Water moderates our weather

             Water is not precious.  It is vital to our health, wealth, and the safety of our homes and cities.  It is not scarce; it is common and often abundant.  Precious things are not vital to our life; they are scarce and therefore highly prized and priced.  But water-rationing rates in cities are pricing water like it is perhaps semi-precious, and are creating fresh water shortages, by stopping a lot of sprinkler irrigation that evaporates water and cycles it into the air.   

             In 2000, our Landscape Management teacher said, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw,” and “Evaporation is waste.”  It is not waste; it is one step in the water cycle, the one most controllable by man.  He was selling us on selling drip irrigation to our customers, because we were headed into a 20-year drought cycle.  If there is anything that drip does well, it’s preventing evaporation of irrigation water.  No wonder we went into 20 years of drought.

            The water cycle is much like the money cycle; the less we use, the less there is to use.  When we are afraid to spend money, we get recessions and depressions.  When we are afraid to water enough to keep our lawns and gardens alive because it has become so expensive, we get drought, fire and floods on the dry western side of continents, and more hurricanes and floods on the wet eastern sides and in the tropics, from lower, warmer river water warming the oceans, powering tropical storms.

          Use it or lose it.  Don’t use it, and it will only go down to the sea, when much of it could be circulating in the air and making rain to replenish it.  The water cycle works better for us when we rev it up by throwing water in the air and all over the ground. 

            Watering stores water in the surface of the land and cools it and the air by evaporation, transpiration, and respiration, keeping plants and animals alive.  Land cooled by watering has more and cooler runoff that keeps fish healthy.  Here in the West, irrigation water vapor flows upstream and uphill on the prevailing wind to make rain in the hills (whatever does not fall where it came from) and refill creeks, rivers, and aquifers, when we water enough to keep our lawns and gardens alive.

            From the time we started building water treatment plants until the ‘90s, we watered our cities to prevent fires, though we later thought it was only for beautiful property, homegrown food, and flowers.  Burning cities had by then become history, a distant memory.  Cities had occasionally burned in summer before we had pressurized water to fight fires and grow plants.  We didn’t run out of water even though it was cheap and sometimes free to use.  Our irrigation vapor spread out for miles, keeping forest fires away from us.

Since water-rationing rates have spread around the world, we have had serious droughts that last for years and never really end, with fires burning through small towns, cities and suburbs.  We have returned to the conditions we had before we had water treatment plants.

          But those conditions were not how it was before Europeans discovered beaver in America.  Beaver dams and their ponds filled river valleys and creeks across North America, and the woods were full of game.  Fur trapping companies led the European invasion, trading their goods for beaver skins with Native Americans in the East.  This eventually allowed settlers to farm former beaver ponds, (flat verdant meadows with deep black soil), travel the rivers, and build roads and cities.  Lewis and Clark had to portage up the Missouri and down the other side of the Rockies because the rivers were clogged with beaver dams and ponds. 

West of the Mississippi, Native Americans would not kill beaver, whom they revere for keeping water in their otherwise dry land.  So American Mountain men trapped beaver for the trading companies.  Britain gave control of much of Canada to the British Hudson Bay Company (HBC), including the Oregon Territory, which was jointly held by the United States and Britain under the Treaty of 1812.  But HBC controlled the Oregon territory first, and its factor tried to discourage American settlement in Oregon territory by trapping all the beaver, rather than leaving breeding stock, the normal HBC practice.  After the Western beavers were exterminated by HBC and American trappers, much of the West became desert with deeply incised gullies and washes where there had been beaver dams and ponds.¹

We have been trying to restore beaver to our wildlands for the last 100 years and have found ways to control their flooding habits near human constructions.  But we need to do a lot more in the West to restore them at least to ranches, wilderness and national parks to hold water in their ponds and the ground around them, growing water-loving trees that don’t burn, creating better habitat for all animals, including livestock and salmon, by keeping creeks running during droughts, while transpiring water from all the plants in their swamps, making rain.

Most of the American West is not naturally desert; it is man-made desert.  We somewhat replaced beaver by keeping water in our land for about 70 years, building dams and watering our cities and farms with sprinklers, banking water in the soil.  Both man and beaver build dams, store water, grow food and modify their habitat for comfort and safety.  

We didn’t know what we were doing when we made war on beavers and other wildlife for three centuries.  But we know now, and we can restore some of the damage to our land, water and weather by bringing them back where and when we can.

For at least 70 years, people on the West side of continents outside the tropics enjoyed dry heat along with the ability to affordably water our property and grow plants, to cool and humidify outside air and collectively bring forth thunderstorms, to cool our weekend evenings.  We didn’t even know we were doing it; it was just weather. 

The 1980s, when we started hearing, everywhere, about the crying need to save water, and also about global warming from carbon dioxide, was considered a wet decade.  It was also the height of sprinkler irrigation around the world.  We paid for our water plants with base rates, and the water was almost free, covering only marginal unit costs, (when it wasn't all paid with base rates) and we used it freely, for all beneficial uses.  Except when we were facing a drought.

The summer after this gardener moved to Grants Pass, we had thunderstorms nearly every weekend of the summer.  Not enough to replace watering, but enough to wash the plants and cool things off.  I formed a gardening superstition that summer: If you don’t water because you think it’s going to rain, it won’t rain enough to matter.  It was true, because if one thinks it is going to rain, so do a lot of other people.  I learned to water regardless of the forecast and leave off watering only after an inch of rain has fallen.

The next summer, we were told that we were in a drought from low snowpack  in our mountains, so "don’t water your lawns or wash your cars."  We had 100 days in a row without rain that year, 96 the next.  No surprise at the time; we were in drought.  But now it seems that rationing water in response to low snowpack in the mountains is always the wrong response, choking off the main source of rain, our own irrigation, and setting up a rain-blocking high pressure bubble by making the land dry and hot.

Water moderates our weather.  It is the only major greenhouse gas at 1%-4% of the atmosphere, while all the other greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are “trace” gases, measured in parts per million (CO₂), billion (methane), or trillion (all the rest).  Water holds heat in the air in its thermal mass and by cloud blanketing, keeping heat from radiating into space.  No other greenhouse gas can do this.

Water cools by cloud shading, evaporation, and rain.  At the point of evaporation, 41 degrees F, liquid water sucks in a lot of heat to make the phase change to a gas, cooling everything around it.  The reverse happens when it gets below 41 degrees and condenses on a surface, such as a particle of dust in the air, releasing heat and warming the environment.  It cannot condense except on a solid surface, so dust in the air is necessary to make clouds.  Without dust, water vapor can be super-cooled without freezing until it meets a solid surface.

When water changes from ice to liquid, the same process happens, sucking heat in and cooling its surroundings, and from liquid to ice, releasing heat and warming the environment.  Thus, when it starts to snow, it gets a bit warmer as the snow crystalizes in the cloud.  The first flakes are small, but they stick together and get bigger as it warms, and then as it gets colder, the flakes stop sticking together as much and get smaller.

Water vapor carries heat from the ground to the tops of thunderheads as they form from rising hot air and water vapor.  Along the way, it condenses onto dust, shedding heat at the phase change, which fuels the updraft.  But the heat disappears as the droplet rises into lower air pressure: the heat is spread thin as the air thins.  Near the top of the cloud, the droplet freezes, shedding more heat to space.  Sometimes the winds in the cloud are turbulent enough to make hail that melts as it falls and refreezes as it blows upward, picking up moisture along the way and gaining weight, repeatedly, until it gets too heavy, and falls, cooling lower cloud layers and the ground. 

That's the way it works when there is enough water in the air.  Over the last couple decades of water rationing rates, thunderclouds rarely make enough rain to put their lightning-caused fires out.  Over the last 20 years, we have come to fear thunderstorms in the West.

The combination of the heating and cooling effects of sufficient watering of cities and farms adds up to more warmth in winter and less heat in summer, with warmer cloudy winter nights and cooler, cloudy summer days and balmy summer nights, when we have enough water in the air.  It counteracts some of the city’s “heat island” effect from pavement, buildings, cars, indoor air conditioning and electricity use.

In the desert, summer days are hot and nights are chilly; winter days are sunny and cold in daytime and colder at night.  It is said, “There is nothing between Texas and the North Pole but a barbwire fence.”  That’s in winter; summer monsoons moderate daytime heat and nighttime cold with high humidity, clouds and thunderstorms when the heat rising off dry, hot land draws in humid, warm air from a warm ocean. 

We don’t have a warm ocean on the West coast of the U.S., so we don’t have monsoons; Eastern Pacific currents off our coast come down from the North Pole.  Cold water doesn't evaporate well under a high pressure dome.  The coastal ranges catch all the fog.  We don’t usually get rain in summer unless we make it with our irrigation, particularly by using sprinklers and misters.  We have had less and less rain, even in late fall and early spring, as we use less and less water and pay more and more for it.

But in late 2018, Congress legalized hemp, and changed our weather for the better in 2019.  Rural counties filled up with hemp fields in California, Oregon and Washington that had to be watered.  Many of them had a late start, but Grants Pass had some good thunderstorms, starting in June.  There were no big fires anywhere near Josephine County all summer.  A few days of fall-type rain in September was the signal for the cannabis harvest, as rain molds the buds.  All irrigation of cannabis and a lot of other property ended.  So did the rain, until December and January.  

February, March and April of 2020 were dry, and we had record water sales in March and April.  Rain started in May with the cannabis irrigation season.  June had rain as well, and the start of the summer was cooler than usual.  

July 2020 was cloudy, as our Water Master had started telling hemp farmers that they couldn't use their wells or creeks for commercial use without water permits. (Grants Pass Daily Courier)  Many farmers started buying hauled water.  Grants Pass sold record amounts of bulk water to haulers.  The farmers likely put in drip systems to use the pricey product.  August was clear and hot, in the 100-degree F range, which lasted into September.  Nights were chilly.

Temperature differences create winds.  Bigger temperature differences between day and night, caused by dryness, create bigger winds, including katabatic winds that start from dry, cold, still, dense air at night on mountain tops and high plains under high pressure.   When it gets too dense and heavy, the air slides off the high places into river valleys, heating up and speeding up as it flows into higher pressure downhill.  In very dry conditions, the winds become a furnace blast, sometimes getting to 100 degrees F and 100 miles per hour, blowing up sparks into conflagrations.^{2, 3}

This is what happened on September 8, 2020, in the inland valleys on the west side of the Rockies, after weeks of 100-degree daytime temperatures building up the biggest high-pressure bubble that this gardener has ever seen, stretching from Mexico to Canada, and out almost to the tip of the Aleutians.

Katabatic wind driven fires used to be a late fall and winter event, mainly in Southern California with their Santa Anna winds, particularly after California cities started water-rationing rates.  The winds blew up fires in Northern California in the last decade, still in late fall or winter.  2020 saw them blowing up fires from Southern California to Washington in September, much earlier than normal.  The further north one goes, the earlier the nights get really cold on nearby high plains and mountains.  But the huge high-pressure bubble put all three states in the same bubble at the same time.

Ironically, the many fires of September 8th, 2020, made so much smoke that it blocked the sun all the way to the coast by mid-afternoon and stopped the heating that made the high-pressure bubble and the hot, hard East wind, though it took about a week to rain, put out most of the fires and clear the smoke in Grants Pass.  

Wood smoke is full of water, because wood is made from water and carbon dioxide, to which it returns when burned.  We can feel the humidity when nearby fires fill our air with smoke and ash.  It’s sticky.  Years ago, the Douglas fire in Douglas County, just north of us, was a huge conflagration and made a lot of smoke that we were breathing in Grants Pass.  It was eventually pulled together by a low-pressure system that dumped about 2 inches of rain on the fire, putting it out.  We got an inch in Grants Pass.

Smoke is hard on people and animals, but not on plants.  To plants, smoke and ash is shade, humidity and food.  They grow better the next spring.  Smoke shading and plant feeding are the silver linings in the dark cloud of choking smoke.  I prefer my smoke far away, a high overcast, blocking some of the sunlight and keeping things a little cooler.

There is no danger that our world will ever run out of fresh water.  This is a water planet.  There is 3 times as much water in the boundary between the inner and outer mantle of the Earth than in all of our oceans.³ It comes out of the mantle through cracks in the crust, particularly in volcanic zones, and is remarkably pure water if it is a cold spring.  These freshwater springs are the source of many of our rivers, which is why our rivers do not dry up when we have no rain.  We have hot and cold springs in the upper reaches of mountains.  Volcanic eruptions feature a lot of steam.

But if we want to be safe from wildfire and its smoke, we must provide the water to keep it away from us.  The good news is, it is at our fingertips; we have but to use it.  But to make it affordable for everyone, we have to return our water rates systems to pricing water to sell it, not to ration it. 

The place to start is with your own city council.  Act locally to do your part in fixing our water prices and weather.  Contact them once a month and spread the word: the water rationing rate revolt has begun. 

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All of these books are worth reading, and each of these authors should read the other two.  My thanks to the Grants Pass Daily Courier for a list of days without rain, and information on hemp growers, City water sales, and the activities of our Water Master.

¹ Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The surprising, secret life of beavers and why they matter.  Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, USA and London, U.K.

² Daniel Mathews, Trees in Trouble: Wildfires, Infestations, and Climate Change. Counterpoint, Berkley, California.

³ Christopher Dewdney, 18 miles: the epic drama of our atmosphere and its weather. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, ECW Press.

         7-17-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener    541-955-9040    rycke@gardener.com