Good morning, everyone. I'll give you a second to find your seats. All right, I'd like to welcome everyone to our first joint meeting of the Board of Earth Sciences and Resources that I chair, Ms. Abel Montañez, and the Water Science and Technology Board, which my partner in crime here, Catherine Kling chairs. We would also like to, of course, thank all of our speakers and panelists and guests for taking the time out of your schedules to join us. So doing joint efforts like this of the two boards permits us to address really cross-disciplinary issues and critical issues, such as the one that is the focus of today, how to be evolving challenges in managing large river basins in the United States. And this particular topic is borne out of a growing appreciation for the cumulative impacts that these river systems are seeing on their natural and engineered functions in response to our use of these rivers and managing of the rivers of the last century. So today we hope that guided by our expert speakers and panelists through group discussions that we'll be able to address what are the multifaceted aspects or services and operations of these rivers that we depend on, how will we optimize our management strategies? And I think we could consider this in the context that if you look into the future, we may be able to ask ourselves, are these major river systems reaching a system threshold? That is, are we ushering in a new Anthropocene-like river system, one that would have a very different needs and approaches to management, in particular under changing climate conditions? So we will start with some introductions. We'll go around the table, starting with the chair of WSTB board. I'd like to mention that we have a series of speakers this morning. Two, we will hold questions because we would like to get through the first two speakers and there'll be a 15 minute break, another speaker, and then there'll be a half an hour for opportunities for group and open session questions. We'd also like you to keep in mind that one of the goals of the boards at the Academy is to be thinking about ways that we can contribute to the agencies and to other groups represented by our guests today. So we'd like you to be thinking about that and we welcome any sorts of ideas or seeds that might grow into bigger things. So welcome again and I'll pass the microphone to thank you Isabel. Welcome everybody, it's a delight to see everybody here bright and early and we're gonna have a really packed day with really broad suites of lots of fascinating issues and two incredibly important river systems. I'm gonna stop there so we can get a move on here. We'd like everybody to do a very quick round of introductions, name, university or affiliation and what board you're on. My name is Kathy Kling, I chair of the WSTB and I'm at Cornell University. Laura Ailers, I'm a senior staff officer with the Water Science and Technology Board. Stephanie Johnson, staff with the Water Science and Technology Board. Rod Ewing, Stanford University where I'm in the Department of Geological Sciences and I'm co-director of the Center for International Security and I'm on Beezer. Hi, I'm Brenda Bowen. I'm at the University of Utah and part of Beezer. I'm Nelia Dunbar, I'm the state geologist of New Mexico and I'm also part of Beezer. I'm Thorn Lay, I'm at UC Santa Cruz. I'm a seismologist on Beezer. I'm Wendy Graham from the University of Florida. I'm a hydrologist on the Water Science and Technology Board. I'm Shaolin Wong, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, Beezer board member. Carol Hardin, University of Tennessee, Beezer board. Mark Leshevaille, I'm a drinking water microbiologist, retired and I'm on the Water Science and Technology Board. Scott Cameron, consultant, geologist on Beezer. Michael Manga, University of California Berkeley with Beezer. Dave Wagner, Water Science and Technology Board, semi-retired, Woolbird Engineering. Dave Duzanbeck, Professor and Head of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and I'm with the Water Science and Technology Board. I'm Bill Hammond, University of Nevada Reno, BESR. Hi, I'm Jeff Rubin, semi-retired, emergency manager from Oregon on Beezer. Elizabeth Wilson, Dartmouth, Beezer. Robert Kleinberg, Boston University and Columbia University, Beezer. Kay Whitlock, Christopher Engineering in Chicago, Water Science and Technology Board. Estella Atiquana, University of Delaware, Beezer. John Arthur, State Geologist of Florida, Florida Geological Survey, Hydrogeology, Water Science and Technology Board. Maybe I weren't supposed to speak. Selma Jackson, Attended University of Washington, Hydrogeologist, Nuclear Scientist, Hanford. Morty McCann, Jack Benjamin Associates and Stanford University, a member of Beezer. Nisha Jami, Stanford University, Water Science and Technology Board. Morning everyone, Elizabeth Ada and I'm with the Board on our Sciences and Resources and the Water Science and Technology Board. Mr. Isabel Montanis, University of California, Davis and again I'm the chair of the Beezer Board. And we are going to, Brendan's there at the end of the room with a microphone and we'd like our guests to briefly introduce themselves as well. Mary Molesky, National Weather Service. I'm Kate Boss, I'm the AGU Congressional Science Fellow and Senator Tom Udall's office, Hydrologist by Training. Leanne Ball, US Geological Survey, Ecosystems Mission Area. Dan Mueller, Environmental Defense Fund. Anna Norman, Congressional Research Service covering Water Resources and Geoscience. Brian Wee, Consultant. Katrina Kessler, I'm with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Reed Benson with the University of New Mexico School of Law. Gretchen Benjamin with the Nature Conservancy, Large River Specialist. Mike Fening, Institute of Water versus Army Corps of Engineers. Fred Phillips with the Hydrology Program at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Jack Schmidt, I'm on the faculty, Utah State University. Jeff Hauser, I'm with USGS, the Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Good morning, I'm Dagmar Lou Allen from the Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Andrea Coelho from Researcher on Water and Sustainable Development. Steve Buen, NOAA National Weather Service, North Central River Forecast Center in Minneapolis, St. Paul. Good morning, I'm gonna stand up. My name is Melanie Stansbury and I'm a consultant. I work on science and natural resources policy issues and my other day job is I'm a state legislator in the New Mexico State House. Justin Lawrence, National Science Foundation, Geomorphology and Land Use Dynamics Program. Tom Knudson, NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Climate Change Detection and Attribution. I'm Katherine Arreard, I'm with the Ecological Society of America in Washington. Lainey George-ism with the NASDA. Courtney Devane, NASDAF. Brendan McEvern, NASDAF. Sam Exino, BESER staff. Deb Glickson, BESER staff. Mindy Simmons, Army Corps of Engineers, Senior Policy Advisor. Chandra Patek with the US Army Corps of Engineers, hydrology and hydraulics communities of practice. And I'm Nick Rogers, I'm staff with the economies as well. And everyone, this is Elizabeth Ada. I wanted to just make a couple of short announcements, housekeeping items before we get started. The first one is with regard to everyone's safety here. We're all in a foreign building. None of us are in this building typically during any course of any day. And so I wanted to make note of the fact that the exit, if the fire alarm should sound here, is exactly the way you came in. That is the stairwell to get out of the building. So proceed out these doors to your right and just make your way as quickly and calmly as you can down the stairs and out the building until we're told what we should do to return. The other aspect is that the restrooms are on the third floor. We are on the fourth floor. So just keep that in mind. There's a little trek to get there. And then the other aspect is that, as I've all mentioned, there'll be some organized breaks, but obviously if you have a need to refresh coffee, get some water, what have you. Please, the beverages are back behind us here, so don't hesitate to help yourselves during the course of the meeting here. And above all, enjoy one another's company and exchange ideas and contribute during the day today. Thank you. Okay, we're gonna introduce our first speaker, but I do wanna give a quick shout out to our fearless leaders here, Elizabeth Eld and Laura Ellers on our two sides, who really are the intellectual power behind and actual manpower behind or womanpower, behind pulling off this joint effort. We were working with a very short timeframe and some across a broad spectrum of top ideas that we wanted to incorporate, and they really pulled together, along with their staff, a phenomenal program for today. So thank you. I'm gonna give a round of applause. Okay, so I haven't had yet the pleasure to meet Dagmar Llewellyn, but you're ready up there? She's our first speaker, and she is actually, I believe, giving two talks, perhaps integrated into one. Dagmar is a hydrologist and civil engineer in the Water Management Division of the Bureau of Reconciliation Office in Albuquerque, where she leads projects related to the impacts of climate change and works with stakeholders to build resilience into the management of these river systems, with an emphasis on the Rio Grande and Pecos River watersheds. She's also an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico, and if I'm correct, I think in three or four different departments. So Dagmar. Good morning. The mighty Rio Grande and Rio Bravo. It's a centerpiece of folklore and music in the American Southwest. No, that didn't work. Now we're back on it, okay, sorry. It's also an ancient river. It's been an ancient source of life to humans in the Southwest. The history of human habitation and dependence on the Rio Grande for life runs very deep. It's also a multinational river. It's part of several countries now and has been part of even more, and along it are numerous independent nations of the Native American people. It's a culturally distinct place. It's also a highly altered river system. We've done all kinds of things to it, to change it from the way that it was for those Native people who have lived there for thousands of years, constructing dams, channelizing and over-appropriating the waters and allowing for the invasion of non-Natives to change the geomorphology and form of the river. It has a complex hydrology and management as it would for a water short river. There's a myriad of jurisdictions. It's a multinational river system, as I said, and it's fought over, as we'll talk about. Overall, it's a water short system and its flows are highly variable. So, from year to year, we're not sure how it's gonna behave, what we have in store. Some recent literature, this is with the Michael Dedenger and Brad Udall. They say, the Rio Grande offers the best example of how climate change induced flow declines might sink a major system into permanent drought. So there's reason to be concerned about the system as the New York Times pointed out in an article last fall. The Rio Grande is dying, does anybody care? Good morning, I'm Dag Marlowe and from the Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And today I've been asked to give you an overview of the Rio Grande system, how we've altered it, how we manage it, what values we get from the system to set up for a discussion about what science is needed in the system. Yes, I understand, are the two systems that we're gonna be talking to today, although I understand that it's only the upper portion of the Mississippi that we'll be talking about. One thing that the two have in common is that both drain to the Gulf of Mexico, but maybe the similarities in there, we'll see today. This is a map of annual average precipitation across the United States. And what's clear here is that they drain systems that have very different hydrologies. We're down in the desert Southwest here on the Rio Grande and we've got some cold wet places that we're draining the upper Mississippi. So we'll be doing some comparing and contrasting in those systems and how climate change is affecting both of them. The management challenges that we have on the Rio Grande are emblematic of the kinds of challenges that we're having in all of the rivers in the Southwestern United States. Water scarcity plays a big role in water management. Water supplies are variable, but declining as the climate warms. Groundwater mining has decreased the ability of the river to convey water and is depleting our drought buffer. The water that we have in reserve, our bank account, as you might say. Tribal water rights have not been fully defined, but they're considered senior to everybody else's use. And so that's a major challenge in figuring out what's left for other uses. And then of course, the requirements to support listed endangered species adds what people think of as a new constraint on an old system that actually has had these species for millions of years. So we hear a lot in the news about the Colorado and in the Rio Grande, whoa, we say, whoa, is us. Who are Colorado? They might not have a complete full supply below Lake Mead. They've never been shorted there. So I'll put out there that the Rio Grande can also be, you might say, a cautionary tale, but an example of the kinds of things that might happen when the water supplies decline enough that there are shortages below the major reservoirs and the users there have to figure out how to get by with less. So this is the system. You can see it is in the US extending from Colorado through New Mexico down through Texas, includes the Pecos River as a major tributary and also includes inflow from the Republic of Mexico. We also have a lot of infrastructure along the full system that's dams for water supply, dams for flood control and a number of diversions for irrigation. So the Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, so we include the perspective that the Mexicans have on it, they call it the Rio Bravo, it's really three rivers and the upper portion where I work could even be subdivided into two itself. So the headwaters up in Colorado in the San Luis Valley are a snowmelt dominated system and the water supplies direct run of the river water supply. Down in central New Mexico, we have Elephant Butte Reservoir and from there we distribute water from the reservoir. So shortages are delayed a year really. And then below that, that water's gone and we're in something called the forgotten reach. There hasn't been water in the forgotten reach in years. And then below there down near Big Bend, if you've ever been to that national park, a river comes in, the Rio Conchos comes in from Mexico and near the river forms again, but really you could call it the Rio Conchos and that is what then continues from Big Bend down to the Gulf as the southern border of the United States. This is the forgotten reach. Here's what's happened to it with no water in it for all of these years. It's come overgrown with non-native vegetation, it's a thicket that we wonder if it really could pass water if we were to put it there. One other thing I wanted to point out is that, so this here is the map that John Wesley Powell created of his vision for the divisions into states of the Western United States and his proposal was to do it by watersheds. And I find it really interesting that he also ends the Rio Grande at the forgotten reach. So it could be that this is something that's been happening for a long time. Back in geologic history, actually these were two rivers, what we call the Rio Grande in the United States actually was a closed basin and eventually was captured by what we call the Rio Bravo which became I think the Rio Conchos through a geologic stream capture process. So this has been true for quite a long time. As I said, the Rio Grande is a multinational system that's true today. There's also a multinational history to it. So historically, the region was the land of the Anasazi Pueblo people, then became part of Spain. And then from that part of Mexico, and then with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 became a territory of the United States. Also in that process, it was accepted that the Rio Grande would become the southern boundary of the United States. Just a little anecdote. This Mexican history is really sort of relevant to our lives in New Mexico. I'm thinking of a friend who was trying to get a variance on putting a fence around his house or something and they said, well, the zoning rules say this and he said that this house was built in Mexico. Those rules didn't apply then. The river also has a highly complex management and allocation system with all kinds of overlapping jurisdictions, as you might imagine from what I've said already. We've got two nations today, three U.S. states, four Mexican states, and then we import water from the Colorado Basin as well and supplement the supplies in the Rio Grande. So the Colorado Basin Compact as well as the Rio Grande and Pecos Compact applies to the apportionment in the United States. Mexico has its own system. And then of course, the tribes are independent nations and in New Mexico, there's 18 just in that state that are independent and many either along the Rio Grande or along its tributaries. Each one of them has an independent government and sets of laws. And so all of those jurisdictions overlap within this highly complex system. And then these states that in the United States that the river runs through, they're the ones in charge of the allocation of water, the distribution of water rights. And of course, each one does it differently. Colorado practices a prior appropriation. That's the system that we practice throughout much of the Western United States that you'll hear more about in the policy discussions this afternoon where the first person to say they're gonna put that water to beneficial use, that's used for humans, generally consumptive, has a right to that water into perpetuity. And we set up priorities based on that the water user expressed that intention. In New Mexico, our constitution says that we're gonna practice priority administration, but we call it the nuclear option. We really don't do it and I'll contend that the reason for that really isn't laziness that we don't wanna do the legal process so that we can do it, but really that it's counter to the culture, one that governance itself, not just governance of water, but governance was structured around shorted sharing of water and has been for thousands of years. So these kinds of things need to be a consideration and New Mexico has some reckoning it's doing on that topic and I believe that Fred Phillips will be talking about that this afternoon. Colorado and New Mexico consider surface water and groundwater to be interconnected and of course physically they are. Texas has a system called rule of capture shown here where basically if you can get at the water then you can have it. So you can't make any generalizations across all the states on how these kinds of actually physical hydrologic considerations are gonna be managed. And then on top of all that, we have a network of federal projects. These projects are for water storage or for drainage or they're for flood control. They're run by a number of different agencies including Reclamation, the one that I work for, also the Army Corps of Engineers and then of course since the Rio Grande forms the Southern border of the United States, the International Boundary and Water Commission who runs the ones lowest down in the system. So Laura had asked me to talk about the services that are the valued services that are provided by this river and this river system. The first among them is that it provides water in the desert and that's a big deal in the desert. That's of course where all the life is because that's where the water is. From the headwater systems in the mountains of Colorado down through the deserts of New Mexico and Texas then even into the more humid side of Texas. There's national parks and wildlife refuges and all kinds of things celebrating what water does in the desert. Another value is agriculture. And there's certainly plenty of diversion for agriculture through federal projects and otherwise along the entire system. Up in the headwaters in Colorado in the San Luis Valley there's a high value but short season. The barley for Coors beer is made there. Also potatoes, lots of grass-fed beef. Then we move down into New Mexico. There's a lot of alfalfa and pasture grown in New Mexico. It's agriculture with a very high cultural value although a low economic value. But that cultural value is not to be underestimated. It's very important to the people there. I'll also say that it would also be high value. I mean it would also be high cultural value if the crops were chilies and melons and beans and the things that they were historically. But I'll also put out there that a lot of the reason that it isn't is because of the unreliability of the water supply. And so alfalfa, if you abandon it halfway through the season you still get something out of it. It grows it back again the next year. The same thing for pasture. Over on the Pecos basin there's a fascinating system of groundwater dominated agriculture. There's actually four or five times as much agriculture for which the water supply is groundwater than there is from surface water. It's a system where the water comes off the Sierra Blanca Mountains in central New Mexico and then falls underground into a karst system that feeds an artesian system. So it's really fascinating place. They also are growing starting to convert to some higher value crops over there. In the back on the Rio Grande here this is the Macia Valley. This is the place where your hatch chilies come from. It's also the place that's the focus of the Texas v. New Mexico Supreme Court lawsuit right now. The irrigated agriculture continues down into Mexico along the Rio Conchos and then in 29 independent irrigation district in the eastern part of Texas including citrus, cotton, vegetables. So that's an important part of how the river is used. It's also used for cities. And there's a number of cities including Albuquerque, where I live. Las Cruces, El Paso, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, one of the largest that are getting water for life in these systems primarily from converting from agricultural water rights into their urban uses. Another value service provided by the river is flood risk management and drainage. Actually the irrigation system in central New Mexico was created to allow the creation of Albuquerque which used to flood widely and the irrigation network was created to drain those lands so that the city could be expanded. The Corps of Engineers runs most of the big flood control dams up away from the border. And reclamation has water storage facilities. Those actually convert to the jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers when we have floods so that we actually pass management over to them. The IBWC plays both roles lower down within the system. In the irrigation districts, as I was saying, provide drainage. Hydro power is another benefit that's provided. It's provided through these dams at least in the upper system because there isn't a lot of water. It's not huge mega wattage. It's not huge amounts of energy but it is important in the local community. This is the hydropower generation at Elephant Butte Dam. This was put in with hydropower early in the 20th century. And then recreation. Recreation is also important, particularly important in the desert. Some research that I've done shows that as the temperatures rise in a particular place, they're the rare grand basin, the importance of that water-based recreation goes up even higher. There's some world-class rafting on the Rio Grande, the Chama and also on the Pecos River. There's birdwatching, as we've seen in the previous slides, some really great birdwatching, boating, sailing, swimming, fishing, all of these ways that people can get to the water in the desert. So Laura also asked me to talk about the interconnected hydrologic, geomorphic and biotic systems and how we've altered those over the history of the river. We put in dams, those have altered the hydrology and the sediment balances. We've diverted the water for agriculture and municipal use. These put barriers into the river, they divert the flows and they decrease the flow overall. We channelized the river from a big, wide system into a very single-channel contained system. We imported water from the Colorado River Basin. We've changed the riparian conditions, particularly because of the changes I discussed above with dams and diversions. Remind the groundwater, that's changed the surface water, groundwater interaction. So here's what we have today. And I ask the question, you can float down the Rio Grande in Albuquerque and it feels like, wow, I'm not even anywhere near a city. It feels like a natural system, but really it's nothing close. So here's the first thing we did. Starting early in the previous century, we started putting in dams along the river. This is Elephant Butte Dam, which was closed in 1916. It's in central New Mexico. And that of course changes the hydrology and the sediment balance considerably. We reduce the flood peaks and then we increase the duration of those peaks or the duration of the flows in the river. We reduce sediment, we tend to trap it behind those dams. We simplify and narrow the channel. There's agridation, generally upstream of the dams and degradation downstream of the dams. So the geomorphology of the system gets changed considerably. And I believe Jack Schmidt will be talking more about that this afternoon. Just, it's an example of how this plays out, both the top one Rio Grande at Albuquerque and then Rio Chama at Elvato here. We see its documentation of exactly what I was just talking about. The change in the peaks is downward, but the duration of flows is upward. And that makes perfect sense. That's how we operate dams. Then also the sediment goes way down. Now on the Rio Grande, 90% decrease in the fine sediment load. So most of it gets trapped in the reservoirs. The Rio Chama, the system passes a lot of the fine sediment and so it's a lot less and you'd see that that's a pretty muddy river. Another implication of this is that these kinds of changes that take scalping off the disturbance events, the flood peaks and making continuous flow all through the year, favors non-native species over the species that grew up there, the cottonwoods and willows and the things that traditionally formed the riparian systems in the Southwest. Here's a couple of the particular culprits, tamarisk, which I have heard that you have had a lot of discussions about here at the National Academies. And then also Russian olive, both introduced species, the tamarisk was actually sewed into the channels of the Rio Grande in order to stabilize it as we altered it in the previous century and it has really liked the conditions and spread wildly. We'll talk a little bit later about some recent changes to that species. Another thing that we did was we developed agriculture. Historically, it was a very, it was a simple process, but it evolved over time and now we have some pretty complicated groundwater and surface water-based irrigation systems within the basin. This is just a diagram of the irrigation canals around Albuquerque, just south of Albuquerque. And you can see it's a pretty complicated network. It's a pretty complicated system, the way that we get water to all of the farmers. I will say this is all gravity-based. It's quite cleverly designed, but it's certainly complicated. And then the municipal growth has also had an effect. And to a large degree, that's because it transfers water rights from the agriculture system. Those are the ones that were using this water first and changes the operations of those irrigation networks and perhaps ultimately their viability. So here's what we wind up with. I took this from a talk of Fred Phillips. I know Jack Schmidt has something very similar in a recent publication that he's put out, but it shows what the, just diagrammatically shows the volume of flow in the Rio Grande historically and what we have today. And we can see that these changes, diversions for putting in of the dams and then the diversions for agriculture and for urban and industrial use have significantly changed that flow. And then with that less flow, we've also channelized the river. And this is how we did it in central New Mexico. We put in these, we call them jetty jacks. They really look like jacks. And what happens when the system floods is that that traps all kinds of debris and basically builds up the flood plain allowing the river itself to cut down in between. And it worked. What we set out to achieve in central New Mexico, we did achieve. This is a diagram of it from the Army Corps of Engineers. You can see you start with this big wide plain of riverbed and ultimately build up this riparian system and then you cut down the riverbed itself. So here's how this has played out over time with all of these changes, including the dams and the simplification from the channelization process. This is what we used to have a big wide braided to anastomosing system to what we have today, which is generally a single thread. It's a single thread that runs through a widespread riparian system that really didn't use to exist. So an aerial image, a rare one, but back in 1935, showing an area about 100 miles south of Albuquerque where there's a major wildlife refuge. And here's what we have today. You can see that's really a quite different system. Now this Bosque, the riparian system that's grown up in this floodplain that we've created has become a treasured ecosystem. And I think that this is something, as we manage the river that we need to think about, these novel ecosystems that may or may not be stable are something that we should look at through a resilience lens to see if there's ways that we can preserve them because as our climate changes, I will contend that what we need to do is preserve what's working. Another implication of that change from the Jetty Jacks particularly and also the dams is that we have very high riverbank walls now. So we had this big wide flat system and today you have some of these enormous banks. This is probably a six foot guy, 10 foot banks here. So you think about what would that do to your floodplain connection? What would that do to the ways that you get nutrients off of the riparian corridor in the floodplain into the river and vice versa? What would it do to species that live in the river that are dependent on overbank for their annual reproduction? So just a couple more pictures to really highlight this point and the changes in the system. This is the Rio Grande at Central Avenue in the middle of Albuquerque back in 1933. And here it is today. This is the same, the circle shows the same location which is the control tower at the airport. You can see that this system has changed dramatically. And then we added water from the Colorado River Basin. Now in some sense that mitigates the changes that we made in diverting some of the river. It provides something else for us to work with. Also provides some additional management complexity. We get this water from the headwaters of the San Juan system. We pipe it through a network, 26 miles of concrete tunnel that goes underneath the continental divide and brings water that would go to the Pacific Ocean. And we bring it back to where it should be for today's forum draining towards the Gulf of Mexico whether or not it gets there. Another way that we've altered the system is through groundwater mining. And I'm sure most of you understand how this works. You live here in a place like Washington DC and generally you're gonna have water infiltrating when it rains and it runs down to the river. If you're an arid system where you have less of that recharge and you're pumping these groundwater wells, you can reverse that. And so water that's in the river is actually what's recharging the groundwater. This term, you hear a lot about this term base flow. Base flow is water that flows from the groundwater into the river and a lot of the Rio Grande doesn't have that. Instead it loses water to the groundwater or it recharges the groundwater depending on your perspective. So here's a beautiful system that we have today. Still beautiful, but obviously water short. Oh, right, and there's one other thing. The ecosystem. So we did all this and it worked. In Albuquerque we had irrigation and we had our city built and the lands were drained and the channel wasn't out of control. And the native species didn't really appreciate that because this isn't the system that they grew up in, that they were used to, to key of the endangered species who have been a focal point for a lot of the changes that we've made in our operations in central New Mexico are the Rio Grande silvery minnow and the Southwestern willow flycatcher. So a riverian species and a riparian species. And I think it's important to point out that what doesn't work for them is this lack of connection between the river and its floodplain that really helps human societies, but it hasn't worked for these native species who are dependent on that interconnection for their nutrients and their spawning, their entire life cycle. So we do a lot of crazy things now to try to support these endangered species. The river dries and we scoop up all the silvery minnow and a net and we bring them to some portion of the river where it's actually flowing. But obviously this isn't a long-term solution, especially as conditions get more challenging in the basin. I plotted these from the NOAA website just the other day. These are data, these are not projections and these are the temperature changes experienced in the three U.S. basin states of the Rio Grande. Colorado, you see temperatures and degrees Fahrenheit going from about 43 up to 48, 52 to 56 in New Mexico, 63 to 68 in Texas. These are average annual temperatures, but I was, I work in this area and I was really surprised by how dramatic these are. There's a lot of implications in a water short basin for that kind of temperature rise. The first thing that's obvious is that it's harder to maintain a snowpack and that's where we get our water supply from. The snow packs in the Rio Grande system or the upper Rio Grande system are marginal to begin with in that the temperature of the snow is pretty close to the freezing point. So this is some work that Reclamation's done. This is an older slide, but the newer ones aren't actually any different and they show a whole lot of red. This is Colorado, New Mexico, and these are our mountains where we keep our water supply for the summertime in form of snow and there's an awful lot of red which is looking like a sort of 70 to 100% decline by the 2070s. So that's a challenge for us in terms of storing water. It leads to changes in when the water is available further downstream. So this is a location on the Rio Chama, the place where we keep our reservoirs that serve the upper Rio Grande system. You can see that because we can't keep that water in the snowpack, projections are that our wintertime flows in the river would increase. But again, that's water that we're not able to store any longer. The biggest implication of course of these temperatures has to do with this Clausius-Clapeyron relationship. Probably many of you are familiar with this. What it shows is that small changes in temperature can lead to large changes in the demand for water out of the atmosphere, right? The amount of moisture the air can hold. And we all know how this works. Whether we work in this field or not, that's why our dryer works. That's why our hair dryer works, right? Because there's an exponential relationship between the temperature and the amount of moisture air can hold. And it really gets pretty steep in these areas where we're seeing these changes. So we've taken this information. We've incorporated into models. Reclamation has been the agency that's been doing most of the hydroclimate projection work in the Western US in the basins that we serve. Mostly as a result of the 2009 Secure Water Act. So we take in the general circulation models, the whole planet and give us temperature and precipitation projections. We've run them through hydrologic models locally and then through operations models where we simulate all of our dams, our diversions, groundwater impact, all of those kinds of things to come up with a picture of how this might play out in our basins. So this was from some work I did back in 2013, the upper-rear-grand impact assessment, which was the first study like this where we actually looked at what the future of the rear-grand might look like. And I don't have to go into the details of each one of these graphs. They're different places along the rear-grand, but what's obvious is if you look at the median trend of all of these projections, the trend is downward and it's downward in a pretty considerable way. And the structure of the rear-grand compact actually makes water deliveries to the next downstream state lower when there's lower water supply. And so because of that and because of the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, these things compound as we work our way downstream. And so the water supply we just established is declining. At the same time, that same Clausius-Clapeyron relationship makes it so that the demand for agriculture, for Iperian consumption, all of those are going up as well. More water is required to maintain those crops and those riparian systems. And they're going up pretty steeply as well for the same reason. So here's something from the Reclamation Secure Report to Congress that we produce every five years since the Secure Water Act was passed. I'm sorry, I'm gonna sneeze. Sorry about that. So this is how this plays out in terms of our reservoir storage. And again, this makes sense based on what I've been saying that we're not gonna have a lot of water left to store in our reservoirs, right? We're not storing them in our snowpack anymore and we don't have the water to store in our reservoirs either because we'll be using it. If you look here, you see this is central New Mexico. This is Texas. Everybody else seems to have a little blue blob in the projection part where some of the projections and some of the systems, the amount of water that can be stored in those reservoirs increases, but not for us. Another implication of that same relationship is that there'll be less moisture in our soils, right? So well moisture will go down and we will probably continue to graze on some of these desert lands. And so what that does is it exposes a lot of soil to the windy springs that we have in the desert Southwest. And when you put dust on snow and snow that's exposed to sunlight, what happens is it sublimates. It goes up into the atmosphere. And I think this is a cool image here. This little piece right there doesn't have any dust on it. And you see that that isn't sublimating like the rest of the snowpack is. We can lose our entire winter snowpack in a matter of a few days from one of these windstorms. And so this is an area that I believe requires a lot what would benefit from a lot of additional research. So we're losing that snowpack. We're also losing our forests. This is an image of some beetle killed areas, some pine beetles killing the forests and part of the Rocky Mountains. So the reason for these losses is that same relationship that I was talking about. Here's some work done by Park Williams who's currently at La Montdority Observatory. And what he shows is that for a four degrees Celsius increase in temperature here, there's an 83% increase in the vapor pressure deficit. So the difference between what the trees need in terms of moisture in the air and also the soil and what they actually get. So this leads to some pretty severe consequences. This is Santa Fe in 2002 when we lost our pinion pines. And again, it's a really culturally relevant species in central New Mexico. Certainly more prior to 2002, but still if you get up in the mountains, you'll see trucks pulled over with it selling you pinion nuts. It's a very important species, but it really didn't grow back here in the Santa Fe area. And another consequence of that is fire, is catastrophic wildfire. And if we combine our concerns about bark beetle and temperature and overgrowth of the forests over the last 100 years when we've had a fire suppression sort of approach to forest management, it can lead to some wildfires that are much larger than we've had historically. Now these are fire adapted landscapes. They want fire, but when the fire goes into these overgrown forests, when they're so dry because it's so hot, then these can be catastrophic. This is the lost conscious fire in the Hamas Mountains of New Mexico. And that was an enormous fire. Can't even remember the rates, some incredible rates of taking 50 acres a second or something like that. It was an amazing thing to behold, but also catastrophic. So back to Park Williams' work, he used the climate models to project how these kinds of impacts on our forest are likely to change into the future. And you can see this forest drought stress index getting more and more stressful over the course of the coming century. The conclusions from his work are that if the climate models are correct, the average drought stress by the 2050s, that's not very far away, will match the worst years during the worst mega droughts of the last 1,000 years. So what that means is we're losing our forests. And that is where we have always kept our snowpack in the forests, in the mountains, in snowpack. The impacts of these changes cascade down into other systems. So this is the lost conscious fire burning in a watershed just downstream from it that basically got completely washed out. 200 year old trees all falling down because of debris flows and then below them, landscape scour that occurred because of a fairly small, less than a half inch of rain that fell on that burn scar. So there's a real danger of those as well. In addition, Albuquerque and Santa Fe have treatment plants that are designed to deal with contaminants that sink but not contaminants that float, couldn't deal with the ash, so they had to turn off the treatment plants, there were fish kills in the river. So there's a whole lot of consequences throughout the system. Groundwater, so we talked a little bit about the mining of groundwater previously and that's already gone on in the system. I will say there's been some recovery in some sections, certainly in central New Mexico because of increased use of surface water for urban supply. The problem with having this system that buffers the annual variations in surface water supply already mined is that then it isn't there for us when we really need it. It also doesn't work well as a long-term supply. So in terms of the impacts of climate change on our groundwater system, and we think, oh, it's great, this is, it's away from the heat, it's not, can't be directly evaporated by the sun, but the primary impact of climate change in the desert system on groundwater is that when humans don't have surface water, they rely on the groundwater. And I think this is, for example, what we're seeing play out in the Mesilla Valley and is in the Las Cruces El Paso area, which is a big focal point in the discussions in the Supreme Court lawsuit. And it's for this reason. Summer monsoons. So in this, in the area of the Rio Grande, we have a bimodal weather system. We get funnel systems that come in that provide snow, at least it has been snow, through the, into the mountain systems in the wintertime.  Each year, generally, we call it a crapshoot. That's the official terminology from the National Weather Service on what our monsoon is gonna look like. So we're just now trying to get a handle on, on how that, how we project that or how we forecast that in a given year, nevermind in the long-term. And we've long said these general circulation models don't actually resolve the components of the monsoon system so that we can't really figure that out. But we've done some, I've done some work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research using weather typing, which looks at the way that the sea level pressure and moisture and winds set up across the whole continental United States and figured out which of those are associated with, with monsoon systems. And this is some really interesting results that we've had. Is weather type four? Is your classic monsoonal system? You see, it's all blue all over New Mexico here. And what this fairly robust signal from the models are showing us is that there's potential for that to increase pretty dramatically towards the end of the century. So that gives us something to work with actually. So this isn't all doom and gloom, but what it says is we really need to figure out how to change the way we manage water from what used to be a snowmelt dominated system in the upper rear grand to something that takes advantage of the moisture that apparently will be available potentially from the monsoons. One complication of that, of course, is that we talked about the fires and the stress on the forests. Now, if we have monsoons increasing at about the same time, then we're gonna be experiencing more of this kind of thing. This happened in 2013. After that lost conscious fire, one of the tributaries had a large debris flow on it that actually went to blocking the Rio Grande. We were not able to convey water through the system anymore. Put a lot of people back to work during a government shutdown. And we were able to clear it, but it should give us pause as these, when we see the confluence of these two things, potential increase in the intensity of monsoons and the potential for catastrophic forest fire. So I'm gonna summarize here with some summary slides of the physical challenges for water management in the system. And then as we get into the discussion, I'll talk a little bit more about my recommendations for science and physical improvements that might help us address those. So we've heard this before, just reiterating that the physical challenges include water scarcity as we've always had, and then climate change induced eridification, which is making it even more challenging. Also along with that comes increasing hydrologic variability and therefore decreasing predictability. And of course to scientists that says we need work in forecasting. Risk to upland forests from predators, that's the beetles that we've been talking about and also catastrophic wildfire. This is associated with a loss of our ability to store water as snow and there's also risk of debris flow. We have challenges with perching of the riverbed in areas, especially upstream of our reservoirs where we have the base levels been coming up and we have, we have plugging issues where again we can't convey water down the Rio Grande because we have too much sediment and too little water. Endangered species are an indicator of the loss of the ecological resilience of the system. So maybe the concern isn't necessarily the species themselves, but what they say about everything that's lived in this river historically and how well they do in the altered system. And then aging infrastructure. And maybe that isn't a terrible thing that we have aging infrastructure in that it could be inappropriate for the system of the future as we change from a snowmelt dominated system to say potentially a monsoon dominated system. Maybe it's different infrastructure that we need. So this afternoon we'll have Reed Benson and Melanie Stansbury talking about some legal and policy challenges. I'm just throwing out some examples in the overview here and things that come to my mind and I believe they'll talk to these in much more detail. Rigidity of the operating rules for rivers and reservoirs. That's certainly one I know well in that I worked for a Water Management Federal Agency and we're confronting these constraints all the time, especially as we try to find ways to meet the needs of endangered species. There's also rigidity in the Priority Administration System and as I said, Fred Phillips will be talking about that this afternoon. And the fact that in New Mexico, we have an inability or an unwillingness or both to actually apply this method of distribution of our water. And that could, I'm just throwing out there that could be because of some inconsistency between the Priority Administration and the local culture and history. There's absolutely a need for the federal government to continue with its efforts to settle tribal water rights settlements because these are the senior rights and the non-Indians get what's left. And we haven't, in many cases, we haven't figured out what those are. We just write compacts and things like that in ways that say, oh, we're gonna, nothing we're doing here is going to affect the tribes, the independent nations that get the first water, but it's hard to figure out how much is left. And then as I noted in an earlier slide, there's a lack of consistent accounting of the impacts of groundwater pumping on surface water supplies. And there's conflict over the Rio Grande Compact in the Supreme Court of the United States. A couple of unknowns. What is gonna be the outcome of that this Texas v. New Mexico lawsuit? And how is that gonna affect the economy, the water distribution, the agricultural system in that region between Texas, New Mexico and Republic of Mexico? The impact of the Tamarisk beetle. So it's funny, I'm lamenting the beetles that are killing our upland forests, but we also introduced one that is a native predatory from Asia of the Tamarisk, the salt cedar that is growing along the riparian system, really taking over the riparian system. And we've complained for decades about this three-mile-wide swaths of salt cedar in the area above Elephant Butte Reservoir. And now you take a look at it in the summertime and it's just standing brown. Most of these aren't dead yet, but they might become so. And I've seen in the Green River, further north areas where the salt cedar have actually been killed by this predator. They move in packs, and so they love these monotopic stands. And I hear that by the time they passed about three times, the Tamarisk might actually be killed. And maybe the natives, if we can set up the system right, maybe the native willows can move in and take over some of that habitat. But there's a major landscape transformation underway, and we're really not sure where it's gonna go. Tribal water rights settlements, as I just said, are another major unknown and constraint on the use of the water system by non-Indians, because the Indian tribes have the first right. So with that, I finished the primary overview presentation, but it looks like I might have 10 minutes left. So what I'm gonna do is just flip quickly through second set of presentations that I've put together. We sort of restructured this today's events a few times, and originally I was on the science panel. So I created a presentation on what I believe are some of the science needs in the basin, what we're doing, and then what we need to do. Scientists through the rescue. There's a lot going on in the basin now, in terms of science, improving monitoring and accessibility to data. Shout out to Melanie Stansbury, who passed a bill to increase that, to improve that in New Mexico. We're collecting more data on crop and riparian of apotranspiration, working with NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory on some of that. We've got some instruments to look at reservoir evaporation so we can better understand where that water is going. A tremendous amount of our water supply is lost to reservoir evaporation. We're trying to improve our forecasting, both the spring snow melt and the summer monsoons. And also if we can, the tropical systems that come in the fall, though so far that's kind of eluded us. We've been developing projections of future water supply and demand, and I've shown some of the results of that work here. Reclamation also has a brackish water desalination research laboratory. So the salty water that's in our ground could also be a potential backup water supply in these desert regions. Research into snow processes and changes in the interaction between snow and the forest. There's a lot of research going on at the USGS on that topic, also University of New Mexico. And then research into the endangered species and their needs so that we can find ways to let the altered system meet them better. Conservation and planning. We've got a lot of federal programs that support the irrigation districts in improving their operations, finding ways to get more out of every drop. We also, there are also a lot of municipal conservation programs. The city's doing the same sort of thing, incentives for the urban dwellers to use less water. There's a lot of drought contingency planning work going on. You've heard that term thrown around a lot in Colorado. Reclamation also was a program where we support local institutions to develop these plans and also figure out what infrastructure that they might need in the future to help implement that plan. Another study that was done in central New Mexico looked at transportation and land use planning. If we don't understand what a 200 year flood is anymore because of the changing intensity of our events, then how do we figure out where we can draw the line where people can't live around the river? Those kinds of decisions need to be made. Shout out for the programs that I work in, the WaterSmart programs. These are outgrowths of the Secure Water Act. They're programs where we provide grants to local entities who are trying to improve their water conservation and efficiency and also their energy use. We support the development of watershed groups where community members come together to try to address some of these problems. And also our basin study program where we work with reclamation and all the major entities within a basin to try to use the modeling tools that we have available in our projections of future water supply and demand to work together to model ways that we might adapt our system. We've got a major basin study just kicking off now in the upper-rear grand system. And so I think that that's gonna provide a lot of food for thought on how the community wants to move forward in this changing basin. Okay, I just said that. There's also a lot of physical system improvements going on. There's habitat restoration to improve the connectivity. We talked about how the flood plains become disconnected from the river. We've got a river realignment going on in a perched section of the river. We've got corrective action. Scott Cameron was asking me this morning, I guess what word has gotten around about this improvement to Elvato Dam that we're doing. The Nature Conservancy, the next speaker is from the Nature Conservancy, has done amazing things in the Rio Grande through the Rio Grande Water Fund. What they've done is created this acknowledgement in the users downstream in central New Mexico that they need to help to protect the headwater areas. So they've been collecting, the Nature Conservancy has been collecting money from the central New Mexico water users, irrigation cities, and then using that water to thin the forests and make it so that non-catastrophic wildfires can move through the system. And then we, reclamation does, river maintenance activities to prove safety and conveyance. This is some of the hydraulic reconnection that we talked about going on in the Albuquerque reach. And this is a channel realignment that, gosh, I think I first started working on this in 2003. And finally, this year, this past year when we had enough water in the system, we actually got the river to move. And you can see it just starting here, comes out of the river here, works across that system. And by now the water is fully moved into a lower section so it isn't as perched. Now, this is of course what rivers want to do, especially in a deltaic system. This is just upstream of Elephant-Pute Reservoir. And it wants to move across the delta, but we've been preventing it. So in this case, we had a success. We were able to move it to a lower area and get better conveyance. This is the spillway at Elvato Dam. I remember being, you can walked along this section here and it goes boom, boom, boom. When you walk on it, it doesn't even touch the ground. So there obviously needs to be some work on that before we actually put any water on it. The dam itself also, it's a really unique design from 100 years ago where the actual barrier between the water and the dam and the river is a sheet of metal. And this side, our side, is a landslide that's been creeping downward and pushing its way into that. And so there's definitely some work that needs to be done on that and on the landslide to stabilize it. So reclamation has that work going on as well. Three minutes for my science recommendations. Though I think we'll be having a discussion about this after the talk on the upper Mississippi. So I'll just, in these three minutes, talk about the sort of topics and categories where I think that there's additional science needs and we'll discuss this further then. The first is in the area of data, data collection, data organization, data accessibility, and then use of that data to develop better modeling tools. That's ultimately that the models are the place where we put all of our understanding of different physical interactions together into a system where we can play what if games. This is some work that we're doing on better measurement of reservoir evaporation. So this is part of that effort. Another thing is to bring in the social scientists. I've been to so many of these innovation work and climate change-based innovation working groups and we talk all about the science and how the systems are changing and the weather of the future. And then at the end, we say, where are the social scientists? These people are, it's humanity we're talking about going into this new paradigm and the needs of the people, the desires of the people, the kind of system that they can live in is a critical part of the equation. Forecasting, if you have to get by with less, it's really important to have some understanding of what we're gonna have in any given year. We've gotten better as a people in weather forecasts and then in some of the sort of long-term predictions out here, but in this sub-seasonal to seasonal area, we're lacking. There's been a major research effort in the last several years, but this is an area where a great need for us. Forecasting of snow and dust on snow is certainly a need for us as our snow declines, but also because we have risks, when we think we have a great year, can all be wiped out by a single dust event. So this is something that we need to understand better. We most certainly need to continue our work using general circulation models, also more localized models and hydrology models that those link to to get an understanding of what we're looking at in the future, how rapidly things are gonna change, and also how they're gonna change and where the opportunities might be, like we've talked about for the monsoon. And then I'm a very strong advocate of looking at all of these questions through a resilience lens. So rather than saying is this what we used to have? How can we restore what we used to have instead of saying what systems are working? Where are the thresholds? And where's our operating room for having functional ecosystems and linked social ecological systems into the future? And I think this needs to carry forward into our engineering practices where we build new infrastructure, can we use this resilience thinking to find a way to have systems that are appropriate for a non-stationary world? And one of the things that we talk a lot about is planning for graceful failure. Engineers, we've always said no, systems must not fail, we'll put a safety factor on, and maybe we should start thinking differently, saying where will the system fail and how can we make it so that failure isn't catastrophic? And that opens up a lot of possibilities for us. And then this was my final one. Reclamation has a program through the America competes act of, I think it's 2010, right? We had these prize competitions and it's a way of accessing solver communities who work in completely different areas of science and application, maybe technology tools and things. But we found that in things like forecasting or fish management or quagga mussels, a whole lot of things that we as the federal government have concerns about, that these solver communities can come up with new and innovative ideas that we just spinning in our own gerbil cage don't come up with. So this has been tremendously successful and I recommend building on that kind of thing. Thank you all very much for your time and attention today. That was excellent, thank you very much. We are gonna take a very short break, five minutes, five minutes. Be back here and then we will move to another amazing, interesting river system. Thank you, Dagmar, five minutes. We're now gonna turn to a different river system, the Mississippi River, but we're gonna focus only on the upper mist given the size of the river. We have two speakers that are gonna cover material related to the upper Mississippi. We're gonna start with Gretchen Benjamin and then we're gonna have a little bit longer break. So if you can hang in there, we'll give you maybe like eight minutes instead of five. And then Steve Bois will follow up after that. Gretchen works at the Nature Conservancy, TNC, in the Upper Midwest Division where is a river specialist works on the Mississippi River, North American River Restoration in general. I'm super excited to have her here in, no small part because I grew up on the river. I'm from the Quad Cities area, so I lived a mile off the river and no one ever said the words of the Mississippi River, it was just the river. So literally on Sunday afternoons we'd go watch the barge traffic. So this is what it's like to grow up and watch them go through the lock and dams. And so in any event, I've had a long interest and so really delighted to have Gretchen here and also wanna give a shout out to TNC. Not only is it really interesting, we've done a lot of great work in the Rio Grande but they've really been leaders in much of the upper mist on water quality and quantity ecosystem restoration issues. So Gretchen, thank you, take it away. Alrighty, thank you so much. I'm gonna do a fairly broad overview of the Upper Mississippi River and then Steve will follow on and we'll be talking more about weather and climate change and that sort of thing. And then we hope to have some time where we can just interact with you and have questions and comments after we get done. So I'm here to talk about the Upper Mississippi River. I will be talking about kind of the development that brought us to our current conditions, a bit about the future and really thinking about it in terms of the natural and human assets that this portion of America's largest river is part of. I have gotten information from a lot of sources and a lot of people, but the three people that I am acknowledging on this slide are very important in terms of photos and content. So I wanna bring your attention to their names. As I go through my talk, I will do a bit about location. I'll talk about governance. I'll talk about the economy and then I'll get into the development of the river and what has happened over time. So in terms of location, we have a 2,300 mile river, 2,300 miles that starts in the boreal forest, ends in the Cyprus Tupelo swamps in the south. And as you can imagine, when we're talking about climate change, there's probably gonna be a lot of resilience in there. There probably was a lot of resilience when the glaciers were advancing and retreating and we may need to use that same resilience again. I'm going to be talking primarily about the Upper Mississippi River. There's the basin picture over on your right. There's the main stem picture on your left. It's about 1,300, 1,400 miles of river. It is a large river and it's very diverse from even the top to the bottom. The bottom is considered where the Cairo River, excuse me, the Ohio River comes in at Cairo, Illinois. So that is the delineating mark between the Upper and the Lower Mississippi. And the Lower Mississippi is an alluvial fan essentially an alluvial plane. So it is a very different river than the Upper River. In talking about governance, there's three different ways to think about it. There is basin wide. The Mississippi River basin covers six sub basins. The Upper Miss just being one of those. And it is 41% of the lower 48 states. It touches 31 states. It is a major basin, 1.25 million square mile area. But early on, believe it's 1879, the Mississippi River Commission was established. The commission is a group of four engineers from the Corps of Engineers and three civilian engineers. Those are appointed by the president. And they, as they started in 1879, were primarily interested in commercial navigation and setting up that system to get people in and out of the middle portion of America and move commodities. Over time, and especially with the advent of the 1927 flood, the Mississippi River Commission has turned more of their attention to the Lower Mississippi River and flood risk management in the lower portion of the river, but they do have outreach to the entire basin. Another group that's newer, much newer, is America's Watershed Initiative. This really got going in 2010. General Walsh is here. He was an important part of that original group. And these are very diverse people from commercial navigation to energy to environmental agencies and NGOs and that sort of thing, working together to figure out how do we, from a social, economic, and environmental perspective, create a more sustainable river and bring more attention to the river. And they were really, initially, and General Walsh helped to define this, thinking about a 200-year vision. How do we move in that direction and get there and have a river that's still functional 200 years from now? And I'll be talking more about some of the work that they're doing in a minute here. The Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative is the mayor's up and down the Mississippi River along that main stem. There's 86 of them that are actively involved in that. And they're really thinking about how do they make their cities more resilient? How do they connect those cities to the river and, again, bring that attention from the federal government to the Mississippi River to help them accomplish that? In terms of federal agencies on the Mississippi River, certainly the Corps of Engineers is the dominant authority, if you will. In 1997, the Corps reorganized and created the Mississippi Valley Division. And the division actually runs from the north to the south, the entire main stem of the Mississippi. So they're the most consistent federal agency with authority up and down the river. They have six districts and those six districts work together fairly well to manage the navigation system, the flood risk management, and then also ecosystem restoration. Fish and Wildlife Service has numerous refuges and they're managing the trust species up and down the river, but they have several different regions that touch on that Mississippi River. So they aren't perhaps as well coordinated as the Corps is. The same with USGS. USGS, we get all of our gauging information from a lot of the water resource information. But again, they have multiple regions that touch on that big Mississippi River border. We do have with USGS, they are running our long-term resource monitoring program on the upper Mississippi River and Jeff will be talking about that later on. So they have a very important role. Finally, the Environmental Protection Agency is more linked in with each of the states providing funds and that sort of thing for those folks. And also the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, I'll talk about here in a second. But they are, other than the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force, generally not linked up and down the system. When we're talking about upper Mississippi River governance in particular, there's two organizations that are extremely important here. The first is the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee. These are conservation biologists that started in 1943 because the locks and dams had just gone into place in the upper river. And these biologists were concerned about what would happen to the fishery. Would it remain sustainable? The locks and dams disconnected that longitudinal connection on the river. And so they were very concerned about that and what would happen. That group is still around today. They've been around for over 75 years, but they broaden their perspective on the things that they work on. And these are really the science experts in terms of the state and the federal agencies. And they're a very important group in terms of thinking about the natural resources in those five basin states. And just to be clear, the five basin states are Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. And those five states actually work together quite well. The other really important group for the Upper Mississippi River is the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. And it was originally a commission. It was a commission for about 10 years until 1980 when a number of commissions were decommissioned. And the states felt it was such an important organization in terms of balancing the natural resources and water management of the Upper Mississippi River that they decided to continue on with the group Paydos and have been organized in that way since 1980, basically. And the governor appoints the representatives and those representatives are representing agriculture, transportation, and natural resources. So they have a diverse interest in the way that they represent things. The basin association is key to getting some of the comprehensive work that's been done on the river, something known as the Great Studies that looked at bridging and disposal issues and also the comprehensive master plan. And I'll get into that in a while here. The basin association still continues to work on legislative work for the Upper Mississippi River. In terms of the economy of the Upper Mississippi, about five years ago, the Nature Conservancy, the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, and the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative decided we wanted to know more about the economy of the Upper River, and they had just gotten done doing a economic profile of the Lower Mississippi River. So we decided to replicate that so then we could have a system-wide perspective of the economy. And we worked with the Division of Economics at the Fish and Wildlife Service and using the in-plan model to find an area that basically is two counties out from the main stem of the River to kind of give us an idea what is the basis of the economy that's tied to the river. And in so doing, we found that there are three major economic drivers on the river, first of which is manufacturing, and that's probably true in almost any economic study you would do is manufacturing would come out much higher than anything else. About 280 billion plus is associated with manufacturing and over 560,000 jobs. Agriculture comes in second, but quite a ways down from manufacturing, about 25 billion a year, employing about 138,000 people. And in third place is tourism, which is very important to the Upper Mississippi River at over $20 billion a year and 358,000 jobs. If you look at the other six sectors, they collectively don't even add up to what tourism adds up to. But they're all very important services that help to support the top three economic drivers on the Upper Mississippi River. Just for instance, commercial navigation is extremely important for agriculture, for mining, for energy production and manufacturing, as well as tourism is an important part of our, or outdoor recreation is an important part of our tourism. So all of these together is really kind of the base of our economics in the Upper Miss. There is another way that we look at what's important to create a sustainable system on the Upper Mississippi River. And America's Watershed Initiative is who kind of put this piece together. And what they did was, we've got this diverse group of stakeholders that are working together. And they want to have a metric for how they think about, how are we actually improving the system by working together and trying to change the dynamics for the Mississippi River basin. And so they created a report card. And that report card was done as a composite for all six of the basins of the Mississippi River, but also individually for each basin. And in this case, they looked at the ecosystems, flood control and risk production, transportation, water supply, the economy and recreation. Overall, the grade was a D plus. There's a lot of areas we can improve upon in order to create a better system. And there's a mix, this is actually a paddle wheel. I thought that was a wonderful way to display the report card. But as you look at the different pieces within that paddle wheel, you see yellows and oranges and greens and even some reds. And that's really giving you an idea where the sectors need the most improvement. When we look at the upper Mississippi River in particular, we see, for instance, under ecosystems, in terms of the living resources and the stream side habitat, we're in pretty good shape. But when we think about our water quality, we have some of the highest nutrient pollution in our watershed of any of the six basins. Additionally, we've lost a lot of our wetlands, the states of Iowa and Illinois have lost 90% of their wetlands. So the dynamics of the basin have changed there. And in terms of transportation, our infrastructure is very old. The dams that went in had a 50 year life expectancy. They're about 85 years old at this point in time. So there's a lot of things that you'll see on that paddle wheel that really kind of give you an idea of what is going on within our basin. Yes, yes, thank you. So to think about the upper Mississippi River and think about it in terms of where we are today, we have to go back a bit and think about where we were prior to settlers coming to the middle part of the country and look at what it might have looked like, especially for the upper Mississippi River, the glaciers and the retreat of the last glacier 12,000 years ago is really what has formed for the most part, what that river looks like. Certainly there's five million year old rocks underneath that, but when you're talking about the geomorphology of the river, it really has a lot to do with that last glacial leaving the area. And as Glacial Lake Agassiz and Glacial River War and carved out the valley, the valley was probably 250 feet deeper than it is today, but as those melt waters receded, that deep valley was filled in with sediment and we essentially have an inatomosing braided channel river throughout that upper Mississippi River and it has a gradient across that whole flood plain that can be three or four miles wide up north to 20 miles wide in the more southern portion of the river. And across that gradient you see flowing channels, main channels, off channel areas, backwater lakes, sluice and deep and shallow marshes and you see a gradient throughout that whole flood plain that would have been there. And you would see seasonal changes, the hydrograph that would have been a part of the upper Mississippi River, say 1,000 years ago would have showed us that in the spring, we would have the snow melting, we would have spring rains and we would have a flood pulse come through the system and that flood pulse would drop off into the summer months and we would have low water conditions and then typically in the fall, we might see another small flood bump from fall rains and then go back into that low water connection. So that pattern of dynamics of the hydrology is really what led to the diversity within the upper Mississippi River. And what you would see on the upper Mississippi and most of these species are still out there today. We're really in pretty good shape. You would see the diverse habitats as you see in this middle picture here that show everything from a marsh to a flood plain forest to deep water to shallow water and every change in between that whole scenario. We have a lot of water birds that use the river, the raptors, for instance, we have a National Wildlife Refuge on the upper Miss that's 260 miles long. In 1974, there was one bald eagle nest. There's now over 300 bald eagle nests in that same area. So we have a lot of raptors, waterfall are abundant, reptiles and amphibians the fish can go from dependent on flows to those who are more backwater, lacustrian in their nature. And so we have a very diverse group. But one of the interesting fauna of the upper river is the native mussel populations. There were well over 50 different species up there historically. And if you read some of the old accounts of what like the first kernel that came to the St. Paul the district wrote about in 1864 was that the mussel beds were two and three feet deep. Today, if you found five per square meter, you'd be doing darn good. So that has definitely changed a lot but most of the species are still there. Along the river, there's been a lot of work to look at the encampments that are on the flood plains. And most of these flood plains show that the people used the area seasonally was an important place to harvest and gather bounty for the rest of the year when conditions might be a little bit more difficult. There was also a lot of artifacts from the river that they could use to help them build tools and objects of beauty and that sort of thing. So the indigenous people were certainly very connected to the Mississippi River, but on a seasonal nature they kind of used it the same way that our wildlife would be using it. And when we look at where the more permanent settlements were, even like Cahokia, which we believe had about 20,000 people at it, which is just close to St. Louis, Missouri, that was always on a higher terraced area where they could access the flood plain but then retreat up there when the water levels would change. So they were very, the river was very important to them as we find all of these different encampments up and down the river. As settlers first came to the river, initially they were looking at the resources that the area provided. We had incredible pine forests in the north. We had incredible hardwoods in Southern Illinois and Indiana. And most of those forests are gone. They were used to help settle the areas and provide products to the people that were moving into the areas. And our prairies were a great place to start doing agriculture. And so the millions of acres of prairies that were once a part of the upper mess were converted primarily to agricultural areas. And that certainly changed the dynamics of the land and the way that the water flowed off of that land, how much quicker it would come off and how it would bring in sediments and other nutrients and that sort of thing. The river was also looked at as a transportation corridor. And we went through a successional stage of how deep a draft of vessel we wanted to float on that river going from a four-foot navigation channel all the way up to what is the present day nine-foot navigation channel. And along the way, we had to do different things to the channel in order to create that channel. With a four-foot channel, you pretty much only need to remove the snags and maybe do a little bit of dredging. As you move into a deeper draft channel, you have to constrict the channel. As you were talking about with the Rio Grande, they also have to constrict the channel, get the river to do some self-scouring by doing that. And continue to do dredging. But by the time we decided to have a nine-foot navigation channel, we had to have locks and dams in the river. So there are 29 locks and dams on the main stem of the Mississippi River. And those dams were built for navigation. They don't have a flood risk management purpose. Four of the 29 locks have hydropower at them. And those are mostly managed by private companies. But for the most part, they are really just there to keep that navigation channel out there. And as I mentioned before, during the low water time of the summer, they keep the water levels high and alter the way of the landscape with permanent inundation. The final thing that really changed the complexion of the upper Mississippi River was the idea that as people came to this area and saw the floodplains and the rich soils that were sitting in those floodplains, they wanted to be able to farm them and reliably be able to farm them. And so they put in intense levee systems up and down the river. On the upper Mississippi River, the levee systems were kind of a mix of private and public levees. And our different levels and heights and the amount of strength that each one of these levees has is different depending on who put them in. As all of this is happening, there were some people, people are, it's important to note that on the upper Mississippi River, people are very connected to the river. They use the river on a regular basis. They get down, they hunt the fish, they go out in their boats. But even back at the turn of the century, people were realizing that all of the river was going to be levied off so that lateral connection of the river would be completely lost. And they realized that a lot of the diversity associated with the river was with that connection. And so one gentleman in particular, his name is Will Dild. He went on a crusade to try and figure out if there was a way that we could protect at least a portion of the upper Mississippi River from having it levied off. And he was successful in doing this in 1924 by creating a National Wildlife Refuge. And that National Wildlife Refuge, as you see, hopefully you can see that in the map, goes from about Wabashaw, Minnesota, down almost to Devonport, Iowa. And that whole stretch that 261 miles of river is not levied off. And that floodplain is still connected to the river. And I would sort of suggest that it's probably one of the healthiest parts of the river. And Jeff may be touching on some of that later on, but certainly the river is in relatively good shape in that portion of the river. So that's a unique stretch of the river that's important to the diversity of the system. That still remains out there. So as we look at the river and what it is today, we sort of see the accumulation of all that that has happened, that we've converted our prairies and our forests into farmland. And I'm sure maybe some of you flew here and you flew over that patch, those patches of field after field after field for miles and miles and miles. And they're dotted with urban areas. And there's a few larger cities along the Upper Mississippi, but really not that many. It's just really Minneapolis, the Quad Cities, and St. Louis are really the only big cities on the Upper Mississippi. So we've got that going on in the landscape, changing the hydrology, coming in from the tributaries, the amount of nutrients, the amount of sediment, and the rate at which the water comes off the land. We are still managing the river for commercial navigation. It's an important part of the Upper River. It is the way that we move bulk commodities and we are an agricultural area of the country and we need this particular transportation system. But again, to have it where we have locks and dams that disconnect the river from a longitudinal perspective, we're always dredging, we're putting in channel training structures continually. And so we're altering that river on a regular basis to maintain that navigation channel. And then finally, in terms of the levees, if you get south of the Quad Cities below that National Wildlife Refuge, about 80% of the river's floodplain is behind the levees and only about 20% of it is within that active river channel. So it's a very changed system, especially as you get further down. So I mentioned before there's a group called the Upper Mississippi River Conservation Committee and they started in 1943. And they were very interested in figuring out how do we balance the uses of commercial navigation, flood risk management, all of those sorts of multiple uses that the river has. And they were oftentimes fighting with the Corps of Engineers. It was kind of a regular thing. And it really wasn't until we had environmental laws that they actually had something, mechanism that they could start to work towards that balance of using the river for multiple uses. And almost immediately, they did start doing that. The state of Wisconsin sued the Corps over dredging and disposal in the St. Paul District. And that was in 1973 and 74. That led to Congress having the Basin Association bring together both the Corps in the Fish and Wildlife Service as well as the states to figure out how we could continue to dredge, manage that dredge material in a way that was least cost, but also environmentally acceptable. And work towards that end to minimize the impact on wetlands and spawning areas and things like that. At a similar point in time, they're also starting to talk about the aging infrastructure of the locks and dams and wanting to replace the lowest dam on the system, Lock and Dam 26. And so Congress authorizes the replacement of that. But in order to do that and some of the lawsuits that followed after that, they said, you've got that somebody's gotta come forward and take charge and have a comprehensive master plan for the Upper Mississippi River. And the Basin Association, again, was tasked with that particular item. And what is really historic about all of this is that we went from a system of conflict and fighting to consensus on the way to move forward. We created tremendous partnerships between the states and the federal government, the NGOs, the public, and those groups that were formed back then still remain together today. And in the Water Resources Development Act of 1986, we actually designated the river as a nationally significant ecosystem and a nationally significant commercial navigation channel. And with that, we created a dual purpose mandate, if you will, for that upper river so that one couldn't take precedence over the other. And so that's a very important piece of legislation and it really still kind of creates an arrow for us to work on together. With this, the lock at, it's called Mel Price now, but Lockendam 26 was rebuilt and we started a river restoration program. That river restoration program is now known as the Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program, was originally the Environmental Management Program. And the folks that put this together were brilliant in what they did. They said, we've got to restore the river, we've lost our islands, we've lost some of our backwater channels, the deep water areas in the backwaters. We have to figure out how to put that structure back in the river. But we also, we don't even know that much about the status of a lot of our biota or our habitats out in the river and we need to monitor that. So it's a two prong program with restoration and long-term resource monitoring. It's been in place since 1988. That was one of my first jobs was doing water quality at the long-term resource monitoring station. And there's six sites that we monitor up and down the river in Minnesota. All five of the states have at least one monitoring station and I believe it's Illinois that has two. So they're collecting data on all of these things I have listed here. Jeff is gonna talk about that a little bit more later on. And so I'll let him go ahead with that. But the important thing is here, it was authorized in 86, it needed to be reauthorized. It was reauthorized in 2000. It is a continuing authority program. It's funded at $33.17 million. We've only gotten that funding, that's the authorized funding. We've only gotten that funding for the last five years, but because of that funding, we have restored over 100,000 acres of river flood plain up and down. This is 1200 miles of river we're doing restoration on. But in the areas where we're doing this, we have really seen tremendous improvement in terms of habitat and biota. It's very clear that there is a change as a result of this work that we're doing. So this is a real success story for the Upper Mississippi River and the partners that are the Upper Mississippi River. And I just say that there is life beyond that in terms of there are many other things that we also coordinate on in terms of the channel maintenance work. We still work with the Corps on dredging and disposal. Again, trying to do it in the most environmentally friendly, least cost way. When we're looking at channel training structures in the river, today we're looking at channel training structures that are innovative, that actually create habitat as well as help to maintain the navigation channel. And in some cases, they're actually literally taking some of the old structures that might've been built in the 1850s. They're taking some of those out or notching them so that we have better habitat out on the river. So we're working along those line in terms of dam operation. We've been working with the Corps for over 25 years to look at managing the dams for, of course, project purpose, which is navigation, but also can we do some things with the flexibility in dam operation to also create better conditions ecologically. And we've done what we call drawdowns in the St. Paul district. And also we manage the water levels a little bit different in the St. Louis district. And what we're trying to do in the summer months when the water level would have been low historically and naturally is to get that water level low enough so that we can get the mud flats exposed. We get chemical processing and we get the aquatic vegetation to come back. We're also finding that we believe that it helps our flood plain for us, which right now are in a condition of stress. So we're working on those sorts of things. And then finally, flood risk management has kind of really reached ahead on the upper Mississippi River. We have been dealing with high water repetitively for probably the last 20 years, but especially in the last five. And as I mentioned before, some of these dams are public and some of them are private. And we're starting to get some back and forth between the levee districts about what is the right way to manage the levees during a flood fight. And so the Basin Association and the Corps of Engineers are working with stakeholders to figure out what we need for a comprehensive plan and then figure out how to implement that. And one of the things the Basin Association did this summer was conduct six public stakeholder meetings throughout the Basin. So this was a big effort for them to really get people to come and talk about what their needs are in terms of flood risk management. And as you can imagine, there's a very diverse perspective on what that might be. So this is some great stuff that continues to happen because we are fairly well set up to work together. Moving forward, the challenges we have, and this is at a very, very high level scale. There's a lot of depth we can get into from here. But certainly the navigation infrastructure is well beyond its design life and funding seems to be stalled in terms of modernizing that. From the natural resource community, we don't expect navigation to go away anytime soon, but we would like to be able to make sure that we balance those uses. So we work with the folks in the navigation industry, so that's why I would put a bullet like that up there. Flood risk management, as I just mentioned, is we don't have it set up as a system on the upper river. We need to start thinking about it from that perspective. And so that's another piece that we need to keep working on. After like in the 70s, 80s and 90s, we had a fair amount of flexibility about how we could balance the various uses on the river, and we're finding some retraction from some of that work that we've been doing. We need to be able to continue to have that flexibility and to continue to advance towards a more balanced use of the upper river. You'll be hearing from Katrina later on about the fact that we probably have the highest levels of nutrient pollution in the upper Mississippi River, which of course pollutes the upper Mississippi River, but also the lower Mississippi River and all to the Gulf. And just in general, the river, whether you're talking about the basin or the upper Mississippi River is in the Midwest. We don't necessarily get the same kind of attention from the federal government and that that other like coastal areas or areas with higher population. So trying to get attention to the things that we believe are issues is a little bit more difficult. And finally, I would say, and Steve will get into this, we have certainly seen a change in the climate. It is a different place. I've lived on the river since I was three years old and it is not the river I grew up on. And for the last two years, we've hardly had any summer months where the water level got low. It's been very high, very high flows. And so it's a very different river than it was historically. And we are seeing that in real time at this point. And with that, I just say that, I do think the upper Mississippi River has is in a strong point that we have found some good solutions in the past. We tend to work together fairly well, but there's still a lot of work we need to do. And we're now dealing with the climate changes as the real grandest. So I don't know if you want me to give the mic to Steve and let him go ahead. We're going to take a break. So thank you very much. Let's give Gretchen a little bit longer of a break this time, but we really want to start at 1120 to get us right back on schedule with Steve. So what time is it? So you have 14 minutes. We're a little bit late. I'm going to say a C minus, but there might be extra credit later if you hurry up. All right, thanks everybody for getting back promptly. We are going to finish our conversation about the upper Miss. Steve, Juan is here from the North Central River Forecast Center for the National Weather Service at NOAA. So we're going to learn a little bit about climate and what's coming weather-wise. And then we'll have our panel, all three will ask to sit up front and we'll have a nice long time for Q&A. So Steve, thank you and have at it. Thank you. Okay, here we go. So as we heard a little bit from Gretchen where it's a little different world when you get into the Mississippi drainage when it comes to water and hopefully we don't all be scared and run for the hills when we're done here. So leaning heavily on the global, the climate reporting that comes out to NCA for a lot of words, but the key things in the Mississippi basin in general in the upper Mississippi in particular that it's not just that we're seeing the amounts of precipitation increase on annual basis. That's not pro rata over the entire calendar year is that one thing in particular, the mesoscale convective systems, that's a fancy meteorological word, but these large thunderstorm complexes in the summer that drive flash flooding and even river and flooding. And I got an illustration to show how that's changed coming up here. That's a really big one. And the predictability of those things is down on the third floor. It's not even here. So that's driving a big problem. And we'll get a little bit in the science challenges. I'll intermix them a little bit here, but since I got to go twice, you'll just have to tolerate me again this afternoon. We'll catch up with some of that. And then in a little bit, the Northern United States getting more precipitation than when in the spring. Again, that's the normal pulse. You'd want to see the precipitation then and that, but when you combine that with the first bullet, then that's the problem. So those extreme snowfall years have increased and projected to in the Northern, but then they're also saying that that rains and snow in the cold, more rain than snow in the cold season for parts of central and Eastern. Well, where's the dividing line there? And what we saw this year in Nebraska and then what didn't get news was the extension of that storm over into across the Upper Mississippi Basin into Southern Wisconsin was catastrophic rain on snow, frozen ground, saturated ground, record flooding in Southern Wisconsin that got no press whatsoever. So these climate events, these weather and climate events, it's just like one-upmanship. You don't hear about a lot of them that are drastic because they're local. You don't hear about them. So this is going to be a big issue for the Mississippi River Basin is these climate events that we haven't experienced before and how to deal with it. And evidence of the case out in Nebraska is our infrastructure ready to handle it or we see catastrophic results that we just can't recover from. So just from NCA4, the most recent publication, you all know this, you see these blotchy graphs and yeah, the pretty pictures green, green is wet, brown is drier and that and this is just kind of where we've been to 2015. And we see kind of the, we're in the multicolored greens here. We're not just in the light green. We're up there in that 10 to 15% in patches. And we'll see, it actually comes out, I'll just let the cat out of the bag now. It's about an 11% increase over the long-term average. So far. And then again, the NCA4 again details it. This is all published information. Again, that spring, pretty solid dark green over the up in Mississippi, winter kind of a mixed bag. And then summer, this doesn't really do justice to the mesoscale convective system problem and issue that we're having. Not quite sure why that doesn't indicate something that's a little bit more, but maybe it's just that the, well, I don't know, I can't say that because I lived there. I lived in the, with the exception of two years in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I've lived in the upper Midwest my entire life and you never talked about eight 10 inch rainfalls growing up, nobody talked about them. My grandparents didn't talk about them. They're regular now. So let's just break this down to something that hopefully we can understand here in the next couple of minutes. This would be, this is from the NOAA, the source of all the meteorological data. They keep it great records, area-weighted upper Mississippi River basin, annual precipitation. So I've gone on here and stuck a couple of things on here. Linear trend line, you all understand, but this darker line here is a 30 year moving average. We do our climate normals 30 years. If you were living in the upper Mississippi River basin from 1800 to 1930, you probably didn't see a lot of difference. Yeah, it rained a little more some years than others. Didn't matter. And it was that way for your children all the way up through 1960 into 1970. The 30 year moving average doesn't really move at all. You have some up and down. You have the drought years. You have the 30s where you have several years in a row of mostly down precipitation. You have the 50s drought. Well then what happened? It just took off and it's been nothing but up ever since the line just goes up and up and up and up with just a couple blips down. We get like the 2012. We get a rapid decline in precipitation in the summer months, flash drought they call it. But it doesn't really even come close to the drying out that you see back here. In fact, there's only been five years since 1990 that have seen an average, the precipitation for the year, five years out of the last 30 years were below the long-term average. Only five out of 30 years, quite remarkable. Gotta make sure I hit all my points. Excuse me. Yeah. Oh, in 1942, just remember that. I'm gonna refer back to it here in the next slide, but 1942 was the highest precipitation year in the kind of before 1970. So what does that mean for the runoff and water that gets into the river? And so runoff isn't the water that's immediately in the river. So we see a lot of pictures about the river. We never see pictures of the uplands or the tributary rivers that come into it. It's a basin as a whole. We gotta drive that into the lexicon that it's not a river, it's a watershed. It's everything about the watershed. And that's what we'll detail a little bit in the science challenges this afternoon. It's watershed, watershed, watershed. So the first thing is to jump out on you here is this orange line, gray line and green line are 25, 50 and 75th percentile. And so it should jump out pretty quickly that runoff's non-linear at some point, at some point it accelerates beyond and you get more runoff than rainfall. The top line is last year record amount of runoff in the basin. The blue line right below that was 1993. So you have, which was the second, previous highest, radically different in look. The 93 runoff came much later in the year. And the purple lines in 1942. 1942 was 39 inches of precipitation over the basin. 2019 was not even the highest runoff year. It was the third highest, about 45 inches. So the runoff in 1942 was 10.4 inches. The runoff in 2019 was 20 inches. So it's six inches difference in precipitation, six inches greater precipitation, but 10 inches greater runoff. How did the basin do that? How did the basin do that? That's a science question we'll look at this afternoon. But how did the basin do that? So we'll get it. Here's the mesoscape convective problem. State climate office in Minnesota, it's done a really good job of cataloging flash flood events over the state of Minnesota. So I took out a typical one from July of 1978. And those are isohyates. We didn't have color graphics stuff back then. So we just were stuck with that. But what's remarkable here is that the six inch isohyate, which inside here is basically the largest inner one here. Not that there's a seven inch here, but six inch. It doesn't even cover the, it doesn't even cover the area of one typical county. A lot of the counties in the Midwest are about the same size. So that's about, they estimated that was about 5,000 or 500, 500 square miles, the six inch contour. The six inch contour for the September of 2010 storm, about 5,000 square miles. What is so different about the climate, the meteorology, the atmospheric circulation that can drive that much moisture into the center of the continent and dump it out in a 24 to 30 hour period? That's a big question. And we see these events all the time, at least in my lifetime. So this is a raster hydrograph of the flow at the St. Louis Stream Gauge. So that includes the Missouri River, but they experience a lot of the same impacts that we do. So it's for a proxy, it's the same deal. Red colors being low flow, blue colors being high flow. What strikes you here is that in 1860s at the bottom, 2019s at the top. And what strikes you here is the rhythm of it. So the center, the high flows, being predominantly here in the center and the low flows in the fall months. It used to be that the low flows would go for decades, literally, in the fall. And then you might get a wet fall.  In the last 30 years that's flipped and it's all wet falls and just a few dry ones. It never takes a break. And as Gretchen said, it's not the same river. It never takes a break. The water's flowing there at high load nearly all the time. It never gets a chance to reset. So that, again, that's the question is how can the uplands retain, how can they retain any more water if they're just constantly getting water? So something to think about. So when I started forecast, I don't know how much time I got because it doesn't look like it's, I don't have 58 minutes. When I started, 1989, the old timers that have been doing this for 10, 20, 30 years, one of them gave me a firehouse analogy.  We forecast for a little bit, we're done. We analyze what we're doing, try to improve on what we're doing. That's just polish the fire truck, fix the hoses and all that. And wait for the next fire to come. Well, I'm telling you right now, the town's burned down. We've been out there so many times trying to battle the fire that it's gone. We're just constantly forecasting. We forecast the river flooding. We're constantly, it just goes from one to the next to the next that we hardly ever have downtime anymore. It's remarkable. As illustrated by the flood history at St. Louis, you see one flood, 1785, one big flood, 1844. And we had none in 47. You don't see 1942 on here. And then 73. And then the rest of them have all occurred in the last few years. I don't think it's me, most of these are in my career. I have actively participated in every one of those in the green box and trying to predict that. And the association with that we'll get, again, we'll get a little bit into the science of that. But literally the basin was developed for a different climate. We're fighting, we are fighting the weather to exist in the basin all the time now. It was the big development, basically a major development from the 1850s after the Civil War through about 1960 when you're talking major infrastructure, flood control reservoirs, locks and dams, all that. There was done on science, engineering and science based on the records they had at the time. Can they handle even where the climate we're at? So, or the climate we are heading to. So can they handle it even today? The challenge might be no, but it could get worse. And again, going back to the US Global Change research program, is it in the upper Midwest, even under the low scenario of emissions, looking out here towards the end of the decade, you're probably in this 10 to 19 to 20 to 29% increase or even higher under the high scenario. We've already gone up 11%. Can we go up another 10 to 20, 30%? That's the question. Especially can we go and keep compounding the problem and make it even higher? And the projections are pretty solid for the winter and spring scenario. That those months will increase. It shows a little bit drier in the summer, but I think that might be because typically these weather models, which are going to develop the climate models, if they can't predict the mesoscale convective systems, now they're not predicting them in the climate outlook. They don't just kind of magically appear in the climate outlook. So I'd be a little bit skeptical on this. This is personal. This is me talking just from the 30 years of experience. This is maybe not the company line, but 30 years of experience predicting mesoscale convective complexes that drop billions of gallons of water on the landscape in 24 to 30 hours. That's not included in there. So what we don't know, now this is right out of that same report, global US report, potential surprises, large scale shifts, hitting tipping points, compound extremes. This 2019 flood was a compound extreme. Gretchen talked about the sub basins, the Ohio river, the upper Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, white and the lower red. Four out of those six basins experienced extreme flooding this past year. Not all at the same time, started with the Ohio, then the Mississippi, upper Mississippi and Missouri kicked in with the first bomb cyclone, started the runoff. And we started to get heavy precipitation up in the upper Missouri. And then in the summer, down in the Arkansas, kicked it all together, longest flood in history, over 200 in some days, down at Red River Landing, down in Mississippi and New Orleans area. Were we one more climate tipping point away from a catastrophic event? Just a question. So if we combine all these together, if we had the longest flood in history, it wasn't record flooding, as far as level goes on, except at Davenport, on the Mississippi, but the duration, stressing the system. Again, we're getting the science of the whole levees. Can these levee systems make it? A lot of them can't, they're breaking. Every year we're breaking new levees of these levees in Illinois and Missouri. And I just want to throw in drought. I came after the 87, 88 drought, so I didn't get to experience that in my working career. The flash drought occurred in 2012. We could still have these droughts. And they're interesting science experiments. We'll just touch on that a little bit here. And again, this afternoon, is that the soil is, the soils I think are the key. Understanding how our soils are working right now is a key. One thing we found in the 2012 drought, because it was followed by a heavy precipitation, winter precipitation year, with a very heavy accumulation of snow, especially just north and west of the upper Mississippi basin and the Red River Valley, border between Minnesota and North Dakota. And we over-predicted the amount of runoff that spring. And on what reanalysis we could do, we actually found videos of these huge lakes of water going into the ground and bubbles coming out, water going in macro pores, created by the shrinking the soils, clay soils shrinking and cracking. So that's just a teasing on the science for this afternoon is that, are we creating macro pores at all in the soil? Something to think about over lunch so that the soil can take water. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that. And that's it. Thank you very much. Great. Okay, I'm gonna ask now that our three panelists sit at the table. And we have a nice amount of time here for Q and A. In order to keep this organized, please, if you'd like to ask a question, pick up your tent and do this. I will do my best with help up here of keeping order of the order in which you put up your tent. And then you can ask questions for those online. If you have questions, there is a chat room or something chat thingy that you can ask questions of. So please feel free to do that as well as anybody. Yeah, if you're sitting out, if you don't have a tent wave at me and we'll add you to the list. I might need you to tell me your name or something, but we'll do our best here. Okay, so Nisha, I saw you. Why don't you start and I'll start collecting names. Thank you so much for all this great presentations. Really interesting and informative. I have two questions. One is for our first speaker about the any efforts on groundwater recharge as the precipitation patterns and also snow capacities changing. And for our second speaker, you spoke about modernization of the infrastructure and as we are replacing the existing aging infrastructure. I was wondering how does that modernization looks like and are we incorporating some of the changing patterns? Again, in climate patterns that we have into this process of designing future infrastructure, are we still considering the same type of dams and levees and all sort of infrastructure we had in the past century or are we considering something that would last 100 years and make us more resilient? Thank you. Water recharge, this doesn't seem good. Hello? Okay, all right, great. Again, thanks for that question about groundwater recharge. Absolutely, groundwater recharge is changing as our precipitation changes, soil moisture changes, the patterns and the timing. The difficulty with answering that question is that it's very site specific, exactly how the recharge will change. Mountainfront recharge will change differently from recharge that comes from the river bottom, which I showed in one of my slides. So it requires site specific studies to figure out how these systems are changing. In some places, the recharge could increase and I think that's a potential in the Pecos basin, which is sort of the eastern and tributary in New Mexico to the Rio Grande, where I think I mentioned that what has been snow and is becoming more rain comes off the Sierra Blanca in central New Mexico and then falls off underground into a network of caves. Now, if we have a more flashy system, there's to some degree that network of caves can absorb a larger, faster runoff in a way that if you required infiltration, wouldn't be able to accommodate that increased flashiness, right? So it requires the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and others to do a lot of site-specific research into those changes. But the big change to groundwater is the one that I pointed out in my talk and that is the fact that when our surface water supplies are low in the desert southwest, we turn to groundwater and we tend to deplete that source and then that in turn feeds back to our surface water system and more of that seeps into the ground. It recharges the groundwater but probably has a diminishing capability to actually effectively recharge it because there's less surface water. Actually, can I follow up? So what I meant, sorry, I should have been more specific. I meant manage recharge, so sort of using groundwater. So aquifer storage and recovery. Yes. Got it. And that is something that is being practiced in quite a few areas in the desert southwest. Arizona is making great use of that. New Mexico is actually challenged by the structure of the Rio Grande Compact. So maybe Eric could put up the last slide from my presentation. I think it's the very or second to very last. The structure of the Compact I mentioned has a lower proportion of the water going downstream when there's lower supplies. But when we have say a big snow melt runoff or lots of spring rains or something like that, a whole lot of water that rings the bell, thank you, in terms of compact delivery obligations. When we have those big years, we actually get to the point in New Mexico where the delivery obligation is actually larger than the actual allocation of the river to that state. So in this case, I looked at 10 and 25% losses through the system as the waters conveyed through New Mexico. And we find that if we were to have say a really big water year of 3 million, that's the top number put into the Rio Grande Compact, the allocation to central New Mexico would be negative 245,000 acre feet. So basically in New Mexico, we take our big water years, that's when we get compact debits and we have to make up for them in our drier years. And so it's challenging to find ways to implement aquifer storage and recovery in that kind of system. But I will say that it's being done by the city of Albuquerque using the imported San Juan Chama water which isn't subject to that restriction. So there's a lot of potential there and it's being used by Albuquerque and in more indirect ways also by Santa Fe. Great, thank you. Next, I have Robert. Sorry. Let me just quickly respond to the modernization question. There's a couple of different responses here. In terms of the locks and dams, we went through a very extensive study, a navigation study that started in 1993 and was completed in 2004. And what we ended up with through that process was taking existing locks and dams and taking the lock itself and changing it from a 600 foot lock to a 1200 foot lock. So it's just a function of creating more capacity as opposed to changing that structure that may or may not be able to handle more water in the system on a regular basis. So with that, that's kind of one glimpse at it. In terms of thinking about the levee system and moving forward and kind of the comprehensive look that I believe we're gonna undertake here very soon, my hope is that we will look at the levee systems, figure out where we need to raise the levees, where we need to lower the levees, where we need to set back the levees and where we need to disconnect those levees and create more flood storage capacity again in that river. Because right now, as I mentioned, about 80% of the river floodplain is behind those levees and when you have that continual flow a whole year's worth of high water levels working on those levees, they start to weaken and you're probably going to need to have more storage capacity, natural storage capacity. So I look at it as a green and a gray and variations in between there and what we're going to have to do and at least we, I think we have that choice right now as we go forward and put together this comprehensive plan. Great, thank you. Sorry for the interruptions. Can I say, sorry, one more thing on the groundwater recharge question. The state of Colorado, actually I mentioned in my talk the way that they implement priority administration on a daily basis, they don't have water storage or significant water storage reservoirs up in the San Luis Valley. So what they do is they allocate water according to priority, everybody has a year of their initiation on 10 day rotating cycles. And when irrigators get water that they can't use, they take, we saw that picture of their big circular irrigation systems. In the corners of those, they use those to recharge the groundwater, which then they can pump again in equal amounts later in the season when the water supplies are lower. And so they practice this sort of aquifer storage and recovery as part of their normal operations every year. Okay, thanks. I have Robert, then David, then Shaowen, then a gentleman over here and another gentleman over there in that order. Robert. Yeah, I'd just like to follow up on the last question. Gretchen described very well the compensation that's gonna be needed for more rainfall on the upper Mississippi River. We all agree that we're way behind on infrastructure anyway, it has to be upgraded. And clearly we need to right size that upgrading if an infrastructure plan ever happens comes out of the federal government. My question is, isn't this really a kind of, in the long-term sense, isn't this a luxury problem? I mean, isn't it great to have more rainfall?  That sounds worse. So, I mean, I'm not a hydrologist, but can somebody give me a perspective in the long-term sense, is this a bad thing to have more rainfall? Wow, that's an interesting question. And actually, I have thought about that, that it is a luxury when I talk to my colleagues out west and I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't have to deal with that problem. It's a water quality problem on the Mississippi. It's a water quantity problem when you get out west. And so, depending on what's going on, I think a lot of our infrastructure is built within that floodplain and is susceptible and vulnerable to these increased water levels. So, if we wanna move our cities back away from the river and spend those billions or trillions of dollars to do that, then it's not a problem. But I think it's going to be a very expensive proposition to move all of that up and out of there. So, is it easier probably to have lots of water? I'm not sure. I think that the takeaway that I got from all three of our talks is that our systems are maladapted to what we're expecting in the future. And whether it's too much water or too little water, there's gonna be consequences for the facts that it doesn't match. And if we can have our crops withering on the field down in the Rio Grande Valley, there might be crops rotting in the field up in the upper Mississippi. So, okay, exactly. So, there's challenges to both. Yeah, I'd just like to summarize that the too much water problem is that, yes, it is a problem, because you have 60% of the watershed wants to get rid of it now. The minority of the watershed being along the river doesn't want that water. It's a fight. The last question opens up the topic of more opportunities for inter-basin transfer, but that's a topic for another discussion. My question relates to spatial variability and climate, the changing climate. Steve mentioned the need to think about the entire watershed. He just mentioned, again, thinking about the small streams and creeks that feed the main rivers and how they're impacted, different management, considerations for them versus the large rivers. And Dagmar mentioned the site specificity of recharge. So, to the panel, I ask for the climate is changing, but it's changing in different ways in different places. And there is a lot of spatial variability. A lot of those maps show the whole northeast is plus X% precipitation, but there's actually a lot of variability in there. And maybe we'll start with you, Steve, what you've observed and does that lend itself to prioritizing different areas of the upper Mississippi watershed, for example. So, if I think I got the question right, is that, yeah, there are priority areas that are probably a little, that can't handle the increased precipitation or may not be as participatory. It's been, the focus of it really has been in the agricultural, not so much the forest and region in the north. So, basically north of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul and say north of, and then extending over towards the Great Lakes and the forest, more of the forested region is not as much of an issue with the heavy precipitation. In fact, they've probably in the last 30 years had the least amount of precipitation in excess problems as you move further south, it magnifies. I think the old adage applies, not old or the wet gets wetter and the dry gets drier and those are the forecasts that we have for the different parts of our climate system. I think I'll just add to that, that certainly there's spatial variability in the changes. There's also temporal variability in the changes and I believe that the big thing that we need to keep in mind is something I brought up in the final slides that I presented that we're going, we're stepping into a place where there is no normal. People talk a lot about the new normal but the challenge that we have for science and engineering and management is that we're stepping into a place where we have constantly changing systems. We don't know exactly how they're gonna change primarily because we don't know how humans are going to behave, but we know that we're in a system where things will always be changing. So we can't just say, okay, well, now let's make those levies and navigation systems fit the conditions we pay. That change is gonna continue. So if it spatial varies temporarily and it's not gonna stop. So that's where I think, thinking within the resilience lens is really helpful. What kind of systems are stable in the systems that we're operating now and where are the thresholds of that stability? Which ones can we rely on? Which ones need help? And that is in sort of social ecological systems that are the same as we had in the past or new ones that are functioning. But if we start to categorize things that way, then we might have a better understanding of how to move forward. And real quick, I'll pick up on that as well. In terms of talking about the temporal changes and we're seeing the water come, not just in the spring as it traditionally did, but we're seeing it throughout the summer and we have certain habitats that were under stress, under past conditions. But as we move forward, especially our floodplain forests, we have over 300,000 acres of floodplain forests in the Upper Mississippi River. And those floodplain forests were aging, they were mature forests, they were stressed out. And now they're inundated all summer long and they don't like that. And so we were already concerned about these forests because of pest invasions and other plant invasions and that sort of thing. So now we've got one more thing to worry about, can they handle this kind of inundation? And also our aquatic plant communities along the edge of the river, if the water is always up, they aren't doing well either. So, and that's sort of the base of the ecosystem out there. You start to pull those pieces out, then the biotic community starts to decline as well. So we have concerns from those perspectives. Great, thank you, Shao-Anne. Well, greatly enjoyed the three fascinating talks. Thank you very much. One keyword jumped out of many interesting aspects was change from your talks as was your responses so far. And there's one slide that really impressed me. I think from the first talk, you had a map depicting two river channels and banks. You know, one is decades ago and one is right now. And dramatic change, right, from those two maps. But I wonder, there are certainly evolution, right, between a while back and what do we currently have based on what you presented. So I have a question slash comment that is for such complex systems involving the natural processes and the human environment interactions in the social ecological systems, we seem to be at a point really require holistic approaches, particularly for predictions we need to make and we would benefit from more detailed capturing of what has happened to get us better predictive power, particularly for spatial prediction, meaning where these things are gonna happen, where tipping points are going to occur across these complex systems. So I know we'll be learning more sciences this afternoon, but I wanna ask you at this stage for better predicting power, what do you see we need to improve for getting us better equipped, for instance, through better knowledge coming from the past events. This could be, for instance, including better data, better models and so on. But this predictive power at this stage, at this sort of almost to me across roads as you were alluded to, we're seeing so abnormal patterns we're not familiar with. So how do we approach this from the prediction point of view and also from holistic system point of view? I know it's a long comment question, but. Yeah, and I'm not sure that I can add that much to what you said in a sense you've answered it. I can see that you're on board with the resilience thinking approach. We have to use all of the information that we have. What is the current system? How did we get there? What were past weather conditions? How to defect it? What's the natural ways the system wants to react? And then use that, I think, in incorporating into modeling tools that understand physical processes to try to play what if games, to try to see how we can, in resilience thinking, how we can break the system. Where are the thresholds? And we need to incorporate all of that, all of those pieces of information, tree ring information in terms of past variability of the climate, geomorphology, in terms of the understanding of the river systems, foresters, in terms of the understanding of the watershed health in the forest system, and then integrate those into a whole to try to get our best understanding of what the future might look like. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. The paradigm of observation, resolution, to what we want to predict. I don't think those are jived right now, and I'll get into that this afternoon. The complexity of modeling, the landscape and the soils is much larger than