Thomas Howard, the Executive Director of the State Water Resources Control Board, has approved the revised Sacramento River Temperature Management Plan, submitted by the Bureau of Reclamation on June 25, 2015. A revision of the plan became necessary when a faulty reading from a temperature gauge showed that there would not be enough cold water in Shasta Reservoir to protect winter-run Chinook salmon if operations were to continue as called for in the original plan.
Mr. Howard notes that the revised plan does not achieve a temperature of 56 degrees F as required, but should provide for stable but higher temperatures throughout the temperature control season. “The June 25 Temperature Plan is expected to be more protective than targeting 56 degrees F now and running out of cold water before the temperature control season is complete,” he writes. “However, there are still concerns with maintaining temperature control throughout the egg incubation period with the revised plan that will need to be managed very closely sue to very low cold water storage levels, expected heat waves, and inaccuracies of the temperature model that was used to develop the revised plan.”
The National Marine Fisheries Service has submitted a concurrence letter with the biological opinions, acknowledging that the storage in Shasta Reservoir “will not provide for suitable winter-run habitat needs throughout their egg and alevin incubation and fry rearing periods,” but the plan “represents the best that can be done with a really bad set of conditions.” The NMFS letter further states that these conditions could have been largely prevented with upgrades in monitoring and modeling and reduced releases from Keswick in April and May. The NMFS letter concludes “the plan provides a reasonable possibility that there will be some juvenile winter-run survival this year.”
The revised plan has been approved, but with added conditions, such as submitting updated reservoir temperature profile measurements on a weekly basis, daily updates of average river temperature conditions, and actual CVP/SWP operations upon any significant change in operations. Other requirements include meeting at least weekly with the Sacramento River Temperature Task Group and performing a review of the 2015 temperature control season to evaluate the effectiveness of operations this year, as well as necessary actions to improve temperature control operations in the future, and many others.
For more information …
- Click here to read Executive Director Tom Howard’s order approving the revised plan.
- Click here for the revised Sacramento River Temperature management Plan.
——————————————–
Get the Notebook blog by email and you’ll always be one of the first to know!
- Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM. Breaking news alerts like this one, too. Sign me up!
Maven’s Notebook
constantly watching over the world of California water
