Wednesday Week Eleven

...some questions...

1. What is going on (water-wise) in California right now?

2. Outside of the fact that the current situation has 98% of the state in a drought, water are the ongoing water management challenges that California as a state experiences?  How do they manage low levels of average annual accumulated precipitation in areas that are either densely populated or agriculturally important? How do they manage high intra-annual variability in precipitation how do they manage high inter-annual variability in precipitation. How do they manage pre-historic (dendrochronologic) evidence for multi-decade-long dry spells? How do they manage sharknados?

3. What does the Colorado River Aqueduct do? What does the LA/Owens Valley Aqueduct do? What does the California Aqueduct do?

4. What are some quantitative mechanisms for understanding and communicating variability (in precipitation)? Why does Southern California have the potential for such highly variable precipitation? How does this present two distinctive challenges?

5. Why is there a drought in California right now?

6. What evidence is there for droughts in California's prehistoric past? How long/bad were these drought periods relative to the current one?

7. Why is California considering building desalination plants in response to the current drought? Why might this not be a good idea?

8. What does California do with its water? What would an ongoing drought mean for the future of California?


Slider from today are on Sakai. Your assigned reading for Friday is Ocean's Dilemma from the most recent issue of Time Magazine (available as a s.pdf in the resources folder of Sakai).