KBCirrigationokforcastinghardhn100604

http://www.heraldandnews.com/articles/2004/10/06/news/top_stories/top3.txt

Irrigation season OK, forecasting hard

Ducks and geese forage on the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge Tuesday. Officials say habitat conditions on the refuge and others in the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge complex are better this year than they have been for several years.

October 6, 2004

By DYLAN DARLING

Water was a fairly scarce commodity in the Klamath Basin this year, but the Tule Lake and Lower Klamath national wildlife refuges are wetter than they have been for years, federal officials say.

"Some people are telling me that this is as good as it looked five years ago," said Ron Cole, refuges manager. "It is certainly a change from when I got here a year ago."

Having water to spread across the refuges is considered critical in the weeks before the fall migration begins. But whether the water will be available from one year to the next remains questionable for two reasons.

First, federal water managers have a hard time predicting how much water will be available throughout the Klamath Basin.

Second, the refuges are at the end of the line for water in the Klamath Basin. Ahead of them are endangered sucker fishes in Upper Klamath Lake and threatened coho salmon in the Klamath River, federal tribal trust responsibilities for the lake and river, irrigators and hydropower dams on the river.

Last year the refuges received very little water until the end of September.

This year has been different.

"They have gotten lots of water from us this fall," said Dave Sabo, manager of the Klamath Reclamation Project.

The refuges also got $70,000 from the Bureau of Reclamation to pay for groundwater pumping this fall, because the refuges provided 8,000 acre-feet of water to sustain higher flows in the Klamath River last spring.

Cole said the timing of water supplies for the refuges can be as important as the quantity of water.

"A lot of people have been learning that it is as important to us as to a farmer growing a crop," he said.

For farmers on the Klamath Project, the irrigation season that officially ends Oct. 15 was up and down.

Sabo said things looked great going into the year, with heaps of snow in the mountains and predictions of a heavy spring runoff.

But the runoff never materialized, and the Bureau of Reclamation was forced to change its water year classification back and forth to reflect changing water supply conditions.

The Bureau also relied heavily on water from wells to reduce demand for water from Upper Klamath Lake. But concerns about the overall effect on the aquifer have officials looking for other options for next year.

"We are not going to be able to pump as much next year," Sabo said.

What the Bureau will need to do to keep water flowing all depends on how much inflow Upper Klamath Lake gets from snowmelt and spring water.

"We really can't know until we get there," Sabo said. "Unfortunately our crystal ball is kind of cloudy and murky right now."

The best option is to increase storage capacity, he said. But more storage won't help much if inflows don't come in to fill it.

Predicting inflows to Upper Klamath Lake is still difficult, as this year proved.

The heavy snowpacks before the irrigation season had officials feeling good. But as spring progressed the mountains didn't yield the water that was expected.

Bureau officials who hoped Upper Klamath Lake would reach its capacity were disappointed.

"We missed it by more than a foot," Sabo said.

On paper, the 2003-04 water year didn't look so bad, with precipitation totaling 91 percent of average. But the timing of the precipitation was strange, said Jon Lea, hydrologist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

"It shut off at the end of March," he said. Later came a wet August that boosted precipitation totals.

It was during the months in between that the Bureau had to rely on well water to keep water flowing. The agency used a total of 57,000 acre-feet of groundwater, including 25,000 acre-feet from the California side and 32,000 from the Oregon side, said Gary Baker, special projects officer for the Bureau.

Government officials are searching for ways to improve water supply forecasts, which rely mainly on automated snowpack measuring stations in the mountains.

Sabo said more observation sites are needed, and possibly changes in how the forecasts are done.

Officials from the federal agencies involved plan to meet later this month in Portland to discuss how to improve inflow forecasting in the Basin.

"Every year seems like a roller coaster in the Klamath," Sabo said. "There is always uncertainty."