Past the peak and a post-mortem...

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nzaugg said:
There is a point at which the salts hold onto the water too tightly and the pressure required begins to exceed the structural integrity of the membrane itself. No amount of time will allow you to achieve the separation required. You can run a distillation unit of of solar, but thermal distillation becomes more and more expensive for the water recovered and just doesn't make sense since you have to use materials like titanium. Seawater is below the limits of RO though so it is a potentially endless source of water with good desalination technology. Since the Salton Sea is below sea level, it would make a decent repository for brine generated from RO systems used to feed agricultural systems in the Imperial Valley. Deciding if the money for infrastructure is worth the crops produced is really the big question.
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If there is already evaporation happening via sunlight then you don't need anything expensive to condense that water vapor out of the air other than cooler temperatures running on the other side of a plastic or glass barrier. The ground water in that area (even if it is brine) will be cool. This is not complicated, just requires pumps, valves, pipes, barrier. I did think RO would be a better way to go, but perhaps it isn't.

I would not suggest adding more salts to The Salton Sea, but any freshwater would be an improvement. The inflows currently to The Salton Sea are full of pollutants and probably salty besides so anything they can do to clean up that would also be an improvement (they are actually working on treatment facilities in Mexico). Some percentage of the inflows come via the Colorado River water being diverted to CA for agriculture and then the waste water coming off the fields is sent to The Salton Sea.
 
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nzaugg said:
No. That is not what is happening. Brine residual for coastal areas of Southern California is being discharged back into the ocean. I'm saying if you wanted to deliver seawater to Imperial Valley for use in agriculture, you could take the brine reject and deliver it to the Salton Sea. It would turn it into a hyper saline lake, but that is its fate eventually anyway. It would help resolve the issues associated with dust along the lake as well.
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It is already saline to the point that the lake cannot support fish any longer. There are regions around the edges that get some fresh enough water inflows that they've been able to set up some bird wildlife sanctuaries and they are mixing some fresh water with the lake water to get areas that support wildlife enough so they are covering more playas with that).

What they need to do is add more fresh water and cover more area that is exposed currently or they'll be spending billions of dollars more (check out what they've had to do for Owens Lake). So far for Mono Lake they've been forced to not drain that one but it's a very touchy situation there as the regulators and LADPW are failing to comply with a court order from many years ago (hopefully this will be changed soon - we'll see).
 
CATD8RII said:
So if I'm reading this right,,, your suggesting that desalinating the ocean water for fresh water in So Cal,,,, the salt brine residual, is to be dumped in the Salton Sea?
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I don't see that in their comments, but my own would be to use all this extra energy in CA to desalinate the ocean water and to send some of the fresh water to The Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea is below sea level so you could set up a canal from the Gulf of Cortez and maybe via the Laguna Salada to get salt water close without even having to pump it. Use this extra energy that is available to desalinate the water and send it via existing rivers to the sea, the discharge could be sent back to the Gulf (the other direction).
 
HMaea said:
Lake Powell has officially given back its entire rise of the season and it isn’t even August yet.
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Oh Fudge! Only I didn’t want to say fudge. I’ve been on and off the beach I’m on right now all summer. based on the erosion on the beach and my memory it does look like we are down 6 to 8 feet.
 
The reservoir has indeed been dropping pretty quickly for this time of year, with inflows hovering in the 4-5,000 cfs range. To put that into perspective, the historic July average is closer to 18,000 cfs (with a lot of variation, of course). BOR is now projecting that the lake will drop to 3551 by the end of August. Perhaps one small silver lining in this is that if this holds, Gregory Bridge will begin to reemerge by the first week of September, and will have a 3-foot clearance by the end of that month. You ought to be able to get a small boat underneath by late November or early December.
 
JFRCalifornia said:
The reservoir has indeed been dropping pretty quickly for this time of year, with inflows hovering in the 4-5,000 cfs range. To put that into perspective, the historic July average is closer to 18,000 cfs (with a lot of variation, of course). BOR is now projecting that the lake will drop to 3551 by the end of August. Perhaps one small silver lining in this is that if this holds, Gregory Bridge will begin to reemerge by the first week of September, and will have a 3-foot clearance by the end of that month. You ought to be able to get a small boat underneath by late November or early December.
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Great positive outlook... (y) Worlings don't just have a 'the glass is half full' perspective.....we expand it to: 'our Lake is half full'. Kinda sounds better.....a tad more expansive.....😋
 
Found this quite by accident this AM...really puts things in 'perspective'....love the lines at 1) Purple: Full Pool 2) Green: Min power generation 3) Red: Dead Pool. Can't believe I've been on our buddy's great site for 125+ years and have never seen this..... 😋
Enjoy!!

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The recent monsoons have helped the inflow but of course that is only a few percent difference and looking to be decreasing.

Still that is better than nothing.

To put a bit of perspective on it a 400cuft/s difference is worth 258,526,753.26 gallons per day of water that we weren't getting before.

No rains in recent forecast for Aspen, CO (that's the place I check once in a while because it's the one place in the mountains I'm familiar with).
 
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So a silly question....all mine are.... :cool: ......when we see many August days of -.22, -.24.....is most of that loss dam release, or evaporation, or leaking out the bottom of our lake?...or something else?

I'd bet it's a mixture, but wondering what our sage water Gurus think is the 'mix'....:unsure:
 
Rainbowbridge said:
So a silly question....all mine are.... :cool: ......when we see many August days of -.22, -.24.....is most of that loss dam release, or evaporation, or leaking out the bottom of our lake?...or something else?

I'd bet it's a mixture, but wondering what our sage water Gurus think is the 'mix'....:unsure:
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The answer is yes... ;)

In reality, USBR measures the water level and then works things out. They have a measure for what went through the dam and then they estimate evaporation based on a measured atmospheric conditions and "bank storage" is used to make up the difference. Generally, what goes through the dam is far and away the cause of the drop in elevation.
 
nzaugg said:
The answer is yes... ;)

In reality, USBR measures the water level and then works things out. They have a measure for what went through the dam and then they estimate evaporation based on a measured atmospheric conditions and "bank storage" is used to make up the difference. Generally, what goes through the dam is far and away the cause of the drop in elevation.
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...I agree with all of that... and to that I'd add some numbers from the USBR in their latest (July) 24-month study. For August, they project a net loss of 361,000 af from inflow vs. outflow, but only 32,000 af from evaporation. As for seepage, I'd argue that's always negligible whenever the lake is dropping, since the lake is always abutting saturated ground. When the lake rises, I'd guess seepage might be a small (but not negligible) factor, as the water encounters dry land and some infiltrates the land...

But as @nzaugg says, by far the biggest factor is inflow vs. outflow...
 
Where is the monsoon? We all know this winter was a disaster but it seems like there’s a developing story this summer as well. This time of year you’d expect big storms sending surges of inflow to slow the drop but there hasn’t been much. The recent small increase in inflows into Lake Powell has been entirely from a pulldown from Lake Navajo. And there is nothing of substance forecast for the next two weeks. My understanding is when you have a weak monsoon that affects the next spring due to drier soils that soak in more of the snowmelt.
 
HMaea said:
Where is the monsoon? We all know this winter was a disaster but it seems like there’s a developing story this summer as well. This time of year you’d expect big storms sending surges of inflow to slow the drop but there hasn’t been much. The recent small increase in inflows into Lake Powell has been entirely from a pulldown from Lake Navajo. And there is nothing of substance forecast for the next two weeks. My understanding is when you have a weak monsoon that affects the next spring due to drier soils that soak in more of the snowmelt.
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We are hogging the monsoon rains in New Mexico. Sorry, but we need the moisture too, in order to grow our fabulous Hatch green chile. I'll talk to the powers that be about letting some of it make it to the Lake Powell watershed.
 
The monsoon has not done anyone favors this year (except perhaps the green chile farmers at Hatch). While the Colorado River basin has suffered under persistent heat and drought, and Phoenix sets record high temperatures, all the moisture has been shunted to the east, creating catastrophic flooding in New Mexico and Texas. There is not that much time left this year to make anything out of the monsoon season in the Four Corners area, and that means we will probably head into fall with very dry soils and thirsty vegetation. Given current hydrology across the Colorado River system, this is not a good place to be. Unless fall somehow flips to a much wetter pattern, we could well be in a situation where even a normal winter snow pack will just get sucked up next spring before it goes downstream. Stay tuned.
 
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