From Snow Surveys to SCAN: USDA’s Commitment to Wise Water Use and Drought Mitigation

Remarks prepared for delivery by Arlen L. Lancaster, Chief, Natural Resources Conservation Service, at the 2007 Drought Monitor Forum.

Portland, Oregon
October 10, 2007

INTRODUCTION
Thank you, Mike [Strobel], for that kind introduction. Good morning.

I want to express my gratitude to the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for bringing us all together this week to talk about some very timely issues. Sponsoring this kind of event takes a focused effort over many months, so we thank you for all the hard work. And I also want to acknowledge local support for the Forum from the USDA-NRCS Water and Climate Center here in Portland.

I don’t know how many of you saw the recent “Thirsty Planet” series on the NBC Nightly News? It aired on consecutive evenings during the last week in September and moved from India to Las Vegas to Kenya to Phoenix to China, examining water management practices, the impact of drought and other threats to water quality and quantity worldwide.

I mention it for two reasons. First, although it was a very broad overview of some very complex global issues, the simple fact that it was shown in prime time five nights in a row is an indicator of popular and, I think we can all agree, growing interest in water-related challenges and solutions. Second, coming here to Portland— where by all accounts the rains have set in especially early this year—reminded me, as the NBC series did, that our personal perceptions of the value of precipitation vary widely depending on the time of year and where we live, work and play. That is to say, our perceptions are very much localized.
For instance, the third episode of “Thirsty Planet” began with a reading of a traditional Masai tribal blessing for newborns that goes like this: “May you stay healthy and drown in rain.” Given that standard for a good life, any member of the Masai lucky enough to visit Portland in winter would consider himself blessed indeed!

WHERE WE LIVE, WORK AND PLAY
As I said, where we live, work and play certainly colors how we view falling rain and accumulating snow and stream flows and runoff and water supply forecasts and so forth. While this may seem obvious on the face of it, what isn’t as immediately apparent—to most people outside this room, anyway—is how many decisions are made hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly based on those perceptions. And furthermore, few give little if any thought to how tremendously those millions of decisions impact our health, the national economy and our individual quality of life, among other things. You don’t have to follow this train of thought for long to come to the conclusion that the more those perceptions (and the resulting decisions) are grounded in science and based on fact, the better off we are and will be.

Consider for a moment the number of decisions just one agricultural producer might wrestle with relating to water supply: imagine that I’m a farmer in Idaho trying to make decisions for the coming year about which crops to plant, and when, and how many acres’ worth. Naturally, I want to do this well in advance of the growing season, as I may need to rent additional land or buy some equipment and might have some pricing or borrowing opportunities I can only take advantage of early.

But there is still more I must weigh. I also generally supplement my farm income with a second job. Any insights into what kind of water year it will be would help me know how much non-farm income I’ll require to stay out of the red. Will I need to hire any farm hands and when should I bring them on? And I was considering whether to invest in an improved irrigation system the district conservationist told me about to help me better manage the water I’m entitled to. Maybe I should just enroll some of my acreage in the Conservation Reserve Program or, if the water supply forecast looks really bleak, just sell out to the developer with the deep pockets?

That list of considerations may, in fact, just scratch the surface, but it is pretty clear that I as a producer need timely, accurate and locally relevant information about water to make the decisions that will determine whether my business flourishes in 2008 or barely survives and whether I end the year in the red or the black.

As I said earlier, these kinds of decisions—repeated countless times all across the land—have potentially tremendous impacts on the way billions of dollars are spent or earned each year, what foods ultimately end up on our dinner tables or are traded overseas, and even the sustainability of family farms and Rural America.

Or what if, instead of farming, I owned a ski resort or operated a barge? Or I were an engineer trying to decide when or if to reinforce a stream bank in advance of rising water, or a forest ranger calculating how many grazing permits to authorize on federal lands in a given timeframe? Or, what if I just like to go rafting in the wilderness and don’t want to bottom out?
As it happens, we in the Department of Agriculture-Natural Resources Conservation Service do work that supports all of these decision makers, day in and day out, and we and our predecessors in the Soil Conservation Service and Bureau of Agricultural Engineering have been doing so for over a century.

FROM SNOW SURVEYS TO SCAN
Major sectors of the nation’s economy—agriculture, industry, recreation and government—base their water management plans on information from NRCS Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecasting Programs. In the West particularly, snow pack and climate data collected by NRCS and key federal, state, tribal, and private partners are used to produce water supply forecasts and drought risk assessments, which are critical tools in the increasingly challenging effort to balance environmental considerations with rapid population growth, agricultural and energy demands, and climate variability.

Just as snow gives the West water, snow surveys give the West’s water users the knowledge needed for sound planning and decision making. Following in the pioneering footsteps of Dr. James Church, who conducted the first systematic snow surveys in the early 1900s, we have developed and continuously improved the program’s technology, equipment and methods. As a result, in the intervening 100 years, the program has evolved from a single, manually sampled site on Mt. Rose, near Reno, Nevada, to a real-time data network of nearly 750 SNOTEL, or SNOwpack TELemetry, sites located in 11 western states and Alaska. This cooperative network continues to grow, and grow quickly. Investments made to automate the snow survey system beginning in the 1970s are starting to pay real dividends; we can now do trend analysis and issue daily guidance based on SNOTEL data. There are also more than 900 manual snow courses from which data are gathered.

NRCS is also the leader of a cooperative, nationwide, comprehensive soil moisture and climate information system—the Soil Climate Analysis Network, or SCAN—designed to support natural resources assessments and conservation activities. SCAN is critical to drought monitoring and we are continuing to expand the network from the current 140-plus sites in 39 states.

MAKING DECISION MAKING EASIER
As an agency formed out of the tragedy of the Dust Bowl, snow and soil surveying and other basic resource inventorying and monitoring activities are core mission areas for us. I am very proud of our legacy and our ongoing work in these areas and I am committed to ensuring we continue to develop and retain the expertise necessary to their execution.

Most recently, of course, the Internet has revolutionized how we share information derived from soil and snow surveys, extending the programs’ reach and utility to ever-more water managers and users. There were over 1.9 million visits to NRCS water supply forecast web pages in 2006 and, with partners such as the National Drought Mitigation Center, the National Weather Service, Oregon State and others, we continue to seek ways to take full advantage of appropriate emerging technologies to make information more user-friendly, accessible and meaningful.

I know you are going to receive in-depth briefings on several new systems and tools later today and tomorrow so I won’t belabor them here, except to say that, to my mind, increased transparency must be one of the planned outcomes and benefits of any changes or upgrades. In every case, our investments in new interfaces and technologies should enable end-users to better understand where the data comes from, to tailor it to meet their specific needs—remember the producer I mentioned earlier, struggling to get information to support his decisions?—and to emphasize where and when uncertainty occurs in forecasting; that is to say, to share with them our confidence level in a given product.

THE NATIONAL INTEGRATED DROUGHT INFORMATION SYSTEM
And that brings me to NIDIS, the National Integrated Drought Information System. We support the aims of the NIDIS, to help the public understand water management issues and to provide an incentive for agencies and partners to share information, technology and research to meet a goal for determining county-level drought. As I have discussed, we have in place and support many important programs through the Department of Agriculture and within NRCS that will be key to NIDIS’ success, and I should quickly mention one more, which is AgACIS.

That stands for “Agricultural Applied Climate Information System.” AgACIS came about through a partnership with NOAA’s six Regional Climate Centers to provide climate data to NRCS. Our electronic Field Office Technical Guide is tied directly to the climate centers via AgACIS, making locally relevant climate data—both historical and real time—available for use by our planners, technicians, engineers and others in assisting landowners. AgACIS is a basis for integrating many other climate networks and is expected to serve as the backbone for the data delivery system utilized by NIDIS.

FROM RECOVERY TO PREPAREDNESS
The USDA-Risk Management Agency’s support of the very valuable U.S. Drought Monitor and NOAA’s development of the NIDIS portal are indicators of our ongoing, necessary national shift in focus from drought recovery efforts to drought preparedness and mitigation activities. As I alluded to previously, NRCS’ predecessor, the Soil Conservation Service, was born from a concern for land degradation brought to national prominence by the Dust Bowl and the social upheavals it caused, so encouraging and promoting good plant, soil and water management has been and continues to be fundamental to our mission of helping people help the land.

In partnership with nearly 3,000 Soil and Water Conservation Districts across the U.S., we deliver planning and technical assistance, as well as financial assistance, to help farmers and ranchers achieve net reductions in water use. Activities under the Ground and Surface Water Conservation component of the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, for instance, include improving irrigation systems, enhancing irrigation efficiencies, converting to the production of less water-intensive agricultural commodities, converting to dry land farming, improving the storage of water through such measures as water banking and groundwater recharge, and mitigating the effects of drought. Such projects must result in a net savings of groundwater or surface water resources in the producer’s agricultural operations.

The importance of educating producers about water consumption and the on-farm economic benefits of improved efficiency should not be underestimated. For that reason, we encourage farmers to use conservation tillage practices to increase soil moisture and reduce evaporation and to reduce runoff and encourage water filtration into the soil. We have also made available on our NRCS website an irrigation water energy estimator tool. Since its inception in June 2006, the estimator has been visited more than 17,000 times.

I am currently reviewing an addendum to our general manual providing policy and direction specifically on drought preparedness, a reflection of the National Drought Policy Commission’s recommendation that preparedness become the new paradigm for addressing the threat of drought. The commission recognized NRCS as unique among federal agencies in that our programmatic and technical approach was in alignment with their proposed new direction for drought management.

We have also undertaken a soon-to-be-published Snow Survey and Water Supply Forecast Program Economic Analysis that thoroughly examines how the information generated from these activities influences stakeholders’ decision-making strategies and also what that means to the economy. It also contains a series of case studies that I think you will find enlightening, as they build on the descriptions of the information needs of water managers and users I attempted earlier in my remarks.

THE 2007 FARM BILL
And USDA also provides traditional crop insurance programs and emergency rehabilitation programs to help farmers and ranchers with drought recovery. It is also worth noting that one of the Administration’s proposals for the 2007 Farm Bill is a new Emergency Landscape Restoration Program that allows for mitigating risk or a reoccurrence after an event. The Senate has put this in its latest version of the Conservation Title language with drought as an eligible emergency event to trigger funding for watershed and farm-level restoration.

Additionally, the water conservation provisions in the Senate draft allow for EQIP, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, to be used to mitigate the effects of drought.

You may also be interested to know that the House bill would establish a National Drought Council within the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture, responsible for creating a national drought policy action plan. The House bill also contains the Emergency Forest Restoration Program to allow for certain assistance to landowners in emergencies, including drought.

The Administration’s proposals also seek to combine several of our existing programs to make them simpler for producers to take advantage. With respect to water, this means it would make conserving the resource easier for producers, which benefits all water users in both the short-and-long terms.

IN CLOSING
Let me wrap it up here because I’ve already covered a lot of ground and definitely want to save some time for any questions you might have. But let me just reiterate that information like that made available through the U.S. Drought Monitor or as a result of our Snow Survey and Water Forecasting Programs is critical to water managers’ and users’ ability to make good decisions, for their businesses, their families, our communities and the nation.

The heroic agronomist Normal Borlaug once explained that “plant diseases, drought, desolation, and despair were recurrent catastrophes during the ages—and the remedies: supplications to supernatural spirits or gods.”

Thankfully, across our many agencies and the government we have created a toolkit of alternatives, strategies, knowledge and expertise that lets us move beyond mere supplications in preparing for and mitigation the effects of drought.

Therefore, we cannot afford to miss opportunities to partner better in sharing and packaging information and in using our authorities, funding, and programs to the fullest potential. At NRCS and in USDA, we look forward to our continued collaboration with all of you to “help people help the land.”

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