Warmer than normal temperatures since the beginning of the water year has left snowpack far below normal.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is alerting Willamette Valley residents that it will begin drawing down reservoirs backed up behind some of its 13 dams in the river system, an action designed to aid the downstream migration of salmon and steelhead through the dams, but also one that has increased downstream turbidity that impacts city drinking water.
Projects in Oregon’s McKenzie River, a tributary of the Willamette River, are restoring the river from its recent channelized state to a healthy river with connected flood plains and natural flows, a river that is much more conducive to salmon and steelhead rearing, according to a recent presentation at a Northwest Power and Conservation Council meeting.
Anticipating extra turbidity and an interruption of the clean drinking water it withdraws from the North Santiam River, the City of Salem declared a state of emergency at its City Council meeting last week. The expected turbidity is due to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ deep drawdown next year of its reservoir backed up behind Detroit Dam to aid juvenile salmon and steelhead passage, particularly for salmon and steelhead listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
Groundwater is declining across Eastern Washington’s complex, interconnected aquifer system, as people draw on it for irrigation, drinking and other uses at a pace that threatens its sustainability, according to a new study by a Washington State University researcher.
Due to lower-than-normal precipitation in May and an early snowmelt in the Northwest, there will be less water available for salmon and steelhead this summer in the Columbia and Snake river basins as water supply forecasts are continuing their downward slide.
Due to a drier and warmer than normal April, the water supply forecasts for May-September for the Columbia and Snake river basins have dropped, according to NOAA’s Northwest River Forecast Center’s last water supply briefing of the season held online this month.
Growing communities and extensive agriculture throughout the Western United States rely on meltwater that spills out of snow-capped mountains every spring. The models for predicting the amount of this streamflow available each year have long assumed that a small fraction of snowmelt each year enters shallow soil, with the remainder rapidly exiting in rivers and creeks.
Warmer temperatures with some snowmelt and near- or wetter-than-normal precipitation in much of the Columbia River basin in March led to some early runoff but overall resulted in higher April-Sept. water supply forecasts and a better outlook for stream flows in the basin that will aid juvenile and adult salmon and steelhead migrations this summer, according to a NOAA water supply briefing last week.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still determining “how to proceed” in implementing actions directed by the 2024 Water Resources Development Act and a new jeopardy biological opinion for its 13 Willamette River projects completed by NOAA Fisheries Dec. 26. The Corps says that it still needs funds from Congress that it could get…
Local and national conservation groups have sued the U.S. Forest Service to challenge its approval of the Stibnite Gold Project, an open-pit cyanide leach gold mine in Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains. The groups say the mine would jeopardize public health and clean water, harm threatened plants and animals, and permanently scar thousands of acres of public land in the headwaters of the South Fork Salmon River.
A drier than normal January is contributing to February’s lower Columbia River basin water supply forecasts for the months ahead.
An Earthwise Knowledge Initiative Publication
