Re: some water resources for the Upper Midwest

Lucy Kemnitzer wrote: 
On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 23:18:04 -0500, "J.F. Cornwall"
<JCornwall@xxxxxxx> seems to have said:


Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 08:55:13 -0500, "J. F. Cornwall"
<JCornwall@xxxxxxx> seems to have said:



Patricia C. Wrede wrote:



"J. F. Cornwall" <JCornwall@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:84CXe.12063$Ix4.10116@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



Patricia C. Wrede wrote:


Water-flow wise, Minnesota is actually at the...I forget what it's called, but it's the geological point on the continent where, absent things like the Rocky Mountains, water flows away from it. So we have rivers in this state 

Watershed divide

Jim C (hydrologic database programmer) 


*Thank* you -- that sounds right.

I knew it wasn't just watershed, and I was pretty sure it wasn't "continental divide," but I couldn't remember the two of them at the same time to put them together properly, if you know what I mean.

Patricia C. Wrede


:-) And, if you want to get more technical, you also have the term "groundwater divide", which is the same concept as applied to water flowing underground. An interesting (well, to some of us anyway...) fact is that the surface watershed divide does not necessarily coincide with the groundwater divide. The direction of surface flows depends on the topography, but the direction of groundwater flow depends on pressure gradients.



Okay, this explains a lot to me about water movement in California.

For one thing, saltwater intrusion, which didn't mystify me before,
but which I'm seeing in a new way on the basis of that sentence (it's
those words "pressure gradients" which give a much richer picture than
"when you take the fresh water out the salt water seeps in," somehow).
We have this problem in the Pajaro Valley -- the farmers use well
water, free and unmetered, and not surface water. Which has resulted
in marked and increasing saltwater intrusion in that part of the
county. The county wants to meter the water (and may have started,
you never hear about these things except at the peak of the argument
or the unmanageable point of the crisis), but the farmers say this is
an abridgement of their rights because they own the land they pull the
water out of.

Here's a link to one of our Fact Sheets which you may find intersting (and educational too, hopefully):

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs030-02/ 


thank you.  Bookmarked.  First glance it looks like it fills the gaps
pretty well.



Water law is a fascinating subject, especially when you look at variations across countries and states. The differences between the water laws in Eastern states and the more arid, recently developed Western states is especially intersting. I'm in Nebraska, where we are having increasing conflicts between surface water users (irrigators and municipalities primarily), groundwater users (also irrigators and towns), and the state government which regulates surface water usage, and the Natural Resource Districts which are empowered to regulate groundwater usage. Plus a whole 'nother set of conflicts with Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming over various bits of river flow, plus being right in the thick of a multi-state conflict involving the whole Missouri River basin (states vs Feds vs barge operators vs wildlife groups vs floodplain farmers vs Cthulhu-only-knows-who-else...). Arghhh, enough to make you want to get people's attention with a 2x4! 



Increasingly, it seems like there's regional districts to deal with
land and water use and allied issues.  Clusters of counties and like
that.Does that happen on a larger scale for chunks like "this river's
watershed that covers several states?"

Sometimes. There are interstate "treaties" ("compacts" is the legal term I think) regarding such things, which is why Nebraska is embroiled in lawsuits with Kansas (they sued us), and Wyoming and Colorado (we sued them) over river flows. There are also international agreements (no idea about their legal status or enforceability) about rivers such as the Red River and the Rio Grande.

Are you going to take every possible opportunity to say things about
water all the time? Please? 

I can try, but the boss does want me to work on my coding first...  ;-)

We have a program here to have volunteers sample the runoff at the
outflows and some other spots -- called Urban Watch in the summer and
First Flush at the beginning of the rainy season (anytime now).  Last
night I went to training again and got assigned to the same culvert I
sampled last year.  Saturday we do the "dry run" and then any time
between now and the beginning of November, whenever the first decent
rain happens (usually in the middle of the night around October 20),
we get paged and we jump in our cars and run over with buckets and
conductivity meters and transparency tubes (or turbidity kits, this
year) and ph strips and sample bottles and thermometers and there we
are, doing all this stuff for a couple of hours in the first rain of
the year.  I know this program runs from Monterey to Half Moon Bay.
Are there similar programs in other areas along the coast?  And what
would be the equivalent thing to do in places where the urban streams
don't go (relatively or absolutely) dry part of the year?

Those are usually local initiatives, set up with a state, county, or municipal group taking the lead. If there are two dozen such programs scattered around the country, you can bet there will be three dozens ways they're being organized! :-)

Jim

Lucy Kemnitzer, still chapter nine is up:
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/donor/donorweb/donorindex 
.

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