{"id":1307,"date":"2012-04-18T14:57:03","date_gmt":"2012-04-18T21:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.obwb.ca\/blog\/?p=1307"},"modified":"2014-08-22T14:06:10","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T21:06:10","slug":"nature-is-a-tough-mother-adventures-in-water-supply-and-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/obwb.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/nature-is-a-tough-mother-adventures-in-water-supply-and-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"Nature is a tough mother: adventures in water supply and demand"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cLive in the questions, and gradually, and almost without noticing, you will enter the answers and live them also<\/em>.\u201d \u2013 Rainer Maria Rilke<\/p>\n

What does water sustainability look like?\u00a0 How will we know when we get there?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>With climate now a moving target, sustainability \u2013 as a concept \u2013\u00a0may\u00a0lend a false sense of future security.<\/p>\n

These green pastures <\/a>probably aren\u2019t a place we actually arrive \u2013 a utopia of living roofs, light rail, and urban agriculture. Instead, I\u2019ve been trying to think of sustainability<\/em> as adapting to whatever change happens \u2013 while protecting the systems of our little planet for those who come later.<\/p>\n

\u201cResilience\u201d captures the same idea \u2013\u00a0the capacity\u00a0to rebound and rebuild after a forest fire, or like our immune systems, to\u00a0keep us\u00a0healthy in a world of germs.<\/p>\n

For water management \u2013 like everything \u2013 to reach\u00a0a state of readiness, we need to start with what we know, pursue the \u201cknown unknowns,\u201d <\/a>and (hopefully) reveal the unknowns we\u2019ve never considered.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In this spirit, over the past six years, a group of agencies and researchers has undertaken a water supply and demand assessment of the Okanagan: looking for practical paths forward, so that decisions can be based on science, information gaps are uncovered, and we\u00a0get a better idea of what to expect from climate change.<\/p>\n

There is a lot of history. The Okanagan has had water shortages since irrigated agriculture arrived more than 100 years ago. In the past, we\u2019ve taken a supply-side approach, building dams and diversions and drainage ditches. But if anything, the balancing act has become more difficult.<\/p>\n

The challenge is the inexorability of change. More people come in, more fields are planted, and we start to recognize that fish\u00a0want water too. Town councils ask, \u201cIs there a real concern? Are we going to run out of water?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Wreckage of the Testalinden dam failure<\/p><\/div>\n

And \u2013 despite\u00a0B.C.’s fame for timber and rain\u00a0\u2013 the rest of\u00a0the province has similar water problems. Some relate to cost (dams are expensive), some to quality (saline groundwater), and some to storage capacity (where will we put the next reservoir?).\u00a0 Everywhere, we need to know\u00a0more about\u00a0climate change. As my dad says, \u201cNature is a tough mother.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early 2000\u2019s, B.C. was gearing up to overhaul the century-old Water Act, and needed a better way to make water decisions. Eyes turned to the Okanagan as an extreme case: Canada\u2019s only desert, with endangered species, drought, fires, rapid population growth, and inevitable conflict.\u00a0 It\u2019s a relatively small area, with all the problems anyone would want to study \u2013 and has baseline numbers from 1974 for comparison.<\/p>\n

To plan for future development, environmental protection and water security,\u00a0we need to know how much water is coming in, and how much is taken out \u2013 and where.\u00a0\u00a0The resulting Okanagan water supply and demand assessment has been an adventure in science and technology \u2013 and in learning how to collaborate on a difficult, long-term project.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Okanagan watercycle, from the Okanagan Waterscape Poster<\/p><\/div>\n

Supply, by itself, is very complex \u2013 taking in snowpack, surface and groundwater flowing slowly south in streams and aquifers, along with the return flows from wastewater and over-irrigation. The geology matters too \u2013 where the water soaks in, or runs off.<\/p>\n

On the other side of the equation, water demand\u00a0ranges from evaporation,\u00a0as\u00a0the demands of\u00a0dry air\u00a0suck water off the surface of lakes, to evapotranspiration \u2013 pumping water through plants on grassy slopes and forested mountains; water for healthy fish and stream systems; water for farmers; and water for kids brushing their teeth with the tap running.<\/p>\n

Many of the models\u00a0had to be\u00a0created from scratch. For climate, researchers scaled down global models to half-kilometre grid squares, laid across the valley topography.\u00a0 In each square, they can project weather patterns into the future.\u00a0 This was applied to an intensely-detailed water demand model, estimating the water needs of every piece of land \u2013 given vegetation, crop, and water source. Even just getting to the details of how water collects and flows through to the lakes \u2013 pushed computations to their limit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Not everything ran perfectly smoothly, but even that had its uses \u2013 finding weak areas and pitfalls, so that other watersheds can do studies faster and more efficiently.<\/p>\n

With the help of (what seemed like) all the water people in B.C., the result has become a huge resource of water information \u2013 and a much clearer road ahead, with less unknowns.\u00a0 While in previous posts I\u2019ve touched on what we found, we\u2019ve collected everything related to the project on its own website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some some of the results are making me think hard:<\/p>\n