In-person Meeting

June 22, 2018

Participants:

Matt Nobriga, Carl Wilcox, Ann Allison, Victor Pacheco, Grifffin Hill, Sheila Green, Scott Hamilton, Gabrielle Biosrame, JD Wikert, Brett Harvey, Denise Reed, Dennis Murphy, YC Chao, Corey Phillis, Mike Urkov, Josh Israel, Brad Cavallo, Kate Poole, Anna Allison, Chuck Hanson, Cathy Marcinkevage, Sam Luoma, Rod Wittler, David O'Connor, Gary Bobker, Jim Peterson, Adam Duarte

Please note action items highlighted throughout the text

Finalized topic-specific subgroups – Phone meetings being arranged for week of July 9

Delta smelt: Scott Hamilton, Evan Carson, Shawn Acuna, Andrew Schultz, Erwin Van Nieuwenhuyse

Chinook: Cathy Marcinkevage, Chuck Hanson, Brad Cavallo, Corey Phillis, Russ Perry, (also waiting for Carl Wilcox recommendation)

Water delivery: Tom Boardman, Jennifer Nevills, David O'Connor, Corey Phillis

Water quality: Corey Phillis, Sam Luoma, Josh Israel, Deanna Sereno?

Flood risk: Ben Geske, ?

Ag revenue: Ben checking with Delta Conservancy and Delta Council

Review the schedule

Jim reviewed the schedule and the rapid prototype process. This review material will be sent out to the group.

Complete hypothesized management action effects

The group went through the proposed actions and filled in the expected effects of each action. JD wanted a scenario added that was centered on trying to route those fish through Old and Middle River. It was stressed that the group needs to keep in mind (and make very clear in final product/report) that this is not a comprehensive look at every option out there, but rather a pilot study.

Fish friendly diversions near CCF: Is it possible to have a bigger diversion in the central delta to avoid pulling water further out? Yes, this is just brainstorming and the group would like to hear other alternatives. The main benefit of this location is a cost issue. If not for cost, the central delta one would be a lot better. This would likely run Dec-June, but would run year round if it's not too expensive to operate.

Carl: Arrundo doesn't grow in the water. It is on the shoreline. How does this influence smelt? This idea came out of the resiliency strategy by enhancing spawning habitat, but arrundo is not related to smelt spawning habitat. Josh: Maybe the group over-specified and should modify this to say that this is targeted at removal of invasive weed species to improve spawning habitat…the group decided on "remove vegetation"

Jim Hobbs comment: Arrundo has expanded all along the lower SR below Rio Vista where we think smelt spawn. It isn't that Arrundo is in the water and blocking access to sandy beach rather it blocks sand beach renewal from the dunes, causing loss of shoal. This also likely facilitates the SAV expansion, which has also taken over the shoals below Rio Vista. We don't know if this has really led to spawning habitat loss, but if they want to spawn below Rio Vista I'm not sure where they could do it in shallow water.

Spring reoperation of Suisun March salinity control gate: Brett: I think the idea is to match the opening and closing of gates to match the tide ebb and flow. Scott: When delta smelt have done really well there was high food in Suisun marsh. So the group is trying to match the conditions before when food was really high. Keeping gates closed would increase residence time but decrease freshness of water in Grizzly Bay. The idea here initially was to slow down water moving through Montezuma slough to increase the amount of food available to hatching delta smelt rather than having the food get all flushed out. Jim: Is this operationally feasible? Deanna Sereno had made a comment about how this might not work. Carl: I would put great stock in what Deanna said. She is very familiar with how the hydrodynamics work here…The group agreed to remove this idea.

If you have ideas to add to the list please submit these to Ben, Erin, and Jim so the group can incorporate these ideas in future efforts, but for now the group has to go with the current list of proposed actions. The group will post these on the web portal in the near future. Modification : The group will reserve some spots for new ideas so that everyone can contribute to this process, particularly folks that were invited late. Please submit these ideas so the group can review.

Idea from Jim Hobbs: Is it possible that additional flows through the Deepwater Ship Channel could be done? The fish appear to be spawning in the DWSC and sitting there until it gets really warm. Makes me think they either can't find their way out or don't know which direction to go since there is a second turbid-salty front in the ship channel.

Finalize approach to non-ecological objectives

The group doesn't appear to have anyone participating from north of Delta. The group will try to connect with someone from north of Delta to check metrics with them.

Proposed Metrics:

• Water availability
  • Scott: My thinking has changed, I think for the south of delta total exports is fine. Josh will check in with someone from north of delta to see what they would like to use. Matt said total exports have declined but stabilized, but the variance is large. Reliability is related to the variance of it as well. Jim asked if a coefficient of variation would work. Matt agreed that total and relative variability works.
• Flood risk exposure
  • Jim: Reclamation operations folks suggested ramping rate be consideredbecause it captured risk to levees. Scott: What about the probability of flooding islands with a 200 year flood? Denise: It is going to vary spatially considerably. This is probably a qualitative increase or decrease kind of thing. Carl: Water operations in the delta don't really affect flood risk, it is the tides and the flow. It goes to reservoir rule curves for operations. Scott: I was thinking the same originally, but the group has a lot of habitat actions (such set back levees, reconfiguring channel geography, etc.) that may influence this. If you are concerned about flood risk, it is all about water surface elevation. It would be good to get someone from Delta Levee Investment Strategy to weigh in on this. Jim will ask Ben if he has heard anything from them.
• Improve and maintain water quality
  • Matt: I think delta salinity (wanting it to be low) is a good one. Sam: The standards for selenium and mercury are in place for the EPA, but for some of these other ones (i.e., pesticides) is a really low bar. Gabrielle: But for the purposes for this case is to compare across scenarios, so if the group can track/quantify it in the model the group can compare this metric.
• Agricultural revenue
  • Jim looked at the agricultural production salinity irrigation drainage economics and they have metrics, but is there someone specific the group wants to look at? Carl: I would look at it as a reduction in agriculture. Gabrielle: But the group could also be reducing the amount of freshwater available. Carl: So that goes to loss of acres for part of the year. All the salinity standards are focused on use for agricultural production, so you are capturing that there. Other places in the delta it's all about converting ag land. Matt: 1/salinity at jersey point times the number of acres in production would be a simple metric. JD: If ag land is flooded in the model then the group should remove this acreage when calculating this metric. Gabrielle: Should the group do acre months because some acreage can be used for part of the year and the group needs to know how to quantify it if it is only one month? Matt agreed. Carl: If the concern is Yolo Bypass, there is an EIS that has been done. I would use information from that. The group agreed to use the metric Matt described. Agricultural production of lands in acre months also was proposed as an index and there was general agreement that it times (*) 1/salinity was a reasonable metric.

Type of assessment:

• For modeling non-ecological (non-fish) objectives, how does the group want to model these? Does the group want to use expert elicitation? Is there a model the group can pull off the shelf and use? Comment from in the room: There has been some modeling done for selenium in the bay. The group has concepts, but I am not sure there are data for this. There is not an existing model for pesticides. Carl: It depends on what metric. Mercury and selenium are ag drainage issue not storm water issues. Pesticides are a storm water issue probably, and you can use expert elicitation for that. Waterfix and BDCP there have been a lot of actions centered on mercury and selenium so I think that information is out there for that kind of analysis.
• Acres in production: Carl: Subtracting acres from existing areas is probably the easiest way to deal with it. You could look at crop type (i.e., orchard vs row crop or pasture). Matt: It's all available in a GIS. Center of islands is less productive than edges, but it's probably not worth differentiating between ag lands' values. The group could differentiate between crop type removed from production.

The subgroup process

• Jim and Erin will coordinate subgroups that focus on specific tasks. There would probably be phone call meeting in the weeks between the regularly scheduled meetings. There would be a designated team lead and the group may have help from outside folks. The topics would be modeling water, smelt, and Chinook, getting expert elicitation for some of the metrics, etc. Below are the contacts for each of these subgroups with the understanding that the point of contact may elect someone else from their organization to fulfill this role. Jim and Erin will reach out to the points of contacts and see who will be in each subgroup, have initial phone call meetings, and go from there. Sam recommended the subgroups have an outline on how they operate so everyone is operating the same…some systematic process. Note: From now through September, this would probably involve 1-2 days/week.
  • Delta smelt: Scott, Evan Carson, Josh Israel will have at least 1 biologist who can help, the state will have at least 1 biologist who can help, Sheila said they can offer someone as well, Corey
  • Chinook salmon: Brad, Corey, JD, Russ Perry, Cathy, the state will have at least 1 biologist who can help, Sheila said they can offer someone as well, Chuck
  • Water delivery: David O'Connor (Reclamation), Corey, Sheila,
  • Water quality: Corey, Sam, Josh, maybe Deanna (Scott's suggestion)
  • Flood risk: Ben
  • Ag revenue: Josh said the delta conservancy or delta council would be interested in this. Ben should reach out to folks like Campbell to see if they are interested.

Reviewed Candidate action groups

Jim talked about the importance of reducing the list to make sure the group can complete this process well in the timeframe. The group has 37 candidate actions…about 15 should be feasible by the deadline. Scott: A couple will be too complicated to tackle in the timeframe the group has. Corey suggested efforts considered/evaluated by SIT with low impact may be a lower priority too so the group is not duplicating efforts. JD said looking at the time of implementing a project. Sam said it could be how much the group can learn from an action…Scott disagreed. Josh thinks the group needs to have a portfolio of things moving forward and the group has to find the right balance of things to learn from because the group has high uncertainty but the group thinks there will be a high impact and things with less uncertainty that the group thinks will have a high impact. Matt said the group can bookend the water supply actions into the lowest and highest water supply actions to see if there is even an effect. There was agreement on the bookend approach with the some baseline to compare to (which may be current operations and rules…."ROC-on LTO (Reinitiation of Consultation on Long-term Operations) is using a 2025 baseline so the group could borrow from them. Mike cautioned that the group should use a baseline that is widely accepted).

For the spring, summer, and fall outflow and reservoir release duplicate scenarios: Cory was wondering if some of these were just not operationally possible that the group could remove. Josh said D1641 can tell if it is too much water. Gabrielle pointed out that the point of these scenarios was to see what would the benefit be if the group used more water than the D1641 regulations. Matt suggested that each group craft a scenario with some set amount of water (say 200 TAF). Mike suggested making rulesets based on the objective and the period the group are modeling over. Matt agreed. So the group will retain the seasonal outflow. The group will look at the 200TAF if Calsim doesn't blow up. And the group will shape the hydrograph according to Mike's suggestion. Matt said this would be 2 runs if the group can agree on a baseline that is already done. The taxa groups will figure out the rules for releasing water.

Gabrielle suggested a subgroup go through existing CALSIM runs and pick X number of options and just use those as long as they represent some bookends. Matt and Scott agreed as long as they approximate these actions. Jim cautioned that when it comes to making decisions it may work better if the group has CALSIM runs that capture what the group has proposed, instead of restricting the scenarios to existing runs that are "close enough". Jim suggested the group look at contrasting strategies.

Scott sees value in the X2 actions. Matt said there is not much water operations managers can do to keep X2 at 65 in the fall. Josh thinks the seasonal actions are likely to have different outcomes for the Chinook runs. Carl said that for the outflow, reduce export scenarios how the group achieve that water condition can happen multiple ways. He does not think the smelt care on how that happens. Brad said it matters if it influences Chinook. Corey mentioned that it matters if it influences Chinook through water quality, clarity, etc., but maybe the first cut should just focus on the outcome (like fall X2) and not how they got there. Sheila sees value in knowing how to achieve that outcome. For the outflow actions, the smelt and salmon subgroups would develop rules for flows in different seasons while considering the number of runs. The group decided to focus on X2 and not worry about where the water comes from (reduced exports or increased reservoir releases) for now because there are too many questions about what will work with the model. Matt comment: It's not so much an issue of what will "work" with the model. CALSIM was designed to strike balances between reservoir and export ops when confronted with operations rules. The model could be hardwired to force all water to meet a rule to come out of storage or to come out of exports, but if that's the choice the group wants to make, we should do so understanding it is basically a choice to not use the model to help with the kinds of decisions it was designed to solve for. They decided to combine spring and summer, which matches with the resiliency strategy. "May-August" doesn't mean that there are actions during that full time period; the specific time of actions depends on what kind of water year it is.

LUNCH

Jim reviewed what he is thinking when he says that the group might look at using a strategy to identify management actions. The group decided to use a strategy in which they selected actions they wanted to include by looking at each category, one at a time. They generally stuck with 2 actions per category. They did not choose actions that are already in the process of happening. They want to include the barge salmonids action to try something new that is out of the box.

For facility entrainment scenarios, David would want the salvage presence/trigger data to know when to adjust the operations.

Clifton Court is basically a new point of diversion. The group will have to figure out what the target would be. The group went with central delta option for a channel bottom diversion because this should have a bigger effect on reverse flow, potentially. The suggestion was to not run this through Calsim, but change the flows to what the data suggest they should be. Sam expressed concern with this because there is so much uncertainty associated with these actions compared to other actions the group has more information on. Chuck suggested instead of modeling the hydrology the group simply change the expected biological response through a route (i.e., increase survival by X%). Scott said the water component is important here too. Scott suggested they do the Clifton Court forebay and Central Delta scenario and have no salvage/entrainment, so this is a best case scenario.

Delta spawning habitat: It was suggested that the group look at adding egg mats or a conservation hatchery and see if spawning habitat is limiting that way, since it is unclear what spawning habitat is for delta smelt.

After discussion, the group is down to 14 different alternatives to pursue. This leaves room to add one or two more actions that new members suggest.

Housekeeping

Jim asked about access to models, model inputs, the format of the DSM, and access to outside groups. He asked the group to think about that to make a decision at a later date.

Next Steps

• Start forming the subgroups and go from there
• At the August meeting the group will take some time to talk to the SIT folks about restoration strategies for the delta.