Well, good morning everyone and thank you for joining us, both in person and virtually. And I'd also like to give a particular thanks to the presenters we'll be hearing from today that have given up their time and as you'll see really invested a lot of effort to provide this overview we'll be hearing from. So I'm Peter Goodwin, I serve as the chair of this ad hoc committee of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine to review the science for the Central Valley project. I am recently retired as the president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and also the vice chancellor for environmental sustainability for the university system of Maryland. Before we get started, a few safety announcements. The emergency exits, there's two exits here, the back of the room in the corner by the flowers and in the front here that is not an exit on the left hand side. In the event of an emergency please don't use the elevators, take the stairs and walk across and congregate in an open safe area. Also the restrooms on this floor out of the double doors here or you can take the corridor from the back of the room. We'd like to start with a land acknowledgement, the history of the Sacramento area and the people is rich in heritage, culture and tradition. The area was and still is the tribal land of the Nisenan people, Sacramento was the gathering place for many local tribes who have lived throughout the Central Valley and the foothills for generations and were the original stewards of this land. We would like to acknowledge the southern Maidu people to the north, the valley and plains Maiwok, Maiduuk peoples to the south of the American River and the Patwin Wintown peoples to the west of the Sacramento River. We would also like to honor the Wilton Rancheria, the only federally recognized tribe in Sacramento County. Throughout our work we acknowledge that we are standing on the tribal lands of Sacramento's indigenous people. So why are we here? At the request of the US Bureau of Reclamation, the first cycle of this study committee will look at two things. The first is to look at the science, modeling, monitoring and decision tools for the long-term operations of the Central Valley project and the state water project where relevant. In this first cycle special attention will be paid to three elements of the system, summer fall smelt habitat, shester cold water pool management and the old and middle river flow management for smelt and samanids. And it's important if you look at the detailed outline that we're focusing on the science that informs the decision making, not the merits of one endangered species over another or one interest over another. A very brief overview of the agenda. Today we will start with an overview of the process that the National Academy employs for this type of review. We'll also hear from US Bureau of Reclamation who will give their rationale for undertaking this study. And we'll be getting a very in-depth dive from a variety of speakers that are studying the Central Valley project and the state water project. And we will conclude today with some perspectives from just a few of the interested parties. Tomorrow we'll be learning about the ecology in the delta, the effects of climate change and most importantly the open mic session that I'll talk about more in a moment. I'm going to run through very quickly the various committee members and I apologize to my colleagues ahead of time that I have pulled out only one or two expert themes for each. All these appointed members are very well versed in interdisciplinary complex systems and their expertise goes far beyond the one or two topics that I'm going to highlight. But for those of you attending the meeting in person, I thought you might like to know who to connect with during the various breaks. So the first member is Dr. Jared Bales. He has served as the chief scientist for water for the USGS and most recently he served as the executive director of quasi for those of you are not familiar with that. That's the consortium of research universities working on water issues across the US and internationally I should say now. The expertise of Dr. Bales of course is hydrology, water resource management and in addition it's important to know he was a great champion when he was at the USGS for emerging technologies and new techniques. Dr. Brandt unfortunately is not able to be with us in person today but is joining from a distance. He's with Oregon State University. His background is fish ecology and management, food webs and is well known as an expert for ecosystem forecasting. Pedro Beauty is with Utah State University. She also serves as the co-director of the USGS Utah Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Unit and her background is conservation biology, invasion ecology, fisheries management and food web dynamics. Dr. Bray is a hydrologist and fluvial geomorphologist. And one of the things she's very widely known for is her temperature modeling and the effects of flow releases in regulated systems. Dr. Joseph Fernando, University of Notre Dame. All things fluid dynamics related to the environment, atmospheric oceanographic, riverine processes, climate and he's also done considerable work in alternative energy. Dr. Renee Henry is the science director for California Trout Unlimited. His background is fisheries scientists and the ecology of regulated rivers. Dr. Lund is one of the two members of the National Academy is on this committee.  As he agreed to take on the co-directorship of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. And of course, he's very active in groups like PPIC. His background is water and environmental systems, engineering and modeling. Dr. Josue Medean Azouara. His expertise is water management and economics. And one of those few interdisciplinary scientists that has a strong background as an economist, but brings it to water systems, both agricultural, environmental and urban. Dr. Myra works with the Rand Corporation and is also on the faculty of the Rand Graduate School. Expertise, of course, is risk management, particularly related to climate resilience and adaptation, disaster resilience and recovery. Mo Amadi is with the University of Michigan, but has had extensive experience working on the water issues in California. And his expertise is in the prediction of climate change, particularly on the consequences to society. Dr. Owen is with the University of California Law. I still struggle over that. I think of it as Hastings Law School, but the University of California Law San Francisco. He's an expert on the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, the Public Trust Doctrine. And also much of his research deals on the negotiation within environmental decision making. Dr. Reed is with the University of New Orleans. She's a coastal geomorphologist and is renowned globally as an expert on mass sustainability and the rate of or the role of human activities in modifying coastal and deltaic systems. Dr. Vidal is with UC Berkeley. His background is freshwater ecology, aquatic food web responses to hydrologic regimes in regulated rivers and the impacts of climate change. Dr. Sadro is with UC Davis. He's an immunologist specializing in aquatic systems ecology, watershed processes, and terrestrial aquatic interactions within ecosystems. David Sen heads the San Francisco Bay Nutrient Management Program and is at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. His background is biogeochemistry, harmful alkyl blooms, and has been a leader in the field of nature-based solutions for nutrient management. Dr. Jerry Stedinger is our second member from the National Academies. He's at Cornell University. Of course, he's well known for the field of hydrology, operation of water resources, optimization, multi-reservoir, and hydropower operations under dynamic market conditions. Dr. Sullivan is also at Cornell University. He's an expert in statistical methods, particularly applied to dynamics of fish, mammals, and other ecosystem characteristics. So with that, I would like to acknowledge the efforts of reclamation staff and Laura Ellis and Stacey Karras, who you'll be hearing from in a moment. The diligence and research in constructing this study is quite a remarkable achievement in the last few months. I would like to emphasize in closing that this is an open on the record meeting. I would remind everyone that this is information gathering session. And particularly, comments made by individuals, including committee members, should not be interpreted as positions of the committee or the National Academies. In addition, committee members often ask probing questions that are not indicative of their personal views. I mentioned on Wednesday afternoon, we have an open mic session. And we would just ask so we can plan that time in the most effective way. If you have not already registered to speak in that session, there's a sign up sheet on the back table. Alternatively, you can email Maya on the email address given here, mfry at nas.edu. And just to emphasize, this study is not going to be successful without the input through these public meetings. And so please, please engage with us over the coming months. So this study can be the most effective and constructive for the ecosystem, the state of California, and the federal government. So thank you. I'll now turn it back to Dr. Ellers to talk about all of Stacey going first. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us this morning. Thank you, Dr. Goodwin, as well for your opening remarks. I just want to welcome everybody to the first open public information gathering session of this committee that's been put together to look at the long-term operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. This presentation will orient us to the National Academies, a bit about who we are, how we operate, and what we do. It will also introduce the committee's task composition, which thankfully our chair went through in great detail, and also the projected study schedule. I'll be covering the first portion of that, and then I'll turn it over to my colleague, Dr. Ellers, to complete as well. As a side note, this image that you're seeing is a piece of artwork that hangs in our National Academies building in Washington, DC. It depicts the signing of the charter for the National Academies. I'm told that this gathering didn't actually happen this way, but that, in fact, those were some of the leading members in establishing the National Academies back in 1863. All right, so as I said, the National Academies were for the National Academy of Sciences, rather, was formed in 1863 by a congressional charter signed during the Lincoln administration. And three subsequent executive orders have reaffirmed the importance of the National Academies and expanded on our charter as well. The 1916 Executive Order established the National Research Council, which many of you that have been engaged with the academies in the past may recognize as the working arm of the National Academies. That's who we represent. That's now called the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. So I'm going to cover a few of the select sort of functions of the academies. We are a nonprofit 501-3C organization. We are independent from the government, although we do receive most of our funding from federal agencies. We were established to provide independent scientific and technical advice, again, primarily to the government when called upon. But we do also accept funding from and provide feedback to other organization types, including state governments, the private sector, et cetera. We do not lobby or advocate directly to Congress. And we also support, I wanted to mention as well, academic institutions as well. We do this by convening groups of expert scientists on a voluntary basis to serve on committees like this. Primarily, we conduct consensus studies. But we do also, I'm skipping ahead a bit here, we do also conduct other types of convening activities as well. That can include workshops, standing committees that provide ongoing input to agencies and other mechanisms. We produce consensus reports, but other products also. Several of our committee chairs and committee members in the past have provided congressional testimony after reports have been produced. We also produce social media, booklets, colloquial and workshop reports. And some videos, we've provided a link to some of the YouTube videos that you can watch as well. I want to go back quickly, because I did skip over this. This is our organizational chart. At the top, you'll see the three national academies, the honorary societies that we represent. That's the National Academy of Sciences, formed, as I said, in 1863. The National Academy of Engineering, which came next in 1964, established under the original charter. And the National Academy of Medicine, which formerly known as the Institute of Medicine, came in 1970. Below the three honorary societies is the organization of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the Working Arm. And there are seven program units within that that cover a variety of topics, ranging from engineering and physical sciences, earth and life studies, health and medicine, et cetera. We fall within the division on earth and life studies. And within that division, there are 11 specific program areas or boards represented. This particular study is being led by the Water Science and Technology Board staff from the WSTB include Laura and also supported by the Ocean Studies Board, which I represent as well. So a few unique strengths of the National Academies that I want to point out. Again, we draw from the membership of those three honorary societies. So the stature of the Academy's memberships is recognized and certainly one of the strengths that we can bring to this is access to those individuals. However, we get the very best to serve both from within the academies and elsewhere. And again, thank you, Peter, for pointing out that we've got a couple of Academy members on this committee as well. But the reputation and objectivity of our committees is both a drawing point for committee members and also one of the assets of what we produce. As I said, our committee members serve on a pro bono volunteer basis, which helps us maintain our objectivity. We do maintain a special relationship to the government in that we have for 160 plus years now been providing reliable, objective, independent advice. And that is respected and called upon continuously. We also have a number of quality control procedures in place, probably most notable is our external peer review process, but others as well within the institution that help maintain a level of quality that is noted by our sponsors and by others that rely on our reports as well. And collectively, these produce independence, scientific objectivity and balance, which again has served in maintaining our reputation. I think with that, I'll turn it over to Laura to talk more about this specific study and some of the related reports that have led up to it. Thanks, Stacy. Okay, so in the last five minutes or so, I'll just pivot to why we're all here today. This is not the first time the academies has stepped into the Bay Delta region to provide scientific advice. Back in the late 90s, we did two reports on flood frequencies on the American River. Jerry Stenger was involved if anybody wants to ask him about that experience of more than 20 years ago. And then around the 2010, 2011, 12-time frame, we wrote a series of three reports that were commissioned by the Department of the Interior on more or less the same system that we're here to talk about. And those three reports were pretty impactful for helping the NASA Stewardship Council at that time set their science plan for many of the other decision-makers in the area. But it's been a decade and things have changed substantially, obviously, as you all know well. And so we're hoping that we will have even greater impact this time around. I wanted to mention that the format of this study, it's an ad hoc consensus study, but the Bureau of Reclamation has been talking to us about having this be an ongoing biennial review in the flavor of our review of the Greater Everglades Restoration. That's the middle report that you see there. We've been advising in the Everglades for about 15 years and committees produce reports about every two years and the membership changes slightly with each iteration. But I think that that is a model that the Bureau of Reclamation is very interested in. This would just obviously be the first cycle. But I just wanted you to be aware that there is the potential for continuing cycles after this cycle is done. We do have experience in large watersheds, although this is the largest geographic area of any WSTB product that I've been involved in in 27 years. Even the New York City watershed is only the quarter of the storage capacity of the Central Valley Project. So we have our work cut out for us. We have a lot of experience working in watersheds and water supplies throughout the country. And also on endangered species issues, the bottom report there you see is one of four that we wrote for the Edwards Aquifer Authority. So this is territory that we're pretty familiar with and comfortable with. Peter's already given you the statement of task. If anybody wants a hard copy, they're on the table in the back. The front side is the statement of task and the back side is the committee membership. Please feel free to take those. It was mentioned that it has this kind of two parts to it. The first part is looking at the state of the science of these three specific issues that the Bureau of Reclamation is interested in at this time. And the second part is really a kind of a broader overview of how monitoring, modeling, and decision-making could be adapted, changed, improved, what have you to better assess the effects of the operations of the state of the Central Valley Project and the state water project on the issues that are in part A. And this is what a statement of task for subsequent cycles would look like as well, except that the specific issues in the first section would change depending on the input of the Bureau of Reclamation and other stakeholders. And that's very much how our Greater Everglades Restoration reviews have been working. Every cycle, there's a discussion of significant progress and then they take on one to three specific issues of interest in that system. That's all I wanted to say about the statement of task. Yes, I'm certainly not gonna talk about the committee membership. You've had a great introduction to our committee members. I invite everyone to get to know people and mingle during breaks. I do just want to point out this is a large committee, 18 people and we just felt like we needed this size of committee to deal with the size of the system and the complexity of the system.  So 2023 is already behind us. That was when we negotiated the contract with the Bureau of Reclamation. The contract start date was in August and in the fall, we received hundreds of nominations to the committee. We had dozens and dozens of phone calls, talking to people, vetting committee members. We appointed the committee and it was approved by our oversight board in late November. During that time, we've been having regular meetings with the Bureau of Reclamation to talk about meeting planning, et cetera. Now we're in 2024 and the first item on there is already past us. That was a closed session meeting of the committee members to talk about their potential conflicts of interests and biases. And we left that meeting with confidence that we had the expertise to do the study and that no one had any financial conflicts of interest that would prevent them from participating. And now we're on to the public meetings that you see starting with meeting one through five, which will be in this year. These will all occur somewhere in the Bay Delta region. The second meeting, if you don't have this on your calendar, will be February 28, 29. I love that it's a leap year. And March 1st, and that's going to be in Davis. And if our website hasn't been updated to show the exact location, it will be very soon. Meeting three has also been scheduled. It will be May 6th to 8th up north in the Redding, California area that I know is not on our website yet, but it also will be there very soon. And as meetings get scheduled, we will post them to our website. You can see these are information gathering meetings where we will spend the majority of the time in public session, but there will be some small closed session times and that amount of closed session time will increase slowly until we get to 2025 when the final three meetings, meetings six through eight will be entirely in closed session at one of our facilities either in Irvine, California or in Washington, DC. And then after the report is produced, it will go through a review and then it will be released in the fall of 2025. So I just want to talk a little bit about what we're hoping to get out of our interactions with all of you during that time. The Bureau of Reclamation, our sponsor, is involved kind of from beginning almost to the end. We've, as I said, had weekly meetings with them in the Delta Stewardship Council since the fall. They've been instrumental in helping us think about who would give presentations, helping us plan field trips. They will also be an incredible source of information to us we will be making in formal information requests. I'm showing that here on the right, formal information requests that will occur subsequent to every meeting. So basically after a meeting has occurred about seven to 10 days later, we will send the Bureau of Reclamation and possibly others a list of things that we're hoping to get. It could be reports in the gray literature. It could be peer review literature, other documents. There could be requests for specific data sets that the committee would like to manipulate or analyze. Often now we have Zoom calls just to gather information. Very infrequently do we ask the sponsor to actually do data analysis for the committee. If the committee is going to embark in data analysis, it will usually do that itself. And also very infrequently would we ask the sponsor or others to do model runs for us. But I recognize this is an incredibly busy time for all of you and we will make these information requests with sensitivity to your very busy schedules as you're going through re-consultation. Because we know there's only a limited amount of time for you to respond to our requests and to come to our meetings. Another thing I just wanted to talk about was this external review that Stacey mentioned. So this is an independent external review involving about 12 to 14 scientists whose expertise mirrors the committee members. It does not in any way involve the sponsor or stakeholders. It is overseen by our report review committee which are staff people at the academies along with volunteer experts. One is an academy member and then there's usually one other person. And it's a weeks long process, very rigorous. And once we get sign off from that process then we format the report and it is released to the public. This release will be sometime in fall, end of September approximately of 2025. There is a small grace period prior, just prior to the release where the sponsor will receive an embargoed copy of the report so that they can read it and be prepared for any media that might wanna talk to them about it. It is not an opportunity for the sponsor to in any way change or review the report. The pre-publication draft that gets released is a fully approved national academies report although it is superseded usually weeks later by a final version that has better graphics and a color cover and et cetera. And the day of not printing anything and hard copy anymore, usually it depends but we just don't like to hold contract deliverables to our press which can't necessarily produce things by certain dates. So the pre-publication when it comes out will be a full report of the national academies. And then after that happens there will be lots of dissemination activities, webinars, these are things that you can all find out about. If you go to our website, which is right here, we encourage people who want to follow what the committee is doing to register to receive updates. That way you don't have to keep going to the website to say when is the next meeting? I don't know when it is. You'll get email updates if you register to receive information. Ooh, I'm two minutes over. Does anyone have any questions about process that I could help answer? If not, feel free to catch me during breaks. That's all I had for introduction. No, I don't need slides. I'm just going to be introducing Dr. Summer. Well-known to many people in this room. Apparently Dr. Summer is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California where he's working on the development of tools to help conserve freshwater ecosystems in the face of climate change. His reputation and publication record is on native fishes with studies on salmon biology, native fishes, floodplain ecology with particular note on his work on the yellow bypass. Until 2021, Dr. Summer served as the lead scientist for the Department of Water Resources in California where he guided the department's aquatic science efforts particularly for the Delta and the tributaries. Also he's well known for his work co-leading the pelagic organism decline, the POD study, a remarkable synthesis effort that happened a few years ago and he's been a long-term champion of not, it's not good enough just to collect the data or to run a model. It's how do you pull all of that information together with synthesis. So Dr. Summer, thanks for being with us today. Hi everyone. One of the recurring lessons over the decades is that unless you really understand how the Bay Delta works, unless you understand the geography, nothing is going to be clear. Well, by the way, can I get presenter? Do you want that? So you have a panel loaded with hydrologists and modelers. The irony here is we're starting this presentation with a non-hydrologist, a non-modeler to talk to you about how the hydrology works. But I'm hoping you find this as a unique perspective. Part of the reason I put the energy into trying to come up with this presentation is we don't really have a simple overview that I can point you to to introduce you to the hydrology. What you'll be hearing is a much condensed version of a training class I've given to our agency staff and others before. So we'll be leaving out a lot of stuff but hopefully there'll be a decent amount of time for questions here. So I'm gonna start out with some key points here. And the first couple are based on input we've gotten from new arrivals in the system. First, estuary is not a river. You'll see Sacramento River. You'll see San Joaquin River on the maps. Nope, we're an estuary. But the estuary is actually a pretty weird estuary as well. And then there's a kind of tongue-in-cheek lesson. There's no such thing as a free lunch. This is really about trade-offs in the management doing the system. And then lastly, nothing lasts forever. I'm hoping to kind of illustrate those points in going through this information. And really I want you to understand some of the logic behind the regulatory criteria. That's something you might not have gotten in just a straight hydrology talk. And I'm hoping I'll give you a conceptual model at the end that will, I hope, give you a better sense of how to understand some of the different components of the system. Much of what I'm gonna be discussing is based on the cumulative history of water development in California. A lot of milestones here, coincident with the massive growth we have in the state. So much of what I'll be talking today really has to be put in perspective of things like the historical levee construction, the flood control projects, and the various dams and water projects that we've produced. So before we begin, you kind of need to understand some basic geography. The nomenclature and how to refer to a system is really messy. I've heard it referred to as the San Francisco Bay Delta, the Sacramento Delta, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Estuary. I'll try and give you what I think is the correct term. The estuary is the whole thing from San Francisco Bay all the way up to Sacramento and down to Stockton. The parts that we're gonna be talking about today, there's two component parts, the freshwater title Delta that's highlighted there. And this is the zone from Sacramento in the north down to Stockton, and then out to Chips Island in the west. And then Sassoon Bay, this is the brackish mixing zone that we'll get a whole lot of attention here. So I'm hoping understanding these geographic components will help give you a little clarity in reviewing the materials. The other thing I wanna convey is that the estuary is really weird, particularly the Delta. When we talk about a Delta globally, you typically have a river, it fans out towards the coast into a bunch of distributary channels. Ours is totally backwards, right? So you have a narrowing and then it spreads out, it fans completely backwards. And this has all kinds of consequences for the way water works, for water management and for biology. I do wanna discuss one of the main drivers, why is the estuary backwards? Yeah, we had rivers coming down depositing sediments, but there was the sea level rise that happened 15,000, 10,000 years ago that drowned a river valley that was in the California coastline. So you had those two kind of opposing forces, sediment deposition versus sea level rise that created this unique configuration. The other thing that should be obvious in a big populist state like California is that the estuary is radically transformed. Historically, we had large areas of tidal wetlands, some riparian zones here, and the lighter color tan stuff you see now, that's the current Delta. It's agricultural dominated, although as you see in Sacramento, we have large cities as well. By the way, this is an excellent source of information from San Francisco Estuary Institute. They have done an eco Atlas, a wealth of information about the historical system. So one of the examples is their reconstruction of some of the regional zones in the estuary. Delta right now is really homogenized. Historically, we had large areas where there were tidal networks of channels, flooded islands, and particularly as I'll talk about in the South Delta, lots of complex distributaries. So I'm gonna now focus on some of the details of the modern estuary. I'll talk about some of the seasonal and annual patterns. Obviously the anthropogenic changes, tidal cycles, and then some of the key geographic bottlenecks that are caused by that strange configuration of the Delta. So I'm gonna start first with the hydrograph. And here's a comparison of the hydrograph. Our water year starts in October when the wet year starts and moves off from there. The old Delta, you have the peak in blue. The new Delta is in green. And the hydrograph is of course, quite altered from historical conditions. So one of the likely mechanisms for that shift is the buffering by the historical landscape. If you remember the historical Delta was that whole spongy distributary of little channels and it had floodplain and so forth. So that landscape helped slow down water. And so there's a peak in flow that happened historically at a later point than it does now. The simplified Delta, the water comes down quickly and earlier. The other part of that is reservoir operations. And again, there's those two hydrographs, the historical hydrograph and the current one. And not surprisingly, the network of reservoirs we have in the system store water from those winter and spring storms and release it. So that helps to moderate the hydrograph overall. So those two different mechanisms, the buffering of the landscape and our operations are really what drives the current hydrograph. I also wanna note that the degree to which the hydrograph is altered depends a lot on water year. So here's a cool analysis that is published in our regional online journal, modeling the historical hydrograph versus the current hydrograph in different water year types. So we have five water year types that we commonly recognize from critical to wet years. And the basic message here is that it's really the drier years when there's that big divergence between what happened historically and what we see now. And in wet years, there's less difference. It's just kind of wet. We don't affect the water all that much. So you also really need to understand further the importance of the geometry here as we get into some of the water management. So forth. As I showed you a few slides ago, the historical delta was highly dendritic and it had lots of micro habitat. So this is a cool reconstruction of the historical delta from a former USGS scientist, Brian Atwater. And here's compared to the current delta which is designed to convey floods. We wanna get the water out. Our local communities from flooding is also designed to keep the delta fresh and we'll talk more about that later. And it's also great for navigation. All those little tiny channels we had before really hard for shipping. So lots of the current channels look like this. Big, deep trapezoidal channels, water moves fast. There isn't much habitat along the edges and you will all see a lot of that in your tour that's coming up. But that doesn't mean the river always stays in channels. Here's an example of some of the transformation of the delta during flood periods. And this is because we have a couple very, very large flood overflow basins. And for the estuary, the largest one you'll be hearing about is the Yolo bypass. This is an area I've done a lot of work in. The basic idea is this inhabited part of the historic flood plain at high water, the Sacramento River, which is the darker yellow line spills out into this basin, moving out over the large landscape and then drains further downstream down towards Maria Vista. Just for you hydrologists, it's also a pretty cool system the way it works. There's a lot of structuring in the different water sources. So there are different creeks and water sources. It's a broad shallow basin. Those waters spread out there. It's a natural color photo. You can see this photo for 40 miles and it's basically happens in all the different flood events. This is more though than just a pretty, excuse me, a pretty place. It also has a lot of biological and ecological significance. So one of the key things I showed you a couple of slides ago is how deep and narrow the Sacramento River is. By contrast, yellow bypass is broad and shallow. So here's some simple modeling I did a while ago on a couple of different flood events showing the Sacramento River in green. You see there's basically no habitat over the course of each of those years, shallow lines versus the amount of shallow water habitat created in yellow bypass in a pretty big flood event in 98 and a modest flood event in 2000. So this is a lot of the shallow water habitat that's created when the bypass fully floods, it doubles the wetted area of the Delta. It also is a massive increase in shallow water area. So we're gonna move now from the more riverine part of the system into the tidal part of the estuary. And again, it's important to think about this is a tidal system rather than as a river. And I'm gonna have us look at it in a couple of different ways. The first is to look at salinity variation in different parts of the estuary. So here's a figure showing the salinity range in different regions of the estuary. And you see out towards San Francisco Bay, it's pretty much marine, not a lot of salinity variation there. At the other end in the tidal freshwater part of the Delta, not surprising, not much tidal range, although there are tides for sure. A lot of the action occurs in the central part of the estuary, so soon march. You see quite a lot of salinity variation there. And as we'll talk about more shortly, it is no coincidence. This is a lot of the focus of management. So the other way to look at this is just based on tidal excursion. So here's a snapshot here. The blue line show tidal excursion from drifters. You can see like in the lower line, just how far drifters will move in tidal excursions. Also you can see some of the exact values for the estimated tidal range of these locations. So at the edge of the Delta, it's plus or minus 5,700 cubic meters per second out by carcina straight, where it empties into San Francisco Bay, more like 12,000 cubic meters per second. And by the way, feel free to chime in with questions anytime I'm going through this fast covering a lot of ground here. So that tidal variation has real consequences for organisms that are trying to navigate things. For example, salmon trying to move up systems. Remember that whole backward Delta thing. Well, if you've got a normal Delta, if a fish comes from the ocean, it finds one of the little channels, it will end up in the main river at some point because things converge. Our system backwards, fish come in and there's this whole splay of these crazy channels. And there are all kinds of complicated things that start to happen at channel junctions. So one of the examples here, adult Chinook salmon, and this is true for other migratory fishes as well, moving up, they come up to Sacramento through the Delta and they hit this split between the lower Sacramento River and the Cache-Slew complex, which is the base of where the Ola bypass spills out. You would think from the map that the Sacramento River channel is large. And in fact, the tidal flows in that lower Sacramento River channel are only about one eighth of the tidal flows that are moving through that North Delta complex. So if you're a migratory fish, it's all Sacramento River water at that point, where is most of the Sacramento River going? It's going up into this North Delta complex. And so this is why fish passage and straying and stranding is actually a pretty big deal. It also has interesting implications for fish nursery use in the system as well. So because of that large tidal action, there continues to be a lot of fish habitat in that region. So for example, young fish moving down the Sacramento River, we get salmon spawning upstream, they move downstream. Even at lower flows, there's this massive tidal jet that happens in that North Delta complex. And we end up with very large numbers that end up in those tidal slews at the base of the system. So again, this is a key reason that North Delta area is such a large focus of restoration and management. Okay, we're gonna move deeper and deeper into the tidal system. And one of the things you have probably heard about at some point is about our regional quirky metric, the use of X2 as a management target. I don't know that anywhere else in the US or in the world does anything quite like this. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But the basic concept here is that this is the location of the brackish zone, where it sits on the axis of the estuary. And for various reasons, folks picked two parts per thousand as the magic number that we're gonna try and track. So X2 is just the distance from the Golden Gate Bridge up to where that two parts per thousand zone is. So to help you understand this, here's a graphic of some of the X2 locations. So you see when there's a wet year, when the salt field is way downstream, so example way down at 55, the number for X2 is going to be a small number. Small numbers mean wet years. And the other end of the spectrum, wet years, the number is large. So why do we do this? Well, the first reason is that salinity intrusion is a really big deal. We'll talk about it more. This is the water supply for a lot of people, a lot of different industries. Salinity intrusion is a big deal. We need to know where that salt field is. The second thing is, and this has changed with technology over the years, but it's really hard to measure inflow into the system. You've got those massive tidal excursions.  But we're really, really good at measuring salt. So X2 is a very convenient tool to use for regulation. It's also something that probably has some biological basis. So where the salt field is, affects where the amount of habitat for some of the species may be. So here's a modeled exercise showing, depending on where the salt field is, how much area or volume is available to species that may be out there. There are other reasons that flow or the salt field might be related to what happens with these organisms. I do not wanna give you the idea that this is the driver of biology in the system, but just simple fact, if a salt field is down in that Sassoon Bay area, it's a big broad open area. So at this point, we get into the really unique stuff of the water distribution system. And much of the story here, not surprisingly is about water supply. The Bay Delta is the water supply for 25 million people in California. It's about 8% of the population. And it supports a multi-billion dollar ag industry where one of the world's largest economies. This really matters, but there's a really big issue here. Most of the precipitation that drives inflow to the system is in the northern part of the state. Most of the population, including a lot of the ag industries occur in the south. And the challenges don't stop there. There's also a ridiculous amount of precipitation variability. So the colored map of the US shows a cool analysis by Mike Dettinger at USGS, showing variability and precipitation across the country. And we are kind of ground zero as the most hydrologically variable spot in the United States. And that further complicates water management in the system. So we'll start first with some of the sources to the Delta. And this is an analysis based on some of the modeling from Department of Water Resources, but the short story here is much of the water comes from the Sacramento drainage. A lot of it will go through Yolo bypass depending on the year. We also get some from East Side Tributaries, San Joaquin River. It's a decent input, but not nearly as much as the others. And where does all this go? Well, surprisingly, the majority of it actually does make it out to the bay. Depends on water you're tight, but about five million acre feet out of that portion that comes in is exported based on this analysis. What happens to all that water that comes through the system? Here's a breakdown from my current bosses at Public Policy Institute of California. It breaks things down regionally across different parts of the state and also by a couple different water years and a couple of things to see. First, in the northern part of the state, most of the water ends up being what we call environmental water. It flows out to the ocean. And in the coastal and southern parts of the state, the majority of the water is really used more for agriculture and cities. And that varies also with wet and dry years. In wetter years, not surprisingly, there's more water that's considered environmental water. And how we typically move that water is super complicated. We could spend the whole day on the next part of this, where all that water goes. I wanna note that there are a number of upcoming talks by John Lehi, by Levi, who are gonna talk more about the specific operations where the water goes. So I'm not gonna go into this in detail, but needless to say, this is a truly impressive water distribution system. There's not anything like this anywhere else on the planet. It's quite remarkable. So I will talk though about some of the diversions that happen in the system. And first we need to recognize just the ridiculous number of diversions there are in the Bay Delta. So here is a map of just of these smaller diversions based, and this is a little bit outdated probably, but it's from my old employer, Department of Water Resource, and mapping around 2,000 different water diversions in the system. And some of you might be surprised, we actually only have kind of a hazy idea of exactly how much water these siphons are all taking and when, but they are an important part of the hydrology. What we do know a lot about is the big water delivery systems, the state and the federal projects. And that is the focus of what you're going to cover today. So that zone is circled here. And how the water gets to those diversion system are really complicated. And again, you're going to be hearing from John and Levi and some of you hydrologists may cringe wasn't about to describe, but I'm going to give you a simple conceptual model to understand how the water gets to the pumps under different circumstances. And in particular, how different features of the system affect flow patterns.  The first tier is the San Joaquin River inflow in the lower corner. And that's the water that's kind of closest if you will to the water diversions. And so the biggest hydrodynamic draw is on that first tier. That's the water that gets taken. And again, this is conceptual, but that gets taken first. The second tier is in this central Delta corridor here coming from the North from the Sacramento River through this central Delta area. Finally, the third tier, when the San Joaquin River flows and the North Delta sources are insufficient to cover the rates of pumping or if they are constrained, which happens a lot, we start pulling water from the West Delta and flows, net flows, if you will, reverse. So the flows there with that whole tiered thing are really complicated. We've actually come up with a way that kind of integrates it. You're gonna be hearing a lot more about old and middle rivers, why? In case it isn't obvious, old and middle river sits right in the middle of all those areas, it's right in the middle, it's a pretty useful integrator of things. So that is why you're gonna hear so much about that flows in that corridor and in particular why flows are kind of negative or southward in terms of net flows.  You will hear more about EI ratios, export to inflow ratios, that focuses on the San Joaquin River because the San Joaquin Rivers are so important, it's such a big driver, we focus on those flows. Second, why we have a Delta Cross channel, that's that second tier, the San Joaquin River often isn't a large enough source to supply the pumping needs for the water projects. So there's this channelized corridor through the central Delta to help draw more Sacramento River into the central area. And finally, why you can have net reverse flows coming from the West Delta? If these other sources are constrained or insufficient, flows will move from where they are needed. So bottom line, the flow effects are really complicated but hoping the conceptual model there gives you some clarity on how things sort of work. And I'm gonna illustrate that with my next slightly tongue-in-cheek thing about trade-offs between different things that we do. So the first example is the Delta Cross channel. Remember I said a few minutes ago, we've channelized this corridor, so that second tier has a decent flow down to the Delta. Well, the challenge is you've got a zillion young salmon migrating down the Sacramento River. That corridor is away from their normal migration corridor. If they end up in this central Delta, there's lots of evidence that survival is poor, habitat conditions are poor. So one of the things that typically is done in winter is the cross channel that you will see tomorrow, yes. Thursday is closed in winter to protect downstream migrating, winter and Chinook salmon and other things. But I hope you'll understand from that conceptual model what happens when you close the door for this corridor, you'll start drawing more water from the other sources. And that in this case is typically from the West Delta, if that makes sense. So you just close the second tier. The other example here is the South Delta barriers. I don't know if you'll see them or go into them in detail, but remember I said the San Joaquin River is the location of the strongest hydrodynamic draw from the export facilities. That has consequences for local channels. There are local farmers down that way. They watch their channels drop in elevation and they have a hard time pumping. What happened several decades ago is the department started installing barriers to try and protect the elevations in those channels. And then a bit later, we found that fish weren't doing well in there. So we added a Hattable River barrier. So there are four South Delta barriers here. Again, there are consequences. There are trade-offs. You have just plugged your first tier. And so what happens in this case is you start creating more pressure on that second tier and you get greater drafting of flows that start to happen from the North and move to the South. I don't have quite enough time to go into it but there are other barriers as well. This is probably the closest thing to a free lunch that we have. Remember I mentioned salinity intrusion is a big deal and that water creeping in during dry years. When you don't have much inflow, salinity creeps in. If the salinity creeps too far in, it gets in the Delta. The Delta becomes brackish. It becomes brackish. We lose the water supply for the state of California until the next big year. It is a disaster if it happens. So one of the things that was done recently and probably will be done again in the future is a barrier in the West Delta to help stop that salty jet coming in. And there's some ecological consequences but not as freaky as some of the other examples that I just mentioned. And finally, I want to mention that everything I mentioned is conditional. We can expect everything I just mentioned to shift with climate change and gradual sea level rise. We know a lot of the places, the low lying areas in San Francisco Bay are highly vulnerable to sea level rise. The Delta is even more vulnerable. You'll be seeing a lot of those islands. They call them islands in the Delta. I just want folks to realize they are exactly opposite to islands. They are levied historical islands that have become society. They are holes in the ground that are just waiting to be flooded. The levies are super fragile, super high risk that those levies will be overrun by floods, by earthquakes and in particular by sea level rise. So this should probably be updated but super high risk that there will be large scale levy failure here. And if that happens, lots of saltwater ends up moving into the system. It's going to change eventually. So I want to tie things back together. Your charge is to think about some of the regulations. I want to make sure folks understand the connections then. So first, some of the regulatory documents and activities really focus on habitat restoration, floodplain, wetlands. I hope based on my presentation, you understand why that is such high value. Second, why we obsess about X2 standards in different things. Third, why Delta crop channel operations are such a high profile part of our operations. Fourth, old middle river flows. I think that's one of your major tasks here. Nice integrator of some of the wildflow patterns. Exports, that should be pretty obvious. It's a huge driver of hydrology. I didn't have a chance to get in to Sassoon Marsh to Lending Control Gates. If folks want, I have extra slides so we can go into that. Lastly, South Delta barriers. Interesting part of the landscape, they have hydrodynamic consequences. You may hear about potential effects of those. So with that, I've given you a lightning fast tour of the Bay Delta. I can take questions. We could talk about a couple of other features I didn't cover, but otherwise you're now experts. Well, thank you, Ted. That was really an excellent opening. So I'll open the floor to the committee members. Were there any pressing questions that came out? Colin, Dr. Summers' talk. Dr. Fernando. Thank you very much for that. Very, very, very good talk. When you look at these whole systems, you said there's no being a system like this. Why is this complexity devoid because of inadequate planning during the process of developing? Oh, boy. Hindsight's great. Hindsight is absolutely great. Yeah, there are definitely some things that when the water projects were planned, people didn't really anticipate. So a couple of examples. First, putting the water diversions down in the middle of a major nursery area and a subsided tidal network was probably not the best location. There are water quality issues with all of the wetlands and so forth down there. It's also kind of a vulnerable area. Similarly, one of the more recent additions to the system, the North Delta Aqueduct didn't have time to go into it. It was put off in the North Delta and that was put there because, well, people were starting to recognize there were problems in the South Delta. We'll move it to the North Delta. Over the past couple of decades, we've realized just how important that North Delta area is. So there are lots of challenges now in trying to manage the North Delta diversions as well. But, you know, hindsight is great. You know, some of this could have been anticipated but we've learned so much of the past few decades that help guide our decision-making. What you tell me, I want if you wanted just to, oh, sorry. Yeah, just a clarification. The X2 standard, is that a tidal lean or a maximum? Oh, boy. Yeah, I will point that to one of the operators you're going to hear from shortly. Yeah, I think it's the tidally averaged value over the course of, yeah, right, right. Sorry, I get biologists here. You're going to hear from a couple of the major experts with specific operational targets like that. Yeah. Why isn't more of the San Joaquin water diverted before it gets to the Delta? So there are, you know, water quality standards within the Delta. You may also get more information about the Central Valley Improvement Act and mandated flows down the San Joaquin system. I don't know how much of the San Joaquin story you're going to get, but, you know, there have been periods when it's been largely diverted and there are not contiguous flows, but now there are some mandated flows to try and provide fish migration. But, you know, bottom line, we can't totally dewater the system without pretty massive consequences. I know. I was wondering if climate change impacts on a snowy partitioning and snow belt is a concern when you talk about, yeah, yeah, I could have easily put some of the projections, but the hydrograph is going to change a lot. It's already skewed as it is, but so much more of it will be coming down in winter and we are going to lose a lot of the snow melt for the later hydrology. So it's a real challenge, of course, for operations. We have this historical baseline, but at the same time it's a moving target with the expected shift in hydrology. So I would assume the shift would be earlier. It would be earlier. And there's the challenge to instoring some of that water, the reservoirs, try and maintain some of it. And then maybe even the more important thing is I showed you the variability in hydrology and precipitation. We are the most variable. Well, guess what? The weather whiplash that we are seeing emerge is going to drive that divergence even more. So there's an even greater divergence now between wet and dry years. I showed you the five water year types and it's pushing further and further towards either end. Either it's kind of very wet or very dry. You showed a slide of the relative importance of the shallow habitat and the yellow bypass to the Sacramento River. Is that relative difference purely an artifact of this highly regulated system or would the yellow bypass area have historically computed a large percentage of the shallow habitat? If I made that clear. Yeah, it's a little bit of both, but we dredged the heck out of those in the river channels. There used to be a lot more small distributary channels in the Delta where fish probably would have found habitat. Also, we rip-wrapped the heck out of everything as well. There would have been some edge habitat as well. But clearly that whole yellow flood basin was historically a big part of the hydrology during the high flow events then and now. Most of the flow ends up going off into that flood plain. So, you know, it would have been historical rearing area for salmon, but also a number of other species as well. David and then Denise. You showed us the historical rainfall, historical flows coming into the system, historical exports coming here, and also the historical landscape, historical habitats. And are you aware of any studies that also explored the historical flow routing through the interior or central southern Delta? Jay may be able to answer that question better than I, but I believe folks have used some of those historical recreations of the Delta geometry in order to estimate some of those modeled flow patterns for historical versus now. But, you know, I don't know how good, like the channel geometry was for some of those modeled runs of the historical Delta, but at least it gives you a better sense of how it probably slowed things down. Jay, did you want to... Most of those historical reconstructions, I think in terms of the channel flows within the Delta are pretty coarse. But the results are what you'd expect in blood here, the whole thing is flooded. And it's dominated more by the second on river flows than south. Can I just remind the committee members, if you ask a question, find the mic that's in front of you and push the button so that that green light turns on so that people on Zoom can hear your question. Thank you. I'll go to Denise, but perhaps we could also check just the CHD grant that's put any questions into the chat. So, Denise. Oh, it's very many. Okay, great, got it. We can hear you better, too. Yeah, gosh, me not being loud. Unless we have it a bad day. So, Ted, could you pass out the North Delta area for us a little bit? I think, you know, in your discussion about habitat, you kind of lumped cash slew with your bypass. Could you talk about the bit that floods when the river's high versus the bit that is there all the time? Giving you whiplash here. So this is a region with multiple personalities. So the simplest one to understand is the flood aspect of it. When the river's overflow and fall out into this seasonal basin and drain southward, floodplain or flood basin straightforward. The more complicated part to understand is the tidal network of it. So cash slew is the lower network of channels down there. And it always receives tidal flow. And it actually floods the lower base of Yolo bypass as well. So there's tidal wetlands there. It's a floodplain, but those are tidal wetland floodplain regions. So the water sloshes strong tidal forces moving through back there. The tidal flows move all the way up past cash flow. So there's always water in this complex. But what happens is seasonally there may not be any net flows coming out of it. During flood periods, sure. But there are a lot of ag uses, other diversions there that tend to pull water. So that is the other region of the estuary that has net negative net flows. And so I don't know if you're going to cover it, but this is one of the reasons why periodically we do tests of managed flow pulses through the system during lower flow periods to try and provide a net downstream pulse of typically plankton and other nutrients here down into the estuary. So it's kind of a gradation of tidal wetlands in the lower half from Sacramento to seasonal floodplain in the northern part of the bypass. Anything else in particular, Denise, you wanted to No, I saw that that was the distinction that you did. I just wonder if it's worth for the folks to look at it. You see that map of the network of channels, but I wonder if you just wanted to comment on the size of the channel and the complexity of some of the flow structure. Just very generally from an ecology point of view, when those junctions come together. Yeah, I don't know if you're going to go visit the junction between the Sacramento river and cash flow, but these are massive deep channels. They are designed to convey a flood function of the system. Yolo bypass is part of the historical floodplain, but it was designed as a partially engineered basin to protect Sacramento and surrounding communities. During high flow events, the Yolo bypass conveys about five times as much flow as the adjacent Sacramento river. So that channel coming down through cash flow, you will see an absolute monster. It's big and deep. It's got big gouged out parts. The Sacramento river, it looks pretty much like that photo. I showed you kind of just a trapezoidal riprap channel. Any more questions from the committee? Ted, I have a question about the tide that you've seen this. The slide you showed with all of the two thousand small diversions. Right. So do you think as a percentage of the total exports that it's negligible and that's why nobody's ever bothered trying to measure any of it or regulated? I'm just curious if you have a kind of a rough estimate of what percentage of the total export you think that that constitutes. It's not trivial. It's at least a tenth of what the water projects are. You know, maybe even 20%. Feel free to ask a couple of the operators. They have models and in the models, they put numbers for different times of the year, but it's kind of an assumed number, but these are all, you know, private facilities. Folks don't have the authority to go in and collect measurements. A few of them have been studied. One of the things I will say is they are not, you know, unregulated during the extreme drought conditions we had, they were severely limited just because there was too much risk of salinity intrusion. There just wasn't water coming down from the rivers to supply them, let alone the water projects. Thank you. I'm sure we'll see this on the field trip on Thursday. I grew up in Bakersfield, and so these, and then Los Angeles, so these hardened channels that, you know, you can drive in, which people do for recreation in Bakersfield. This is very familiar to me, but now I live on the east coast where there are no channels that look like that, so I'm just trying to think in my mind is everything south of the city of Sacramento, on the Sacramento, is that how the river looks? There's no riparian zone anywhere south of the city of Sacramento? There's some, if I remember right, someone can correct me, but like 70% of the banks are rip-wrapped. And there are some shallow areas like with toolies down by the water, but it's pretty trapezoidal. That's why when I showed you that modeled estimate of shallow water habitat in the Sacramento River versus like the flood plain there, it just doesn't even register. I'm going to be blunt, there's nowhere to hide the fish in the Sacramento, which is part of the reason one of the quirks of fish migration to the system. The models tend to show well, higher flows are what you need to move the fish out. And that is because there's so little habitat, it's better for those fish to move fast through those channels than to try and stay, even if they're not quite ready. And then the San Joaquin River, does it look similar or is it more natural along the bank? Could I say worse? Of course. Yeah. And the channelized network that you showed, which is simplified from the historical condition. Are those channels similarly rip-wrapped and hardened? Absolutely. And the degree of change is even more extreme in the South Toba. Because based on the historical analysis that I showed you from San Francisco History Institute, historically that was the part of the Delta that had the greatest density of all these little channels. They're just gone. You can see them in some of the land use photos. You can kind of follow where they used to be, but yeah, it's radically altered. Okay. Great. Maya, anything from Steve? No questions. That's great. Thank you. And so, Ted, just to wrap up this session, we'll right up the start with listening. Do you have any thoughts for the committee within that scope that Laura mentioned before that you think could be particularly constructive? No, I make, I guess I'll just sympathize with you. It's such a messy, complicated system. It takes a while to come to grips and understand it. I hope this has helped, but even with some guidance up front, I realize it's a headache to try and understand all the different scenarios, water moving, all the different features and so forth. So be patient with yourself. If you start to get a headache at some point on Thursday. Thursday. And by the way, do ask lots of questions on your tour. I think you're going to have a bunch of great tour guides that know a lot about the fine details that I really haven't had a chance to cover. Okay, so perhaps we could thank Dr. Summer. That was a great summary. So we're going to take a break now and we'll be back at 1045. And, you know, thanks again. And anything else, Laura? Okay, so we'll be back in 15 minutes. I hate to break up great conversations. Okay, this next session we're going to have an overview of the Central Valley project and the state water project. The first part is going to focus on water supply and hydropower delivery. And our two speakers, which I'll introduce both of them at the same time. Levi Johnson from the US Bureau of Reclamation. He's currently serving as the acting operations manager for the Central Valley operations office that oversees water and power operations for the Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley project. Prior to joining the CVO, he served as the water resource branch chief for the Central California Area Office in Folsom, supporting the management of the American River Stennis Laos River and Nimbus Fish Hatchery. Before joining Reclamation, Johnson worked for the East Columbia Basin East Irrigation District in the Columbia Basin. And John Lehigh is known to many, many people in the room. He's with the California Department of Water Resources, where he serves as the lead water manager for the state water project within the California Department of Water Resources. He's got more than 30 years of experience with the department and over 25 years of those has been of leading the state water project operations. So welcome, Levi and John. I'm not sure who's going to go first. Good morning. Thank you so much. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you so much. Levi Johnson, Central Valley project operations acting operations manager. I'll admit I did not know the committee makeup until the role introduced this morning. So incredible brain trust here. Fantastic. I just wanted to provide a very brief overview of CVP Central Valley project from an operations perspective. Very brief. I'll introduce CVP operations and then hand it over to John Lehigh to describe state water project operations. So reclamation. Many folks don't know of our organization. Just a brief overview. We are under the Department of Interior, US Bureau of Reclamation. Our region is the California Great Basin region. You can see we cover pretty wide geographic area here. Good portion of California. Our La Hutton Basin office extends into Nevada. And then of course we sneak into Oregon a little bit with the Klamath Basin as well. Our mission is very clear. We look to manage water resources and environmentally and economically sound manner for the public good. Thanks Dr. Summer describing the disparities in precipitation and demands in California. This is really one of the foundational challenges of California water. I won't go into too much detail. I like to use a rule of thumb of about 80% of the available precip that hits the state is in northern California. Whereas conversely 80% of that demand is really in the southern part of California. That's a big variation in that precip as we all know. Added complexity to operations. So from the federal facilities of the Central Valley Project. Let me just walk us through some of these and I don't have a pointer available. But starting up north in the 1940s we had authorization and construction of Shasta Dam. Shasta 4.5 million acre foot of storage. This is the largest reservoir in California and really a cornerstone of water management in the state. That's on the Sacramento side, northern part of Sacramento, Sacramento Valley. And then in that same time frame we have a friant division on the San Joaquin and then the Jones pumping plant. This is the export facility in the southern Delta on the federal side. 1950s we have Folsom Dam not far from where we're located right now. Critical piece of infrastructure for flood control on the American River protecting Sacramento. 1960s let's head back up north. The Trinity River Division is constructed. This is a very unique set of facilities. Trinity Division has the ability to divert water from that basin into the Sacramento basin with major implications for hydro power, water supply and species on both systems. Also in the 1960s the San Luis unit construction. So this is the San Luis reservoir, the large off-storage facility. This is a joint use facility that's operated jointly with our state water project partners. Simfully pay unit coming off of that. And then kind of the latest major facility, the Pneumolognes Dam on the Stanislaus River. One thing to remember are that these federal facilities are authorized by congressional authorizations to finance and these describe the authorized purposes for these facilities. And often there's numerous authorities and often those are multi-benefit purposes with the primary on most of these facilities being flood control. Levi, can I ask you to just define the word division because you have it there for Trinity and this seems to be all over the literature. Is there a specific definition of what a division means in this context? I use that term loosely. So when we think of, for example, the Trinity River division, we're not thinking of just one dam, there's going to be numerous facilities that are typically covered under those authorizations and to get the specifics we'd have to go to those authorizations. So the idea is that it's not just a single dam but it's a single dam. What is the significance of the Central Valley project in California? So the federal facilities that are authorized by Congress and operated are underpinned by water rights that are issued by the state of California. We then in turn use hundreds of contracts and agreements to make deliveries of this federally developed water in hydropower. You can see our delivery of water goes to Wideswas in California. Water supply, 7 million acre foot. We should probably put a range in there. This is highly dependent on the water year as you can all imagine. I will point out we are more focused on delivering ag water but we do have several important M&I water service contracts as well. That'll be a bit converse to what you'll see on the state water project side. I'll highlight as well that we deliver vital water supplies to wildlife refuges throughout the Central Valley to support the Pacific Flyway. As we're operating our federal facilities, making releases for demands, requirements, et cetera, most of our facilities are generating hydropower. So this low carbon power source is very important. 2.8 billion kilowatt hours. We were at 3.6 billion last year. Again, this is highly dependent on what the water year looks like and how much water we're able to release. And of course, we have to coordinate our operations not just with the state water project but with numerous local systems that were here before the CVP and came after the CVP. This will be a reoccurring theme. Water management, natural resource management in California is complex. CVP is no exception. A few unique characteristics of the CVP I think worth highlighting is we have to coordinate our operations with the state water project. We hold joint water rate permits and conditions on those permits that require us and compel us to coordinate on how we operate our systems together. And we're operating in a milieu with other local water districts whose operational decisions will impact us and the system as a whole. Another unique feature that I think is worth highlighting is that the CVP, as you saw, we have numerous facilities that are controlling flows on numerous basins in the state. We look at tributary and basin specific requirements on releases from a facility, but we operate the CVP as a whole. An example, a great presentation on delta water quality requirements. When we have to operate our systems to meet those delta water quality requirements we're not looking at Shasta, we're not looking at Folsom, we're looking at all of these reservoirs as a whole and how can we best meet these demands and requirements looking at the conditions of all these reservoirs. That integration is across the CVP not just from an operational standpoint, but also from a financial standpoint. In this pie graph you can see the outsized role in terms of storage, the CVP plays. These highlighted blue reservoirs. Our state water project partners have Oroville. So major role in storage, but we're not the only players. We have a lot of challenges in California. A lot of you are on the front lines of researching those. I'll just highlight a few here. PhymaChange came up and I think this is going to be a reoccurring theme. There was a question and response concerning the type of precipitation, the changing dynamic and there's some compelling research on the American river basin specifically on climate change scenarios not impacting the total amount of precipitation in that basin, but how and when it falls. And so as we rely on the biggest reservoir in California, Snowpack and that diminishes or runs off into our reservoirs earlier in the season. So that's a major implications on how we operate our facilities and our ability to meet water quality requirements in the delta. I like this slide because I believe the charge of this committee will be looking at and hopefully helping us chart a path on addressing some of these challenges that we're dealing with in California water. More of a CVP California water 101. I like showing what these historic fish habitats look like on the tributary prior to the construction of these large rim dams. Why I wanted to highlight this when we talk about and Dr. Simmer did a great job in presenting operations and how that can affect delta water quality and delta dynamics. As we're operating CVP reservoirs and all these rim dams, there are tributary specific operational considerations that we look to namely temperature for species and also flows for species. Those operational changes will ultimately make their way into the delta. So as we're thinking of the delta, we have to think also of how that interplay with tributary management is affecting delta. Floodplain habitat, how we make releases out of fulsome could easily trigger when a floodplain is activated. For example, we are flowed during flood management and then of course our delta export operation, which I'm sure will be a focus of this committee, affects and is affected by that complex hydrodynamics of the delta. I wanted to put this delta slide in there just to highlight some of the facilities in there. Really appreciated the focus on the delta cross channel. This is a key feature to how we operate the system in terms of bringing that fresh or Sacramento river water into the central south delta for water quality and export. So soon marsh, Selenic control gates, another key feature, Old and Middle River, and then of course I'll just highlight the the most well known delta facilities. These are the export facilities, Banks and Jones pumping plant. This is the hub of California water where there's a lot of controversy and a lot of room for improved information science and hopefully tools to help guide operational decisions in the delta. And I think John Lehi will describe a little bit more on the differences and similarities of our export operation, hopefully. Okay, so operations. We have goals, we have requirements, we have demands and what does that look like? Well, it really depends and one of the most interesting aspects of operating the CVP and I'll speak for a state water project is every year is different and every tributary is different. But we do have these overarching goals we can point to and we can look at them from a seasonal perspective. So in the winter, if you have kind of a wetter winter, wetter year, you will be making releases from your upstream reservoirs to ensure you're within a flood curve. Right now at a Shasta, for example, we have a huge atmospheric river coming in this week and so and we're close to encroachment. So we're increasing releases out of Shasta. So that's to protect that flood storage space and protect the facility. What about a dry year? You could be in winter. You could have had, you could have been on the heels of two dry years. You could have very low storage and say Shasta and you might be releasing minimum release requirements to try and build up storage to get through the year. We're increasing releases out of Shasta right now for flood control and at the same time, we're limited at what we can export right now through the facilities because of an old and middle river fish trigger, so a protection measure. So you can have those two dichotomies going at once. Moving into spring, again, it depends on what that season looks like. If you had a really wet spring, like we did last year, you could be operating to flood rules through summer. We had a historic snowpack down in the summer in Sierra last year. You're dealing with flood control management late into the season. If it's a dry year, you might be trying to make minimum releases to meet minimum requirements in the delta. Again, because your storage is so low and you're worried that you're not going to be able to get through that year in meeting minimum needs for fisheries in those tributaries. Summer rolls around a typical operation. If it's been a good year, a wet year, you probably have good storage. If it's a dry year, it's pretty cold. You're going to have a stratified reservoir and you're going to know what kind of cold water pool resource you have available to meet temperatures in the river and also hopefully protect some of that cold water pool resource for temperature management in fall. If it's a dry year, you're making releases for minimum demands on the system. You're trying to recognize that you have limited cold water pool resource. Temperature management may be a struggle. Meeting minimum delta requirements might be a struggle and you might even need to request relief from some of those requirements. And then in fall, maybe one of the more challenging times this is when you are trying to maximize the remaining cold water pool of your reservoir to meet in-stream temperatures. You might have some opportunities to export depending on what the conditions look like in the delta or you might be constrained. These are just broad brush kind of operational goals of what we're looking at. Conceptually, the tributary temp operations, some thinking Shasta and Folsom specifically on this, you have this really cold full reservoir and winter. You'll notice that the reservoir level doesn't change here. That's probably not too accurate. You've got spring inflows come in, things start warming up. You've got some warm tributary inflows coming in and then by May you're hoping to have this nice stratified lake and you're hoping that we have a really good abundant source of cold water pool here. This is critical. And then we will use on depending on the facility selective withdrawals from these different strata to mix and blend to get the ideal temperatures again to meet, say, rearing habitat temperature goals on the American first steelhead during the summer and then trying to ensure we have enough cold water pool to get to the fall run spawning season. Here's Folsom. So what does that look like in the real world? So this is water year 2023 huge year, Folsom's full. Here's the dam. We have an M&I intake here that's pulling water to meet local water supply demands for our water service contractors. We're spilling out of the main spillway here. Ideally, we would be pulling water through our power generation units. So we'll probably max those out. We have temperature shutters here so we can close those shutters to try and preserve that cold water pool for later in the year. And then we have this relatively new auxiliary auxiliary flow way as well providing flood control protection. So just just what these facilities kind of look like in the real world. And huge variability Another thing I hope this committee will take away from this presentation two examples extreme examples of Shasta during kind of a wet wetter and a drier year. So I think this is 2022 in this kind of lighter orange beige and you can just see what Shasta storage looks like. So during our wetter months, we are not doing well at recovering in terms of our storage correspondingly. You can see I think these are flows at Bend Bridge on the Sacramento River. This corresponds to really minimum releases out of Shasta. But also these flows are influenced by tributary flow downstream of Shasta as well. So just very, very low trying to get the storage to recover. Why? Because you need that higher storage and cold water pool to get through your temperature management season. Conversely, this is 2017 I believe and you can just see huge increases to storage, huge increases to flow in the Sacramento River flood control releases and really a nice recovery of flood storage. So just two examples depending on how the water year plays out Main takeaways I'd like you to consider as you're doing your work is this is an incredibly integrated system not just from the CVP and state water project side but also within other local systems within California water landscape. We're managing in an environment of high uncertainty even without climate change or in a Mediterranean climate you don't know what year, what each year is going to give you and you don't know what next week or next month is going to give you. And so there's a lot of uncertainty in a lot of variables we're having to manage. I'll give you one example I think the Fall X2 question came up on how we use that we use a monthly average for Fall X2 this last year we we actually had an exceedance and we're not able to make meet that Fall X2 because of a huge title anomaly that we cannot foresee and so when you look at like a daily or you know five day average in a title system like the Delta it just does not work from a practical standpoint we have uncertainty as well in terms of how the regulatory landscape will play out our facilities are old often they don't perform like we think they're going to perform so there's a lot of uncertainty there as well given these two truths coordination is key just to give an example what that looks like in the real world we coordinate daily with the state water project on how we're making releases to meet all of these different requirements and goals of the system when you're in flood operations you're meeting even more with the flood operations center to manage releases from all of these dams to protect human life and structures so coordination is key I'll say one more one more pitch on coordination we work incredibly close with our Bay Delta office and our science arm to make the most informed operational decisions and I think we have a in place a very collaborative process with all of the state agencies to help inform and express why we're making certain operational decisions and the reason I say that not to pat ourselves on the back but I think the work this committee can undertake to help improve inform and find some of those gaps in those tools will have real world consequences to help inform our operational decisions so thank you in advance for your work on that and with that I'm happy to hand it over to John Lehi I actually take question oh yes yeah yeah so all right thank you good morning everyone again my name is John Lehi the lead water manager for the state water project with the California department of water resources so the state water project is the state project that runs parallel and close coordination with the federal project that Levi just presented we have responsibility in meeting a lot of the requirements in the delta so just an outline of what I'm going to cover here I'm going to go over the background again some of what you'll see is maybe somewhat repetitive from the last two speakers but I think it's really important to understand the foundational information that the reason why the projects exist as far as I will also go into more detail on who our customers are the water supply contractors the project facilities of the state water project how water is developed by the project and a little bit on the delta hydraulics so again back to these these graphics it's all about when and where the supply occurs as opposed to when and where the demand is so you've seen various other slides similar here of course most of the rain and snow melt occurs in the north part of the state and predominant population centers in the south and also majority of the ag demand is also south of the delta and of course the mismatch seasonally the Mediterranean type climate we have here all of the precipitation occurs in the winter months and virtually nothing for several months during the summer period so there is that great mismatch between the supply and the demand both geographically and temporarily and then others have touched on this as well just as the intra-annual disparity exists there is an inter-annual disparity that also exists and you can see the chart there on the left is the various year types and the volume of runoff in the Sacramento Valley Dr. Summer went over the five different year types that we have in the state so the greener colors there are the above average wet the warmer colors are below normal dry, critically dry and what you might also be able to tease out there is those extremes are only getting more variable over time we saw our wettest year 2017 just a few years ago followed by one of the driest droughts that we've seen on record as well and that's only expected to get even worse with changing climate and there is the Dettinger plot showing that our standard deviation for the precipitation up to, you know, 50-60% in California of the average versus only a 10% deviation from the average in most of the rest of the country so the canals on this really applies to both projects that's to rectify this geographic disparity what's shown here is as an example is banks pumping plant so that's state water projects primary export pump out of the delta there's a long approach channel there you can see the delta in the background and then the reservoirs remedy the temporal imbalance and so the example here is Lake Oroville up in Northern California which is the state water projects principle reservoir so a little bit more on the state water project it is the largest state built multi-purpose water project in the United States we have over 29 water supply contractors up and down the state one of the big differences as Levi pointed out is state water project primarily uses urban uses 70% but we do have a fairly large agricultural constituent as well 30% 750,000 acres of cropland in the Central Valley and we do now supply water to 27 million people at least two thirds of the state's population it gets at least part of their water supply from the state water project and here here are the various service areas for the state water project of those 29 contractors you can see that we have some up north near Lake Oroville itself we do service off the the North Bay Aqueduct the Napa region Solano after water is pumped at banks in the south part of the delta we have a south Bay Aqueduct services Alameda County and Silicon Valley and then the majority of the flow continues down south through the Central Valley and you see in green there that's our largest agricultural contractor Kern County Water Agency and then you can see the various other blue areas there in southern California that the Central Coast we have the cities of San Luis Obispo Santa Barbara and further south is the LA Basin Metropolitan Water District of southern California is the largest contractor and that includes the service area of the city of San Diego so quite an extent extensive geographically there and so here's the breakdown for the originally contracted for a little over four million acre feet in the 1960s by these contractors that's not how much we deliver by any means on a year to year basis the kind of the average is just referred to as table A as you can see there only about 56% on average is the estimate and dropping the you can see that Metropolitan Water District contracts for a little under half of that total and Kern County Water Agency is about a quarter and then the other 27 contractors make up the remainder if you were to take a look at that service area served by the state water project you look at the economy for that area and you rank it it's gross domestic product against the rest of the world's it would be the eighth largest economy so you often see California as a state the fifth would rank fifth amongst the world's countries but just the state water project service area alone would be up there as well state water project facilities we do have 33 storage facilities 20 pumping and generating plants 700 miles of canals and pipelines the fourth largest power consumer in the California and the fourth largest power generator in the state so our project is very impactful to the state's energy grid both in terms of the power, the load that's put on the grid and the generation the flexibilities that we can provide really help stabilize the overall power grid in the state just going over a few of the major state water project facilities starting up north again Lake Orville so about 60 miles north of where we are now where the north end of the Sierra Nevada meets the southern end of the cascade range on the Feather watershed that's the principal reservoir for capturing those winter rains and snowmelt water is then conveyed down the Feather River confluence then to the Sacramento into the Delta estuary pumping from banks pumping plant south the other major reservoir shown there in kind of a purplish color that's San Luis Reservoir and that's a joint use facility that's the second largest reservoir for the state water project and it is shared with Central Valley project close to 50-50 so there are not only are both projects responsible for meeting a lot of the flow requirements in the north we also share many of the facilities in the south including San Luis Reservoir here's a profile or elevation view of the state water project turning the state on its side there gives you an idea of the elevation changes involved starting on the left you see Lake Oroville between a little less than a thousand feet elevation where most of the generation occurs down in the Feather River and then down to sea level at the Delta banks pumping plants then lifts the water into the Central Valley a number of other pumping plants along the way and then these larger you see these big lifts those are the pumping plants that lift a lot of the supply over various mountain ranges so we've got the coastal aqueduct that are the coastal branch that we lift water over the coastal range over to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara and then the biggest lift is a series of pumping plants culminating with Edmondston power plant sorry pumping plant over the DeHatchby range into the LA basin and then we have a couple of recovery generating plants to recoup some of that power it took to pump the water up to the crest of those ranges so because of the vast expanse of the project we many of the operations and maintenance activities are performed in five different field divisions throughout the state we also have centralized control of the system in Sacramento and that's where the power scheduling occurs in this facility is called the joint operation center and for reason it's called that is because that is where the operation staff for both the state water project and the Federal Central Valley project are headquartered and we also share the same building with the meteorology and flood forecasting arms of federal and state government so National Weather Service is located in that building as well as California Department of Flood Management so a little bit of deeper dive into the Orville complex it's the second largest reservoir after Shasta in the state 3.5 million acre feet it is the tallest dam in the entire United States so this is even taller than Hoover Dam it's Earthfield Dam 770 feet high has the gated emergency spillway can pass up to 150,000 CFS may have heard about that spillway a few years back that's another story for another time the latest and it is the largest SWP hydropower asset for the state water project 900 megawatts on the flip side of the power coin we have Edmondson pumping plant that I referred to earlier that lifts rivers worth of water over the Tehachapies 4,480 CFS max and the power load from that facility can max out to approximately the same amount that are just under the amount that the Orville complex can generate so takes 800 up to 840 megawatts of the power load again these are key components to the power grid to the extent that we can have flexibility in those operations so now I'm going to talk a little bit about so how does the state water project in what way does it develop the water supply so it's a seasonal operation in the winter spring period is where we're filling the reservoirs both up in Orville we're picking up feather watershed flows that are in excess to the needs downstream and also at banks pumping plant we're picking up excess flows to the extent that we're able or authorized to fill into San Luis reservoir the joint use facility I was talking about earlier in the summer fall period then we are taking that previously stored water from Orville releasing it downstream and conveying it through the delta and re-diverting it at banks for water supply and then we're also releasing the previously stored water from San Luis reservoir to supplement that total delivery for the high demands in the summer and the fall we talked about so the delta comes into play in all aspects of our operations whether it be the direct capture of excess flows or the conveyance of previously stored water for re-diversion in the summer and the fall so it is the hub of the water management system of the state it's let me go to the next slide here so Dr. Summer did a great job of talking about the internal hydrodynamics within the delta itself I'm not going to harp on it too much here but of course we have the freshwater primarily from the Sacramento river but we can get substantial contributions from the San Joaquin and what we call the east side streams of the delta and of course that's the mixing that occurs because of the salt being brought in from the Pacific Ocean that propagate through the San Francisco Bay into the delta the collective effects there was a question about the in delta agricultural diversions those can be significant so we estimate those at peak during the growing season would be up to 4000 CFS and so in comparison to you know Jones pumping plan is right about 4000 CFS at a point source where that pumping is occurring state water project in kind of average to wet years we would typically be 6 to 7000 CFS but in drier years especially critically dry years those internal delta diversions will be much greater than the projects because we will be at combined maybe 1500 CFS or so just a little bit more on the tidal interaction to get a feel for the hydrodynamics that's occurring there there's twice a day flood and abtides that are occurring 6 hours of flood flow coming into the delta channels followed by 6 hours of heavy rain so that's a continuous cycle and then over laying that daily cycle there's a monthly spring neeptidal cycle there's a gradual 7 days of filling of the average of the delta followed by 7 days of average draining of the delta so we've got a very dynamic system of Delta regulatory requirements. Some are has been in place since about the 1990s, largely unchanged since then through the state water board. And these would be our flow and salinity requirements that are jointly currently jointly responsible for both projects. These are some of these are for municipal and industrial beneficial uses agricultural and some are for fish and wildlife. So actually on the on the and these are called D 1641 standards from the board. These these actually the fish and wildlife beneficial uses that includes a spring x to think there was a question on the x to in in the spring that's actually us. It's a shorter time frame and duration in terms of the compliance. So that's either a day to 14 day average x to location requirement. It's a very complicated way to meet this. There's you can meet it through flow or you can meet it with the with the salinity. But that's just to give a sense that was a question on that earlier. I think Levi then talked about the fall x to which came on in effect as part of the biological opinions back in. This would been the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 08. And that is the monthly that's more of a monthly time step for compliance. The and then the other Endangered Species Act actions of all the old and middle river requirements. Those came about as part of these 0809 biops. And then we also have to meet the requirements under the California Endangered Species Act through our incidental take permit. We also have requirements for the state water project through that. So how do we meet these all of these standards. Monitoring is a key for the salinity requirements. So we do have a network of flow and water quality monitoring stations throughout the Delta channels. You know, the most important constituents there is flow itself. Salinity and turbidity has become very important in terms of predicting presence of various fish species in the Delta. So that's that interacts with a lot of the the biop and ITP requirements. So the kind of the take home here for me again that word complex. It is a complex system. It is supporting much of the economic needs of the state. The developed water supply and the fishery are dependent on the same Bay Delta estuary. And that inherent conflict requires a high degree of coordination between the resource agencies. And Levi did a good job of talking about especially in the winter spring period, the high sensitive sensitive period for the fishery, you know, weekly coordination between what we call five agencies, actually six agencies, resource agencies in determining the best balancing of those of those two purposes. So it's very important that we get the science right. Very important competing interests for society here. So I believe that's all I have. Thank you. I'd like to thank both John and Levi for those summaries. It's not easy. Perhaps I'm not quite sure the order that Patrick would just go along the line and then Jared and then Jay and then there we are printed on. So thanks for the presentations. I was valued seeing the the storage relative to rainfall figure. I'm curious, this is my question to what extent is groundwater included the equation? So groundwater is a statewide groundwater is a really important source of supply for the project itself. It is not a source for project supplies. It's all surface water. But many of our customers will manage or bank water in their local groundwater basins. And I think there's there's certainly a strong emphasis here lately on to what extent can others divert flood flows and recharge those groundwater basins. That's that's been a concerted effort over the last couple of years is trying to figure out mechanisms to to make that make that more efficient make that happen without unduly impacting the other water users that exist. If I can do a follow up. So to what extent is is the groundwater regulated anyway? Yes, well, there is a there's it's act called Sigma, which was passed. Gosh, it was I'd say 14. Thank you. There's a they're going through the process now of many of the the groundwater basins have submitted their their plans and how they're going to manage sustainably for each groundwater basin. There's about a 20 year implementation phase for this. So it's a quite a long drawn out drawn out process that is is underway now in terms of of getting regulation. You know, California was one of the I think one of the few states that did not have groundwater regulation until that act was passed several years ago. Maybe I did you have. I'll just add on the ground groundwater management impacts on the federal side. So we've seen and continue to see subsidence affecting a lot of federal and non federal facilities that in turn impacts how efficient those facilities can be managed to meet their initial purposes and also conversely on looking at maximizing excess flows for recharge and groundwater. So we're actively involved in that as well. Yeah, so this is for Levi. Will the Klamath River restoration dam removal project have any impact on the CVP water delivery? The Klamath basin office is managing the current dam removal effort up there. They're managing and figuring out how that's going to impact or how they're going to operate that system now that they're taking over those facilities and removing some of those facilities. In terms of the Trinity River Division, that Trinity River makes its way into Klamath. There's no no changes in how that Trinity River Division would be operated because of that. Good question. The benefit of your committee, can you describe it maybe a minute or two? The day in the life of an operator for their CVP and state water project during that interesting time of the year. I'll take a first cut at it. Sure. All right. I've been removed from that for a few years now, but it's pretty well ingrained in my brain. Yeah, yeah. So really starting really in the winter starting January through June is really that period of intense coordination with the resource agencies. And that's when we have most of the requirements both under the state water board standards that are probably the more challenging to meet, but certainly the biological opinions and the ITP requirements are most in effect in that period. So a lot of the standards for the state water board are more prescript, more prescriptive in terms of, you know, linked to water year type, you know, we need to meet a certain amount of, you know, a certain level of water quality at a certain location in the Delta, certain flows on a monthly average. The challenge with the ESA and CESA related actions, they're much more dependent on location of the fishery, which is a lot more difficult thing to monitor for. We do have, by the nature of the export operations itself, we do have salvage facilities before both Jones and Banks. So that's kind of a natural sampling location for what sorts of species are in the vicinity of the pumps. So there are some actions that are triggered based on the amount of salvage that we see on a day to day basis. The, I talked about the importance of turbidity. There are, this is relatively new, well, since 04, sorry, 0809 biops, but this is a constituent will, is very important to track during the string period because it's thought that that is, that is an indicator of the smelt species on where they might reside in the Delta. So number of the monitoring, we have a good, we have a really good monitoring network. We will, you know, that gives us a good indication of when those species are most at risk to the project pumping, and that will dictate the old and middle river flow that is required to meet. And the knob for that is the exports. And so we have to make rather quick changes to those operations. They have to be very nimble on and off during the spring period. Anything you want to add there, Levi? They're really good. Maybe one difference to remark on on the export and that knob, super important, coordinated between the agencies. State has a bit more flexibility. Jones is on or off and impacted by title influence. Banks can take gulps of water in more ideal time. So there's a little bit of a difference in nuance there.  We had a recent, what we call a first flush event that was triggered. This is triggered by certain flows on the Sacramento River and turbidity. And you're trying to forecast, oh, looks like this might happen. Oh, on a Sunday. Great. So what does that mean? We have power schedules that we need to respect. We have reliability standards that we need to meet with our hydropower facilities. And so having that water operations, power operations, coordination is key. A lot of our new operations are based off of feedback or informed from these technical teams. And so are they going to then be able to put together an ad hoc meeting on a Monday morning, looking at the conditions and make a recommendation on an OMR trigger based on what they're seeing and what that data is showing. These are some of the real world things that we're dealing with on a day to day basis, trying to make the most informed operational decision. Thank you, Leigha, both John and Levi for those presentations. What we're going to have to do is cut it off. There's a lot of questions here. If you are around, I'll put a little wide. I know we have a lot of questions. Right. And perhaps, you know, catch them during the break and make sure we capture those answers. So the second part of this overview of the Central Valley project and the state water project, we have two speakers again, one on behalf of the state and one on behalf of the federal government. Josh Israel is the science division manager in Reclamation Bay Delta office. Prior to this position, Josh worked as a fish biologist for more than 10 years, studying salmon survival in the San Joaquin River and Delta, built impacts on winter run salmon and the yellow bypass fish habitat and fish passage modeling. More recently, he's focused on leading staff to incorporate decision analysis tools into Central Valley project real-time and long-term planning exercises. Lenny Gromaldo is with the California Department of Water Resources. He serves as the state water project environmental director for the California Department of Water Resources. He oversees environmental planning, permitting, compliance activities associated with the long-term operations of the state water project. He's currently leading DWRs in dangerous species consultation on the state water project and the Central Valley project operations. Lenny spent more than 25 years as a researcher in the estuary, so we really appreciate both Lenny and Josh being with us today and we'll turn it to Josh first of all. All right, this is the presentation. It's going to keep you from lunch and then Lenny's going to have to extract more slides from his presentation. Thank you, Laura. Thanks NAS staff very much for coming out here and thanks to all the panel for participating. We're really looking forward to your work on our wicked problem. Great, great. Thanks Sabina. All right, so I was asked to talk a bit about the ecology of the Central Valley project and what I'd like to try to do here is explain our approach to understanding the actions of the Central Valley project and its potential impacts on species. I'm going to discuss the varied approaches we have taken over time to manage various stressors and the tools that we use for assessing and understanding impacts of our actions. And finally, I'm going to take a bit of time to describe our interests and goals on each of the specific topics that we'd like for you to cover related to summerfall habitat, Old and Middle River, and Shasta cold water pool management. So to start with, we have a number of foundational documents. We have a number of conceptual models that have been developed by interagency teams that can help us identify stressors, threats and limiting factors, some of which are influenced by our project operations. This example is one we frequently use from the interagency ecological program. It's almost 10 years old at this point, but it's a useful conceptual model for understanding the stressors and limiting factors on the species. Similarly, a few years later, agencies assigned more technical experts to get together to take on a similar assignment for winter lunch nook salmon in Green Sturgeon. And we've continued to use these models to develop conceptual models for central valley steelhead and spring lunch nook salmon, which we do our consultations on and have to understand the potential action effects on. So this presentation is really going to walk through the approach we're using to consider each stressor, how it's being influenced by operations of the central valley project and state water project, and also quickly describe the tools we have for evaluating these stressors and actions, knowing that we're going to get into that over the next couple workshops. And you're going to make a lot of information requests for more information about that to us. So this is not really our assessment framework. It's something that we've taken from Nimps's strategy for evaluating our actions as part of their biological opinions. We think they're places where we got it right, based on the literature and observations and models that we have, but they're also places where it's possible we didn't get it right. And we're always open to that feedback and the adaptation and evolution of these tools. Overall, though, we think that this is a strong approach because it guides an assessment that science based can help us with re making it reproducible and transparent. And it leverages a lot of tools that have been developed in partnerships with the other agencies and interested parties. But before I get into sort of walking into that approach, I want to talk a little bit about how we describe the operations of the central valley project and the state water project. And there's fundamentally five things that the central valley project does. It stores and releases water, which reduces flows downstream. When it releases water, we increase flows downstream. We also blend water, excuse me. We also blend water, as you've heard, at our selective control devices on a couple of our dams. We divert water in the delta. You'll go to those pumping plants on Thursday. And there's places like the delta cross channel gates in the upper right hand side. You'll also be going to where we can route water through different channels of the delta. So we know that this operation causes hydrologic alteration. But it's important to sort of understand like what is that hydrologic alteration? And so we've done some exploratory modeling that I want to share with you over the next five or 10 minutes. We've looked at three scenarios, one that we call run of the river. We think this is important for understanding how the ecology of species is being influenced by CVP operations. Because it's just the impaired inflow into CVP reservoirs that are then passed downstream subject to channel capacity of the Army Corps of Engineers flood control curbs. It also allows us to then look at when there's no delta diversions, how much water might be taken out by other water rights holders when their feasible diversions can occur. Another scenario I'll share with you is called D1641, which we know is being reviewed right now as part of the water quality control plan revisions happening with the state board. But it's important one because it's the current operations of the CVP and SWP under the assignment of responsibilities from the 1995 Bay Delta water quality control plan and our contracts for water delivery. And finally, excuse the NEPA terminology here with no action, but our current operating scenario, which is basically the operating rules for the Central Valley project and state water project under our 2020 record of decision and the operating rules for the state water project under the 2020 incidental take permit. I will sometimes talk about water year types. Those are related to the D1641 definition of water year types. So as you've heard from other folks, here's some modeling to sort of show what's happening. This is two figures of flows on the Sacramento River. X axis time on the Y's flow. We'll look at a couple of these. On the left is releases from Keswick Dam. And you can see that compared to run of the river. We're storing water in the fall and in the winter. And then at some point in the springtime, typically around May, we start to make those releases. And we're releasing quite a bit more water than would be there otherwise under the run of river conditions. Now Wilkins slew is a point downstream of the senior water rights holders diversions. What you see there is a very similar pattern is that under run of the river, you have more water in the fall and winter. And in the summer and fall, you see that we continue to through operations under the D1641 and the current operating scenarios. We actually are maintaining flows. And part of this is because as part of those actions, we're required to meet flows that are sufficient for other non-project diversions along the river. And so we tend to always be providing in the summertime at least three to five thousand CFS depending on water year type at this downstream location. So we can also look at some modeled water temperatures coming out of Keswick Dam into the Sacramento River. On the right hand side, we have sort of three scenarios for temperature management. The first one, again, is run of the river. And you'll notice what you'd expect, which is that it's following the sinusoidal pattern in which temperatures are low in the winter and high in the summer. When we can target 56 degrees, which is the red line using selective withdrawal, we see that across water year types, we're able to reduce temperatures considerably from what they would be under run of the river conditions. And when we use a tiered approach, that'll touch a pound later. It results in slightly warmer temperatures through the early summer, but lower temperatures late in the summer. Now, if you break this down and you look at water temperatures during the different water year types, you can see we do a reasonable job during all water year types except for critical years where we really lose control of temperature and can't meet those temperatures during the summer and fall. So looking at some modeling results down in the delta. So this is inflow. This is when we're releasing water. We're looking at inflows at Freeport, which is the location that I'd say water is entering the delta. You see that same pattern that we saw earlier where you have less flows entering in the fall and winter because of storing and then more flows in the summer and fall due to releasing entering the delta. So building a little bit on Ted's presentation and also what John talked about, I wanted to talk about what really the delta looks like to fish. We're going to talk a lot about old and middle river flows and we're tending to talk about them in generalities like we'll say old and middle river flows no more negative than minus 5,000 or no more negative than or old and middle river flows of minus 3500. But those conditions are seldom actually observed in the system because the delta is tightly driven as we've heard about and flow is just being summarized to you over various averaging periods. This is actually a location in the middle river corridor and this is what flows look like during this two month period in 2016. You can see that although the averaging comes out to about minus 3500 to minus 2000, the daily flows varied over 20,000 CFS at this location and that's what the fish are feeling. The velocities are changing as those flows are occurring and that's part of the ecology of our delta in the central valley project. That helps us understand a bit about suitable habitat. Schnook, salmon, sturgeon and delta smelter all using this delta for migration and rearing in the springtime and in the winter. As we talked about delta's tidal system, if you go out towards the confluence further west than the location I just showed you, sometimes flows can span 150,000 CFS near the confluence. So what we do know though is that the closer to the export facilities you are, the greater the influence of the export operations can be on this from the CVP and SWP. And so here is some modeling of old and middle river conditions with and without exports and it helps us start to identify a zone of influence for regions where habitat is affected by exports. This figure is looking at the daily velocities at each of the nodes in our DSM-2 hydrodynamic model. Each one of those little circles is a different location in the model. This is looking at all the data from the month of March. This model is being run with and without exports in the distribution of the 15 minute velocities compared in that proportion of overlap calculated. And what you can see is that some of these red areas down in the south delta start to pretty much stay there throughout the different values of OMR flows, but there are areas in the south delta like close to the head of old river, which is in the circle here, where you're seeing the proportion of overlap between the velocities changing with the old and middle river flows becoming less negative. Regardless, whether you're at minus 5,000 or minus 1,000, we typically don't see the zone of influence moving into the north delta. And those are the three circles on the top there that you see. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about salinity and X2. As you heard, the location of X2 indicates the extent of our low salinity zone habitat, which we'll talk a little bit about. And it's typically used as a surrogate for delta smelt habitat. This is a modeled information from those three scenarios that looks at the location under X2. You can see there's a couple thin lines here, one around Chips Island, which is excuse me, one around Chips Island, and one, so Chips Island, which is the downstreaming descent is located at 74 kilometers, excuse me here. Upriver, which is a higher number, is more indicative of where Sherman Island is. It's closer to 85 kilometers. During fall and winter, X2 is further west in the run of the river scenario than the other scenarios that we have where we're operating. And this changes, though, a bit during the summertime here, where actually our run of the river operations is slightly greater salinity than when we're operating under these other regulatory conditions. So there are many biological population environmental attributes that we're tracking in real-time and seasonally and annually. And I think we're going to cover a lot of that in workshop two. But we're collecting this information to really understand how the operations is affecting species ecology and habitats. We collect data to evaluate both direct and indirect effects. And these are just a list of the metrics that we're working on to understand Shasta Cold Water Pool Management, Old and Middle River Flow Management, and the Delta summerfall habitat actions that we use as approaches for managing stressors. So next, coming back to our conceptual models, when we look at our conceptual models, we see that there's many habitat attributes that are potentially limited by operations. This is a list of all the habitat attributes that are potentially influenced in the upper Sacramento River. So considering our hydraulic alteration framework, we're identifying stressors also that are not anticipated to change. I haven't included those. Some of those are things like in river fisheries and poaching, competition, introgression and brood stock removal. We can also identify plausible habitat attributes that are affected with all life stages, such as pathogens and disease, toxicity and contaminants. But the one I want to focus on in this next few slides and in the series after that, will be the ones related to the stressors of interest to us in those three topical areas. And this is the stressor of water temperature and how it's related to cold water pool management. So again, going back to our conceptual model, you can see that Shasta Intronity Storage Hydrology and Influenced is our releases in the summertime that influences water temperature, which in the end influences the transition of eggs to fry in the upper Sacramento River. And so what influence do we have? Well, when we store water, we reduce downstream flows, but this is in fact building storage of cold water. When we release water, it depletes cold water storage, but it may be adding some kind of thermal mass that may actually help us maintain temperatures further downstream. When we divert water, this typically happens in the Delta where we're reducing outflows, so it's probably not applicable in the upper Sacramento River. Routing water also tends to happen in the Delta, so it's probably not applicable for things relating to water temperature. Finding blending water, this is really important, this is our temperature control devices where it preserves cold water for release at a later time. So we've taken a lot of different approaches to actions for addressing temperature since the Central Valley Project was started. We did nothing for a time. Then we decided to start managing to target locations for 56 degrees. In the slide on the right, you can just probably make out some little yellow triangles that represent locations where we tried to target locations for 56 degrees. We've also taken approaches where we've tried to manage to end of September storage objectives to meet 56 degrees during that season. We've also used approaches to manage for tiers where cold water that's less than 53.5 degrees is limited. That's this figure that's on the bottom right here. This is our current action approach. What you see here is when we have sufficient cold water stored, we target 53.5 degrees releases, but when we don't have sufficient cold water stored, we attempt to shape releases and blend cold water to the period of time that's most beneficial for spawning winter lunch and oaks salmon and incubating eggs. If these conditions cannot be achieved, we then shape releases and blending for alternative temperature targets that are not 53 degrees to meet the optimal time periods for winter-run Chinook eggs. Then finally, there are periods when we can't even meet 56 degrees. This would be considered a tier four year. That means we have to take other actions to make sure we're protecting eggs, including things like Livingstone National Fish Actory, which I'm not going to touch upon today. Then there are other approaches we're trying to take for managing cold water pool to address temperature management, like managing multiple actions that are guided by storage objective bins that can include things like reducing diversions to contractors. We have a lot of tools for evaluating these different actions and for thinking about what's going on in our system. This is where we really like your help thinking about these things. We have a lot of planning tools around temperature models. We've got a brand new temperature model that I believe is coming online next year called the Water Temperature Modeling Platform. Hopefully you'll hear about that in Workshop 2. We have a number of different survival models that all work with slightly different functions and relationship between temperature and other environmental covariates. The number, a number of mortality models as well to help us understand how temperature is influencing different life stages of winter-run Chinook salmon. Then in real time, our biologists meet as interagency teams and look at red and carcass surveys, rubbery screw trap, information about juvenile production, the condition of fish, and then there's continuous temperature monitoring at many locations in the river and reservoir temperature monitoring as well. Some of the things we like to get out of temperature stressor modification and trying to improve and reduce temperature stressors is trying to find what the right environmental conditions are to support multi-species survival and recruitment. We'd also really like to make sure that we get to defensible criteria for protecting winter-run Chinook salmon. There's things, there's obviously approaches and actions that we take for water temperature through cold water pool management that affect water delivery and power generation. So some of the things we'd like to do there is try to minimize uncertainty that impacts delivering water and power. So if there's things that we can do to reduce delaying allocations because of cold water pool and meteorological forecasts, we'd really like to know what kinds of tools and approaches we should be thinking about and also ways that we can avoid carryover storage spill when it could be delivered. And of course, California liked to find ways to maximize power generation during the summer and fall when our communities needed the most. So moving on to entrainment risk, this is a list of all of the stressors potentially linked to operations in our IEP conceptual model. I'm going to focus on entrainment risk. Again, you can go back to the conceptual model and see that the proximity of water diversion sites is impact the amount of water diversion and the amount of water diversions that occur affects the entrainment risk of adults that then need to spawn to produce eggs and juvenile delta smelt. This is also an issue for juvenile salmonids. So this is a figure from the NIMPS conceptual model and the title estuary. And you can see the proximity of these fish to the water diversions affects their entrainment risk and their survival to be coming out migrating juveniles. So some of the things we do is we reduce delta inflows. We release water. Now this typically doesn't occur in the winter and spring, so it's probably not applicable, but we'd be interested in your feedback. Blending water typically occurs in the river, so it's probably not applicable in the delta. We divert water, which reduces outflow from the delta, which probably does influence out migration cues and entrainment risks. And we route water, which also can move flows into different locations. Now Ted talked about the Delta Cross Channel Gates. This is actually a figure from our seasonal report last year that shows when the Delta Cross Channel Gates operations are. And the gray lines there are when the Delta Cross Channel Gates are open during this season. And you can see that the little boxes there in the triangles represent when we see fish in our fish monitoring surveys. And so what this suggests is that the Delta Cross Channel Gate was closed. It's clear in that area where we are seeing fish entering the delta, which suggests that our closure of the Delta Cross Channel Gate help