Hello my name is Ken Nowak, I'm an Engineer with the Bureau of Reclamation and I'm here to talk today about our Colorado River basin water supply and demands study. So really we've been able to get through a number of droughts using our stored water very effectively. However, in recent times, we've seen drought, we've seen increase in demand, and really that's put a strain on our reservoirs, and that's really where we are today. We're able to meet our demands, we're able to meet the water use needs in a lot of the communities that rely on the Colorado. But in the future, it's more uncertain, and we really want to look at what are the demands looked like in the future, what are the supplies look like in the future and how do we make that a sustainable resource for future generations to come. So in 2010, Bureau of Reclamation and the seven basin states that share this resource embarked on this Colorado River Basin study and the objective was to look at water supply and demand over the next 50 years. Then look at opportunities and strategies that could potentially mitigate whatever vulnerabilities were finding with those different scenarios going forward. As I mentioned, this was a collaborative effort. So as Bureau of Reclamation or seven state partners working together and then we had stakeholders throughout the base and representing a wide range of interests. So really I think we had a complete picture of all the forces and interests on the Colorado. It ended up being a three-year effort. So we started in 2010, we published in the end of 2012, and really that provided us a long time to work with these stakeholders, work with the states and develop what I'll call momentum. We really came to a common understanding of a lot of things and understanding the challenges ahead, and that really resulted in no decisions. But what it provided was this common technical foundation for planning for the future, and that really provides us that momentum. We have a common technical foundation that really we can draw from as we have to try and make these difficult decisions and plan for the future. It's difficult to forecast the next year or two years of flow on the Colorado, never mind forecast out demands and supply over 50 years. So very quickly we realized that if we're going to try and pick what's likely to happen on the Colorado over 50 years, we're only going to ensure that we're wrong. So we use this scenario planning approach where we acknowledge that we know generally where we are today. But as we go forward in the future, that becomes less and less certain. So it creates a cone, a cone of uncertainty, and so by 2060, there's a lot of uncertainty. We identified the major factors that contribute to that uncertainty. Supply, how much water is going to be available in the future? Demand, our communities and the economy is going to continue to grow in a way that continues to strain and demand more water from this already strained or resource, and then how are our reservoirs going to operate, that's another uncertainty. So really we tried to fill out that cone of uncertainty the range of possible futures with different supply scenarios, different demand scenarios, and different operational scenarios so that when we model the system using our planning tools, we can really see not just where the difficulties are, but where we can do okay, and that really can help guide robust planning and decision-making. So when we marry those two together, supply and demand, we look at all of our scenarios. We end up with the figure you're seeing right now. What you're seeing right now is the fruit of that labor, and on the y-axis, you see volume and millions of acre feet and on the x-axis, you see years. You can see the running averages of those data we looked at earlier supply and use. You can see that they're converging at present time, and when we look at our scenario's going forward, demand being in red and water availability or supply being in blue, you can see that they're diverging more and more. When we get out to 2060, the median imbalance between demand exceeding supply is 3.2 million acre feet per year. But it's really important to emphasize that there's a huge range there. It can be as small as zero or it can be as large as about eight million acre feet. So that's really the context that we embarked in our modeling, in our evaluation of future opportunities recognizing that we have an uncertain future. We want to understand what would it take to make an eight million acre foot deficit viable are sustainable and meet demands versus what would be needed for a 3.2 or zero. We're really able to explore those different scenarios using our modeling tools and again contribute to a sound technical foundation that can provide all of our stakeholders and interest groups the information to understand what really needs to be done. Now it doesn't say how it needs to be done, but what are the challenges? Just agreeing on those is really important and having that general vernacular, the general understanding of the system and those challenges is a huge step forward. I can't underscore that enough because being on the same page with someone as the first step to moving towards a solution, and so that's the first half of our study. Supply-and-demand, what are those scenarios, and now we move into what I'll call the second half of our study, evaluating the system, trying to see how reliable, how resilient it is under all those different scenarios. We looked at our system using metrics for six different resource categories. The Colorado obviously supplies water, so we had water deliveries. But we also have electric power resources. We have ecological resources, recreational resources, we have water quality issues, and then we also have our objective of providing flood control. Now obviously we're talking about a lot of scenarios where there's an imbalance between supply and demand and perhaps flood control isn't something that would be a concern. But if we look at our climate change hydrology, we actually see that there's some likelihood of really high flows mixed in with a decreasing trend. So making sure that our system can handle those flows and provide that flood control is really important as well. So you'll see in the graphic shown on right that we've got all these colored dots and each one corresponds with a location in the basin that we're monitoring for one of these resources. You can see by the color which resource it is. When we model the system, we can look at all of these 90 different points and really get a feel for how is it performing under a given scenario of supply, demand, and operation. That helps to identify a baseline of what are the vulnerabilities, what are risks, and then that helps inform what might need to be done to mitigate those risks and vulnerabilities. So once identified, the risks and vulnerabilities under a baseline say a do-nothing scenario. We went out and we said to the public to anyone interested. Give us your best ideas, give us the options and strategies that you think are going to help to make the system more resilient reliable going forward. So over a three month period, we received over 150 submissions and they were a range of ideas, crazy stuff. I mean really crazy stuff. Towing icebergs from the Arctic down to Southern California. This is real stuff that we got and we evaluated, but also really practical solutions like conservation and things that can be done pretty quickly. So we grouped them into four major categories. We saw increased supply, we saw decreased demand, we saw modify operations, and then we saw things like community round tables, and we called those governments and implementation types of options that maybe don't necessarily create water or reduced demand, but change the paradigm, and that obviously can be important as well. So one thing we recognized is that none of these are silver bullets and we probably need more like silver buckshot. The way we accomplished that is through a portfolio approach. We take various options that fit together, based on what we're calling a strategy. So maybe you have a low-energy approach. So what are the options that don't need a lot of power in or easier to implement from that regard. Or maybe you have a really high reliability strategy where I need the water every year, year in and year out and I can't afford to not have it. Those are strategies and then you group options together based on that strategy, based on how well something performs. You can see that our graphic here shows that you have a pie now. The pie fills the gap between supply and demand using those different options that fit with your strategy. So for the purpose of our study, we looked at creating four portfolios. Now they're not solutions but more examples of how you might come up with different strategies and then implement them and see where those trade-offs start to occur, based on your approach to solving the challenges and the basin and really where your interest is because that's going to affect your strategy obviously. So we've now model the baseline scenario in the Colorado using our tools,our modeling tools, or metrics. We've seen what the system looks like in terms of the imbalances, the vulnerabilities to these various resources and now we model it again under each of these four portfolios resulting in a general five groupings of scenarios if you will based on what you're doing to address the vulnerabilities. What I'd like to talk about little bit now is some of the results that we got from that effort. So as I mentioned, we had a number of metrics across the basin and so there's a variety of ways to look at it. But there's one example here, I'm providing a water supply centric view of the upper basin in the Colorado and its ability to deliver its compact entitlement to the lower basin. Then a lower basin water supply view that looks at lake Mead pool elevation. Lake Mead is one of our two major reservoirs and Las Vegas directly pulls water out of Lake Mead. So the elevation of lake Mead can be very important for their ability to extract water. That's what we're looking at here. The ability of one basin to deliver its compact obligation to the other, and looking at that as a potential vulnerability if it can't. But then also the elevation of this key reservoir and seeing is it dropping so low that there could be potentially challenges for Las Vegas getting its water directly out of the lake. This figure shows results broken down by the hydrology, the supply scenarios. The first one, looking across the first row is observed resampled. So the paradigm here is simply that history repeats itself. If history repeats itself, you see that the upper basin can deliver its compact entitlement to the lower basin with no problems whatsoever. The baseline has zero vulnerabilities and as a result all the portfolios have zero vulnerabilities. Now for lake Mead, the lower basin bellwether for water supply availability. We do see a few vulnerabilities cropping up. You can see seven percent of the traces we were looking at. That's individual realizations of the next 50 years had some problems where lake Mead fell below that elevation. However, when we look at our four portfolios, we see that all of them were able to remedy that situation and bring it down to zero vulnerability. Now we've got a couple of other different hydrology scenarios that we looked at but I'm going to cut to the bottom one because that's an interesting one. It says down scaled GCM projected. This is really our climate change scenario. We take our climate models. We look at the hydrology output and that drives the supply the water availability. So what we see now for the upper basin, its' ability to deliver its compact entitlement to the lower basin. There's quite a few vulnerabilities. When we start implementing our portfolios, we see that they're not able to mitigate all of those vulnerabilities entirely. Portfolio A was our broadest portfolio, sort of our kitchen sink really throwing anything that's reasonable at the challenge and not really trying to limit things based on cost or based on other potential impacts. Then Portfolio D was really our smallest portfolio is the common ground, where everyone generally thought these were good things to do. As a result, it has the fewest options to pull from. So you can see that portfolio A does the best, it gets it down to three percent vulnerable from 18. But Portfolio D only brings it down to 11 percent. So that speaks to your portfolio selection, how you craft your strategy and ultimately what you can achieve. We see similar results when we look at the lower basin vulnerability, Lake Mead falling below elevation at 1000. What we see is actually that for the baseline that do nothing 44 percent of traces were showing some challenge where lake Mead falling below 1000 threshold. That's a lot. When we look at our portfolios, however we see that you can bring it down to about a quarter or 11 percent using that portfolio A, again the biggest portfolio kitchen sink but that portfolio D the smallest only gets to about 18. So again, once you start thinking about your strategy and what's included, you can then understand why you're getting the performance you are. The basin study completed in 2012, but in 2013 we launched what we're calling moving forward. This is really building on that momentum. We identified a number of things in the study that we're right for further investigation, may be things that we couldn't get at for whatever reason during the basin study. This effort aims to bring in the right stakeholders, technical experts to make that happen. There's a phase one and that's what's wrapping up right now. The reports will be published in early 2015, documenting what these groups did and how it really shapes what we're calling phase two. So phase two is really looking across these work groups, and the reports that they've generated and looking for common ground for things that we can do that will have multi-resource benefits and really starting to actually do things in a pilot project type of phase. That's where we're headed and that's where we're we're directing and using this momentum to really start doing things that hopefully will help to sustain and ensure the viability of this important resource the Colorado River basin. So I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to share this study with you and hopefully you found it interesting and informative and would certainly welcome any questions or comments by contacting the email address shown on this slide here and be happy to follow up with you. Thank you.
