credibly complicated CVP and SWP system. Just as a side note, the 2020 final document for the LTO was about 14,000 pages of appendices that printed out in my office. So chances are you're going to have a heavy lift in front of you to understand this but we're all here to support you and help out and answer questions. So thank you very much. I appreciate this opportunity and sending you all the best for a successful review. Great. Thank you, Cindy. And also for keeping to time, the next speaker is Regina Chichizola who is with the Save California Salmon. Is Regina with us? Oh, okay. So we'll shift her to the virtual. The next speaker is Scott Hamilton with the Center for California Water Resources Policy and Management. Scott, good to see you. You too, Peter. Good to see you again. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Scott Hamilton. I am a senior scientist with the Center for California Water Resources Policy and Management. The operators of the state and federal water projects are in a very difficult position.  They are mandated to meet a number of important and often conflicting objectives, including water supply and environmental enhancement. In trying to operate to meet one competing objective, they have two big problems. One is identifying trustworthy science. The second is sociological. You heard several times yesterday references to combat science, studies from one group with one agenda presenting one result and a different group often using the same data but with a different agenda presenting contradictory results. What is the Bureau to do? The quality of science employed on delta issues varies. Errors are too frequent. Use of univariate analysis that emit more relevant covariates, compelling conceptual models but with elements not supported by the data, confounding misuse of conventional terminology and incomplete use of the scientific process. All of these errors can lead to implementation of inappropriate measures. As noted, there is much at stake. Survival of species, jobs and water supplies to support the hopes and dreams of literally tens of millions of people and one of the largest economies in the world. On both sides, people are passionate and rightly so. The Bureau is stuck in the middle. Whatever they do, some people are going to be unhappy. Passion turns into rage and you can't negotiate with rage. What we have been doing has obviously not been working. CVPIA goals have not been met. Numerous listed species are in serious decline and water supplies are half of what people have been promised and paid for. And so the Bureau has turned to you. The intent here is not to lay blame. What we need is to understand how we can do things better. Clear and unambiguous direction would be very helpful. In answering the specific questions to which the Bureau seeks answers, we look to you to demonstrate better ways to use available data and to get results we can trust. In doing so, perhaps you could address some of the following troubling questions. Number one, when competing scientific conclusions exist, how do we recognize the best available science? Number two, in complex ecosystems, how do we identify what factors are limiting species abundance and when are they limiting? Number three, how do we know if we have correctly identified the mechanisms influencing growth and reproduction of a species when data are lacking? For example, is long finned smelt abundance higher in wet years because there is increased outflow or because the increased precipitation led to improved flows in streams enhancing the quality and quantitative spawning habitat? Number four, should science engage in controversial issues? We have heard some of the main problems with the current system, vulnerability to floods and earthquakes, water quality declines due to sea level rise, fish strain due to unnatural flows, and entrainment of fish at water diversions. Ironically, a peripheral canal combined with newer technology would address all of those problems, but fears that might what happened to the delta would totally prevent consideration of that or any similar solution despite the effect inverse of new misregulated project protections. Should scientists evaluate and present their findings on such options? Number five, has our implementation of adaptive management met your standards? And if not, what should we do better? Number six, why has it been so difficult to determine if actions that have been implemented such as the fall outflow actions for delta smelt have actually been effective and met their goals? Number seven, how does the bureau fairly and offensively allocate resources among competing needs? And number eight, if by some miracle they can do that, how do they get people that don't agree with their decision, including state and federal agencies with narrow mandates to respect the decision? So finally, let me end with a quote. The truth is, California has been much overrated and much overdone. She has been pressed beyond her limits and capacities. Her managers have been rash, prodigal and incompetent, and they have embarrassed her beyond hope of relief. These harsh words were penned by Hinton Helper in 1855. The point is, it seems it's time we did better. We hope you can help us. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. The next speaker is Solomon Vimal from Cornell Tech. Ready to go, Solomon? Good to meet you all. So I'm a recent PhD graduate from UCLA. I finished my doctoral degree in water and climate. So specifically, I studied the use of remote sensing imagery over a 30, 40-year period over millions of lakes in the Arctic. And I developed innovative data science tools. So some of the breakthrough technologies that I've developed as a result of my work is related to non-stationarity, the term that we use a lot in hydrological literature. But really, the work in non-stationarity in the econometrics world is far advanced by seven or eight decades. And still today in hydrology, we use very simple descriptive statistics, and we really don't know how to incorporate non-stationarity. So some of that IP, the technology that I developed, is protected by patents. And now, my technology is incubated through Cornell University's incubator for a two-year deep tech program. So my question to the committee is, as with this life cycle of the salmon, right, there are baby salmons and big ones. How do big baby ideas like in a startup contribute to this committee's work? And how can innovative technologies also be taken to the eventual long-term plans? So that's my question to the committee. And I would like maybe a little bit of discussion. And I would use like maybe two, three minutes of my time for that. Actually, the rules we set for this was not to engage directly, but I think the point you've raised is absolutely center to the second question we've been posed. You want technologies, as you say, it's the emergence of AI and many other tools will certainly be part of what we're considering. So thank you for raising the issue. And I saw several of the committee members nodding. But we have to treat everyone equally. All right. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. The next speaker is Keiko Mertz, who's with the Friends of the River. I know she's here. Yes. Is this good? Okay. Great. Good. I think almost afternoon now. My name is Keiko Mertz and I'm the policy director of Friends of the River. I wanted to start by expressing my gratitude to all the members of this committee for taking on this colossal task and to all of the agency scientists that we've heard from yesterday and today who are deeply committed to solving this very complex problem. So I'll start by telling you a little bit about Friends of the River. I might also refer to us as FOR. We work to protect and restore California rivers through hydropower reform, restoring flows, advocating for sustainable water storage solutions, flood management, and legal protection. We have a long history of work on rivers impacted by long-term operations of the CVP and SWP. For example, FOR was actually the first to highlight dam safety issues at Oroville in 2005. FOR was also instrumental in achieving wild and scenic protections for the McLeod River above Shasta Dam and led efforts to prevent the illegal Shasta Dam Rays, which would have violated the California Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. On the American River, FOR worked to designate the lower American as wild and scenic and continues to work to improve public values on the American River as a senior member of the Collaborative Water Forum. The CVP and SWP directly impact our body of work, our values, and those of there are thousands of members across the state. As we saw yesterday, there is a serious potential for scope creep on this review. So with that in mind, we tried to tailor our list of asks to be as in scope as we could. So as it relates to the topics of this review, I asked that the committee might consider including species that are candidate for listing, mostly because this could help reduce the need to repeat this sort of exercise in the near future and, alternately, the committee could consider candidate species in the second cycle of this study. Regarding Shasta Cold Water Pool Management, recent research by Willis et al. published in 2021 has suggested that reservoirs actually have pretty limited effectiveness in managing cold water pools. It identified Shasta as the only reservoir that could produce a cool regime at its outlet, but even with Shasta, Anne Willis' research noted some issues including that cold water regimes transition to warm water regimes as a function of distance from the dam. Considering this and potentially other more recent research that I'm not aware of, we would like to know how this might change with climate change and would like to see recommendations from this committee on how that might change objections and actions for preserving cold water species. The Willis paper also notes that fish passage or dam removal are probably best to conserve cold water species. So we asked this committee to evaluate opportunities for fish passage at Shasta Dam. I know this is a big ask and possibly a little bit out of scope, but achieving species recovery will really require thinking outside the box and the brain trust in this room has the potential to truly move the needle on this. This evaluation could also help reclamation meet its legal obligations under numerous, the numerous federal and state laws outlined by Professor Burke yesterday. I will provide to this committee the citation for the Willis paper and other papers that I reference in the rest of my comments. Regarding summer fall delta smelt habitat and old and mid-river flow management, we would love to see this committee delve into the species flow abundance relationships mentioned by Eric Oppenheimer also yesterday, specifically and we're feasible to identify key flow thresholds of biological significance and to couple these with specific locations, timing and the frequency needed to achieve population growth of the species in this review. We also request that this committee analyze the voluntary agreement proposal, which you heard a little bit about earlier and which implicates operations of the CVP and state water project, but only where it overlaps with the scope of this review to determine if it aligns with best available science. There were some requests made yesterday by some panelists that were probably definitely out of scope for this review. However, should this committee choose to dive into some of those topics, I have a couple additional requests. First, if the committee dives into social studies and governance, I think it should include in its review research published by UC Davis professor Mark Lubell. He studies governance and social ecological systems in the delta as it relates to complex decision making conflict and science. For example, his most recent paper currently under peer review is titled, governing science colon, learning adaptive management in the California delta. Further yesterday, this committee was asked to calculate emissions from lost hydropower production. However, although claims have been made that hydropower is carbon free energy, emerging research has indicated that hydropower and reservoirs emit a significant amount of methane. This is an issue the US EPA has actually recently taken up by reporting dam and reservoir emissions to the UN starting in 2022 and also initiating a research program. If this committee undertakes any emissions analyses, I would ask that it also includes in it this research, this recent research and analyzes reservoir and hydropower emissions from the projects. I know that's a huge ask, it's only if they take up that first ask. Lastly, we ask that the recommendations from this committee avoid the monitoring trap. More data and better understanding is certainly always helpful, but we really hope this committee will also provide concrete and actionable recommendations to help achieve species recovery. Friends of the river would be pleased to attend future meetings, provide additional feedback and resources and we are committed to future engagement in this process wherever it's useful for this committee. Thank you so much for your time and consideration today and thank you again for your incredibly important work on this. Thank you Keiko. The next speaker we're not sure is Lisa Marie Wyndham Myers with us. I don't see her so I assume she's going to join us virtually after lunch. Okay, she is on the sign-up list. So the next speaker will be Sarah Pyramoon with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. My statement is very short so hopefully you all can get to lunch soon. My name is Sarah Pyramoon.  Santa Clara Valley Water District is a unique player because it it receives water from both the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project and those supplies make up about 50% of the water supply for the Silicon Valley. So and not only just for the two million residents but the businesses and we also have agricultural interests and a robust groundwater recharge program. So a lot of those imported water sources go straight back into the groundwater. So it's pretty important for us to have some sense of where these these consultations are are going and not trying to influence anything but but what you're doing here is really important and we really do appreciate USBR for taking the initiative to convene this committee and and be a part of a transparent process to build up the the available best available science. So I did just want to mention let's see we are doing our part to reduce reliance on Delta sources. I know that that is is a continual theme here and I just want to let you know that while we are doing everything we can those changes don't happen overnight and so we still are very reliant on the water that comes through those two projects and we're we're eager to see that this consultation is concluded in 2024. I know that that's a little bit different on the timing of your all your work with the reports not being available until next year but we do think that it's still important to build up that that body of best available science and continually improve it and I think equally important the committee's recommendations may identify new tools that potentially could lead to a more flexible adaptive management program and we'd like to see that kind of effort um well you know after that climate change talk I think that the need for flexibility into the future is going to become more and more important um so I just want to thank you and and still express some hope that we can do better in this next term this next phase of the long term operations um in the face of climate change um thank you all for taking on this challenge that's it thank you so much and the next speaker is Deanna Serino from the Contra Costa Water District Deanna you meeting yesterday I decided that my comments would be easier if you could follow slides so my name is Deanna Serino I am the science and policy manager for Contra Costa Water District while she's bringing out my slides I just mentioned that I'm very happy to see uh faces that I recognize around the table um also happy to see Cal represented around the table I came out to California um to do my PhD at Berkeley and I've now been studying hydronomics in the Delta for over 25 years so um as science and policy manager for Contra Costa Water District my role today is is to make sure that we communicate science to inform policy and so I want to bring in an issue to your attention that's related to something on your scope regarding old and middle river flow but I want to start first with just a little background on Contra Costa Water District and where we are every water district agency who speaks to you today is going to tell you they're you they are unique so um we are um an urban water supplier within the delta and then immediately adjacent to the delta um our surface area is shaded green in the map which is maybe difficult to see projected here but you'll get the slides I understand as well um we operate under so we divert water under pre-1914 water rights that are held by a irrigation district that overlaps with our service area we divert water under post-1914 appropriative rights that we hold and we are a CVP contractor so all the water rights that you learned yesterday or we're reminded of yesterday lots of colors of water going on here um we also divert from four intakes um that are not the CVP and SWP export pumps that are the subject of the biological opinions you are reviewing now the intakes we use are the four diamonds that are on the map in front of you um we do not receive any water from the CVP and SWP export pumps that you're going to visit on your tour tomorrow um they are in the orange circles on the map in front of you okay so because we have different intakes um because we have multiple sources of water we have independent biological opinions and an incidental take permit from the state so we have different requirements that govern us than what you're reviewing today but we are a CVP contractor and uh and uh integrate operations with them so I have our our four intakes named on the map with our diversion capacities I just wanted to point out that we don't operate at capacity at all times as a delta diverter we're chasing water quality so we move our diversions around based on water quality where water quality is good and when it's good for fish and so we have in our permits that govern our operations guidelines on when we take water from different locations to to make sure we avoid impacts to fish I should also mention that all four of our intakes have positive barrier fish screens and so we're talking about fish screens that have very small meshes so that we're protective of anything larger than about 20 millimeters for most of our intakes um 30 millimeters at at our earliest built intake we built the very first fish screen in the delta in 1997 so um we've been and that has a slightly larger opening so it's protected to maybe 30 millimeters instead of 20 milliliters so of the species we we talk about today really the only ones that our district has effects on are the larval stages of the smelts um no real effects on the salmonids or the sturdies anyways on OMR it is I wanted to make sure we're understanding what it is and what it isn't old and middle river flow is um measured at two locations on two channels in the delta on this map they're on the the purple um squares square circle squares um our diversions are too small to be measured by OMR we have about 320 cfs at those locations our maximum diversion would be 0.0016 feet per second it's actually below the calibration error at this instruments um but we're in the but we're in the area right I mean you see some of the green diamonds between those gauges and the CVP and SWP gauges so um reclamation and along reclamation DWR don't operate to measured flow they operate to an index and that that calculation of old and middle river flow does include us so we need to coordinate with them on a routine basis on how we operate so that we don't get in their way on on meeting OMR and I flag this for you because when they first got old and middle river flow requirements keep in mind we're regulated by separate permits they're initially there was a little bit of a conflict where we could hurt them they could hurt us we worked really well together and we operate really well now on a good coordinated weekly meetings to make sure that we are operating both within our own permits but as the new consultation goes forward and OMR might get expanded and it might control more often there there is that potential for a conflict um because of that wanted to just refocus briefly on what is this OMR because it's been over a decade since we did it so OMR is a Eulerian indicator so it's fixed locations keep in mind organisms are going to experience Lagrangian they move around with the flows they experience what what is where they are so um and and fish that's more on the western side of the delta is not going to be experienced with seeing what's happening on those purple squares right so um this is stuff I pulled from presentation I did 15 years ago so forgive me um here I just I'm going to show you a particle animation because you know that's I don't know that you got any animation yesterday so these are two time periods with similar OMR values so OMR on the left side of minus 4600 on the right side of minus 4800 um we're going to be releasing particles where the red dot is it's on the San Joaquin River at about where it meets uh oh where old river dives into the San Joaquin River um because the particles will leave the scope of the frame I'm going to be tracking the particles that exited the bay to pass Martinez which is on the western side going towards the ocean and then those that are entrained in agricultural diversions at CVP and SWP so I'm just going to start the animation um Lenny did a wonderful interpretive dance to show us tides here we have the particles showing us tides and of course Josh also showed us the huge tidal range of velocities at these sensors um so these are two time periods that have very similar net flow in Old and Middle River over these three time over these three weeks I'm showing you this for three weeks and what we're seeing is that the movement of the particles where things really go um is quite a bit different so OMR is not a master variable that's going to explain transport it is an indicator and we're going to see in a minute where how exactly uh it is a great indicator but it's not entirely perfect right so looking at the results the OMR that was actually slightly more positive um ended up with more entrainment at CVP and SWP the OMR that was more negative more of those particles actually exited these two OMRs differ by 250 CFS but I don't know that that is within the ability to be predicting on transport um so if we look at this and we did this 150 times again change the animation here we did this 150 times and we just plotted the results and here we're looking at um on the bottom left plot that's the USGS OMR gauges so the actual measured flow in the river um and the percent entrainment based on the modeling simulation at that time it is a great indication right that you get more negative flow um more negative OMR you get more entrainment great indication lots to scatter now because we're in the same range of OMR um and we have separate permits it it is something we're interested in and getting an index an entrainment index that represents entrainment at the projects without having the bycatch of including water users that are not in training fish so we developed back in 2012 a flow index that we could look at to say okay can we can we mimic can we have a different metric that looks at the predicts entrainment that doesn't have the bycatch of including water users that don't entrain fish um so that's what you're seeing on the right um so just in summary uh yeah that's this so in summary the Old River River is the Eulerian metric um and it generally it does a good job representing regional hydronomics but it may not be the best indicator of entrainment um and use of it as a regulatory metric has unintentional impacts on species and what those impacts on species are is right now we work really well with DWR and Reclamation to to be able to work to both sets of our permits um if OMR requires more often what happens is Reclamation or DWR DWR more likely would call us and say hey we need you to turn down your diversions at fish screens where you're not in training fish so that we can divert more so we turned down by 100 CFS at fish screened intakes so they could turn up 100 CFS at unfish screened intakes so um that's not happening now but in the future with the state board looking at having new requirements for OMR and as this becomes more of a regulatory metric it has that greater potential for conflict and it does not benefit species to turn down diversions at intakes that don't impact the species to turn them up where they do um so we've been evaluated an alternative entrainment index we've been using established tools such as the Delta spelt life cycle model with the entrainment side that's the LCME um we'd welcome the opportunity to discuss that with the panel and our ask for you today is really that as you review the science that's supporting OMR which is one of your charges that you consider the bycatch of using um such a regulatory index and see if you'd have any feedback on any something that might be a more targeted regulatory metric looking directly at the exports for instance instead of looking at at something that catches those in the area so that's all I have for you thank you thank you Deanna that was very helpful Maya can we bring in Dr. Gartrell now so Dr. Gartrell was a formerly Contra Costa Water District and one of the early and most influential hydrodynamic modelers of the system so Greg thanks for joining us like a good morning thing here or good afternoon now yes we we can hear you Greg okay great thanks uh Peter uh for coordinating my uh my schedule and thank you to the committee for the work you're doing I just want to um go over two points I think that are important when you consider any of these things the first one relates to water use your types for regulatory purposes and for presenting results it's time to get rid of them um the water your types were invented when spreadsheets were done with a sheet of paper a pencil a big eraser in the slide rule and now that I've said slide rule I'm sure there are a couple of people in the audience are going for their phones to do what the hell that is um the the current ones that are in use now were made with pre 1990 data we did this uh around 1992 and the world's changed a lot they're no longer valid for the kind of uh uh hydrology that we have now they were designed they're brought it up into approximately 25 to 20 25 percent of the years for each year type um x2 actually when we did that in 1994 was the first shift uh to relating regulatory requirements to recent hydrologic conditions and not water your types and it's time to do that with all requirements for example it makes no sense to require a fish well in april based on a water your type that includes flows from last year and forecasted flows from mid june and july that have nothing to do with flows in in april so what i'm suggesting is uh it's time to move away from a water your type to for all uh requirements to sliding scales based on the important hydrology that relates to that regulatory requirement same thing for presenting results we find that in in uh water your types even in a critically dry year as which shown today we can have uh big storms uh it it doesn't make sense to classify all political years or dry years or right years the same the second item is caution on when you're considering summer and fall clothes the data that have been used to and analyses they show relationships with abundance in the summer and fall clothes have failed so far to consider auto correlation of clothes for example if you do an auto correlation of flows uh september august july you'll find they're highly auto correlated with flows earlier in the year that it's just a way the hydrology works in the state um it doesn't work on a on a um an annual basis but it does work on months but highly high correlations for example to flow in april and flow in july and paris that means that this you get the same result using april flows as you can with shall I flows relating it to uh abundance levels and in fact you do if you do that analysis so one is a caution on that to make sure you're relating that and if you get really big deep into it you find out in both the summer and fall flows that wet years are great the other years are bad for official limits not really just summer flows let's see other flows all through on fall x2 if you look at the data that were used to initially develop that you find that it's really driven by four years four or five years four or five wet years and they were all wet years in the 95 to 2000 era and they're all wet years that were followed by wet years they're back to back what years so the the fish experience not just the wet flow in the fall also in the winter and spring that's a second thing to and then second part on that through the fall x2 it should not be related to water your type it needs to be related to something more if you're going to continue it more consistent with what you're doing for example summer and fall runoff and a trigger with with recent storms and I want to thank you for again for accommodating my schedule and those are the only comments I had to make thanks worry of that for the committee several points in there that would be very helpful to submit it in writing to yeah yeah I can do that I have an analysis that forward I know that sounds great well thanks for joining us Greg we're going to take a break for lunch now and we would ask that if folks could be back by 115 um so that we can take advantage of the agency presenters who've agreed to stick around for a while this afternoon so feel free to bring your lunch back into the room and we'll get going again at 115 I'd like to invite Darcy Austin with the state water contractors and good to see you Darcy hello hello all right thank you um Peter and um the committee thank you for allowing us to come and speak in person this afternoon I had a doctor's appointment so I could not avoid that so it's really nice to be able to be here anyway in the afternoon even though you're taking uh the online folks my name is Darcy Austin I am the science manager for the state water contractors you may have heard in the past of the state and federal contractors water agency SWFCA science program so we kind of take over where SWFCA left off so you may be surprised that there's a science program at the state water contractors but it's very recent the state water contractors themselves we are an association of 27 public water agencies and you will hear from one of our member agencies very soon and we represent the legal policy and regulatory interests of those contractors we also work very closely with department of water resources and other agencies and I'll talk a little bit about that um you've already heard a lot about the high stakes and the big impacts that um we're talking about today so the biop and the ITP they have significant water supply and economic impacts to our members you've already heard two-thirds of Californians receive water from the state water project that's um that is 27 million Californians and Lenny mentioned yesterday that's one in 12 Americans that's like a huge number of people I also wanted to mention that about seven million folks from disadvantaged communities also rely on water supply from the state water project so the stakes are high not just for the people but also for the fish our science program has a big focus on how to manage water supply but also figure out ways to help the ecosystem and the fish in particular we spend about two million dollars annually in science projects that are intended to understand mechanisms and processes that underpin those relationships we also host science symposia and some of them have been in this very room so uh it's kind of nice that it feels like home a little bit our mission of the science program is to collaboratively collaboratively fund and facilitate objective relevant and rigorous science that advances the understanding of factors affecting water supply reliability and habitat restoration for improved decision making and um one of the things is so I'm the science manager I have a counterpart at SWC but we rely on our technical experts at our member agencies so that expertise is available to you as the committee and we would also be interested in providing relevant literature to the committee as necessary we are also very strong proponents of collaborative science as I mentioned so we uh participate in the collaborative science and adaptive management program CSAMP and in in that arena we are looking beyond the impacts of the water projects and looking towards how to recover species both delta smelt and Chinook salmon we collaborate with other science programs including the delta science program that was my previous job I worked for the delta spans program to fund relevant science and we also helped to fund their delta science fellows we sit on some of the other groups we heard a little bit um in passing really about the healthy rivers and landscape landscapes agreements which is aka the voluntary agreement and that really is seeking to increase flows and habitat and seeks to understand the relationship between those two things and then finally um we are also part of a salmon recovery project called reorienting to recovery and again we're looking beyond the impacts of the water project to how do we help recover species in these efforts we want to be a partner in science so that's what we're here to do we're obviously a part of the puzzle and when it comes to water supply so we want to be part of the solution as well we heard a little bit about disagreements so Matt mentioned that there's disagreements even within his own office I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised there's disagreements among the water contractors as well but I think we are moving away from combat science which Eric Oppenheimer mentioned yesterday I feel like this is a little bit of a new age and um the thing is the disagreements persist and so I will give you one little example so Dr Conrad was here today she mentioned a paper by Sam Bachev skin and Brian Maharsha uh regarding temperature in the delta so we actually think that that um comparison between instantaneous discrete temperature measurements and monthly inflows you can't um you can't ignore the physical drivers that affect that instantaneous water temperature so this is just a very small example of course there's much bigger examples of areas where we disagree and this is where we can use your help so we're very glad that you're here and again we already know we've talked about it very high impact um there's a lot of impacts to people to California to water supply but also to the fish and that's something that believe it or not we care very deeply about so how do we do that and that is using best available science so we urge the panel I have three points that um we urge the panel to weigh in on and hopefully that does not expand your scope because you have plenty on your plates so the biops and the itp include constraints on project operations to minimize take of species and typically these are individuals we would like uh if you could also take a look at and provide guidance on how to frame operational constraints when you're taking into consideration population level effects so that's one thing another topic that uh we want to encourage the panel to weigh in on is scientific uncertainty and framing of operational constraints and then finally it's about flexibility and optimizing so the need to use criteria to protect both fish and move water when it's safe to do so so that operational flexibility that um that allows us to ramp up water supply when it's safe to do so but then dial it back down when it is not safe to do so and with that that concludes my comments thank you very much for this important work that you are all doing and thank you very much peter for allowing me to speak thank you Darcy and our next in-person speaker is brian shinstock with rosewell electric utility good afternoon um i'm brian shinstock i'm representing rozo electric um it's customers and our fellow power customers here today uh rozo electric we're a publicly on utility so we're not for profit we have elected council members so in short we're very community focused a quarter of our energy comes from hydroelectric resources some of that is the cvp it's a very important resource for us it helps meet our pillars of reliability affordability environmental compliance um for for reliability uh like i spoke energy but also capacity not too long ago just september 22 we had capacity constraints nearly blacked out california the cvp stepped up and provided the needed energy and ancillary services to keep the grid stable and then environmental compliance um electric utilities uh have mandates now to be 60 percent renewable by 2030 and the remainder to be zero carbon by 2045 that's a very steep goal and we really have to work together to do that hydro is a very important resource because it's dispatchable it's green it's really the only utility scale sized resource that can generate that kind of power um like batteries they can only shift power hydro actually produces power so we need that to meet again affordability reliability and compliance we understand that there's many competing interests but i would argue that we all have in common we want to meet affordability reliability and compliance um and we want to do that for our customers for all power customers which are nearly a hundred power customers and one thing that we really want to look at and study is the the emissions profile with it not only on reduced volumes but also the timing so depending on the time of day certain resources are online or offline there's a different emission profile so um with that if changes in operations happen it's going to affect emissions which then turns around and affects everything that we heard this morning with fish um global warming everything else so we're here to help um for everything that we can do please reach out me and the rest of my team um thank you for the time and consideration thanks great thank you Brian now i'm transitioning to the uh online contributors but i just ask if there's looking far enough down the list so the next speaker is i hope i pronounce this correctly case or willy with save california salmon i apologize if i mispronounced your name and just for all the speakers if you went around this morning uh we are asking people to restrict your remarks to about five to six minutes uh good afternoon my name is kasso willy i am pomo payu went to and while if you tribal person and i'm a staff attorney for save california salmon for those unfamiliar with our organization save california salmon is dedicated to policy change and community advocacy for northern california's salmon and fish dependent people we support the fisheries and water protection work for the local communities and advocate for effective policy change for clean water restored fisheries and vibrant communities we are focused on ensuring tribal voices tribal knowledge and traditional cultural resources are considered and integrated into policies regulations and project development in northern california we aim to support tribes and the general public and engaging with issues related to water water pollution fisheries and beneficial use issues with that in mind i would like to discuss a few ideas that were mentioned yesterday first i would like to encourage the community to consider traditional ecological knowledge also known as indigenous knowledge as a scientific source i'll be using both of those terms interchangeably throughout my comments the definition for traditional ecological knowledge or indigenous knowledge provided by the federal government is a body of observations oral and written knowledge innovations practices and beliefs that promote sustainability and the responsible stewardship of cultural and natural resources through relationships between humans and their environment in december of 2022 the white house office of science and technology policy and the council on environmental quality released guidance for the federal department and agencies on indigenous knowledge this guidance recognized that in order to make the best scientific and policy decisions possible the federal government should value and as appropriate respectfully include indigenous knowledge this knowledge has application in social cultural and spiritual systems but also in physical and biological systems indigenous people have developed these knowledge systems over millennia and continue to do so based on evidence acquired through direct contact with the environment long-term experiences extensive observations lessons and skills and this indigenous knowledge is a valuable component of being able to face climate change and preservation and protection of all resources including water and aquatic native aquatic species california has also taken action to integrate traditional ecological knowledge state agencies including the department of water resources and the state water board have policies that encourage integration of traditional ecological knowledge into their work bringing in this knowledge bringing this knowledge into review of the central valley and state water projects is important because they were built and operate on the traditional lands many tribes tribes that are still here today some tribes have traditional ecological knowledge departments and have scientific data that could be invaluable especially when it comes to culturally significant species like salmon salmon are salmon species are extremely important to many tribes in california including the when i'm a went to tribe whose creation story includes salmon and whose traditional villages were flooded by the chastor reservoir tribes have lived within and depended on california's water system since time immemorial and they have unique knowledge and scientific data gathered outside of modern scientific methodologies next i would like to briefly mention tribal beneficial uses which were mentioned yesterday that have been adopted by the state water board and are in the process of being implemented implemented by the regional water boards and their basin plans and by the state water board in the bay delta plan in 2017 two newer beneficial uses were adopted tribal traditional and cultural use and tribal subsistence fishing use like i said before the traditional tribal lands expand the state the adoption of tribal beneficial uses is an effort to acknowledge and recognize the areas that still have importance to tribes and is important to keep in mind and i just wanted to raise awareness on this issue for potential impacts to areas that may be designated in the future lastly i wanted to draw attention to a point brought up yesterday regarding water rights uh tribal water rights are relevant to this to this discussion because there are federally recognized water rights for the trinity river which partially feeds the central valley project any decisions made related to the central valley central valley project have impacts on the trinity river and would impact tribes and their reserve water rights and i'd ask the community to keep those tribal impacts in mind when conducting your review the central valley and state water project have great impacts to tribal and other environmental justice communities again i request that the committee expand its scope of science to integrate traditional ecological knowledge for the most inclusive and holistic collection of data for its review and i encourage the committee to consider tribal conditions concerns including tribal beneficial uses and tribal water rights to promote an equitable review save california salmon appreciates the work of the committee and thank you for hearing my comments today thank you kazel the next speaker is barry nelson with the golden state salmon association thank you very much for the opportunity to speak before you today and for undertaking this really important task my name is barry nelson representing the golden state salmon association it's appropriate that you're hearing from kaseel's organization and then ours because one of the things i want to talk about is the human impact of the ecosystem decline we're facing california salmon fishing industry when it's healthy which is supported by central valley almost all of the salmon caught in california and in coastal oregon come from the sacrament obey delta system it's a when healthy more than a 1.4 billion dollar industry 23 000 jobs uh and the future of that entire industry is very much at risk the salmon fishing season is shut down this year none there no one is catching and keeping salmon in the state of california this year it's only happened twice before in state history it's clearly happening because of bad water management during a drop um very shortly we'll see the population counts for the 2023 spawning season um we know based on a whole host of of incomplete information that those numbers are going to be bad we don't know yet if we're going to be able to fish at all next year it's also going to be very clear that some of the listed runs for example the spring run um you know has suffered truly catastrophic losses um in the last several years um we fish for the unlisted fall run um but we're we're our our our fall run is affected by the inadequate protections for the listed species and the listed species as they decline also produce more restrictions on the salmon fishing industry we have an enormous amount um uh at stake uh fishing families fishing communities um from the central coast from roughly morrow bay until northern oregon are almost entirely dependent right now on whether we maintain healthy bay delta salmon runs um so i urge you to keep uh keep that in mind um the work you're doing addresses the health of the ecosystem that's enormously important but it's also important for the people tribal people and um um fishing people and there's overlap one of the seals board members is also on our board um um there's an enormous amount at stake there so so i just wanted to make sure i provided that context second thing one of your speakers earlier talked about dueling science and there's no doubt that that's an issue but there's another issue that has been increasingly a problem in recent years and that is just not bothering the science uh ignoring science is increasingly a very serious problem couple of speakers previously have talked about the voluntary agreements uh you'll find if you dive into those agreements there is remarkably little scientific support for for the effectiveness of those agreements i'd urge you all mention a few things epa recently wrote to the state water board about those uh brookley law recently came out with a report on voluntary agreements 2020 national wing fisheries service issued a peer review on two of the models used on the to all the river voluntary agreement um and then our community submitted joint comments to the water board that summarize the the science from our perspective um this is not really a case of dueling science this is a case of a voluntary agreement that's built enormous political support that honestly hasn't really bothered to make a serious of case for itself it raises a real question about the role of science in policymaking this is not dueling science this is a question of whether science is relevant um so we urge you to take that very seriously and since your 2020 2012 review we have an enormous amount of additional science about flows and temperature and habitat um and we urge you to take a look at that uh i'll forward our comments to the state water board which summarizes a lot of that new science we think there's a really robust scientific evidence for dramatically stronger um um dramatically stronger protections um i will mention that i was disappointed to a certain extent when i saw your agenda because the NGO community has some very strong um um scientists i wish they had been part of the presentations to you i think you can get benefit from some of those scientists through our comments to the state water board but i urge you to make sure you seek those folks out i'm not a scientist um last thing i'd like to talk about briefly is delay um and just very briefly um the current Bay Delta standards were adopted 1995 they were updated in 2018 for the San Joaquin side of the system those standards have still not been implemented um the bait of triennial reviews are supposed to require under the clean water act a review of water quality standards every three years it's been 30 years since the Bay Delta standards have been updated um 2008 and 2009 we had um smelt and salmon biological opinions that were found by the administration to be inadequate they need to be stronger they were succeeded in 2019 by politically driven science free biological opinions it's one of the reasons you're here today um it was clear a decade ago that we need stronger protections than we had in 2008 and 2009 um and frankly right now it's not at all clear to us if that's being that need is being taken seriously and your review will play an enormously important role in future consultations the last thing i'll just mention here is that the volunteer agreements which have been mentioned a few times uh those that effort has been underway since 2011 um that process has set eight deadlines for a complete package that process has missed eight deadlines for a complete package um delay is deadly for tribal interests for fishing interests for the ecosystem for listed species um and the final point i wanted to make is that is not just urging you to talk about the need to make sure that our policies are grounded in relevant science but to make sure that the science um with your help makes a solid case for urgent science-based action now um there's always a need for more science there's always a need for more monitoring we have a robust we have an ecosystem crisis and we have a robust body of scientific evidence that points in um in a clear direction about the the critical need for strong flow and temperature protections so i'd urge you in your deliberations to think about that about the strength of the science and the state of the crisis and make sure that your recommendations do more than just urge decision makers to value science and ground policy in science but also give a sense of the urgency for taking that action now thank you thank you very the next speaker is craig wallace from the county water agency thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today my name is craig wallace i'm the state water project manager for current county water agency uh current county water agency is a public agency created in 1961 by an act of the california legislature the agency serves as the local contracting entity in current county for the state water project uh agency water deliveries serve over 800 000 californians and over 650 000 acres of irrigated farmland we own and operate infrastructure in current county to deliver state water project water to residents businesses and agricultural operations we receive about 30 of our water supply from the state water project and those state water project supplies are critical uh not only to all of those previous operations but also critical to our groundwater recharge operations therefore the agency has a vital interest in the operation of the state water project the past quarter century the state water project has been subjected to increasingly stringent operational restrictions to protected list listed fish species over the same period we've seen little or no evidence of changes in species trends in fact the populations of delta smelt and winter run chinook salmon are at precarious lows despite such restrictions just this past fall the federal and state agencies implemented an outflow action at a cost of 600 000 acre feet of water for the state water project with a value in excess of a quarter billion dollars purportedly to benefit delta smelt although it is highly uncertain whether this costly action yielded any biological benefits for the species lack of understanding and confirmation bias have contributed to the combination of costly restrictions on operations a lack of conservation benefits and failure to introduce resource optimization into the decision-making process that said efforts are taking place to change the way we do business in the delta one example is through the collaborative science and adaptive management program or CSAN there efforts are being made to utilize structured decision-making to inform efforts to contribute to the conservation of delta smelt a second example is through the healthy rivers and landscapes agreements there flow and non-flow actions are being proposed to benefit native fish and metrics for success of those actions together with monitoring to collect necessary data which are being developed before their implementation and to inform adaptive management given its breadth of expertise this committee can play a critical role in identifying a roadmap from emerging efforts and good intentions to successful implementation of the above examples and others there are three ways we think you might be able to help do so one provide an honest appraisal of existing management actions including an assessment of the extent to which they were developed such as success criteria to evaluate evaluate their efficacy and whether they were informed by consideration of costs and benefits relative to alternative actions two review existing monitoring efforts and how they can be reimagined to inform our understanding of the status and trend of the listed species as well as the efficacy of alternative management actions and third provide recommendations for best practices to both communicate uncertainty attendant to management actions and regulatory determinations and how to reduce uncertainty over time the cvp and sw con swp contractors are public agencies that fund the operation and maintenance of the two projects we have a substantial interest and expertise in the focus of this committee's work and we hope in the future you will include us in your efforts thank you very much for your time in your service thank you great i think there was a couple of other hands in the audience is anyone else yeah that's just you're not on my list you could at least uh introduce yourself to the audience i'm sorry about that my name's lisa casner i am uh the manager of the long-term resource planning division at the city of redding's electric utility and i'll just provide a little bit of background context for you redding electric utility is a publicly owned utility we're in shasta county we're a designated low income area and we have 13 disadvantaged community census tracts in our area that we serve of the 44 000 customers that we provide power to over 17 000 of the meters are located in disadvantaged areas the cvp hydro power accounts for around 33 of our power mix depending on the hydro year redding heavily depends on cvp hydro power deliveries during summer months when customer demand is the highest when hydro deliveries are lower than forecasted redding has to purchase replacement power there are real quantifiable environmental impacts that i'll break down into three main areas reliability emissions and affordability during the summer of 2022 as brian mentioned earlier the state was in a crisis there was a power shortage we were rolling blackouts and issuing flex alerts and urging customers to conserve energy the cvp provides critical capacity to utilities during times like that in redding we received the lowest cvp deliveries ever we only received about 60 of what was forecasted to be delivered to us we had to then go and try to find replacement power we were paying around 800 a megawatt and we were unable to find power to completely fill our position to be able to serve load so we went into that day not fully resource which is something that severely impacts reliability for us with emissions um as some of you probably know when we don't receive deliveries during those critical load times we have to go and replace that power and that's typically replaced with carbon emitting resources so that significantly impacts our carbon emissions and impacts what that looks like for us so in 2021 we were about 80 carbon free and we had normal deliveries from cvp generation during that year the following year in 2022 we were about 55 carbon free so it totally impacts our carbon portfolio and as brian mentioned earlier we have clean energy mandates that we're trying to meet we're really focused on those it's one of the things that's most important to us in our integrated resource planning so the cvp plays a strong part in meeting those energy compliance targets um additionally the low income and disadvantage areas are primarily the ones that are most impacted by carbon emissions and poor air quality in those areas where the generators are located um as a power customer we pay the same amount for our share of the cvp power regardless of whether it's a strong hydro year or whether it's not as abundant precipitation with 33 percent of our portfolio coming from cvp hydro power variability and deliveries exposes us to a risk of increased power supply costs um during that event in 2022 it cost us around four million dollars to replace the power that we expected to receive from the cvp but did not and those costs are um eventually passed down to our low income and disadvantage customers creating disproportionate impacts for them any change in seasonality of the flows or allocations to Sacramento diversion would significantly impact not only redding's emission profile but the state's emission profile its ability to reliably serve load and disproportionately burden the state's most vulnerable customers we're urging this committee to consider the wide-ranging environmental impacts um and the benefits from cvp power generation including the critical role in supporting carbon reduction for the state and um consider all of those impacts when evaluating the operations of the cvp thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today thank you i think we had two other in-person speakers good afternoon um i'll keep my remarks brief my name is lina perkins i um i'm here representing city of palo alto electric utility uh we date to 1896 so we have roseville beat um but uh we're a public agency and you know i just want to thank everyone here for their commitment to their public service um through being in this process all the knowledge that i see in this room on this committee is incredibly appreciated and as you can tell you know i don't think there's a single actor in this room that isn't and of the customers and the and the involved parties that isn't in in a crisis the the fisheries are collapsing tribal interests um and water rights haven't been respected water customers um are struggling like never before in the face of new challenges and as a power customer um this is an unprecedented crisis um probably in the last or transition you know crisis an unprecedented change for at least the last 50 years that we're looking at um and you know i i want to keep my comments really focused to the second point of the first cycle of the study oh and and as an aside i have a phd from sanford and engineering and so i'm a modeler in a form of life so i don't envy you your your job but but i there is so much knowledge here and the bureau of reclamation cary fox i'm going to give a shout out he has made he has made this project so much more dynamic and there's an incredible amount of um knowledge so don't underestimate the staff members that you have in the bureau of reclamation that operate this as well as you know how how quickly wapa can tap dance to try to capture the most value from the cvp um power as possible so um you know when you have questions about how it's really going to work they know and they're nuclear engineers you know that are now running these things since they're really really smart um so you know to the second point how can we use um better modeling to for decision making for operations you know i think that the current as one of the prior speakers before lunch mentioned you know the current prescriptive course buckets of this is this water year this is that water year thou shalt do this it hasn't worked for species and it hasn't worked for the other folks either and so i would really urge you to not underestimate the capabilities of the staff that will be implementing um what what this committee and other public process decide because they have shown me um incredible um ability to be nimble and adapt um and specifically carry fox again at usbr but you know i would urge flexible carefully designed flexible um guidance for operators because it's not just that the course buckets didn't work then for the type of water year and and for species survival it's that our hydrology and our temperatures are different and tougher coming forward and so even if it had worked then it wasn't going to work going forward so you have that you have incredible research days for going into weather forecasting for better more granular weather forecasting there's a lot of people interested in that you're you're not alone on that front there's incredible resources there as well um and you know lastly i'll just say for city of Palo Alto electric utilities i should have said this first i guess but we have been carbon free since 2013 we have a deep commitment to um the environment carbon neutrality we carbon free electricity and we have been um accounting for our hourly emissions since um 2018 you know back when nobody cared um and so you know we you know so there is a there's a deep commitment there and we we recognize that um that this project has to serve a lot of purposes but um anything that you can do to um preserve the interests that need to be preserved um through your science process but also that the within the day flexibility that hourly flexibility because projections are or there to be negative power prices in the middle of the day in december and january going forward you know and that also means you know gas plants are going to run all day long just to cover the evening ramp um and things like that so just huge environmental impacts and the the financial viability of these systems to do anything going forward it is is really you know at risk because these are old projects um and we haven't invested in infrastructure you know in a big way in several decades so thank you thank you so much for those comments i think we have a couple of other speakers at the back thank you for the opportunity speak um my name is paul hooser i'm the um general manager for trinity public utilities district we're an area of a virgin for trinity river previous speakers uh for trinity river water mentioned trinity um and i'd like to kind of encourage you as other speakers have to including your analysis impacts on hydro power generation and by extension carbon emissions and i'd like to share a real world example about why that's important and i guess to back crack a little bit at the risk of stating the obvious i don't think that entails a massive analysis of emissions from reservoirs because you're really only looking at impacts of changes to operations so um but like other speakers have talked about and alluded to even if the changes you recommend don't result in a net change in hydro generation the timing of that generation could have huge impacts on carbon emissions and to go back to a real world emission that might not or example that might not be popular but is accurate so i've been in california for 18 years over 18 years and certainly following restoration efforts in the northern part of the state for that long particularly on the trinity river i've been the general manager for trinity pud for over 12 years the salmon fishery actually used to be as small and rural as we are it was a considerable economic driver um in our area uh candidly it no longer is because there really is no salmon fishery any longer uh in fairness the steelhead fishery still provides some economic benefit in our area but even that is declining but i'd like to go back as an example and the 2000 record of decision that dramatically changed flows on the trinity um you know at the time uh diversions to the central valley were much higher um in round numbers it um almost doubled or actually more than doubled uh flows to the trinity river again on these five water year types that i agree with other speakers are really outdated given um our modern technology now but the expectation was more than doubling flows down the trinity versus diverting it to the sacramento would result in considerably better fish returns the reality is fish returns are lower now than before those uh higher flows were implemented you know while it was a 2000 record of decision litigation unsurprisingly kind of delayed those flow changes but since 2005 that has been the case we have a lot of history not just of a lot more water down the trinity but more than 300 million and direct expenditures on habitat and when i say direct expenditures that ignores the considerable value of that water and power that could have been delivered and the carbon aspects of that are important right so if just in case you don't understand the plumbing of the trinity because we're kind of an afterthought in the cvp that we consider ourselves pretty important um the you know trinity reservoirs are roughly two million acre foot watershed it's located at uh well full pond is 2370 feet above sea level so it's the most efficient generation hydro generation on the cvp because of the the drop so there's two tunnels 17 and a half feet in diameter around 11 miles through the mountains come out into whiskey town lake and then more tunnels that come into the keswick after bay for shasta so when you divert the water every acre foot that's diverted generates 1170 kilowatt hours more than if it just flowed through the trinity power plants so if you think of that example i haven't gone back into the math it wouldn't be hard to do but around numbers it's probably it's certainly in excess of 10 million additional acre feet that didn't generate hydro power and it wouldn't be a difficult exercise to determine the increase in carbon emissions that resulted from that now obviously if someone living in trinity had that resulted in a restoration or even improvement in the fishery it might be reasonable to say okay yes here was the cost of the action um and it was worth it but as i mentioned fish returns are lower than before those flows started so as you look at potentially doing things like that again i think it's imperative that you look at the impact on hydro power production its timing and by extension it's the carbon impact of that because you could argue i mean it's a it's a big globe but in aggregate certainly that record of decision dramatically at least well it increased carbon emissions uh from you know as a result of changes in the operation of the central valley project for no benefit in terms of the fishery so um just example i'd like to leave you with and and i hope very much that you'll consider hydro power and by extension carbon emissions in your analysis thanks for allowing me to speak thank you any other speakers from in the room i think we got everyone yeah we've asked and everyone uh speaking to us today if they have information or the power points please send them to the academies absolutely so we're now going to the virtual audience and let's see just going down through my list here uh did Lisa Marie join us so Lisa Marie Wyndham Myers is with the Delta Stewardship Council okay thank you see is did Regina join us so on the list here we have Brett Baker from the Central Delta Water Agency Dipangia Manik with the West Bengal Pollution Control Board so is Dr. Manik with us this is getting easier uh Mark with the Western Area Power Administration yes welcome Eric so perhaps as we're waiting for Eric i'll then go to Glen Spain after Eric followed by Heinrich Albert so is Eric with us with Glen Spain so what we'll do we go down the list and then we'll have a call if we happen to miss anyone Glen Spain yes i'm here can you hear me Pacific Coke Federation of Fisherman's Associations and the Institute of Fisheries Resources uh thank you Glen good to see you thank you panelists uh and thanks for the opportunity uh a little bit about our organization specific us Federation of Fisherman's Associations is the largest trade association of commercial fishing families in the west coast many of our folks make their livelihoods in whole or in part from salmon fishing which is of course closed now not only here but in most of the rest of the coast for various reasons we will discuss i'm also the program director and northwest regional director for Institute for Fisheries Resources which is the science arm of the fishing industry dealing with issues like this and uh you will be hearing more from us and we will participate as much as we can in this process we've also assigned one of our contractors Deidre Deidre Jadon Deidre is with California Water Research Association and she will be also providing some services to the committee as a modeler she's done a lot of wonderful stuff on those lines to put it into perspective our industry that is the salmon fishing industry are people who need water in the river they need that water to provide for the salmon runs that have been a billion dollar industry in the past in this state and provide tens of thousands of jobs or support those jobs up and down the coast and inland this year we are closed that means no fishery and the reason we are closed is because of water decisions that were deliberately made during the drought in year 2000 and year 2020 I mean based on a biological opinion from the prior administration that would have essentially resulted in the extinction of their salmon runs the reason is primarily and I want to bring your attention to this because this will be under discussion um for a while and that is because the current status uh and the protection standards um that were written into and frozen into the 2019 salmon biological opinion which was began implemented in 2020 allow water temperatures at least two and a half degrees higher than what could be considered protective water temperatures that is it allowed water temperatures to go up to and even above 56 degrees Fahrenheit for people who speak centigrade that's 13.33 centigrade when the best available science now says that that water threshold that hot water threshold for salmonines should be about 53.5 Fahrenheit or 11.94 degrees centigrade in other words we are basing our management of the California Central Valley on water standards that are fatal to fish um it turns out that if you keep the water temperatures at that 56 degree Fahrenheit limit which is what's allowed by law under water right order 90-05 that is 30 years old doesn't reflect any of the better science if you keep temperatures that way you wind up with more than a 70 mortality rate of eggs and that's what was done in 2020 as a result it killed a great number of the eggs and a great number of the juvenile before they could be fry and move out to the ocean as you know there's a three-year lag time so the fish that did not come in and could not be captured because they don't exist missing in action in 2023 were the same year class of the juveniles that went out through that hot water curtain in 2020 one measure of the success of that run would be what's called the egg to fry survival rate the usual 16-year average of egg to fry survival rate is about 25 to 30 percent in 2020 we reached near record lows of 11.46 percent that means only about one and ten fish made it to the ocean from the from the eggs in 2021 the same standards were applied we hit a record low then record low of 2.56 percent survival rate that's about one in 50 in 2022 we hit a 2.17 percent egg to fry survival rate this is for the wind rushing up the most threatened or actually endangered since it's endangered under these a stop in the central valley now these are not numbers for spring round but they're comparable and they're not numbers for the fall round but those were comparable in terms of that same kind of precipitous decline all because a deliberate water decision was made under the 2019 buy-up to maximize quote unquote maximize diversions at the expense of salmon this is not a mistake this is not this is not just climate change this is not just drought issues yes there was a drought during that period of time but all the impacts of drought were deliberately exacerbated for the salmon run in order to feed too much water to too many people in what was a record drought so that I want to bring that to your attention I also am providing you a letter from the Pacific possibly wrap up in the next minute I'm doing doing that yes I'm also providing you a letter dated September 12th 2022 from the Pacific fishery management council which is you know it's a federal body that manages our west coast salmon fisheries pleading with the agencies to change that standard to what is the best most protective standard in accordance with the best available science there was an earlier presentation I forget the gentleman's name but he talked about the Martin et al studies the in-site studies on egg survival under temperature standards that's where we need to go those need to be the standards or we will continue the march toward extinction less than a three percent survival rate is a an extinction level and we've done it two out of three and there are only three years and three cohorts and a life cycle so we are on the verge of extinction for most of the salmon in the california central valley which by the way I want to emphasize includes the trinity the trinity is part of the central valley project because that's where a good portion of the water in the northern part of the state comes from so with that I will close and thank you for kicking this on we will certainly continue to engage and provide whatever information we can on fisheries impacts we look forward to receiving that letter and a summary of what you've just given us so thank you moving on through the list is honey culbert with the sierra club with us virtually so we have two more speak to last speakers or just let's go with the first of all so if you'd like to go ahead and introduce yourself asking people to restrict their comments hello this is dirgera deja down with california water research and I'm a consultant with institute for fisheries resources on pacific coast federation of fishermen's associations and my research background is in non-linear dynamics and complex systems theory and I did research at the center for non-linear studies at was almost and the sanofa institute and I worked on climate adaptation in the california water sector since 20 you could check you may have hit mute unintentionally at your end can you hear hear me now now we can yes great okay thank you in 2022 I make comments to the water board that the department of water resources snow runoff forecast had fatal flaws in that they were based on analog years in the historic hydrology the first half of 2022 turned out to be the driest six months on record and the california legislature requested an audit of dwr snow runoff forecasting based in part on my comments there has since been research by the us forest service that indicates the source of the snow runoff forecast errors is related to increased sierra forest root zone deficits which are going to continue in late 2022 I began a comprehensive literature review on the effects of climate change on pacific ocean atmosphere dynamics in california precipitation and temperature the more I looked at the literature the more I realized we're in the middle of climate change there was a regime shift and pacific ocean in 1977 and there was a warmer wetter period from 1977 to the next regime shift after the 1997 98 El Nino and these were both associated the shift after 97 to 98 we saw a shift to a more La Nina like pattern of a tropical pacific and a cold pacific decadal oscillation pattern and it's was associated with a reduction of precipitation in january and february across western north america and developing mega drought in the southwest the reduction in precipitation accelerated in 2013 and there was also a step increase in temperatures that is associated with hot droughts and I've been doing extensive analysis of the NOAA climate division data and it's really clear we're no longer in the 20th century high hydroclimate the precipitation distribution has flattened out there are more very dry and very wet years and the dry years are much drier due to increased atmospheric thirst there's been intense research on the pattern effect of cool sea surface temperatures in the eastern pacific and climate models experiments are showing La Nina like trend is likely to be caused by a slow recovery from anthropogenic aerosols and if so this La Nina like pattern will last for decades and that will have major effects on precipitation in the southwest and in california research also shows that this pattern effect may have masked higher climate sensitivity and and we could see more warming for a given increase in CO2 and this has been the subject of a major international research effort through the clivar program which is coordinated through the world meteorological organization this is the best available climate science and it's cutting edge and I'll be providing a summary and some information to the panel and as far as climate adaptation I would say water projects have been using a greedy strategy that tries to optimize operations to move as much water as possible in any given year to the San Luis reservoir and reservoirs in southern california but that in our changed hydroclimate this creates major risks of draining northern california reservoirs to near-dead cool and we have to move to much more risk-based management for both the reservoirs and water supply and for ecosystems and we also need to recognize that human systems have a much greater capacity to adapt than ecosystems so thank you very much we look forward to getting you further information and we look forward to receiving that information so I think that concludes the open mic one more yeah please do so Kevin please introduce yourself and try and keep your remarks to just five or six minutes please hello can you hear me uh can you can you hear me now yep we hear you very well hello this is Kevin uh can can you hear me we hear you very well hello okay so it looks like you can hear me uh well well thanks a lot for the opportunity to provide input and offer support to the committee I'm Kevin Howard the federal power program at manager for the northern california power agency or ncpa and ncpa is a joint powers authority serving 16 municipal utilities within the state of california who serve over 700 000 in-use electricity customers these customers can seem approximately 12 of the electrical loads served by the california independent system operator representing a significant percentage of california residents and businesses the central valley project hydro generation facilities provide a large component of ncpa's generation resources since ncpa members hold the rights to over 40 of the press preference power generated by the bureau of reclamation and delivered by the western area power administration my comments covered two main topics first a request to consider the hydropower operations component of the cvp and state water projects and second an offer to partner with the committee to help explore the science related to managing environmental and economic impacts related to any changes to operational practices within the cvp which limit the volume and timing of hydropower generation any further limitations to the flexibility of hydropower operations will almost certainly increase greenhouse gas emissions which goes against california's goal to be carbon neutral by 2045 this is an area of study that should be added to the current evaluation long-term operations of the central valley project and state water project hydropower is a defined purpose of the cvp which provides a large amount of renewable very low carbon energy to the state of california given the current and environmental goals of the state to limit emissions and emissions related climate change one of the strategies is to electrify most of the energy used within the state by incorporating electric vehicles heat pumps etc along with the integration of large amounts of renewable energy into the electric grid this will ultimately result in an increase in the overall electrical load on the already strained system within the state in order to charge vehicles and meet heating cooling and industrial loads this will exacerbate the issue which led to rolling blackouts in california during the summer of 2020 as well as energy emergencies which nearly led to rolling blackouts in more recent years these events tend to occur during extreme weather events in these cases extreme heat events which are becoming more and more common as climate changes continue these energy emergencies almost always occur during net peak loading times of the year and are caused by significantly increased loads that begin during early evening hours in california when consumer loads ramp up with increased cooling and other activities at the end of the workday this also corresponds with the time of day when california's large solar generation capacity is ramping down as the sun sets vehicle charging and increasing electrification will accelerate this issue in order to maintain grid reliability and prevent blackouts all other sources of generation that are dispatchable or called upon to fill the gap as solar generation drops off during these peak loading times if hydro power is unavailable during these times due to lack of water or other operational limitations natural gas fire generation will be called upon to fill that void for example during recent stress conditions on july 20th 2023 when the cal iso declared in ea1 60% of load was served with natural gas resources which is clear evidence the state is dependent on the gas fleet which will likely continue for many years any decrease in hydropower availability will increase the utilization of natural gas generation increasing greenhouse gases and other harmful chemical emissions another simple example of a factor that can have substantial air quality impacts is that the green hydropower production from each acre foot of water diverted from the trinity river division to the sacramental river results in approximately three times as much hydropower generation due to being routed through additional hydro turbines these divergence can also supplement and conserve the shasta cold water pool to support seasonal and annual biological protection requirements maintaining the availability of clean affordable hydropower is also in alignment with the current federal administration's environmental justice initiative as you saw in an earlier presentation over the last decade cvp power has been dangerously close and has sometimes exceeded market prices the reduction of cvp generation availability or the restriction of system flexibility further increases the cost of the federal hydropower resource which disproportionately impacts the economically challenged communities that are prevalent among ncpa members service territories if changes to system operations cause additional cost increases the state is at risk of losing these clean hydropower resources i recognize the challenge of adding hydropower and emissions considerations to an already complex set of issues associated with water quality water deliveries and the biodiversity of the system but believe there are very important issues that need to be considered by utilizing science and data to develop appropriate tools we believe that power and emissions interests can be optimized while honoring other environmental and water goals ncpa and our members have been working closely with the western area power administration to explore an approach to modeling and evaluating these areas of concern and we have developed an initial emissions model as a starting point for consideration we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas on this model we also offer our support as a resource to the committee to identify expertise as well as helping to identify datasets that can inform modeling and analysis thanks for your time and effort on this and and for the opportunity to speak with you those comments and again as with many of the other speakers please do forward that information or a summary where that information could be found to the national academy staff so with that my uh i think we are done with the open mic session and perhaps what i'll ask is that we really appreciate some of the uh staff folks who have agreed to stay on this afternoon because we didn't get to everyone's questions earlier and we can take about 20 minutes or so uh to uh address some of those questions so i know dr conrad uh acclimation uh noa steve do you want to come sit sit at the front from the world so in particular if you had questions for the fisheries discussion this morning uh tea them up because they're all here and then josh and lenny from yesterday are also here as mario with us no no okay um but i know there were a number of questions that we were compiling in david's uh google document if and if you'd have would like to ask one of your questions follow renai's example and just tilt your check card please okay should we start should we start with renai and then go to denise um i have a question for you josh from yesterday on the the x2 plot that you showed the red and the blue line and then also the um the one with uh temperature uh below chasta that was similar the run of river will you explain to us what that actually is yeah so real in both cases yeah so real briefly and there is a slide that sort of describes them but the run of the river is an exploratory modeling cal sim 3 run that basically has flows moving through the reservoirs except for those that are limited by army core of engineer flood control rules and there's no cvp diversions and the only diversions in there are senior water rights diverters that are allowed and can divert off of run of the river so there's no releases being made for uh senior water rights diversions effectively you can sort of think of it like the dams being left open except for making sure that um flooding does copy in the case of shasta the shasta one though there's still a reservoir there with reservoir temperature effects it's not like the reservoir wasn't there and it was actually the temperature coming into shasta you know what i mean yeah so the run of the river temperature run uh would reflect the water the temperatures of the water coming out uh just based on the reservoir storage that's in there due to um trying to think through why there would be might be a little bit of water in there due to flood control in white years in may or april or something like that that's being stored instead of release due to flood control curves okay thank you can we come across to denise okay denise then we go to steve okay do you want me to use this one hey denise i'll just say one more thing we can you know i think we're gonna talk more about modeling at the next workshop too so if this is something that's interesting you know let laura know and we can make sure to have modelers here who can talk more about the specifics sorry denise thanks i had two questions um one for josh and one for steve um for josh um we had some good presentations on operations yesterday and a lot of it was fairly kind of immediate weekly decisions so this led me to think about our statement that talks is about long-term operations what does long-term operations mean as opposed to short-term operations or some other kind so that's the question for josh and the question for steve is um you had a very elegant diagram you know of the life cycle right and um you talked about temperature and oxygen and at what point and what do we know about food being a limiting factor in those early life stages because she kind of it's on the diagram but you didn't really talk about that so that's one of my questions okay so real quickly thanks for the question denise so long-term probably is more of uh art than the science so i think uh we tend to call our consultations long-term operations i think probably the best way to think about it could be um between years so because i think they're storing as one of our actions and storing tends to happen across years so that we have old water resources uh the next year uh with some of that's some some of the approaches that are being considered and have been used have been trying to link across years uh stored water for releasing and diverting in future years so um that's probably the best i can do when it comes to long-term so does that mean that we don't need to worry about um operating the pumps in response to local conditions on a fairly immediate time frame because that's not really into year right so yeah and i think just the other point is you know on the slides that i gave you i gave you some ideas on sort of the real-time tools we have for sort of interseason or weekly or monthly approaches to operating but you know our consultations and our thoughts about the operations of the project span and include things like what's going to happen over many decades of time so in that context it's long-term but Lenny wants to add to this so maybe i could add just i removed long-term operations from the title of my slide the way that i see it it's a jargon term to describe the permit period for the consultation long-term that's that's very helpful thank you that's good i got it it's independent of real-time operations it's just a jargon term thank you yeah but we i think it is important for you all to be thinking about inter-annual operational choices so thank you Denise for that question that that was uh one of the many things i did skip over very quickly or not touch on a poll touch upon at all uh food is very important for juvenile salmon their growth depends on the food supply and the water temperature and both of those things can be influenced by the water project in different ways in different environments so below reservoirs um at least certain times of the year those can provide a subsidy of high-quality food to streamvillings cell monitors in terms of like daftia and whatnot coming out from reservoirs but i think more of the effects are uh negative the disconnection of floodplains in particular those are areas of very high quality for juvenile salmon or rearing because of incredible invertebrate production that you get in flooded wetlands and uh there's much less access to that now because of of levees and reduced flooding in general because of this water storage during the wet period and then the delta itself has been as you saw from some of the maps radically transformed from a title marsh that probably had from if i recall from jim clerns work maybe two orders of magnitude more production coming from from marshes through a tritle food web that would have been supporting salmon um most salmon bearing river estuaries uh the estuary is an area of growth for juvenile salmon and it's not so much in ours the fish just migrate through and they don't really grow at all okay maybe we can talk about this at another meeting thank you steve um i think i wasn't very specific in my in my um question i was reflecting on some of the comments we got during the open mic session about about egg to fry survival and sorry it's really at the much earlier life oh okay so we can talk about it uh another time but okay yeah sorry so uh perhaps we can now go to steve steve online steve brand well uh welcome everyone sorry i can't be there and i seems to me we all just got together about a month ago to talk about food webs so i won't ask about that the uh this may be diving into the weeds a bit and but i want to target it towards uh steve and matt maybe is you both talked about the uh complete lifecycle models and i think for both salmon and and smelt and as as sort of the uh i want to say a shining example of of a of a modeling approach for those fishes but i'm really having a difficult time understanding how in fact they're actually applied uh to cvp operations you know because of what we've seen with the cvp is clearly uh uh it's geographic there's there's diversity and where flows change and temperatures and so forth like that and and the model as far as i'm aware doesn't have a spatial component to it so i'm just wondering how do you apply those in terms of a space spatially to cvp operations are they actually used in any kind of an operational sense or sort of post facto sort of or pre facto kind of analysis and um and i guess what are what are what are the drivers in that case and what are what's the output you're actually looking for now maybe this is something we can tell you for the next meeting together but go ahead have a shot yeah so i uh steve thanks for that i'd be happy to come back and talk to the committee it probably would warrant if you're interested in that i can give you an overview of the winter ocean of life cycle model it is indeed spatial in a kind of a course sense uh it is driven by inputs uh that come from things like cal sim 2 it uses other models like hecras which describe the depth and velocity changes according to the hydrology so we can look at habitat suitability in large areas like the upper river the lower river the yellow bypass in the delta and the model accounts for movements among those habitats during the rearing phase so it captures really a lot of the dynamics that i was trying to tell you about today in a simple way but in a way that i think is helpful it has been used in a couple of the biological opinions basically because there are so many effects is what i was trying to get across to you today um some positive many negative and to be able to integrate that over the whole life cycle is the necessary task and the model is capable of doing that i think fairly successfully there's always a tension between realism uh and tractability uh connecting it to data and all of that there's a huge technical challenges but i'd be happy to come back and tell you about the progress we've made there has in the last in several now yeah and it will be it's being used right now in the planning oh and i should say that the analysis generally um comes to us in the form of a few scenarios there's like a baseline and a couple alternatives and that is what we analyze so we'll get the calcium runs from our colleagues at the bureau and we run that through a complex set of models and come out uh the outputs are things like projected uh trends in abundance and survival through different life stages uh the the production of a fish into the ocean and things like that that are pretty diagnostic for understanding what what's going on overall with population dynamics right yeah did you want to add i'm sorry well yeah did you have something to add on the yeah i can add to steve's question so thank you for it um i think in one of the earlier q and a as i did mention there's there's multiple delta smelt life cycle models that are now in existence um what i can say about the 2019 opinions is that at that time there was one published individual based model kenny rose at all we didn't have access to it and we didn't um so all we could do is read the paper and report what the paper said basically um we were working on our own life cycle models other people were working on some um but but we got very clear direction from washington dc that we were not to use uh life cycle models that hadn't been peer reviewed in that consultation so we weren't able to use anything in development at the time uh the reason is actually not a bad one you heard today how much controversy there is with everything we do and so um there was concern about um basing decisions on something that might be preliminary might get changed um so that's that um we do now have them and they were used in the biological assessment that we got from reclamation recently so um but it and to your second part of your questions steve kenny's model is spatial um the statistical models that we developed with our load eye office are not um we have variants that are hybrids of individual based and statistical that are spatial but they don't do space well so yeah we we are where we are with with that part but they are being used this time okay thanks a lot so um i think you know we are we did use the delta smelt life cycle model uh we've also as part of our central valley project improvement act been working to develop decision support models for the different runs of shinook salmon and working now on sturgeon and steelhead models as well to do sort of multi objective multi species uh modeling of different scenarios and slightly differently we've used those tools sort of in two ways one for running through what the experts around the central valley think are sort of the best restoration opportunities and then running that through the model to see how much it influences the objectives of increasing uh shinook salmon populations and then we've actually done competitive solicitations focusing on the candidate scenarios that are prioritized as most likely to achieve the outcomes that we're interested in then we've also used it to do sensitivity analysis to look at what parameters influence the outcome the greatest and are doing competitive solicitations for research to try to focus our research efforts in that direction so that we can improve the models and improve our decision-making over time so we're hoping to talk about that during the second meeting some too with the other life cycle model discussions right thanks uh and david coming to david next we'll work our way back along the line so i had a question about groundwater surface water interactions and it's really i think three the general question is how much those factor into the analyses you're doing but then to be more specific how much do they affect the relationship between what comes out of the reservoirs and what gets to the delta and i guess the second part is how important are they for temperature and the third part just more general is how how important do you see them for the species conditions that you're studying like to take that first i think we could provide a general response to that and we'd like to table that for the next meeting when we'll have our modelers here that can tell you how they incorporate that into calcium in different ways so i think yeah they'll have a better response than you would yeah uh joe so i have a question from steve i mean this this may be a little bit too detailed so in the in the morning you showed this beautiful graph between the survival rate versus temperature and then it basically comes down and drops down at about 15 from 75 to about three four percent and it really struck me because usually the fish data are a little bit scattered here and there not like you know when we teach aerodynamics you know lift coefficient versus Reynolds number they fall in one or another all the time for your blades but anyway so it struck me but then one of the speakers one of the the open mic speakers guns pain he basically uh probably you heard that he said that when the biops were changed from 11 point 13.33 to 11.6 also 11.6 to 13.33 there were completely annihilation of of eggs and they don't have after three years everything disappeared so but 13.33 is within your limits so there must be uncertainty on these things which or maybe i'm going to detail here but it's really a issue i think yeah it's science-based and your your stuff is science-based it looks like biops is science-based but he claims that it is not science-based so it's a little bit of an issue maybe you can you can i i'll try to untangle this so i can there are a number of things that this is pretty complicated so that the the figure i showed with the such the beautiful data those were from laboratory studies so when you you can estimate a model very precisely from that and when that model is that estimated from the field data it comes up with a lower temperature which is below 13.3 uh the biological opinion then changed to reflect that and someone else can probably help me out with exactly the timing and the criteria and all and then that was relaxed somewhat in a revision to the biological opinion it's not really clear in a multi-year drought whether those targets even if we were committed to meeting them are physically achievable you have to reduce the flows so much that the habitat for the salmon constrict and then there may be issues going on with actually the water velocities i alluded to the importance of oxygen the salmon spawn in very deep areas now which is not what they did evolutionarily or you know 100 years ago um and there's some new studies coming out now that suggest there there could be a velocity component to this as well as well um i'm not sure if that helped uh okay so yeah a laboratory data pretty nice agreement but a lot of complexities maybe your your thermal stress model might be the one which you should be using for the biops because then that will take care of the depth of the water and the temperatures and the operation and stuff so that i mean it's so much science to be done it looks like yes yeah like in everything you know you you find a new result and it shed some insight but it raises a number of new questions and there's so much attention to all this too it's a little bit ironic maybe in some of these things where i think we we know more are some of the most controversial areas because they're so impactful other things we know nothing really about and there's probably a lot going on there because we can't measure it we kind of ignore that it's a weird dynamic patrick thank you guys for sticking around i appreciate that so if you were here you heard michael anderson's talk frankly i was a little disappointed in it i uh in in statistics in albert i were talking about this earlier uh stationarity often is viewed as changes in the mean but we think of it as changes in variation as well and that's so important to keep track of and people often forget about it so the message i got from michael's talk was that it's complicated but clearly there's patterns going on especially with the variability and i've had the opportunity to use oceanographic and atmospheric data in as in estimation to see where fish go and how they survive and so on and so forth and it seems like we could be much more advanced than what we're we're doing now and so my question is uh are you using michael's input at all in anything and uh and if so at what scale and uh is it is it helpful this was indirectly included in one of my questions about climate change and maybe this goes back denise to your clarification on long trip operations this is a consultation period that we're dealing with now and we keep hearing well we're in climate change yeah we agree with that but we don't want to kick the can down the road on what may change in the next consultation period on the state side it's a 10-year permit it's not defined on the federal side but given that we want to be aligned guessing that we would do this every 10 years um and that's where we would like some feedback there because when you sit in our seat and you're developing the rules for what you need to do today you don't really integrate what michael was showing in the way that you you know need to start thinking about it for the future that's just the nature of the work it's government work right you got to get this done today but we know it's there and we would love impact i mean love feedback on how we could start integrating what you all see in our rules that will help us get to a better place in the future knowing that this is on the horizon and even things that we could do now you know on the science side looking at our adaptive management side did we miss a question or two in our adaptive management plan um are there other things we need to consider so that goes into that box of uncertainty that i was talking about that we framed as questions um there's just different ways of looking at that so it's not being used directly now at the moment um yeah well calcine yeah so yeah and calcine we actually yeah yeah good thank you matt so we do have a way to model that right and we have calcine runs that evaluate the out that the outcome of that climate change prediction and you could do the biological models that have some prediction but in terms of the the real-time rules and the scope here yeah not in that sort of way but we could look at it at a at a larger view so yeah thank you thank you very much that makes sense so if we can go to baidwa and then back to michelle for the last word i'm not a hundred percent sure this um question is appropriate necessarily to this group because i think not everybody was here but a lot of people ended their talks yesterday by saying that coordination was critical and so i would be curious to hear your opinions about what is what are limiting factors for coordination interesting question i there's some biologists who are still in the audience here who meet you know on a weekly basis and talk more frequently uh with their colleagues on technical teams related to real-time operations uh you know i contrast that maybe with some of the long-term planning that we do in consultation where i also think that there is weekly coordination on a multi-year consultation process and uh so there's a lot of coordination going on there we do have a lot of science partnerships also where we get together to talk about some of these topics um i think typically all the agencies are there but at the same time people are really busy because they're getting pulled into consultation or they're getting pulled into real-time operations so there's let those things take away from our ability to advance and coordinate on the science that's necessary um and so i think uh you know we have to sort of balance how we staff and resource those three areas long-term planning real-time operations and sort of coordination of the science that's advancing and helping us adapt over time with new tools that are going to help us evaluate and approach potentially the next information and consultation or better understand what we're seeing on the ground i think uh that's probably the place that i think may suffer the most is just being able to allow staff the time to go because they're getting pulled in these other directions sure thanks that's a great response i i think several of us have been wondering about the mechanics of coordination at different time scales with respect to operations and one thing i was wondering about is do you guys are there internal mechanisms to evaluate how coordination is functioning is that part of the coordination is sort of this meta analysis of how coordination is working i could take a stab at that again and i'm mostly going to reference what we're talking about in the consultation for how we do coordinated ops under the new permits we spent a lot of time talking about governance because one of the items that we recognize over the last few years is there's there's often not been a clear path if staff have a disagreement on what they're seeing how that gets elevated up so we spent a lot of time thinking about that elevation process how the groups coordinate and then thinking of a decision team that's between the staff folks and the directors to help sort it all out and then maybe that decision that's we call it the sub directors could come to some sort of resolution on whatever got elevated as a general matter we would love the staff folks to figure this out but it's not always perfect and i think you know one item one word that we like to use here is consensus but as design when you're in a group consensus it's hard to be the individual that disagrees in that you know in that dynamic and because of that we know we want to make sure that all the individual agency members have an opportunity to weigh in if they don't feel comfortable they can elevate it up so if you look and we could provide this at the new governance that we have described in our consultation that's a verbatim between the biological assessment and itp application there's a very clear structure not only among the staff but then the different committees that make decisions on water ops and the modelers the sub director team and the directors and include there's actually a language about how the directors go about decision making too and then there's even a nuance piece on the state and feds have different ways in which they approach governance and who has ultimate decision authority we even address that in some indirect way too so yeah we've we've been thinking about this a lot because this is part of the lessons learned since 2008 thanks all right please do thanks for the question what I wanted to add is and I think that as Lenny and Josh talked about there's a quite a bit of coordination among the agencies but I think as you hear from the public comments in the open mic session there's also a need for coordination and communication with external parties and that's one of the things that will be great to get your input on because it's so important that the science that we're using is transparent and it's clear how it's being used because there isn't always a shared understanding of what we are doing so your input on how to achieve that effectively would be would be great I had one more thought and it's escaping me right now but but I I yeah that was the other point is that's one of the things I was trying to emphasize yesterday in my comments about adaptive management that's one of the pieces that we'd like to solve is a strong word but get to a better space in terms of coordination with interested parties thanks who is so again to go to Michelle for the last question and then we'll turn to the agency folks if you would like a parting shot at the committee on your way out the door um great well thank y'all all for your time today and I had a two-part question that really followed up on Patrick's comments around climate information and the first is we've heard a lot about various adaptive management plans over the last couple days and I'm curious kind of to what extent those consider climate change and y'all sort of started to answer that question I just wanted to probe it a little bit more um or is adaptive management defined slightly differently here and climate not climate change I should say not not a large component um and then kind of as a part of that I wanted to understand a little bit more about kind of consensus around climate sensitivities within the larger system um and do you you know people in the open mic session and kind of throughout have talked about various aspects of management which are sensitive to climate change I'm sure we could all rattle off off many right now but do you feel like there's a general consensus or feeling of maybe completeness is not the right word here but around which key aspects of operations um or key metrics are most sensitive to climate change and where where it really needs to play a bigger role in decision making I think I I do have one point that I think is relevant to this that I didn't get to make um and that is when you look at the biology of the animals that I'm most familiar with the salmon their responses to things like temperature are highly non-linear and as as we manage the system more towards those thresholds and the uncertainty around those relationships becomes more important and the opportunity for exceeding them and having really bad things happen rises and rises and that's the kind of trajectory we've been on is going right up to the edge uh and maybe over it sometimes and I think that's gonna be an increasing risk and you know some of these these are cold water fish they're gonna uh just be under more and more pressure like this and that's what I'm just trying to get at with the last slide is can we find ways to get get them away from and ourselves away from those edges where we have a little more room for error because there's almost no margin anymore I don't know if that really doesn't answer I think your question entirely but no it's okay so I mean climate change impacts on the water projects themselves are pretty profound I think we've heard about that for the last couple days um the projects rely on snow to be there to help them store water over lengthier lengthier periods of time in the spring if that's not there um then they're you know the as that cycles through time the storage levels will be lower on average the flood flows will be higher but shorter on average that's going to affect how much they can export that's going to affect how how much and when outflow leaves the delta so it's completely integrated um from the perspective of the my I'm not saying myopic as a bad thing here but when you work for the Fish and Wildlife Service and you're consulting on something in this case water project operations and you're consulting for fish we're certainly looking at the predictions of climate change but Lenny mentioned that permits maybe got a 10-year shelf life and that's if something doesn't change so profoundly that we have to re-consult and open it all back up again um the 2019 opinions were re-consulted in part because of chronic drought in the 21st century and what was happening to fishes as a result of that so in that sense climate changes is causing us to do something and we're trying to do something but also that longer view of long-term strategy as much you know the Fish and Wildlife Service I'm sure it's the same in NOAA have think tanks in places but but in a consultation like this that's not where that really can happen we're sort of looking at a limited range of time and what we're presented with so so on the adaptive management just underscore what Matt said I think that you said it really well Matt that not yet it seems but that's one of the things we're trying to do is understand at what time cycle is it appropriate and what factors need to be considered when evaluating any of these management actions and I think that your question plays into that the other thing I just offer is that one of the materials and that's relevant to your question that we could provide to the panel is the state water project has produced a new delivery capability report that adopts a new approach in the 2023 report it's a believe a biennial report that then this this approach that is new this past year is underestimating the risk involved in not meeting what are the what's the risk profile for the the state water project to be able to provide its deliveries and takes a climate approach to that so we could provide that for additional context to the panel that would be great thank you so actually Louise you do have the the mic do you have any parting message um let's see I wanted to not be the first to do this but I sat in the wrong spot so well I am I'm glad this isn't the last meeting there's obviously so much more to talk about I I keep finding myself gravitating towards the question of what is the charge for for the panel and of course it's written down but exactly how you take in all the information that may or may not be directly relevant to what's listed on that page and consider it I think that's going to be a real challenge um I I so I'm reserving the right to say more tomorrow after I've had a night of sleep and I'm on the bus with you and I have more thoughts um so but I do want to note that one of the things that I heard quite a bit during the open mic session was an encouragement for you all to review parts of the voluntary agreements that's um voluntary agreements are something that the Department of Water Resources is heavily engaged in and is a signatory for on the MOU and the memorandum and understanding and one of the things that I just think would be really helpful to provide to you is that there is a separate scientific basis report on the voluntary agreement proposal that is being separately peer reviewed and we expect comments next week so I would love the panel to be able to consider that and as you consider your charge and the urging to also review the voluntary agreements please look at all the relevant materials there there is as Eric Oppenheimer said a big process that's going on and while there may be a nexus important to keep your charge to what is what is reasonable and consider all the other materials that have been provided separately in a separate venue for those voluntary agreements so um let's see I guess the last thing I'd say is it's reflecting on some of the life cycle modeling there's been several discussions on that and I think that the real the person I want to point to is Renee Henry who's actually leading one of the leads for a reorienting to recovery effort that considers and is and is expanding on life cycle models and how they can be used to prioritize different investments in the salmon life restoring habitat and opportunities for for salmon to complete their life cycle and so there's the in addition to the life cycle models and their use for operations which is really the scope for this panel be aware that there are other supplementary efforts going on that that have take a really broad approach and get a lot of valuable input into the improvement of available models and think broadly about how they can be used that might be really good fodder for thinking about how we approach adaptive management for the water project operations is that there's other examples even within this system that you can look at for for thinking about that piece and thank you for your time looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow I would just add what I've already told you that I am at your service for any kind of information that you need about an adorbous fish salmon steelhead sturgeon I lead a laboratory of about a hundred people that have been a lot of whom have been working for the last 15 years to try to improve the scientific basis for all of this water management related to the adorbous fish and I'm happy to connect you to them or I can present in their stead and if you want me to come back at any time I'm available to do that well I will second things that Steve just said and Louise thank you to all of you and to everybody who's participated and all of the talks that proceeded mine to make mine a lot easier because I didn't have to do so much background I I have been asked to provide some lifecycle model references by Patrick but like Steve I'm available to provide information to the panel I guess I have to provide that through Laura so we'll do it that way but and then I just wanted to give everybody a heads up I won't be on the field trip tomorrow Jana Afonso who's my endangered species colleague in my office and the expert for our office on that will be and I do feel like there's probably you've got plenty of great scientists that can talk about biology I think it it will be actually better for the panel to have that regulatory expertise available so thanks again and I will pass this along all right thanks Matt um and the other panelists here and the national academy staff science or national academy science staff who helped us uh get this underway with all of you so really appreciate this we're just jumping in right now and I think maybe at the next meeting we'll give you a life vest or something like that and I don't know if I can finish my presentation right now Peter probably not okay um but if you look back at it um I think what's interesting is you know there's been a lot of really I feel like great discussion and dialogue and people providing a lot of information to you and you can see that there's a lot of opportunity to do something uh else given the needs to adapt for climate change needed to address flexibility with water supply and and hydropower and all of that is hinged on having tools that help us make choices and the three large issues around diverting water and storing water and releasing water and blending water are all really critical decisions that a reclamation has to make choices about and we can't decide if the voluntary agreements or some other proposed action or something else that someone else might decide to want us to implement is better or worse unless we have good tools and so um I really appreciate the hard work you're starting to think about what those tools are that will help us evaluate uh the trade-offs uh biological hydropower and and water supply uh and I'm really looking forward to the to the field trip because I really don't get out in the field very much and I'm really looking forward to additional workshops where we'll be able to talk about some of the monitoring and modeling here from other interested parties uh around the state uh this spring and this winter and so thank you very