological resources needed to support those and those were sort of the basis of some very simple conceptual models that worked from those ecological major resources to the major drivers of those research resources internal to the system we were concerned about as well as more external to the system that we had sort of self-defined and I just want to two points about this and again not getting into any detail but the papers out there for those of you that are interested one is that the management actions through the restoration program directly affect a lot of these things depth, velocity, connectivity water level fluctuations are associated with the locks and dams but all of those things are also affected by temperature and discharge so management and restoration is working to alter these drivers at the same time that changing external conditions are also altering those drivers and the net effect of that sort of remains poorly understood this was just one quick example of what a rehabilitation project looks like so this is what I showed you earlier where those islands were completely eroded here is where they were basically rebuilt and this is the town of Stoddard to give you an idea of the scale but this is that project and ultimately that project was covering most of the lower third of pool 8 so some of these projects are quite large I got a couple minutes to talk about some challenges and some related questions just from a very sort of narrow focus there are sort of three kinds of challenges related to this the changes in climate and discharge related to some of the restoration and management that's done within the river some of them are really simple logistical things such as just getting access to sites being able to work on sites when things are underwater they're hard to work on some of the slightly more interesting and complicated things are related to designing projects they design projects generally based on the range of expected conditions those projects are going to be operating in and as we know less and less of what to expect for those conditions those sorts of decisions become more complicated but what I think is actually most interesting is and what we've probably thought about less is what this means for project objectives and you know what point do we need to start reconsidering exactly what we're restoring things for and what those objectives are giving the the reality of of how things are changing around us so then the questions and these are pretty general but these are the kinds of things we're really thinking a lot about now is as we look at the river and the changes in in discharge that we're expecting to see changes in water level that we've already seen where do we think the largest changes in the river and flood plain geomorphology are going to occur and if you look at that whole system where the areas that we expect to see the most change in terms of the hydrologic changes what do we expect those to do for water exchange rates between the river and across the flood plain both the terrestrial at they're at parts of the flush plain that are generally terrestrial or those that are more aquatic and what is that going to do to the overall distribution of water depth velocity and residence time in the river because these are sort of the fundamental building blocks or characteristics to determine what can live where and so understanding how those changes are going to happen is one part of it and then understanding what those changes mean for the diverse ecosystem services the river provides is the other part and we have a lot of really good data for some of these things now and and trying to come up with better anticipation of these things will allow us to to use that information to to better anticipate and manage I think into the future so we're now going to return back to the Rio Grande River and we'll first up is Jack Schmidt who's a professor in the Department of at Utah State University in the Department of Watershed Sciences where he leads the Center for Colorado River Studies in the future of the Colorado River Project before returning to Utah State he served as the Chief of the U.S. Geological Survey Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center Thanks I have too many slides fasten your seat belts so the Colorado River and the Rio Grande are the two great rivers of North America that are truly binational rivers in each case they carry Rocky Mountain snowmelt across large expansive desert areas where water is extensively used of course the Colorado was long known as America's Nile and in that sense so is the Rio Grande so I want to emphasize a number of points at Dag I'm just going to riff off of Dagmar for a while but a few points Long history of irrigation development from the observations of first Spanish contact in New Mexico but the opening of the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado to agricultural development expanded greatly consumptive water use there such that by 1890 the amount of irrigated agriculture in south central Colorado was 50% more than all the irrigated land in New Mexico despite the fact that New Mexico have been practicing irrigation for centuries keep that in mind the other thing is that by the late 1800s the system was completely screwed up such that New Mexico was filing legal complaints in the Supreme Court against Colorado Mexico was filing complaints against the United States for drying up the system that's why the 1906 treaty was negotiated that's why Elephant Butte was built and that's why the oldest gauge in the United States is Rio Grande at Embudo it was to measure a screwed up system that's why the oldest gauge is there so we have no pre-development hydrology for the basin we publish in Water Resources research a strategy to reconstruct the natural flow of the river Todd Blythe and I published this for the northern branch and then working with my colleague Sam Sandoval Solis at UC Davis we looked through Mexican records and this is a picture of the unperturbed Rio Grande the Rio Grande really is a river with two headwater branches what I call the northern branch and what we've been referring to is the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos they are two nearly equal flows that then passed to the sea and the river was a fully connected river system that is the natural river in the era of gauging so it's already screwed up but elephant butte dam hasn't been completed yet the flow records at the confluence of the conchos and the northern branch show that coming down the northern branch was a snow mill pulse albeit smaller than it really should have been and everything but and the black is the Rio Grande below the conchos and everything between red and black is what came in from the Rio Conchos so the Rio Conchos's flow is a completely different hydrology coming out of the Sierra Madre Occidental during the summer and fall season and the Rio Grande downstream is the mix of those two large-scale construction of dams this is simply the increase cumulative increase in reservoir storage with time this is on the Rio Grande and then the difference is what was constructed on the conchos and this is the sum of all reservoir storage above Amistad reservoir so there's quite a lot of reservoir storage that allowed massive increase in consumptive use and in red is the average hydrology for the last 50 years today and the difference is this is what's lost out of the system so the only reason we talk about a river with a forgotten reach and no water here is because of consumptive water use it's not that that's nature not that that was employed but we should remember that so this is the daily resolution average hydrology of what the river would have in the absence of humans and in red is the average hydrology for the last 50 years and this is the hydrology of the river just upstream of where the Rio conchos comes through it is a fully utilized river such that this river has nothing to do with this river it is a completely fragmented and disconnected system and downstream on the above the conchos what's coming out of the conchos there's massive ag development in the Rio conchos and then below that is sort of an estimated hydrology and in red is a modern hydrology it's a completely transformed river from stem to stern so humans matter you got to get this right that long-term historical data provides an image and a reminder that that's a river system that the native ecosystem developed its cues for and if you're trying to restore those elements of the native ecosystem in something that transformed it's one heck of a struggle the next message for western rivers sediment is the other half of the game you forget about sediment you don't have anything this is the average pre-european contact sediment flux Missouri first Colorado second Rio Grande third is estimated by Bob Mead years ago we know that if you perturb the balance of flow and sediment you can induce either aggregation or degradation below dams and we learned that right away when elephant butte was completed in the first part of the 20th century and we created a zone of sediment deficit and bed incision all the way down to El Paso Juarez and then below that all of this sediment when here plus the tribes came in an aggregational zone and a degradational zone fundamental change so much aggregation here that eventually IBWC gave up and they just channelized the whole thing put it in levees put it in concrete through the city and said we're done with it the same thing happened below Cochiti but I'm not going to talk about the slide let me just make a point if you take all the or a whole lot of the water out of the river in the San Luis Valley but you keep dumping sediment in from all the desert trips in New Mexico with half the water guess what happens the problem is the bed upgrades the channel was completely connected to the flood plain flood plain connection wasn't a problem it was a societal crisis that's one reason why Cochiti was built was to provide flood control trap sediment induce sediment deficit have the river re-ensize its bed now we say ecologically the problem is the river is not connected to the flood plain good for society bad for Rio Grande silvery minnow that's a theme here bed incision on below on highway bridges in Chihuahua um and then further downstream no water lots of sediment the river completely fills up and the grades and completely shrinks and that's a story told by Ben Everett in the story of what's happened in the forgotten reach except that in an average channel with with time there's evidence of once the channel re-widened during the big snowmelt year of 1941 in the early 40s so there's a capacity to re-widen and an evidence of a disequilibrium channel there are other impacts on this river channelization and levies I could show abundant pictures in New Mexico this is the confluence of the Rio Grande northern France and the Rio Conchos in near Presidio and Oenaga and invasive vegetation Tamarisk is only one problem the big culprit on the international border is Arundo Donax which is an enormous problem Tamarisk is a trivial problem it's Arundo Donax 20-foot high cane dense I mean a hell of a challenge I could tell you stories about what's been involved there in the Rio Grande now we're below the Conchos the river is not Grande even in the National Park and our model here is that as sedimentation occurs within the channel during low flow years channel capacity is decreased as vegetation and sediment accumulates such that even with declining flows you have decreasing channel capacity such that the same flows reach higher and higher stage we have clear evidence of this in stage discharge relations and so there's mechanisms by which the river can continue to aggrate and I would hesitate when the remark is made the bed is in sizing look how high the banks are the banks are high because the flood plain aggrades not because the bed is necessarily going down but every once in a while a massive tropical depression parks over the Sierra Madre this is Oinaga, Presidio big flood coming down the Conchos and we still get massive floods on the lower part of the river which scour away some of the forest rejuvenate the habitat and so the long-term history of channel change in the big bend is narrowing reset with a flood narrowing reset with a flood and we need a mechanism we have to think about river management that accepts these big external forces and we need to understand what is the frequency at which these hurricane depressions park over the landscape as well as what goes on in the intervening period okay sediment is part of the deal and this is a program that I've been part of and led at GCMRC David Topping is the brains of this and the deal is if you're going to responsibly manage the river you guys you have to know how much sediment is in play and so the new cutting-edge science is using acoustic sensors to measure the backscatter and attenuation of sound waves to get continuous measurements of suspended sediment transport and this is simply one flood for two days showing a hydrograph at an upstream gauge at one end of Big Bend National Park and the same hydrograph at the downstream end of the park and this is the load of silting clay at the upstream end and you can't even see it and everything between the two got parked on the flood plain if we're going to manage the river we've got to understand these patterns and so we're trying to come up with a program for that all right so in conclusion on the northern branch we have big ag areas and if you want to solve the Rio Grande problem you've got to deal with the biggest user we keep talking about climate change like the biggest user isn't at the furthest upstream end that's the culprit not climate change and then oh we're trying to worry about some environmental issues but you know there's a big background similarly we have massive population needs we have some important ag areas and then we have the most wonderful environmental resource of the place in the Big Bend a source of bi-national collaboration the largest shared bi-national conservation area in North America outside of Alaska and the Yukon so last point the biggest problem to me in this whole game is the absence of a vision for a river that includes novel ecosystems we have a vision for exactly what we want in the Rio Grande and the Big Bend because we don't have as many federal agencies involved we have a clear set of goals of how to live with this interaction between hurricanes and otherwise massive water depletion we have steps of policy and science that are easy and hard to deal with sedimentation and vegetation and sediment delivery and so the geography is about people what makes the Rio Grande distinctive is the biggest user is the San Luis Valley it's as if the imperial irrigation district was at the other end of the watershed the place has been screwed up for a long time you cannot manage any western river unless you manage a sediment the river is disequilibrium in disequilibrium the ecological implications are enormous and the biggest challenge is we have novel ecosystems we get to play God which forces society to force all of us to decide what do we want for this river and the river is a binational river so last up we have Fred Phillips who's a professor emeritus of hydrology at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology thank you the topic of this meeting is challenges in river basin management and so I decided to sort of tackle that head on and look at the major challenges in both the 20th and the 21st centuries I thought a historical perspective might be helpful so in the early 20th century the big challenge was very different than today basically from the perspective of a New Mexican the problem was the big spring floods came across the northern border from Colorado they flowed pretty much unimpeded throughout the whole state and they flowed across the southern border into Texas and Mexico and New Mexicans were not able to make much use of them so this is summarized Jack already did a good job of presenting this stuff but this would have been the river in like say before 1870 and you can see here as Albuquerque is about down here and the flow of the river is essentially constant all the way through by the 1930s the flow of the river looked pretty much like this and it increases down to about here and then it goes down, down, down until it disappears in West Texas and that is due to consumptive use so the key to the story is actually the election of Teddy Roosevelt as president in 1901 he supported the concept of water resource development in the western United States and he appointed Frederick Newell to be the director of what was then called the U.S. Reclamation Service but before they could develop these water resources they had to have some principles to guide them in that effort and these were the objectives they wanted to have rational scientific management of the rivers they wanted the water resources to be developed efficiently and quickly and very important they wanted the water to be equitably distributed they did not want powerful moneyed interests to be able to gain control gain a monopoly and the quote common man to be cut out of the picture so Jack mentioned that the oldest gaging station in the United States is that in Ambuto and this is pictures of Ambuto and this is part of this program of scientific management of the water this is what river gaging looked like in 1889 not a very enviable thing especially in January in the Rio Grande Gorge this is the first class of proto river gagers and if you scan that quickly do you see anybody that looks familiar in that photo right there is Frederick Newell and he was in fact in charge of this school back in 1889 he had a long commitment to scientific data collection and use of that for rational water management okay the second part of the program was rapid efficient and equitable allocation those are societal goals not scientific goals and the key person in bringing this about was Morris Bean who can be considered the father of the doctrine of prior appropriation and Newell and Roosevelt ultimately insisted that before states get development projects irrigation projects they had to agree to institute prior appropriation so it became New Mexico territorial law in 1907 and when the territory became a state in 2012 it became part of the Constitution and the fundamental principles are first that natural water belongs to the public not to private interests however a right to use the water may be appropriated by putting it to beneficial use the beneficial use is key you can't just say I want to develop it and lock it up and first in time first in right and that is enforced when there's water shortage the most junior users are cut off in order of their temporal priority they're completely cut off right so that's called priority administration so how well is prior appropriation worked in practice the answer is in the areas for which it was intended which is newly created irrigation districts it works very well the people who who operate under it like it well it's widely used in the San Luis Valley of Colorado it is universally used however in industrial or urban settings it does not work at all so in the middle Rio Grande which is where I live priority administration has never even been attempted once in a hundred a hundred and fifteen years of the prior appropriation being part of the Constitution and the answer for why it doesn't work very well is kind of symbolizing this picture we have an intel chip manufacturing plant there that's a picture of a some chip manufacturing plant are you going to go and tell the people that run the factory your water supply is going to be cut off indefinitely because the river is caught below a certain point on the gauge you're not going to have any industry in the state if you do that kind of thing it just does not work for that setting okay now let's switch over to the 21st century and this unfortunately PowerPoint did something weird here this is a picture from a 2007 article in science and I can't think of the author's name right now but it shows a projected change in precipitation between the middle of the 20th century and 2021-2040 as a percentage and you can see that the southwestern states particularly New Mexico and Arizona are sort of at the epicenter of climate change driven drying okay how has that prediction worked out in practice so this is average June temperature in New Mexico and you can see that starting in about 1980 temperature has steadily increased it has has been predicted how has the flow of the Rio Grande responded this graph is on the same time scale and you can see 1980 is about here since 1980 the flow of the Rio Grande has decreased by about 50 percent it's about 30 percent below the long-term average so this is the present what about the future this is future projected increases in warming the optimistic one and the more realistic one and these are projected changes in the flow of the Rio Grande from Dagmars report and I'll just put a line through the present we are a long ways from the end of the predicted decrease in water now so so I mean this that's constituted I call it challenges you could call it a crisis right I think this is a genuine crisis decrease in the flow of a major river by 50 percent constitutes a crisis and so what do we do you know what what action do we take and so I'm just going to suggest that for the moment at least we sort of sit back in our chairs take a deep breath and say to ourselves wwfnd and I'm sure you all know what that stands for but just in case I'll put it here what would Frederick Newell do and I think if Fred were here we're able to consult him he would say to do about the same thing that we did at the beginning of the 20th century first of all collect appropriate data develop a unified planning process formulate a rational scientific program to address the problem and manage the Rio Grande so as to preserve its most valuable societal functions so where do we stand on implementing this how how how are we doing he did pretty well 120 years ago at implementing it how well can we do how about scientific data and understanding data collection there's things that could be done some of the previous talks pointed those out but in that regard I think we're relatively well off how about ability to predict here we have some definite gaps we need more particular information on the southwest we're going to have vegetation succession how is that going to affect the hydrologic cycle the effects of climate change on groundwater and more detailed operational predictive models that we can use for future scenarios but I would be remiss if I told you that the scientific problems were the most important ones the biggest ones the biggest problems are legal and institutional so a unified planning process these this is the U.S. sort of highest level this is the federal agencies these are the New Mexico state ones these are kind of in between and then we have parallel ones for Colorado and Texas all of these have to be brought together at one table and negotiate out how a planning process might work that is truly truly a formidable task but it has to be done you're not going to get a solution to the problem without doing it how about managing it in a rational way well it turns out that prior appropriation is probably the biggest barrier to do it a water right I'm not sure Newell intended this but a water right has become like an unrestricted transferable property right and New Mexico farmers basically under that principle own 80% of the water they constitute 2.5% of the population it's had exactly the opposite effect that Newell intended the control of the water has been locked up by a relatively small proportion of the population and we live in a time of increasing flow shortage but priority administration is really unworkable in the current urban and industrial environment so what can we do one thing is we can just do nothing if you're confronted with a brick wall and the only way to get through it is to batter it with your head maybe you're better off just giving up if we do want to tackle the problem we have to do it on two levels scientific analysis and planning has to be at the super state level and if it's going to happen what organization is going to do it what sort of leverage do we have to get people to come to the table how do we deal with the Rio Grande Compact and then the management and administration has to be at the state level and if we're really going to have it flexible enough to deal with these problems we're going to have to reform prior appropriation and set up a new flexible water allocation mechanism so that basically concludes my my thoughts on this issue but like any good TV show or something like that I think we need to end up with a word from our sponsor right so here it is thank you so the theme of this panel discussion are the scientific challenges and opportunities for understanding and managing large river basins and so all four of our speakers are going to come up here again to answer our questions and engage in the discussion about the scientific challenges and while they're doing so let's thank them all for being exactly on time and sharing their vision and I think Eric has your name tags no I do not care where you sit and we'll do the same as we did before if you have questions or comments turn up your name tag if you're sitting in the back row and you don't have a name tag to turn over put up your hands and I'll try and make a list of the order in which people's hands go up so we'll start with Carol test Carol Hardin from the University of Tennessee my question is primarily for Steve I think and I couldn't agree with you more that soil is a really important piece of this that is often overlooked I wonder if you could expand a little bit on what you said because I'm wondering what it is about the soil that you think we should be monitoring are we mostly concerned with density, compaction, loss of organic matter chemical change or can you tell us what you think we ought to go with this all of you both yeah it um you know the way we model we're trying to predict humans can deal with things if they can if they have a forecast of what something's going to be and then they can do an action on it I mean we do that with economics with with a lot of things and so to predict the water to be able to predict the water in our streams will allow us to manage it to use it to what other so um I just remember something was told to me years and years ago soil has the first mortgage on rainfall and and it gets it first and so to understand how that how that soil is going to react to when when rainfall or snow melts put on it is critical to being able to predict it and so um we we right now we use the the Sergo data from whenever 70s 60 70s whatever as as kind of the proxy to be able to to use that as a physical process on to to how that soil is going to react what percolation rate is you know all the the classic Darcy's law things all that stuff and it's just it's just not working that we that those models just don't produce the explicit prediction of what actually happens you know when you quantify it aggregate it up therefore how do we what do we have to you know we get it get in there and measure how especially at 60 percent of the basin that's the product that's going to produce most of the water how is that and so what is actually happening I don't know I mean this is this is an I don't know research moment I mean is that all I know is that some of the things that maybe look at what the GLRI is looking at as far as for water quality purposes there they're starting to look at these research working fields looking at the soils looking at the cropping looking at at at all of the things together and and then and maybe try to then move that elsewhere at and maybe there's it could even apply in the where the water is scarce if you understand how that fields are going to work in the agriculture rather than just oh it's just farming you know that that doesn't get us anywhere so I think we have to start somewhere and and really measuring how a working soil infiltrates and and how it deals with the water is probably a good place to start David but let me let's thank Carol for asking a question with the pun she asked about expand expand on soils David yeah fascinating talks by all of you and you know it strikes me from this morning and then listening to each of you that the Rio Grande is in a much more perilous situation than the upper Mississippi River by a fair amount no both systems have need for coordinated policy action coordinated science action coordinated monitoring and so my question to to the group and to especially starting with the folks from the Rio Grande is we we have data we have scientific analyses we understand what the challenges are how aware of the is the public and what can we do in terms of new approaches for visualization bringing together groups leaders in different kinds of decision learning and decision formats to bring that scientific rational approach that Frederick Newell would have wanted us to do and so maybe we'll start with you Fred pin you down so I mean I think that if you talk to the people in any of those agencies or groups that I had listed up on about my third slide from the end the long list of parties that have to be brought to the table all of them would be pretty well cognizant of the issues that we've talked about today however if you went out to a member of the general public you surveyed a thousand citizens of Albuquerque and Las Cruces and asked them does climate change pose a problem for the Rio Grande whatever I think there would be a very low level of awareness okay so it's reached one level which is up here and it needs to go all the way down to the grassroots level I don't know that science Chad I think that's more social policy right and I think I mean I mean there are a lot of similar issues that have come to the public attention that people are aware of there are even pseudo issues such as anti-vaccination stuff and so on that have become widespread right so I think that by quote consciousness raising activities that could be done that's a little bit outside my area of expertise Jack can you respond now let me let me answer in a little bit different way I tried to make the point that human activity can either exacerbate or ameliorate the impacts of climate change whatever might be the decrease in snowmelt runoff and the change in runoff generation and the San Juan mountains which are the primary source of runoff in the Rio Grande if you retired ag water use in the San Luis Valley even with a drying climate you'd have more water going through Albuquerque and you could save the silvery minnow and so the question is not climate change in the fundamental distinction but that about large river management is that the issue is entirely about the intersection of all these natural processes and the human societal response that's what makes large river management a uniquely different intellectual challenge and I would submit that here's one thing that I think we could do as a science community rather than simply depicting with visualization visualization tools and what have you what might happen in the future that's important but it's we have to walk a line in which we suggest to the public that there are significant ways to change how we do things you not not just just to highlight you know the talks you know Dagmars talk right as a federal agency representative it was taken as a given that the Rio Grande compact was a non-changeable entity and it was a job of the federal government to manage under that right but I would remind you that when we talk about the future of the Colorado River and we are renegotiating going to renegotiation of the 07 interim guidelines there's another adage the law of the river is whatever we decide it to be and that's the world of the future and I think that our job as scientists is to take off the shackles of saying well we can't med they won't meddle with the compact they won't meddle with the binational treaty but simply say if there were no treaty if there was no compact point of the Colorado River at least very whatever here's how it could be different if you didn't you know have ag production in the San Luis Valley here's how it could be different we have to broaden the mind of the public and we have to give political people the courage to think broadly because all of these straight jackets of agreements we have now will all have to change and we have to help people find a safe place to really expand their minds excellent I'll just add on to that real quick to say that was sort of the point in my very last slide right I had alternative number one which is to live under the strictures of all of these things and alternative number two which is let's open it all up and Hi Anna Norman congressional research service earlier we had a comment from the Army Corps about the FIROs of forecast informed reservoir operations and I think there's been a lot of interest in the pilots that have been going on but those are more in isolated systems and pilot programs that we're still waiting to see what the results are so if people are interested in that type of approach in these types of systems what can you say that we know now and what would work now and then what do we still need in order to have forecast informed reservoir operations or more flexibility in operations of reservoirs, dams, diversions I'll start off on that one the in the Midwest in the upper Mississippi in order to do that because they're driven by a precipitation regime that we we have you know some modicum of ability to predict the precipitation but not in a long enough time scale to where you can make confident decisions in direction of the reservoir operating in real time you know if you're looking at say a few weeks out when you're dealing with something for flood control at that time we really need to have that quantum leap in precipitation forecasting skill in the in the Midwest because where they're doing those the FIRO experiments now are out in where you're dealing with that El Nino the atmospheric river situation where they're looking at what the what the winter precipitation is like so a little different paradigm I think it's really driven we need to increase in skill in the precipitation in the it's in that timeframe of you know a week out to four weeks that's where you really we can increase the precipitation skill there that we would have a chance at at optimizing our flood control reservoir operations in the Midwest Nusha thank you so much for all your presentations I actually had a comment and a question Steve I was part of the DMAP 15 years ago I think that was the first one maybe that the distributed intercomparison project for hydrologic modeling and I would argue actually the problem we had back then was that we didn't have as much data or computational capacity I think if you would have done DMAP again now and I'm not suggesting we should but I think we have a lot more the problem was we couldn't calibrate these you know smaller distributed systems as at at the point so we had to calibrate everything to the outlet and then also National Weather Service have these like people who have been working on these models forever and ever so they have this human capacity that no computer could have mimicked at a time and the argument there is how much longer are we going to go forward having humans keep adjusting these models a little bit to make them better rather than relying on a little bit more additional information that we can get so that's and I would love to hear your you know your thoughts on that and then the second thing I want to say is you know David asked this question earlier and that was my sort of comment too that I think we have forgotten the sort of interconnectivity of all the systems from soil to groundwater to surface water to atmospheric processes and we all do our own thing in the silos on atmospheric sciences I'm a hydrologist I'm a groundwater hydrologist and then you know we just don't necessarily have a lot of like integrated models that would sort of talk about how soil would behave how hydrology would change and all that and then on top of that these humans are essential part of these processes the most complex part of it and we constantly assume that they are at the end of the receiving end of everything we do while they're actually at the center of everything that we do but they don't they don't provide input into it and they don't necessarily react to a lot of the decisions that we make so I would love to hear what any of you think how we can actually make them more engaged and I know sort of you know Jack I appreciate your comment on the you know your fields we're bounded by all the things we are we have but you know we have a different generation of people coming up they are they're used to Twitter and Instagram and you know Facebook and the reality is they are the next generation and they would use this kind of information so different very differently from the previous generation and the ones before so okay I'll start off addressing the distributed modeling question and yes the increase in computational speed and things like that definitely improve it you mentioned you know you're getting down to one kilometer from you know you started a basin at 300 square miles is it the reason why the human can get in there and manipulate and do things in real time is because the human can compensate for the heterogeneity that the computer can't in that in that you you can make up for biases and things like that whereas if you're trying to do it computationally grid cell by grid cell it's got to be exactly right and and we're just not there yet the the at least in the Midwest I'll speak I won't speak to the coastal modeling or anything like that but in my domain we're running that the wharf hydro model using the NOAA land surface model and that's with an H and and it just it doesn't it doesn't produce results that frankly are really even close to what the humans can produce when you're looking at the salient points and then all the points in between and so and we're trying to calibrate it and and like you say you have to you have to tweak these grid cells I'm not sure that we know that we're even starting off at the right point because again we're dealing with a highly manipulated landscape that may not really be acting like we think it is and so I'm just I'm perplexed like I said my professor in 1990 said you'll be using those models just to forget about that well we're not there yet and we've got the best minds in the world have been pounding away at this problem and so I just think it kind of needs to be turned on its head and and really looked at in the close smallest scale possible which is to get down there and see what's actually happening on the the real landscape not a not a contrived watershed but something real and try to learn from that and say oh okay you know I don't know I it just may that's a pie in the sky as they use the function yes so and but but put on top of that is the precipitation prediction problem and in getting it down to that resolution of maybe we're feeding it what it doesn't want to be fed and so you got a lot of chances to be wrong twice and that's what we always say we want to be wrong once you know that's so Brenda thank you I wanted to ask jack a bit more about sediment transport processes you know we talk about water rights but you don't really talk about sediment rights very often so are there do we understand how much these sedimentary processes are actually changing in these highly manipulated systems versus being partitioned and are there examples of places where we are sort of managing the sediment transport and what you think is an effective way certainly well I would say that the shining light of of intentional management of sediment is the management of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon in a place and under severe deficit where controlled floods clear water floods are introduced into an environment that already doesn't have enough sediment and yet we have the courage to implement those floods because we think we precisely can measure the inputs and precisely estimate the duration of those floods that they might do some good versus some bad now that's a it's a debatable point now that how well that's working but that's where a lot of these technologies have been developed we've been able to expand that network into the green and Colorado rivers and the whole principle of of temporally precise measurements is that if you can link temporal changes at a precise time frame for sediment transport then you can link changes in sediment transport and changes in sediment mass balance to precise operational decisions made at dams the standard way that we all learn in civil engineering in geology classes is oh sediment transport has high stochasticity there's a variability of a couple orders of of magnitude uncertainty draw a line through a cloud of points and then use that average relation you're off to the races we learned in Grand Canyon how fundamentally wrong that is we understand how many other things processes depend on the linkages if we can understand how those geomorphic processes ultimately tied to sediment transport are linked to explicit management decisions at the dams then we can target ways for dams to release water that provides specific outcomes so we are doing it the sediment programs that I highlighted are all run by the Grand Canyon Monitoring Research Center the agency I used to run throughout the Colorado there's a gauge now at Santa Acacia in the upper Rio Grande and beginning to look at a couple other places USGS out of rest and has other programs similar but it is a program that's well underway and I would say that in big bend on the Rio Grande the whole program is funded on a shoestring by end of year money by the National Park Service and it doesn't have the base funding that it deserves we have to move from just base funding of stream flow to base funding of sediment transport as well if we're going to responsibly manage western rivers Xiaowen thanks very much again for very nice talks I'm going to ask you questions that I think is overlapping with the question asked earlier each I think you asked about the sort of human activities social processes that might not be addressed completely yet and we learned earlier today you know these are very central to the big problem space we're dealing with so how do you see we could meaningfully bring more social science into this context and how do you integrate the natural social science together to kind of I'm not talking way too much but let me just let me make a distinction how you said how to bring social sciences in I'm going to say how do you bring social policy the perspective of the public what is the public how do you empower those organizations and let me just throw in a complete wild card that went through my mind earlier here's one distinction between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River in terms of the infusion of NGOs and the perspective of NGOs and environmental groups it's a Walton family foundation that funds 30 million dollars a year to empower citizens and groups to be actively involved and engaged and the whole decision process in the Colorado River has been thrown upside down because there's a foundation which is empowering environmental groups and tribes to be actively engaged and it's completely different from the Rio Grande and I can tell you that for as much as we talk about the middle Rio Grande and the silvery minnow and all where at least there's sort of a structure down on the big bend the best resource on the river we can't get any traction even though the science is great because there's no enviro group who can sustain themselves working and it's binational so it's really complicated but so one answer that I would just say is social science is huge obviously but the other piece of it is without enviro groups not just TNC TNC and a whole bunch of others that are typically edgier than TNC need to all be involved to push the envelope of the conversation without pushing the envelope of the conversation we're never going to get out of where we're at so that would be my perspective Chandra Can I let me just get in on the social side of the flood mitigation impact is that I think there needs to be some emphasis on going back and studying when things like the town of Valmire, Illinois would moved up the slope when Minnesota bought out hundreds of families out of their homes and relocated 20 years later what does the community even remember that or what in learning from that situation and sponsoring that type of research of looking back and seeing how communities people have dealt with these things in the past I think I don't think that gets enough cred out there So one of the things we did not talk about in the challenges in water management part is the droughts so when we have the water management we talked about a lot of floods but we didn't talk about droughts so the important part in water management with Army Corps of Engineers is the predictability of the drought so what happens as a seasonal and sub-seasonal level the piece of research R&D is really greatly needed because we have done a very not adequate job of an example 2012-2013 we had drought which were not predicted because La Nina and La Nina with teleconnections were absent and subsequently that the drought came in onset of the drought predictability is is pretty practically non-existence if there is a La Nina strong or La Nina strong you have a good predictability and not too at a satisfactory level of seasonal and sub-seasonal level and that is a very important component of water management part Mark on the social part it was interesting to see the basis of the fire the other question is with the models and the questions we have are we ready then to support dilation of different uses of water so that we could support which are more beneficial yeah from the modern perspective the limitation of the beneficial use aspect prior appropriation is that although the water is stated to be you know the property of the public it becomes restricted to one beneficial use if you can show you have one beneficial use for the water then you get exclusive access to it and I think from our modern perspective we would see that the waters of the Rio Grande have many potential uses and those need to be balanced against one another and we need to have societal valuations that say where does it go when in order to best meet the purposes of society and that would require let's just say major revisions to prior appropriation as it's currently written Scott panelists again for another round of excellent presentations I have a comment and a question my comment is based on the fact that I'm probably a because I'm a geologist I work a lot in deep time which is me anything's important here I would say and I was really struck to the the last two presentations that you kind of went back into deep time to lay down the scientific history and the history of things that based on science and policy what the policies that have impacted the history of the Rio Grande up to mainly the upper part of the Rio Grande but also touched on the role as well I found that extremely useful in terms of studying the space with some of the useful choices that Fred laid out which I think we'll probably talk more about in the next session my question is for our friends from the upper Mississippi River Valley do we have that kind of look back that kind of sets the stage historically of the time before how the systems have evolved really since before anthropogenic impacts became really significant I guess that's it because we certainly heard a lot about that from the Rio Grande you know I'm thinking about not just the uppermost primarily the upper Mississippi River but thinking of further downstream in some of the other sub basins of the Mississippi you could comment on that for Jeff this isn't this isn't my strong suit but there are a fair amount of there's a lot of anecdotal information from sort of early exploration diaries early surveys and I've forgotten the name forgotten the name but now there was an early survey of the overall geology and water distribution from I think the mid-1800s I want to say the brown survey but don't hold is that right okay and so there's there's that information I guess I don't know what you mean by how far back in time are you thinking like like well 10,000 years ago I mean the glacial history is very well known and that is actually what shaped a lot of the broader geology and current hydrology is sort of the trajectory from the glaciers to now but let me clarify I'm thinking this morning Steve alluded to you know the potential for another great Mississippi type flood if we had like to have disasters we have in the 1920s if we go back to the you know before that whole system was put into place to detain the Mississippi river okay from from you know the the north country of Bob Dylan all the way down to Cajun country do we have that kind of look back because that's kind of the setting that I think we kind of heard that kind of level of review from from Jack and Fred do we have that for the for the Mississippi system I think that might be useful yeah that look yeah I don't know if there's a real solid idea of some of that because of of the because of it was water was a resource of plenty so to speak and and so there wasn't really you know anybody really looking at it in at those scales I mean because you it just came water just came on the landscape you didn't have to go and grab it I mean irrigation agriculture was came about with the invention of the submersible pump and you could pump groundwater out and and it's and so but what I think the historic look back if you look back at when they when they plan for the lower river project and they looked at with the weather service back back in the 30s they looked at storms and where these storms would be and the only idea of a flood is it can only be generated out of out of the Arkansas and the Ohio and there's really no there's really no credit given to the Missouri and the upper Mississippi that there'll be a problem and so I I just kind of and they re-looked at now they did a re-analysis of looking at but the weather service wasn't involved and maybe there should be a deeper dive of looking at with climate change in idea and that the upper mist it may have an increase of 20 to 25 percent precipitation could it be a significant factor involved in in a lower Mississippi flood rather than finding out about it by happenstance I so I know we have more than five people who had their hands up and we're out of time we will start again in 15 minutes but before taking a break where you can ask more questions of our panelists let's thank all our panelists once again start we're in the home stretch come on are we ready to go Laura good to go all right we're going to get started here in the interest of time and to to make sure we get enough time for our next four speakers I'm Dave Wagner I'm with the Water Science Technology Board and our interest in pulling this austere group of speakers and and you folks together today was to help us explore this issue of integrated river management for very complex systems and I think as all of our speakers this morning in this afternoon have illustrated dealing with large river systems is a complex issue it is full of all kinds of of I don't know speed bumps potholes and such but in the end science can really help bring it all together and I think that's what we've heard up until this panel which I think we're going to continue that process but we're going to take a slightly different perspective now and that's to look at the governance issues et cetera so there's in my opinion there are four broad areas that this group we've asked this group to speak to one is the governance issue second is the policy issues third is the value of science so everything we've heard up to this point the value of that science into the governance and policy process and thirdly to identify if there are some specific gaps in governance and policy to help us implement programs that are appropriate our first speaker is retired Major General Michael Walsh a little bit of thing a little bit of a statement before we get into this when I used to work on the hill General Walsh would come up and try to educate a staff on the nuances of how the the Corps of Engineers did their business and managed large complex system I think one of the major ones we were dealing with a flood on the Mississippi River and you had to make a difficult decision about opening some floodways and the the importance of that in terms of managing a system on top of dealing with all the barge companies the commodity people upstream the soybean farmers in particular and the corn folks illustrated to me the the complexity of this issue so General Walsh it's all yours thank you thank you David good afternoon mrs. King and mrs. Montanara's and the members of the national academy of science I've don't have any eye candy so I'll sit down and and read through my read through my presentation that I wrote it out last night mostly because I need a little discipline to to get this done and in 15 15 minutes so I'll go through that and there's really the four things that that I'm going to talk about is the river divided nest the navigation ecosystem sustainment program climate change science and then and then governance and and so that's kind of the direction that that I'm going to go and some of the things that need that that how climate change science is impacting the the infrastructure just a little further background I spent 36 years in the in the military the first portion of my career was in the tactical or kinetic part of the army and then spent the the latter part in the in the core of engineers working with water resource issues in california and in the southeast and then the mississippi river division valley division I did spend some time as a division commander in in iraq and i was general patrice's engineer there when they asked me to come back and start work on the hurricane storm damage risk reduction system in in new allians the 14 billion dollars the chief said i couldn't i'm a new yorker they put me in mississippi and the chief said i couldn't leave until i got the city up protected to one percent chance of flooding it was four years to get that 11 billion dollars into the end of the ground while we're working floods of 08 the floods of 09 the hurricanes in 10 and then the floods of 2011 where we had to operate the project and use the floodway in the in the missouri at the same time i opened up the floodway bonny carry and morganza at the end so i was not able to get the hurricane system completed in in the may june time frame it took me to august of 2011 to get it finished because i was involved with the up river things and i missed that a little bit the issues on management are are so large that i tried to bring them down to the things that i think are most important and and frankly gretchen talked talked mostly most about them so i i'll quickly go through those those portions of it the first part is like i talked to you about the river divided and gretchen and i were talking about a book that was written 70s it's called the river we have wrought maybe the 80s and it talks about the upper mess and gives a history of it and so i can talk actually i could talk about two hours on all four of those topics so i'm trying to squeeze them on end is into the 15 minutes so what john wrote about is the struggle to put the nine foot pool the commercial navigation system the nine foot pool in i mean it just didn't happen where people woke up in the nine foot pool happened it took decades and decades and decades to make it happen but i'm quickly going to go pass that and go right to to the 1940s and say that the nine foot channel was put in place and it was really put in place by a lot of folks who are working the navigation boosters the the guys who are interested in in navigation in those in those times on the other side there was a conservationist now called environmentalists who are pushing back the other way and saying there's going to be significant impact to the environment because of these nine foot pool being put in place they got put in place and so that's where the struggle the divided river has been ongoing ever since historically the the Mississippi River has been really the symbol of connection a connection not only of the region but also the connection to the to the to the world actually for two centuries the mid-westerners looked at looked at the Mississippi River as a highway to get their goods and service and goods out to the out to the region and to the end of the world I think over time the navigation interests have probably lost perhaps some of those grassroots appeals we're talking about how do we get people tied to the river back when the nine foot channel was put into into place the farmers were local farmers I mean they they walk over the river it was there and and I think we've switched from the local family owned farmers to large agricultural corporations and the towing industry are the current movement of of where we are on on commercial commercial navigation today the the public is probably largely unaware that the Mississippi River is part of the mid-west transportation system the highways rail there is rivers and most folks forget about that as a matter of fact Gretchen heard me talk in many different areas the four Rs roads rails runways and rivers everybody forgets that that last Rs how do we get that how do we move that forward and get people to think about it from that so the history of the upper miss river has led to the present debate that's ongoing is the expansion of the navigation system as Gretchen said we want to go from a six foot lock 600 foot lock to a 1200 foot lock and they need to all be updated as they were constructed 85 years ago and they're just not going to stay in that they're just not going to stay in place so expand the navigation system but also the needs preserve and restore the river's ecosystem and I think there's a lot of lot more folks are involved in that side of it is how do we restore the ecosystem at the same time trying to figure out the navigation system so Congress as Gretchen said and I'll say it again on in 1968 with the water resource development out Congress was tired of the fight and they said okay the Mississippi and declared and pronounced the upper Mississippi river to be a nationally significant ecosystem and you know all the power and weight that that has but that's not where the period went you know the period went and also a nationally significant significant commercial navigation system so they codified what the issue is and then turned it over to us the people on the upper Mississippi to figure out okay so what do we how are we going to put this how are we going to put this together and so I'll slide into the next piece which is a navigation and ecosystem sustainment program but before I get there again NEST didn't just happen in the 1980s there was lots of unsuccessful tries on trying to figure out how to update the 600 foot lock chambers the 1200 foot and the environmental review of that was how to mitigate those impacts and not necessarily how to how to restore the environment as before we had those those locks and down so from the 1980s there was a huge fights politically back and forth and back and forth and really nothing happened until we started putting together why don't we take this environmental management program the amp had certain dollars and then this cop study had certain dollars and put them both together and figure out how we can do the locks as well as the restoration and that's where we came up with the navigation ecosystem sustainment program a more comprehensive study was finally was finally worked trying to balance the the navigation benefit with the equally important and probably more important at this point is the environment values that the river provides to the nations and has trying to balance those who has been interesting like in the curse word interesting is trying to bring those together and and and move forward what I didn't say when I talked a little bit about my history is when I came to be the commander of the Mississippi Valley Division the president also nominated me to be president of the Mississippi River Commission so I had a commission on the lower Mississippi on the upper Mississippi there was not a there was not a commission to to work through in particular areas and I'll get to that in in in just a moment and that has some interesting impacts so Congress did finally authorize NESP the navigation ecosystem sustainment program and 20 in 2007 were at a requirement of 2.2 billion dollars goes to navigation and 1.7 billion dollars would go to ecosystem restoration plus 10 billion dollars a year for for monitoring so that seemed to be the balance where where the core engineers and others were able to bring forward and make things happen now that of course four billion dollars was not going to happen on year one it was scheduled over a 15 the 25 year plan assuming that we had efficient funding and nobody ever gets efficient funding so it would be about 30 years to put something like like that together and by the way the price said five billion the price tag is more in the area of six six and a half billion as things have changed over time the NES system will restore the ecosystems by implementing projects kind of like what the panels have talked earlier Gretchen as well island building floodplain restoration water level management backwater restoration side channel restoration we worked on those Gretchen and I worked on those in different areas wing dam restoration and island and shoreline protection so those are the kind of the environmental piece at the same time we would go go down and look at those 29 locks and update those again over that 30 year period NES was the challenge with NES is that it hasn't been included into the president's budget request to congress since 2004 the only way it's moved forward is by congressional ads and in this environment there are no congressional ads so how do we how do we continue work in that environment it's again pretty challenging and what congress has been doing over time is putting more money into the president into the core's budget than what the president asked and then come back and ask for work plans on how the core is going to use that way too detailed and I should keep my notes because I'm going wider wider than that wider than I need to so where NES now requires since it's so old where NES now requires an update of the economics and an update on the on the cost estimate just to make it compliant with the to get it into the president's budget request for construction again trying to redo these the economic and the cost-benefit ratios is a huge challenge but it did make it into the FY 18 work plan for about a million dollars to update the economic review keeping the navigation interests and the environmental interests interests and the flood interests and the recreational interests basically a systems approach keep all of those guys still interested in NES at the same time while you're going through this political process is quite a challenge as people don't have a tendency to wait for you to catch up as you're working there as you work on the politics so that's another piece that the management needs to needs to figure out how to keep folks folks working so that's where we're at with NES and where the challenge now is climate change and climate change science the core of engineers during this same timeframe we were putting NES together and from 2004 till now while we're trying to work the politics of making that go forward the core of engineers started to develop climate change engineer regulations everything in the army core of engineers is covered under some sort of regulation and so we started writing regulations on climate change the thought was that managing hydrologic extremes due to climate variability is an essential mission of the water management agencies and the core and the core's infrastructure its operations safety maintenance program has been facing growing stress not only by aging infrastructure hydrologic non-stationarity urban growth evolving navigation and shipping practices changing agricultural practices we must also ensure that the systems and project will remain adaptable and sustainable over time even with the frequency and severity of extreme hydrologic events happen and so that's why we started putting together our engineer regulations on climate change in any case the core took its first step to developing policy and guidance around this normally I think there was a question over here is there enough history in the science that we have in the Mississippi River and the answer is yes definitely back to dinosaur years so there's enough data there and that's where a lot of our engineering came from looking at that historic past where the challenges come now is what do we do with non-stationarity and how do we put the science in there as an infrastructure engineer that science has been shifting showing with what Steve showed all of those slides where it looks like we're going to have more precipitation the variability is quite wild but as an engineer I need to figure out what flow is and so that's part of where the where the challenge is now where the historically we're able to look back and figure out what the problem maximal flood was going forward is how do we not only take the information that we've had in the past how do we take the information that we have in the future and science isn't developed enough where I can figure out what Q is if I know what the flow is and I know what velocity is I now know what the area is and I can figure out how much I need for a levy to be for a levy to pass the 1% chance of flooding where I've need to put the mechanicals for for locks and dams if I'm going to put an island in make sure I put that island in high enough that it's going to survive whatever whatever Q comes down so the science of the science of river climate change is still developing and is therefore more challenging for us infrastructure engineers and impacting from a management perspective is how do I put together a economics review of NESP when I can't figure out what when I can't figure out what Q is from an engineer perspective that's pretty easy what I do is I put a factor of safety in and and I say I'm going to put seven feet of freeboard and easy right I can just put freeboard in and and and get going the answer is no I can't do that and that's part of where the where the where the challenges are for NESP to be a credible project that needs to have a cost-benefit ratio of $1 n equals $1 return and that's the minimum threshold if I put seven foot of freeboard on because the science isn't there yet to tell me what Q is the cost of the project is going to continue to go up where the cost-benefit ratios are not going to be one to one but in our country we typically don't fund a project unless there's a cost-benefit ratio coming back up two and a half to one so the challenge of where we are from an engineering perspective is we're waiting for science to pick up and give us more of a shot group of where we can put together and figure out what Q is that it doesn't become too expensive to to move forward so part of part of my discussion here with with all y'all and Ewan's and you guys from New York you guys is you need to pick up the pace I had I had the same discussion with the American Meteorological Society a couple years ago and trying to forecast where hurricanes were and I told them letting me know where a hurricane is going to be four days out doesn't give me an opportunity to to take the people out of New Orleans and put them somewhere else I need seven or eight nine days and the American meteorology meteorological society said they can do about one foot one day extra every decade hopefully we can figure out our climate challenge a little bit faster than that so we can get our engineering challenges underway the next piece but the next piece is is governance and Gretchen talked about governance Fred talked about governance as as well I've gone a long time as a as an army guy without a quote so I have to throw a quote in otherwise I won't be able to sit still and the quote is from George Washington Carver and he said where there is no vision there is no hope and so there was a discussion Fred talked about how to put that vision together and how do we and how do we move forward as you guys know there is no water minister in in our country and by the way I can't tell you how many times around the world water ministers would come find me and say how come there's no water minister in in in the United States and I was telling them well we've got a federal country not a national country and the water rights are run through the run through the states so there is no water minister there's no national approach to water resources policy is ad hoc implementation is decentralized coordination is fragmented and communications is non-existent or it fails to connect to make matters more complex under the federal system several important aspects of water and water-related land use management basic water laws are the responsibility of states and are reflected in the separate laws of the nation's watershed there are few successes in developing integrated management approaches and I think it has to do with that ad hoc nature of how we of how we move forward I when I had to operate the levy when I had to operate the levy back in Missouri I flooded 140,000 acres in Missouri the Illinois governor was saying do it fast the Missouri governor was don't do it at all the Arkansas governor says I don't know and so how to put together that governance body is an interesting challenge on how to put that vision together and so what I think is it's more of governance structures like commissions the Mississippi River Commission has been working since 1879 and is part of the federal budgets and gets about 200 million dollars a year to work on their program to have a vision a strategy implementing guidance and they get it done other places that don't struggle on how to get that vision going the upper Mississippi River Basin Commission provided that vision of the future but was taken down with most of the water commissions back in 1981 when President Reagan took the commissions down since then there really hasn't been on the upper miss something that can pull federal and state organizations together and move forward now there was something that there is something that's called the Upper Miss River Basin Authority was put together in 1981 when President Reagan took down one structure and these guys are five states that are working together to try and coordinate amongst the different states on moving forward but typically they fall underneath state laws and they can only spend state money on state things and they don't have any federal connection to it I think it's an excellent try on moving forward but I think things are growing more complex than what we can do in an ad hoc organization so we finish this up General I'll show you got it what so what we need is a governance that can look at the upper Mississippi and probably all of our watersheds that can be put in place of basin structure for the last half of the 21st century one that's going to put together a shared vision a consensus vision that looks at risks and benefits a vision that's informed by the underlying causes of unification and collaboration and a vision that has a long-term perspective as Gretchen said I was advocating a 200-year vision on the third largest watershed of in the world and if you want to move cities you need 200 years to do that and so we need to look at governance structures on how to put that together so the real real question I would bring to the science organizations is when you're going to pick up the pace thank you thank you General Walsh Gubit that was a great perspective on the upper Mississippi and the Mississippi at large our next speaker is Katrina Kessler from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency as she gets ready to speak one little piece of of personal anecdote I began my fit my career 1974 Minnesota DNR so carry on okay so going to be efficient I appreciate the invitation I also appreciate scientists who want to bridge the policy gap I'm an engineer and my role at the Pollution Control Agency is in charge of water policy in agriculture so this is the fine line that I walk every day and I'm glad to have company so I'm from Minnesota and in Minnesota we are used to working on complex water challenges that span multiple jurisdictions we are the headwaters of three international basins we have water that flows to the Great Lakes out to the St. Lawrence Seaway we have water that flows north to the through the Red River to Lake Winnipeg and then certainly what we're here to talk about today the headwaters of the Mississippi and to get to the point of social science which I think is really excellent that people keep bringing up there are 18 million people that drink water from the Gulf or from the Mississippi River and only one million of them live in Minnesota and we talk about this a lot this is a responsibility that we have as a state to people downstream and in 2008 the voters in Minnesota actually passed a constitutional amendment to tax themselves more to devote money to clean water and it's called the Clean Water Land and Legacy Amendment and that was a result of multiple years of trying to bring the science to the people and say we are not working at a pace that is going to reach the goals that we have so I think there's something to be said for just persisting and meeting people where they are talking about drinking water talking about where they like to recreate what the legacy that they want we did we did a survey with the Minnesota University of Minnesota recently of people post amendment and said you know how many of you think water is an important part of your identity and 80% said yes and then the question was how many of you think it's important to clean up the water before you send it downstream and almost 70% said yes so there are ways to bring people along and you just kind of connect where they are so somebody said impacts at the local level and I previously worked as the director of all the infrastructure underground for the city Minneapolis so this is near and near to my heart thinking about the impacts that we're seeing which are not unique to us the upper Mississippi states are all having shorter winters warmer summer temps much higher flows precipitation happening during times of the year when crops are not growing to take that water up or groundwater is already saturated or frozen and therefore you're not getting the infiltration that you would otherwise this picture was taken in 2014 in Duluth turns out this is in front of our staff people's house that's not her car but she said that when I showed her the slide this slide comes from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources I give credit to Megan Moore this shows at the Lakanam 3 which is downstream of the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota river basin the changes in flow over decades you can see that starting with the light blue line in the 60s you see a peak in April in the spring time so there was a flood of record in 1965 so that peak is higher than the 70s in 80s but still you see that bump in the spring to think about snow melt and spring time precipitation you go through the 90s 2000s and 10s and what you see is that and this was highlighted earlier that we are now seeing a peak that lasts all the way through the summer there is and you've heard this there is no downtime it is high flows all the time so I want to play this so I don't know if you could push that button this is paid for by money that we we generated through the clean water land and lakes change in river flow there are things we know other things we don't know in 1940 the USGS United States and what we know is that all those tributaries either to the Minnesota or Mississippi river some of them have not changed in the amount of flow the annual flow that they have we also know that about half of them have changed and that that change is very large they doubled the amount of flow they have per year in their rivers since 1940 so we we know there's a change it's measured it's not it's not a hypothesis it's a measured value then the question becomes well why have flows changed and we certainly know that we've we've done a lot of land use changes and some of those land use changes are consistent with increasing water flow like drainage we also know that the climate is a little different and I don't mean global climate warming I mean we have more rain now than we did in the past at least some of them we've we've been able to separate out and make estimations about how much that change in contribution from climate and land use and drainage is contributing to those changes in water flow and what we found is that the increase in rainfall can describe less than half of the increase in fall and that's really not a surprise because remember I told you that some watersheds do change and some don't change and yet they all have some change in rainfall so there's something else driving the change and flow beyond just an increase in rain and part of it is the crops we're growing and part of it is what we're doing to those depressional areas that used to hold water so here's the other thing that has changed dramatically since 1940 and if you have any any farmer friends who remember back to 1940 they'll all verify this change and that is in 1940 in Minnesota we grew almost no soybeans soybeans are now 50 percent of the row crop agriculture in the Minnesota River Basin and it isn't that we're farming more land we're farming about the same amount of land but we've replaced and changed the crops so a large portion of the land used to grow alfalfa rye oats winter wheat all of those crops are green and growing like this grass here early in the year green and growing crops suck up water and they transpire it or it gets evaporated back to the atmosphere soybeans aren't planted until mid-may and they're really not big and growing until June therefore there's no water being evapotranspated back to the atmosphere by soybeans that water then is available to either infiltrate into the ground or runoff so that's one change you know and the other is the drainage we know that since 19 well we know that over the last 950 years we've been installing artificial drainage and we continue to install artificial drainage and I think it's interesting that you can just held ponded water and evaporated it away and it just he's talking about not only is there a change to the river there's a change in land use with the change of the cropping system and it's significant the crop conversion and the drainage contribute to more flow in the rivers we got it and so we know that it's not just rain but it's rain plus changes in land use and changing in the way that we manage the land and we know that if you push water off the landscape faster and we know this through experience in urban environments when you build storm tunnels or you put in drainage in agricultural areas that it's great for that immediate relief but it does wreak havoc downstream and this is a problem not only in Minnesota but with our downstream partners and so what I want to highlight is the work that we're doing in partnership with the other Upper Mississippi River Basin States and the other states downstream related to nutrients because what I was asked to talk about is not only what agriculture how agriculture poses a challenge but also are there frameworks that exist across state boundaries that we could leverage or to look to and there are and others talked about this there are 31 states two provinces that drain to the Gulf and we have a dead zone the size of New Jersey and that is a problem locally and it is a problem downstream and again these are things that we need to talk about with people in a way that resonates with them do you recreate at a lake or stream and is there sometimes scummy algae there do you want your dogs or children to be able to play do you want safe drinking water for your family or downstream communities the Gulf of Mexico hypoxia task force is a good example of states coming together with federal leadership there were many federal agencies that came together in 2008 and representatives from all of the states that put together an action plan and said okay we know that there's a Gulf of Mexico hypoxia zone that's you know 15,000 square kilometers plus on any given year and we are going to set a goal of 5000 it's not nothing but it's actionable and it's less and that is what that group found to be a reasonable target and as a result all of the states including Minnesota put together a nutrient reduction strategy and there was a choice that was made you could get a 65 percent reduction in total nitrogen or you could do a 45 percent reduction in phosphorus and a 45 percent reduction in nitrogen and you could get to that 5000 square kilometer goal Minnesota's strategy was completed in 2014 and we're just completing a update to our so five years in how are we doing are we on trajectory to meet our goals and it addresses not only the downstream needs but the immediate needs as well because in order to get buy in again to the question of social science we needed a lot of state and regional and local partners to be on board because certainly at the pollution control agency we have Clean Water Act permitting authority but we do not have authority over drainage we do not have authority over agriculture and a lot of this comes down to what is the land use what crops are we growing where do people want their food to come from and what food are people buying and it turns out as we've looked back over five years we've done a pretty good job related to phosphorus and this is not a surprise for those of you who think about where large phosphorus sources are and we did there were changes in cropping systems that occur there were conservation practices that were adopted but the vast majority of our change came from wastewater and these are the levers that we have these are the permits that we can drive home and litigate to the nth degree and ultimately people have to make changes and we have met our milestone goal of 2025 for phosphorus so we we had a 20 percent reduction interim for both phosphorus and nitrogen by 2025 and then the 45 percent reduction by 2040 and we're already there for phosphorus but we are not there for nitrogen and this gets to something that others were saying about where water where we're seeing changes in precipitation again we have three large basins and the highlighted squares here are where that we have drainage to the Mississippi River Basin and those are the areas of the state where we're seeing not only the biggest changes but the biggest rate of changes in precipitation so it is not equal everywhere and because we have such increased flow it negates some of the benefits that we're seeing on the concentration side because load is concentration times flow and when you decrease your phosphorus by 45 percent but you increase your flow by 40 percent in the area where you're having contributing tributaries you get no reduction so the gulf is still seeing the same load and on the nitrate side where we've really done poorly and I can take responsibility because I'm in charge of this work for the state now we are not doing well on nitrate and we don't have a nitrate aquatic life standard whereas we have phosphorus standards or eutrophication standards that apply to all lakes and all rivers and all streams in Minnesota we have a drinking water standard for nitrate but that does not apply everywhere and we haven't driven home the changes that are necessary to get to the nitrate nor if we focused on wastewater treatment plants would we get there because we know that 85 plus percent comes from agriculture so to get the change that is required in Minnesota and in all the downstream states to get to the gulf we need leadership across states that talks about where the crops are grown what the crops are used for and what crops are we growing and then the other thing people were talking about sediment and there's a big concern within the state of Minnesota for Lake Peppin which is at Lake Lockendam number three and it's a widening of the river and it's filling in because there's too much sediment and this is a challenge that is common amongst our different parts of the country and here's a highlighted illustration that if you have the same amount of concentrated pollutant versus what it looks like if you have more flow you're still getting the same load you're deluding it so maybe the fish are feeling better about it but in the interim and in the downstream though you're still getting eutrophication and algae that is harmful so our statewide strategy calls for all sorts of accelerated cover crops and soil health and changes in drainage and we are not doing very well with regards to these things and I think it comes down to the social science again what is the what is it that people want to do and what can we incentivize people to do and what do we have regulatory control over if two more slides the one other thing I would say is one thing that we like to talk about is if we meet these goals we also will meet some climate goals the state has aggressive like other states has aggressive climate goals we've called for an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050 we're not on the trajectory to get there and a quarter of our emissions of greenhouse gases come from agriculture so if we even meet that interim milestone we'll get we'll get it the equivalent of three million tons per year of greenhouse gases saved and then one other thing a shout out to the other Upper Mississippi River Basin Association group that we work with they are proposing with their state legislators so at the congressional level a Upper Mississippi Water Quality Improvement Act to bring additional resources to our multiple state efforts to improve health at the Gulf and it will it's targeted at bringing bridging some of these gaps bringing consistent funding bringing consistent leadership to this work and I think that that's a model that I think is important to think about our third speaker is Professor Reed Benson from University of New Mexico and we are very pleased to have him here you can't be a student of the Rio Grande River without reading your papers and your thoughts on water management the legal side of things and what the future may hold so Professor Benson thank you I appreciate the opportunity to be part of this program and really appreciate the board's interest in water management on the Rio Grande so you've already heard from Dagmar and Jack and Fred a number of salient points regarding the Rio Grande I'm going to focus on some of the legal dimensions that were to water management in this system here we just have what we call the upper basin above Fort Quitman, Texas it shows the transboundary nature of the Rio Grande and also some of the federal water projects that manage and control its flow for some for a variety of purposes and I'll be talking quite a bit about those so some of the features that you've heard about already the water reliable water supply in this basin has been over-allocated for about a century and here we get into state laws that have really encouraged and promoted that allocation it is shared by three U.S. states and also by two nations and also by a number of tribal nations most of whose water rights remain unquantified and there are unmet needs there we've got federal reservoirs that play important roles for water supply and flood control primarily but the actual water water delivery is primarily done at the local level and certainly irrigation districts municipal water suppliers play key roles throughout the basin so what you see here that is really common in western river systems is jurisdictional fragmentation in management and that is a big big part of the Rio Grande like others added to this and working at cross purposes to this system is the Endangered Species Act which introduces environmental concerns into a system that was engineered and developed without them in mind so in most so I'm not going to say much about the international piece or the local entities I'm mostly going to talk about the Tri-State Compact the Federal Reservoirs and the Endangered Species Act as they relate to the Rio Grande there's certainly more to say about all of those sovereigns and those levels and I know Melanie is going to say more in particular about about tribal water rights so state water laws and water rights here, Fred this morning talked earlier today talked about prior appropriation so I don't have much to add to what he said but it's worth remembering that this system was all about and remains all about putting water to work right irrigation municipal water supply industry mining and that required taking water out of its natural course some of the key features water rights based on beneficial use oldest right use is take priority in time of shortage although New Mexico doesn't actually manage water that way the thing I want to emphasize is that these rights last forever and there is no process or framework for periodic review so this is not like even hydropower licenses issued by FERC that are subject to periodic review every few decades these are a species of property right that last forever as long as the water is used so that means that when a system is over allocated it is really hard to undo that problem it's hard to make progress in solving over allocation and just to dramatize over allocation this is the dry river bed of the Rio Grande at Las Cruces in May of this year and we had a pretty good snowpack this year right the river was flowing well in the upper basin at this time but it was dry below elephant reservoir as it typically is outside the irrigation season so you heard today about how the upper Mississippi was declared by Congress to be a nationally significant ecosystem and a nationally significant transportation quarter this part of the Rio Grande is a regionally significant conveyor of irrigation period so the compact is an important feature here adopted by so so compacts are the preferred means of allocating interstate rivers in the west and what we have under the compacts is they start out as contractual agreements negotiated by the states they become state law and federal laws approved by the states in Congress so here we've got a compact that divides water among Colorado, Mexico, Texas it's entirely focused on ensuring water for consumptive uses there's really really no other purpose built into the compact its delivery obligations and its restrictions on upstream storage were established based on historical observation the 30s with the expectation that the future would look like the past right very quickly the future came to look different than it did in 1938 but these obligations are set for all time and they they impose like most compacts they impose limits on upstream states for the benefits of downstream states a key thing to remember about about compacts is while it is theoretically possible to change them in reality it's about like amending the U.S. Constitution it is extremely difficult politically speaking to change a compact once it comes into being so that the provisions established in 1938 in practice will probably never change the other thing about compacts generally in the Rio Grande Compact in particular dispute resolution is not what they do well so when there are disputes they land in the United States Supreme Court that's Texas v. New Mexico now and it is in litigation and so there is no good mechanism to keep these things out of litigation so the compact is a big feature you think why did the states ever think it was a good idea to impose these limits on themselves well there was a carrot and the carrot was federal dams compacts were the facilitating means of getting Congress to fund the big dams that the states wanted now elephant butte predated the compact and was sort of woven into the Rio Grande Compact but there was a desire for more reservoirs in New Mexico and in Colorado so that's why those states thought it was good to enter into this so a Bureau of Reclamation's elephant butte dam you might note the bathtub ring in the depleted elephant butte reservoir based on its low water conditions in recent years one of the economically successful reclamation projects but this is why the river is dry at Las Cruces for most of the year so this gets into the role of federal reservoirs the dams in the Rio Grande like most of the nationally are 50 years old and older based on the boom period of construction as authorized by Congress talked about reclamation focusing on water supply core of engineers having the flood control portfolio with some other purposes as well but those purposes are determined by project authorizing statutes Congress authorized these reservoirs to be built for certain purposes it's the agencies though that fill out the details of their operating regimes and I should also mention that with Bureau of Reclamation reservoirs their water supply contracts that play really important roles in how these projects are operated most of the plants are old decades old and it's not that it wouldn't make sense to update them there are a number of reasons why it would make a lot of sense to periodically update the operating plans why does it not happen bureaucratically there are great reasons why the agencies don't want to do it it would cost a lot of money to do the reviews you would have to do environmental compliance NEPA it would be controversial because many of the stakeholders would see risk to potential changes in operations and you improve you increase your chances of getting sued if you do something if you maintain the status quo you avoid all that all right so it's not that it doesn't make sense to update them it does but that's why they're reluctant the system we're talking about was intended to be rigid right flexibility is not what it was built for it was built to provide certainty because certainty in water rights certainty in available water supplies was viewed as promoting investment put water to work decisions whether they're state water rights or contracts or or interstate compacts involve once and for all time allocations and so unlike environmental law unlike most features of federal land management there is no periodic review there is no opportunity really to revisit re-engage these decisions this system was really set up to handle the kind of short-term variability we have always had in the Rio Grande it does not deal well with any kind of long-term change and that includes climate change but it also includes the kinds of what we think of today as new demands that were not built into the system originally that's unresolved tribal water claims and it's also environmental demands that nobody thought about in the 30s and before so which brings in the silvery minnow and the Endangered Species Act I should mention everybody talks about how ferocious and unyielding the Endangered Species Act is this species was listed in 1994 it would be extinct today if it weren't for aquariums okay the at least two I believe three years in the last decade the usual annual October sampling but none of these in the wild so it is in dire dire condition in the wild so the Endangered Species Act is the one law that makes environmental concerns relevant in managing the Rio Grande true of many interstate rivers in the west and it's the only law that really works at cross purposes to this allocation and management system that I laid out before so five years after the minnow was listed litigation required consultation by the Bureau on the core and their operation of the federal water projects huge controversy but it also led to some positive efforts for the minnow that are ongoing today but the risk to the species grows as available water shrinks partly due to climate change partly because Albuquerque now is using more of its surface water and less groundwater one other thing to note though is that the Endangered Species Act in practice has some real has one real negative perverse incentive feds are required to consult and to avoid jeopardy on any discretionary action they lighten their endangered species load by denying or shedding discretion so at a time when we need flexibility and discretion to solve problems they want to avoid it for it so as to minimize their burdens under the Endangered Species Act and and I that is particularly true of one of the federal agencies in the Rio Grande so just last slide here some of the things that climate change is going to make more difficult the laws are hard to change they aren't built to handle change what we are doing in the Rio Grande and some other basins is trying to find creative workarounds to keep this system in place but find little tiny points of flexibility where we can make progress in resolving problems climate change will exacerbate over allocation for some of the reasons that we've already heard about today compliance with compact rules those conditions in the 1930s on which the compact requirements were based no longer obtained and so compliance will become an even bigger constraint on the upper states reservoir operations as hydrographs change but also as values and needs change in the basin reservoir operations that operate under an old fixed plan are an ongoing problem and finally water to support aquatic and riparian ecosystems what we need is an adaptive and forward-looking system for water management that is not the system we have now thanks thank you that was it was very excellent Melanie do you need this our last speaker for this afternoon is Melanie Stansbury Melanie has a long history in working on water issues from a federal level and currently she's a state legislator from the great state of New Mexico and watching both in her campaign to be elected and what she's done since being elected has a keen interest in the waters of Mexico so Melanie all right congratulations you made it to the end of the day I'm the very last speaker how's everyone feeling out there today I see a lot of tired looking people so we only got 15 more minutes of people talking at you and hopefully I'm gonna deliver some information I know probably everyone's got information overload right now but I'm gonna actually ask you to do two things while you're listening which is to really think revolutionary and secondly to think about grounding this entire conversation locally and what does that mean so let's start first we're talking about our rivers and I want you to think for a moment about your river humans are innately wired to have a connection to water I happen to actually be a water sociologist a lot of people have been talking today about the need for social social scientists working in water and there's not very many of us out there but I've been working on water literally my entire career I grew up in a family that owned a irrigation company so I grew up digging ditches and laying pipe my first real job was teaching science to kids at the Natural History Museum in New Mexico and taking them out to do water quality monitoring I did my graduate research on water governance and then I had the extraordinary opportunity to go serve in federal government for almost seven years working first at the Council on Environmental Quality and then at the Office of Management and Budget in the White House where I worked on earth science and water programs and then I was the earth science and water staffer in the Senate Energy Committee before I moved back home and hung my shingle as a consultant and got recruited to run for office and so I've been serving in the New Mexico State Legislature since November so I have had a very long tenure so take what I have to say about the political process as you will but I want to talk a little bit about some why it's critical that we really think in a revolutionary manner and I think that Reed's talk really put an exclamation point on the reality that we've been talking about all day which is that we need revolutionary answers we're not going to solve this problem with old ways of thinking we need to fundamentally change the tools, technologies, and paradigms that we're using for management and policy so I'm going to start I was asked several times today to talk about the New Mexico Water Data Act and I think it's a perfect lead-in to talk about the revolutionary aspect of what we need to do to really change this paradigm so if you think about the one thing that has probably most fundamentally changed your life aside from your personal circumstances over the last 20 years what do you think it is? You don't actually have to say it because I'm going to tell you it's this it is the technology and data revolution that has happened in our world over the last 15 or 20 years and one of the things that we don't really think about anymore because it's completely normalized in our everyday life is that we use big data to do everything from figuring out how you got here this morning to figuring out what the weather is going to be for the rest of the week to finding a place to eat to online shopping and what data and communications revolutions have done is fundamentally transform the way that we solve collective social problems by crowdsourcing them and bringing data to your hand with tools that help you make decisions that are actually big giant social problems and that has fundamentally transformed our society in fact some of our biggest social problems have been fundamentally transformed by it think about transportation 20 years ago we were trying to figure out how to build more high speed trains more giant infrastructure more highways and what happened some dudes in Silicon Valley wrote some code called Uber and it fundamentally transformed the way we think about our public transportation system because it crowdsourced the solution so I'm going to make a case for why we need a new paradigm for water management and why we need to move away from the analog solutions of the past to the digital solutions of the future because the reality of the situation is is that we are living in a system that is extremely rigid and very difficult to change so this last year in the New Mexico State Legislature we passed the Water Data Act and the reason why we passed this Act was because we do not have the kinds of solutions in water management that we see in every other sector in our society partly because water is a public good and the private sector is not developing the tools and creating the demand and action to put the power of big data and technology in your hands when it comes to water management and that is why you need sometimes the government to intervene to provide frameworks to provide resources and so this year not only did we pass the Water Data Act we became the first state or the second state in the US to do so California was the first and we have garnered attention from all over the country and even from other countries around the world because people understand intuitively that we're not going to get ourselves out of this without making fundamental change to our fundamental systems so let's talk a little bit about I'm going to recap some of the things that we heard today and then talk about how that how that transforms and how we land this locally so for me the biggest challenges in the Rio Grande are these aging and outdated systems that includes our infrastructure and our policy and legal frameworks system change and the need for a whole new approach we need revolutionary thinking not only in our policy and management but in our science itself so we need a plan to develop new tools that are going to fundamentally change how we actually solve these problems and we need a roadmap to get there and that's actually one of my hopes for the outcome of this meeting because I think the academies can help drive a roadmap for the science piece so you've heard a lot today about the old paradigm but let me just recap it so the old paradigm and water management isn't actually very old it came into being in the late 1800s because it was imported as the United States was moving into western territories and that paradigm I would summarize as divide it the compacts capture it with dams and canals and things like that move it to where you want to actually develop something you use it put it to work as we said and then if you don't use it you lose it and it goes to somebody else but it's important that we put this in a historical context because one of the things that hasn't really been talked about today is that Americans were late on this scene so New Mexico has been home to many many native tribes for thousands of years and they're still there and they're sovereign nations and they continue the practices that they've been practicing for thousands of years and they are also practicing some of the most innovative water management in the United States and so these two things are happening simultaneously within these communities in the 1500s the Spanish came up the Camino Real from central Mexico and they established communities throughout the territory of the tribes that we call Pueblos and New Mexico there's 19 federally recognized Pueblos at this time and they established their own sort of quasi-indigenous Hispanic culture in the Southwest as well and they brought with them traditions from North Africa because Spain had been occupied by the Moors immediately before settlement they brought with them Spanish traditions and the traditions of Europeans who came from all over to help the Spanish settle the Southwest and they melded and brought their systems together with those of the tribes that they met and so when the United States showed up on the scene they tried to impose an entirely new structure this paradigm that we've been talking about onto the indigenous systems because they wanted to open the West to settlement and yet those systems are still practiced in the American Southwest and in New Mexico and continue to be impacted and we don't have sufficient time to talk about it here but one of the things that I want to impress upon you is the tribes continue to practice their political sovereignty over their lands and waters and continue to practice traditions that have been going on for millennia and our Hispanic communities have been practicing traditional Isekia culture for over 400 years in New Mexico and in many places those communities those Isekia institutions are the primary governance within entire towns and so our traditional systems are still there and still functioning and many would argue are among some of the most resilient systems right because they have weathered not only changes in climatic conditions but in a time before there were huge centralized control systems actually controlling the systems of water so we've seen a lot of change especially since the late 20th century we saw the rise of the large dam building movement in the 1930s and 40s up through the 1960s the environmental movement and urbanization of the west really transformed how we think about water and so the old paradigm was already beginning to experience stressors I would say significantly by the 1960s before we even really were conscious that climate change was impacting it and those stressors included changing demands so that's especially increasing urbanization and population growth ecological change the Endangered Species Act collapse of natural riparian habitats and other impacts and social and political change because there were a lot of people living in the west tribal and otherwise who thought that building big dam systems wasn't actually a pretty good idea and it only benefited a small group of people and of course as we've been talking today the big change now is of course climate change and Dagmar showed you several outputs of models earlier this morning but just to really drive the point home this is actually a temperature model it's an output model from the current work that the Bureau of Reclamation and USGS are doing to downscale global climate models for the upper real grand and as you can see under every single carbon scenario in every single global circulation model we have an increase in temperature in the real grand but when you land that into communities and you'll see here this is Chama in Espanola and if you're from New Mexico those are tiny little villages Espanola was settled in the 1500s by Spanish settlers we're going to have significant changes no matter what happens with our carbon scenarios in the growing seasons temperature and precipitation within these communities and that means these communities are going to be impacted and are going to have to do things to change so many of you have probably read Thomas Kuhn's work he wrote a famous book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and basically he's one of the people who helped coin the idea of paradigm shift and tipping points and if you haven't ever read this book and you're interested in science history it's a wonderful read and one of his major points is that paradigm shifts often take generations to take hold it's not like you just thought up a new idea one day and then everything changed and his overarching argument is that old ways persist until a credible alternative is viable and so you always have kind of the old paradigm and the new paradigm happening simultaneously and I would argue that is the exact moment that we're living in right now so what is the new paradigm if you've been educated in water management in the last 25 years you won't think this is particularly interesting but if you work in policy or other places this is actually very revolutionary so I say there are five major components of the paradigm shift of the new paradigm that's happening in water management first we believe that watersheds should be managed at scale basin and watershed scale we believe they need to be integrated across sectors we believe that they need to be science-based increasingly we understand that we have to restore natural capital and I would argue also our social relationships reconciliation we did a lot of things when we managed and constructed the large infrastructure of the west that severely impacted communities that were already there one of the data that was alluded to today was Cochiti Dam which was a dam that was built for sediment control on the railground and it struck the most sacred place for the Cochiti Pueblo people and finally we understand that our systems need to be redesigned for resilience so the system is tipping we know that but we need to tip in our responses there's a mismatch between what we know and what we do so here are the challenges and here is the imperative and then I'll wrap it up so we can have some Q&A so the challenges that I see in tipping into the new paradigm are along these five lines there are huge gaps in our knowledge that we don't know about how these systems work and especially how they work across different kinds of systems we have a pretty good hydrologic model of the railground but we don't have very good integrated models with other parts of the bio and social systems we need to develop tools we need to fundamentally redesign our entire infrastructure now this is like literally the biggest single thing that we should be thinking about in public policy because it's going to cost us trillions of dollars to redesign and redevelop these aging pieces of infrastructure and we have very little public money to do that so how are we going to do that into the future we're going to have to change our policy and management we're going to have to change our cultures and our thinking and our habits and we're going to have to respond to new challenges New Mexico is having the largest oil and gas boom ever in recorded history right now which is not only causing challenges and fresh water it's creating massive quantities of produced water and waste and we don't know what to do with it so there's always new challenges that come up as well so the opportunity and the imperative the fundamental most important things I think we need to do to really help bring this new paradigm is innovation and translation of our data and science and this is where I say how do you touch it down locally at the end of the day it's farmers utilities irrigation districts people turning on their taps that are going to have to change their behavior how do we provide tools to water managers and water users that actually change what they're doing there's a revolution right now happening in the energy sector a lot of people don't realize this but the grid has been fundamentally transformed over the last 10 to 15 years and it comes under the rubric of grid modernization and that is the transformation that we've been talking about in telecommunications and in electronics is fundamentally changing how we think about the grid how it's managed and the drive to switch to renewables I would argue we need to come up with the same kind of concept in water management how do we modernize our water grid and use new tools to do so in a revolutionary fashion the future is collaboration people love to say in the west the water is for fighting for no the future is for collaborating over and finally we're going to need to touch these changes down in our communities and lift up their solutions into our policy making because many of our communities have extremely wise answers because many of them have been around for hundreds and thousands of years and we're going to have to undertake brave policy making so one of the things that I was also asked to talk about is the work that we're doing in New Mexico right now to rethink our water policy at the state level and I've been traveling all over the state for the last six months and just listening and I want to tell you guys something I've been working in water for 20 years and it turns out I had it all wrong because what it was very important is to actually get out and listen to people and listen to the things that they care about and when you think about how communities think about water and how their needs can be met it really changes the way you think about what the solution set is it's not top down governance answers it's about how do we empower people in communities to solve collective action problems and finally it's going to take leadership because this ain't going to happen on its own we need leadership at the highest levels in federal policy making we needed in every federal agency we needed in every state every local utility every local water manager and we need it in the research community because we need your leadership to change and develop the new ideas the new tools the new technologies that are going to actually change our system and so with that I think I'll leave it for questions and I really just want to say thank you so much for having us and it's really an honor to be here today have another social scientist in the room that's the thing about it so I'm an economist and so all day long I've been hearing about the call need for more social science and I've been hearing a lot about a lot about need for change and how to induce change and actually we know great be a deal about things like how to make get people to change you have to give them the incentive to change and those can be negative incentives or they can be positive things and psychologists economists sociologists all put a lot on on these these different things so I we don't have all the answers I certainly don't mean to suggest that but we know a heck of a lot so for example when we're talking about the nitrate nitrogen problem in the in the golf and the golf hypoxia task force that they haven't achieved anything except for making some very broad useful plans they haven't achieved any reductions because they haven't done anything that changes the incentives in a scale large enough to make change so we need to be saying that we need to be bringing this the the science and evidence we have of that likewise how to get people to reduce water use how to all of those things it has to do with incentives and it needs to be bottom up ideas it needs to be shared governance but economists and psychologists and social scientists actually have some answers but just like climate scientists sometimes people don't like our answers and so they don't want to listen and so I just urge people to remember that we actually have basis on which some of these things are that's not really a question it was going to be but so are you done Kathy? okay all right I'm Melanie I have a question for you related to the one of the last points you made you said in the last six months you've spent time traveling around New Mexico talking to people seeing what was important to them and that it changed your way of thinking and I'm just curious if you could summarize some of the things you learned and some of the changes in your thought process? Absolutely so going back to the Water Data Act specifically one of the things that I think is so interesting about it is like all good pieces of public policy it started over a happy hour at a local brewery that actually somebody in this room was at and we thought we thought it was a pretty good idea and then I got a call the next day from Stacy Timmons in your office and she said so you're gonna write that bill and I said okay let's do it and because the Bureau of Geology has wonderful relationships with all kinds of different stakeholders including a lot of work that Stacy and others have been doing with the ranching and farming communities we were able to share that bill widely as part of the vetting process and it turns out one of the things that every single person can agree on is that we need more and better data on water to actually help us solve problems and for me that was a huge eye-opener and people actually were incredibly surprised because water is known as being one of the sort of like core things that causes conflict not only did the Water Data Act pass it passed unanimously in the House and Senate and went from being a happy hour idea to being signed by the Governor in less than three months yeah so what that taught me is that if you have good ideas that people can agree with and you can actually go out into communities and talk to people and understand where they're coming from that you can actually do revolutionary things and I think that one of our big challenges is that we don't spend enough time listening to each other and so part of what I learned from the Water Data Act experience was that we really needed to get out into communities and listen and so I would say one of the biggest things that I've heard being out and about and it's across the board is that our state agencies in particular are not doing a very good job in providing customer service if you will to our to our local communities we literally have hundreds of small communities in New Mexico that are not able to develop clean drinking water systems and we just don't have the capacity to provide technical assistance that actually helps people solve problems in a way that would be affordable and sustainable for them to me that's one of most fundamental things that's a totally solvable problem but I didn't even know it was a problem until we went and started talking to people and it turns out it's like the number one problem I would say the second thing that I've just heard over and over and over again which won't take probably any of you and by surprise but in the west water management of supply and water quality are completely vulcanized and have virtually nothing to do with each other water is not treated as a single resource within our state agencies water is treated as a commodity that's managed as a supply issue by two agencies in New Mexico and then our water quality standards are handled in our environment department and everywhere I've traveled in the state every stakeholder of every stripe has told me we need to recombine these and really work on these issues together so those are several of the things and then finally I would just say you know all of these challenges are hyper local and that's partly why we need new tools because there is no possible way that any centralized government at any scale can solve all of the problems that everyone has and so that's why I think it's very important that we develop new tools that people can really harness their own creativity to solve their own problems Do we have any other questions out there? Yes So I'm going to address this question to read which is that you very eloquently laid out all of the deficiencies of the current system with regard to dealing with our contemporary situation but you didn't actually say anything about alternatives that might be explored and I'd like to hear a little about that So I would say there's a lot that needs to change but if I'm going to just three things quickly one is I think we really do need a program for reviewing and revising federal reservoir operating plans not just from a technical standpoint not just in terms of integrating better data into short-term decision making but really engaging people in what they want to see with reservoir operations because climate change isn't the only thing that is changing in these basins needs and values are changing as well two is um we need to have some way some system of modernizing management imperatives on interstate rivers so that it's not all driven by compacts that will never change that are rooted in historical assumptions and observations and that we're never designed with anything more than surface water management for consumptive uses in mind we've got to have something that tries to provide at least an overlay to to get some constructive engagement on on interstate water management and three we need to have something that is a more holistic approach to environmental protection and restoration in western rivers and just the endangered species act most western rivers that is all there is and and i think it it's it's not it's both under inclusive because there's a lot more environmental values that people care about than just endangered species themselves and it's also it doesn't it it does have some certain perverse incentives built into it so if i were going to name three things i would i would name those three held it you have another up so i was really intrigued um Katrina and Mike you you made reference to the state of Minnesota and its citizens being able to think out of the box to care about water quality delivered downstream to care about hypoxia way down in the Gulf efforts to think broadly within the piece yet when we talk about the Rio Grande for all of the nice words we talked about how to work together within New Mexico I never heard anybody say we need to get new Mexicans to really care about the flight of a forgotten river we need to really get more water to reconnect the river we need to stop what they're doing in Colorado to get more water we have two and a half million however many people there are in Juarez they don't have enough water we in New Mexico have to care about their water down there and so I'm wondering is it easier to think out of the box about other people's problems when the problem is too much water but when we're talking about the pain of drought it's a whole different deal and whether that's one of the fundamental problems that it's always going to be easier to think about large river management when it's the problem too much water but we're really going to struggle to think way out of the box when it comes to the pain of drought you know I'm just going to say one thing I think to another point we have been organized by watershed in Minnesota for 50 plus years so there are watershed districts all over the state there are local units that plan for water and get support from the state so there's a lot of layers which makes it complicated but also people are very civically engaged and involved that doesn't mean yes people will tell you they want change that they want water quality but when it comes to it as highlighted we aren't seeing the trajectory of change that we need in terms of the nutrient example you can we're having way less phosphorus and that's primarily the success of wastewater treatment plans but we are not seeing the agriculture changes that are called for even though people say they want to send cleaner water downstream there's definitely a disconnect so if people have answers to fix that problem to get motivated people who don't want the government in their life to find other ways to incentivize that I mean we're working on agarban partnerships we're looking at since we've got oaks of data that show we know where the lands use changes could occur that would drive the biggest change those people don't want to talk to us so how do you get to that place is still a disconnect in Minnesota so if there are social scientists who have the answer you know we would love to hear from them I saw a political poll last year I think I'm good and it was a poll about what is the most important environmental issue to you and the top issue across New Mexico and nationwide was rivers people care about rivers and so how you get people involved in caring about other people on other parts of the rivers is by building campaigns and stories and ways of connecting people I think you know for example you look at these catastrophic floods that have been happening in places like Houston and you know the islands and the Caribbean and the huge outpouring humanitarian outpouring of people making personal donations who don't even have money to help families in need is because those stories were presented to us as people in need of help so I think part of what we need to do to reconnect our river systems not just hydrologically and sedimentarily is also through story and by highlighting those things in in the public face one of one of that challenges just you know on the in the west and it's not just drought it's the it's the mentality of entitlements that are set up by water rights and also by compacts and so we get in the mindset that so all three of the Rio Grande Compact states want the same thing that is to get every drop of water they're entitled to and not have the bastions in the other state get any of those drops and and I think that that too works defeats the collaborative enterprise reach the end of our public question and answer period I think I speak for the the panelists here they'd be willing to take questions individually afterwards please join me in thanking okay so Jeff Rubin must have been behind us finishing 10 minutes earlier than I thought we were going to he told me that happy hour officially started at five downstairs and that was officially the end of today's meeting so that gives me a couple of minutes to again on behalf of my co-chair in this joint boards meeting Catherine Kling would like to say thank you again to our speakers to our panelists to our guests I think we've really heard a great set of very informative presentations lots to think about we would like to pass on that we plan over the next couple of months to individually the each board as well as collectively ruminate a bit on what we've heard what we've learned and try to assimilate and synthesize some of these ideas and most importantly we're going to work towards defining the next steps because we would really like to see where the boards and the academy can contribute to these discussions and action on that note we have some other people to thank we really really want to shout out for Courtney's thing where I don't know what Courtney is sitting she's oh she stepped out okay Courtney Eric Edgins and Brendan McGovern these are staff members who have put an awful lot into the background work into making this happen and to make sure that today really came off without a hitch so we could give them a round of applause that would be great okay Jeff if you walk slowly you'll make it exactly at 5 p.m. for your free glass of wine