In recent years, cities, municipalities, tribes, and industries have been upping their orders from the Central Arizona Project, which is responsible for transporting water through 336 miles of pipelines and canals from Lake Mead on the Colorado River to Maricopa, Pima, and Pinal counties.
Arizona cities are using the larger orders to stockpile water ahead of potential future cuts, which are being negotiated as part of Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan (DCP).
In 2016, CAP delivered about 511,000 acre-feet of water, for example.
The year before, it delivered about 600 acre-feet more than ordered.
For the third year in a row, Phoenix has ordered its full allocation of Colorado River water — 186,557 acre-feet per year, according to Campbell.
The Colorado River is not Phoenix’s sole supply of water.
Water banking, as the process is known, can be done by actively injecting water through wells and into aquifers underground.
Recently, the city has inked deals with the city of Tucson and the Salt River Project to store water in facilities owned by those entities.
In late September, SRP and Phoenix announced a deal that would allow Phoenix to store additional unused Colorado River water in the Granite Reef Underground Storage Project, which sits on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land.
That includes being able to store it for the future.” Patrick Dent, water control manager for the Central Arizona Project, said that the city of Tucson was responsible for the single largest change in the additional 23,500 acre-feet of water that cities and industries ordered in 2019 from CAP.

Although precipitation slowed down harvest, it was beneficial in cutting down drought conditions in parts of Kansas.
Early October rainfall also had some positive impacts in Texas and Oklahoma as it improved drought conditions there, too.
The USDA said the hurricane left damage to pecans, cotton, vegetables and other crops in the Southeast.
Looking ahead, the month of November looks to favor above normal precipitation for Texas, Oklahoma, southwest Kansas and the southern half of Colorado.
November is expected to be warmer than usual for the entire United States.
Above normal temperatures are expected to stay the next several months for Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and central and western Texas.
Globally, the watch for the switch to El Niño is ongoing as scientists watch for changes in sea surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions.
The views from the farm helped spur her interest in weather.
Following high school, she went on to get a bachelor’s degree in meteorology from the University of Kansas.
Follow her on Twitter: @ReginaBirdWX.

The gap between Pinal County farmers and the Gila River Indians over how to protect the Colorado River and Lake Mead is far wider than the interstate highway separating their communities.
But non-Indian farmers, tribal leaders, cities, developers and other interest groups can’t agree on what to cut.
Under the guidelines, when Lake Mead first falls below 1,075 feet at the end of a calendar year, the CAP would lose 320,000 acre-feet of water.
Pinal farmers would lose nearly half their CAP supplies under the 2007 guidelines, but all of them under early versions of the drought plan.
The Pinal farmers, numbering about 200 in four irrigation districts that get CAP water, are fighting to get the cuts reduced by the committee.
I’d have to give it back,” said Pearson, who has a “Born to be a farmer” sign in her office.
Pearson’s Santa Rosa Produce farm has long-term contracts to sell melons to Walmart, Costco, Aldi’s and Kroger, grosses $30 million to $40 million annually and employs up to 1,200 people during peak harvest seasons, her state representative, David Cook, recently wrote to Gov.
But if his CAP supplies went away in 2020 — when the Colorado River’s first shortage could be declared — his Maricopa-area farm would drop from 1,700 to 775 acres, reducing crop yields 45 percent, he said.
Thelander said that under the 595,000 acre-foot plan, farms would get 35 percent of their current supplies over the next seven years.
When Mead drops to 1,025 feet, under any plan, cities and tribes would still get water while non-Indian farms would get none.

A major deficit in the post-monsoon rain, i.e. rain received after September 30, has left parts of the country high and dry.
Therefore, many states were looking forward to good rains in October and November to avoid drought conditions.
This might seem quite good, but the problem lies in the distribution of rainfall across regions and months.
The major issue with extended dry periods during the monsoon is the lowered soil moisture content, a crucial factor for a drought declaration.
This year, although the northeast monsoon is expected to bring more-than-normal rainfall, its onset was delayed multiple times until its eventual arrival on November 1.
The reported groundwater depletion in Maharashtra is worst since 2015, which was an extensive drought year in India when 11 states including Maharashtra declared a drought.
Monsoon 2019 and brewing El Niño risks Soil moisture reduction due to dry spells during monsoon might become a vicious cycle.
Though it is too early to predict the impact on next year’s monsoon, it is proven that all the severe droughts in India have historically been preceded by strong El Niño conditions over the Pacific.
In fact, all droughts in the past century have followed El Niño events (although all El Niño events do not necessarily mean a drought).
Be it monsoon or El-Niño, most major weather phenomena across the globe are dependent on the heating on land and oceans.

After five years of drought, more that 1.5-million people were uprooted from their homes as their soils slowly, year by year, dried and cracked.
In Kenya, one goat can sell at market for $70.
While we are talking goats, we can also talk about cows and camels.
All in all, experts estimate that about 20% of the entire livestock of drought-affected areas has died.
While these estimates are not precise, it is safe to say millions of animals died.
When the Horn of Africa last had a famine in 2011, we talked of numbers which are hard to articulate.
Over the past year, governments and aid agencies worked hard to avoid famine, and large-scale death was averted.
How am I supposed to provide for my family with no livestock?” Ahmed, who lives with his family in a makeshift home built from aluminum and fabric in the outskirts of Hargesia, Somaliland, said: “I lost all of my animals decades ago during my first famine in the 1980s.
While this past year has brought rains to most areas, changing weather patterns mean this is an impasse and we need to think of the future.
For the more than 1.5-million people displaced over the past year, they will continue to be stuck in dismal camps for years to come and are dependent on our generosity.

Australia’s long-lasting and severe drought, known as the “Big Dry,” has been persisting for years in some parts of the country and is devastating populations of Australia’s iconic animals.
The drought is shrinking greenery and with it, food and water for many animals like kangaroos, Koalas, emus, wombats, and echidnas.
Unable to adapt to the drought while farmers work to reserve grazing areas for their livestock, wildlife in Australia are taking more risks, traveling farther, and venturing into more populated areas in search of food.
As a result, wildlife rescuers are seeing an increase in traffic incidents from animal crossings and abandoned young.
In the last three years, there has been a 20 percent increase in wildlife traffic incidents, according to insurance reports from Australia.
Many drivers in North America don’t have to be reminded of the hazard of driving during peak deer season in the fall.
“People don’t want to hurt the animal because that’s understandable, but sometimes you just need to learn you don’t swerve, you just have to brake,” Australian farmer, Sandra Ireson, told the Daily Mail.
“And you may have to injure the animal, which is disappointing but that’s better than having a disastrous accident.” The Daily Mail reported on the steep declines in wildlife populations due to the drought and stated that the animals are not able to adapt quickly enough to the changes.
“We’re finding a lot more wallabies with blindness because they’re actually coming out into the open paddocks searching for food, and their eyes are unable to cope with full sunlight,” Rachel Walker, a wildlife rescuer told the Agence France-Presse.
In some parts of New South Wales, kangaroos have been particularly hard hit, with one ecologist reporting a 90 percent decline in the local kangaroo population.

MITHI: Nine more infants died from complications caused by malnutrition, waterborne diseases and viral infections in drought-hit Thar towns of Mithi, Kaloi and Nagarparkar on Sunday, raising the death toll to 544 this year so far, according to officials.
Seven of the children died in Mithi Civil Hospital where they were brought for treatment from remote villages of the desert region.
Health officials reiterated the government’s line of arguments about unabated deaths of infants and said that most of the children dying in hospitals were underweight, a result of child marriages and lack of birth spacing.
Parents of the victims and those accompanying their ailing children at the hospital complained about lack of healthcare facilities in their villages because of which they had to travel several miles to take their ailing babies to Mithi.
Banks, NGOs, moneylenders warned Thar SSP Imran Quraishi has warned NGOs, traders and local branches of micro-financing banks to stop recovery of loans from poor Tharis as long as severe drought persists in the desert region.
He said at a press conference at his office on Sunday that lending NGOs and some individuals who dealt in the ugly business of interests had made the lives of poverty-stricken Tharis miserable by first trapping them in the debt and then callously demanding it back despite drought conditions.
Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2018

This summer’s drought forced Ketchikan Public Utilities to run diesel generators and limit use of hydroelectric power from the Swan Lake Hydro Facility due to low lake levels.
Since mid October, the city has been powered exclusively by generators, incurring high costs in fuel and maintenance.
Bryan Bertacchi, Utility Director for the Sitka Electric Department, joined KCAW’s Katherine Rose on the Morning Interview to discuss what steps Sitka is taking to avoid similar measures.
One of the key projects is the revitalization of the Marine Street Substation, which was built in 1980.
The Electric Department’s biggest concern at the facility is the nearly 50-year-old switch gear, essentially the substation’s circuit breaker.
“If we have a failure in there, it could be a very very long outage like 3, 4, 5 months without power for 80 percent of our customers,” Bertacchi said.
Bertacchi said Sitka did not have to rely on generators this year thanks to the the Blue Lake Dam expansion project, which saved electric customers $7 million dollars on fuel and maintenance costs for diesel power generators.

Earlier this month, after years of fitful effort, state agencies and water providers agreed on a Drought Contingency Plan to deal with the very real possibility of shortages in the water supply provided by the river.
On the positive side, the tentative agreement creates a framework to save more water in Lake Mead in coming years and to allocate the supply cutbacks that will accompany the nearly inevitable shortage.
According to the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which oversees management of the river system, there’s a nearly 60 percent chance that a “Tier 1” shortage will be declared in the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) in 2020.
The goal of the Drought Contingency Plan is to prevent even deeper cutbacks in the future supply available to the Lower Basin.
A successfully implemented Drought Contingency Plan will reduce the risk of deeper shortages.
From the moment a Drought Contingency Plan is formally signed, central Arizona will have to live without 192,000 acre feet of water per year.
It’s also likely that the federal government will declare a “Tier 1” shortage in 2020, forcing a cutback of 512,000 acre feet of water per year, or nearly 30 percent of Arizona’s annual Central Arizona Project supply.
But the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan only gets us so far.
This month’s agreements will help get river communities through the near-term shortages that seem inevitable, and they are an important first step toward more lasting solutions.
Protecting the river and the water it provides will require us to develop resilient solutions that reduce water consumption and efficiently share the river’s waters.

Additional rain expected early next week will provide additional help with the drought conditions.
http://DROUGHTREPORTER.UNL.EDU/MAP
http://WWW.ADECA.ALABAMA.GOV/DIVISIONS/OWR/PAGES/DEFAULT.ASPX
http://FORESTRY.ALABAMA.GOV
http://FORESTRY.ALABAMA.GOV/FIRE_TOTALS.ASPX?BV=1&S=4
http://WATER.WEATHER.GOV/PRECIP
http://WATERWATCH.USGS.GOV/INDEX.PHP
http://WWW.TVA.COM/ENVIRONMENT/LAKE-LEVELS
http://WWW.EMC.NCEP.NOAA.GOV/MMB/NLDAS/DROUGHT
https://WWW.GSA.STATE.AL.US/GSA/GROUNDWATER/REALTIME