Let’s start thinking about water!

Focused Flows To Maintain Natural Nursery Habitats

Estuary Pool in Galveston Island State Park. Photo credit: Warren Price

Environmental flows are a worldwide challenge with these flows competing for flows for people. Environmental flows are particularly challenging during drought when streamflows are low and demands are high.

In this paper, Montagna and friends out of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi discuss the concept of strategically placed and timed focused flows to maintain upper estuaries during droughts. The authors note that focused flows are likely to be more politically palatable and economically affordable due to lower required volumes (and should work in Texas).

No Widespread Signature of the COVID-19 Quarantine Period on Water Quality Across a Spectrum of Coastal Systems in the United States of America

Map of the National Estuarine Research Reserve study sites.

During the COVID-19 lockdown (and the general pattern of people staying at home), scientists saw environmental improvements such as in air quality and species habitat. So did the lockdown also benefit water quality along the Gulf Coast? The short answer is “No.” Wetz and coworkers, all from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, showed that while there was a decrease in fecal bacteria in highly impacted areas, overall there was little effect of the lockdown on overall water quality in the broader area, demonstrating that natural variability dominated water quality along the coast.

Twenty-first Century Drought Projections in the CMIP6 Forcing Scenarios: Earth’s Future

A major concern with climate change is the stress on water resources anticipated from increased temperatures and lower soil moisture (which in turn leads to less runoff and recharge). With the recent release of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (what the cool kids call CMIP6), part of a standardized framework to study the output of the general circulation models, scientists are starting to assess what this update shows about the future.

Cook and colleagues used CMIP6 to look at drought at the global level (which includes Texas, hence its inclusion here). They found that impacts depended on region, season, and drought metric; less soil moisture and runoff is more widespread than less rainfall (due to increased temperatures); and results for CMIP6 are consistent with CMIP5, the previous set of models. The western part of North America is among the parts of the globe with the strongest response (drier) than the rest of the planet. For the most part, it’s hard to say anything about rainfall changes in Texas due to the large amount of natural variability, but there is a lean toward drier conditions. Soil moisture is expected to decline across the state under all warming scenarios. Runoff for Texas is a mixed bag of drier conditions in the western half of the state, wetter conditions in the eastern half of the state, and dollop of uncertainty up the middle. All this baddish news results in expectations of more extreme drought in Texas, particularly in the western reaches. The authors figure that extreme drought in Texas might be two to three times more frequent toward the end of this century. All in all, CMIP6 is showing a similar story to CMIP5, and it ain’t a good one for water resources in many parts of the world, including the western half of Texas.