AUSTIN, Texas — As the western U.S. suffers its worst drought in a millennium, the government of Texas, a state facing its own unique set of extreme weather risks, is finally turning to address the threat posed by climate change its long-term water supply.
Texas’ situation is dire enough that in July, a majority of Republicans in the state legislature voted unanimously to ask the state water planning board to consult with the state climatologist as he advises cities to plan to meet the state’s water needs in the future.
The rule change “removes the possibility of harming the political climate [local water officials’] ability to responsibly plan for the future,” Sen. Nathan Johnson (D), a major proponent of the change, told The Hill.
“It kind of insulates the regional water authorities from political pressures that would hurt their ability to do what they need to do,” Johnson said.
But that process won’t bear fruit for years — and Texans are increasingly worried that the crisis is here now.
It never rains but it pours
The most recent display of the fickle climate was last month’s torrential rains that stunned Johnson’s hometown of Dallas — a record rainfall that broke the city’s long drought, draining soil and acres of asphalt to flood much of the city. These kinds of events offer a foretaste of the future Texas can expect, climatologist Katharine Hayhoe told The Hill. “You saw record drought conditions week after week – and then all of a sudden, a summer rain in one day,” Hayhoe said. For much of the state, annual rainfall levels may not change much — but that average hides potentially deadly extreme drought and flooding, he said. “The amount of precipitation remains the same. But the distribution is changing. It’s getting more extreme in both directions.” Even if rainfall totals and distribution remained the same — which is unlikely — the simple fact of increased heat due to climate change could portend water shortages, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told The Hill. “Lakes are evaporating faster, water on the ground is evaporating faster,” said Nielsen-Gammon, who is also a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. This is a problem for a state whose water storage strategy relies heavily on a collection of nearly 200 outdoor reservoirs, exposed at all times to the sun. Moisture absorbed into the air can also exacerbate storms, making rainfall heavy enough to overwhelm the ability of soils to absorb it and catchment infrastructure to trap it.
Population growth is coming
When these disruptive effects are added to the growing populations projected by the Texas Water Development Board — expected to grow from about 30 million to 52 million by 2070 — they create a situation that worries many water planners interviewed by The Hill.
Much of that growth is expected along the dry and vulnerable I-35 corridor that connects Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio, Austin and the vast collection of cities and towns surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth. The highway roughly separates the wet east of Texas from its dry west.
With this influx of people will come new water-dependent industries, from manufacturing plants like Tesla’s new facility going up outside Austin to more than a dozen high-tech semiconductor factories. And even with climate change making the weather more extreme, the state is fighting hard to protect fossil fuels. These also take a lot of water, particularly when oil and gas are extracted through fracking.
“If a community in the state fails and their water supply fails, that’s big national, international news, and then it affects, I would say, the economic development and the perception of Texas,” Robert Mays of the Meadows Water Center and Environment he told local station KXAN, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media.
The looming prospect of a more intense and unpredictable drought-flood cycle presents a daunting challenge for water planners.
It’s also something that — at least when it comes to climate change — local officials have largely been left to figure out on their own, state water experts told The Hill.
For now, members of the Water Development Board “definitely don’t seem to be reaching out [climate issues] directly,” Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist, told The Hill.
In contrast to the state’s specific and data-driven approach to planning for population growth, “there is no formal projection of the effects of climate change on streamflow or groundwater recharge,” he added.
“It would be great if individual water suppliers weren’t left to their own devices to deal with the problem.”
But the Texas Water Development Board’s planning process has traditionally looked backward, not forward, in terms of the worst-case scenario managers should plan for.
“By not looking at climate change, we’re counting on water that probably won’t be there in the future,” Mays told KXAN. “And that increases the risk of reservoirs drying up and people losing their water supplies.”
However, integrating climate planning is extremely difficult.
“The key word with climate is complicated,” Matt Nelson, water resources professional at the Texas Water Development Board, told The Hill.
Even at the state level, Nelson said, the models are ambiguous, leaving the next effects on the ground unclear. That means state officials who move quickly, say, to increase supply risk installing expensive and potentially “maladaptive” infrastructure aimed at solving the wrong problem, he added.
The long-term trend of climate change — to the extent that it’s clear — is also easily drowned out in the short-term chaos of Texas weather, he said.
“There may be a more substantial risk in the short term than a long-term climate effect,” Nelson said.
Local groups are taking action
Some individual water suppliers took the state’s absence as an invitation to make their own plans.
For the city of Austin, the constant threat of climate change has led the city to study its own vulnerability — and to secure its water supply after 2100, when its population is expected to triple from 1.1. up to 3.3 million.
“Water utilities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change. The nature of our product is such that we have to respond and adapt to these changes as they happen in real time,” Austin Water program manager Marisa Flores Gonzalez told The Hill.
During the tumultuous century ahead, “we may have periods of time where we have plenty of water around — more water than we want,” Flores Gonzalez said.
“But we need to be able to tap into those supplies when they exist in average or wet conditions and store that water so we can use it in times of drought.”
Austin is exploring a number of ways to do this. City officials are looking for locations where excess water could be channeled into natural underground caverns during times of plenty — essentially creating an artificial aquifer, impervious to evaporation, that the city can draw upon during prolonged dry spells to come.
Groundwater injection is a measure that many other cities around the state are pursuing — most notably San Antonio, an hour’s drive south of Austin, but also smaller cities like El Paso and even folk music mecca Kerville.
Dallas-Fort Worth and other sprawling North Texas cities are building new reservoirs as quickly as possible, and both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are exploring ways to divert water from other basins as they look toward a future where their stores will be overtaxed.
But with “really unusual things that are certainly being discussed without precedent, we often neglect the easiest and most common – which is conservation,” Hayhoe said.
Austin, for example, has gained the amount of water it needs per person per day by nearly a third since the 1990s and is about a quarter of the way through a campaign to change all of the city’s analog water meters to smart ones. leak detectors.
And the city is experimenting with pilot wastewater recycling systems — which treat wastewater on-site for reuse in irrigation, fountains and flushing toilets — that could eventually reduce demand for water by 75 percent, KXAN reported.
At the extreme end of that strategy, residents of Big Spring, Texas — in the arid faraway state — drink purified and treated sewage, a system officially called “direct potable reuse” and sometimes derided as a “push toilet,” public radio . station WHYY reported.
“The lowest point I’ve ever seen”
Nelson at the Water Development Board says the board is working to incorporate usable climate models into its planning process. The board’s researchers are working with Nielsen-Gammon to try to derive standardized rules and models that are flexible enough to apply to state planning processes, such as trying to understand how changing heat levels will affect evaporation from lakes and rivers of the various regions. The state itself lags behind growing cities such as Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, where local governments have made their own accurate climate forecasts…
title: “Sterane Texas Cities In Fear Of Running Out Of Water Klmat” ShowToc: true date: “2022-11-08” author: “Lilly Hanlon”
AUSTIN, Texas — As the western U.S. suffers its worst drought in a millennium, the government of Texas, a state facing its own unique set of extreme weather risks, is finally turning to address the threat posed by climate change its long-term water supply.
Texas’ situation is dire enough that in July, a majority of Republicans in the state legislature voted unanimously to ask the state water planning board to consult with the state climatologist as he advises cities to plan to meet the state’s water needs in the future.
The rule change “removes the possibility of harming the political climate [local water officials’] ability to responsibly plan for the future,” Sen. Nathan Johnson (D), a major proponent of the change, told The Hill.
“It kind of insulates the regional water authorities from political pressures that would hurt their ability to do what they need to do,” Johnson said.
But that process won’t bear fruit for years — and Texans are increasingly worried that the crisis is here now.
It never rains but it pours
The most recent display of the fickle climate was last month’s torrential rains that stunned Johnson’s hometown of Dallas — a record rainfall that broke the city’s long drought, draining soil and acres of asphalt to flood much of the city. These kinds of events offer a foretaste of the future Texas can expect, climatologist Katharine Hayhoe told The Hill. “You saw record drought conditions week after week – and then all of a sudden, a summer rain in one day,” Hayhoe said. For much of the state, annual rainfall levels may not change much — but that average hides potentially deadly extreme drought and flooding, he said. “The amount of precipitation remains the same. But the distribution is changing. It’s getting more extreme in both directions.” Even if rainfall totals and distribution remained the same — which is unlikely — the simple fact of increased heat due to climate change could portend water shortages, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon told The Hill. “Lakes are evaporating faster, water on the ground is evaporating faster,” said Nielsen-Gammon, who is also a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. This is a problem for a state whose water storage strategy relies heavily on a collection of nearly 200 outdoor reservoirs, exposed at all times to the sun. Moisture absorbed into the air can also exacerbate storms, making rainfall heavy enough to overwhelm the ability of soils to absorb it and catchment infrastructure to trap it.
Population growth is coming
When these disruptive effects are added to the growing populations projected by the Texas Water Development Board — expected to grow from about 30 million to 52 million by 2070 — they create a situation that worries many water planners interviewed by The Hill.
Much of that growth is expected along the dry and vulnerable I-35 corridor that connects Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley to San Antonio, Austin and the vast collection of cities and towns surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth. The highway roughly separates the wet east of Texas from its dry west.
With this influx of people will come new water-dependent industries, from manufacturing plants like Tesla’s new facility going up outside Austin to more than a dozen high-tech semiconductor factories. And even with climate change making the weather more extreme, the state is fighting hard to protect fossil fuels. These also take a lot of water, particularly when oil and gas are extracted through fracking.
“If a community in the state fails and their water supply fails, that’s big national, international news, and then it affects, I would say, the economic development and the perception of Texas,” Robert Mays of the Meadows Water Center and Environment he told local station KXAN, which is owned by The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar Media.
The looming prospect of a more intense and unpredictable drought-flood cycle presents a daunting challenge for water planners.
It’s also something that — at least when it comes to climate change — local officials have largely been left to figure out on their own, state water experts told The Hill.
For now, members of the Water Development Board “definitely don’t seem to be reaching out [climate issues] directly,” Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist, told The Hill.
In contrast to the state’s specific and data-driven approach to planning for population growth, “there is no formal projection of the effects of climate change on streamflow or groundwater recharge,” he added.
“It would be great if individual water suppliers weren’t left to their own devices to deal with the problem.”
But the Texas Water Development Board’s planning process has traditionally looked backward, not forward, in terms of the worst-case scenario managers should plan for.
“By not looking at climate change, we’re counting on water that probably won’t be there in the future,” Mays told KXAN. “And that increases the risk of reservoirs drying up and people losing their water supplies.”
However, integrating climate planning is extremely difficult.
“The key word with climate is complicated,” Matt Nelson, water resources professional at the Texas Water Development Board, told The Hill.
Even at the state level, Nelson said, the models are ambiguous, leaving the next effects on the ground unclear. That means state officials who move quickly, say, to increase supply risk installing expensive and potentially “maladaptive” infrastructure aimed at solving the wrong problem, he added.
The long-term trend of climate change — to the extent that it’s clear — is also easily drowned out in the short-term chaos of Texas weather, he said.
“There may be a more substantial risk in the short term than a long-term climate effect,” Nelson said.
Local groups are taking action
Some individual water suppliers took the state’s absence as an invitation to make their own plans.
For the city of Austin, the constant threat of climate change has led the city to study its own vulnerability — and to secure its water supply after 2100, when its population is expected to triple from 1.1. up to 3.3 million.
“Water utilities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change. The nature of our product is such that we have to respond and adapt to these changes as they happen in real time,” Austin Water program manager Marisa Flores Gonzalez told The Hill.
During the tumultuous century ahead, “we may have periods of time where we have plenty of water around — more water than we want,” Flores Gonzalez said.
“But we need to be able to tap into those supplies when they exist in average or wet conditions and store that water so we can use it in times of drought.”
Austin is exploring a number of ways to do this. City officials are looking for locations where excess water could be channeled into natural underground caverns during times of plenty — essentially creating an artificial aquifer, impervious to evaporation, that the city can draw upon during prolonged dry spells to come.
Groundwater injection is a measure that many other cities around the state are pursuing — most notably San Antonio, an hour’s drive south of Austin, but also smaller cities like El Paso and even folk music mecca Kerville.
Dallas-Fort Worth and other sprawling North Texas cities are building new reservoirs as quickly as possible, and both Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston are exploring ways to divert water from other basins as they look toward a future where their stores will be overtaxed.
But with “really unusual things that are certainly being discussed without precedent, we often neglect the easiest and most common – which is conservation,” Hayhoe said.
Austin, for example, has gained the amount of water it needs per person per day by nearly a third since the 1990s and is about a quarter of the way through a campaign to change all of the city’s analog water meters to smart ones. leak detectors.
And the city is experimenting with pilot wastewater recycling systems — which treat wastewater on-site for reuse in irrigation, fountains and flushing toilets — that could eventually reduce demand for water by 75 percent, KXAN reported.
At the extreme end of that strategy, residents of Big Spring, Texas — in the arid faraway state — drink purified and treated sewage, a system officially called “direct potable reuse” and sometimes derided as a “push toilet,” public radio . station WHYY reported.
“The lowest point I’ve ever seen”
Nelson at the Water Development Board says the board is working to incorporate usable climate models into its planning process. The board’s researchers are working with Nielsen-Gammon to try to derive standardized rules and models that are flexible enough to apply to state planning processes, such as trying to understand how changing heat levels will affect evaporation from lakes and rivers of the various regions. The state itself lags behind growing cities such as Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, where local governments have made their own accurate climate forecasts…
