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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Nicole T. Carter
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Category : Droughts
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Drought in the Southeast in 2007 has brought attention to an ongoing interstate water conflict among Alabama, Florida, and Georgia over management of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. How the current drought is managed may set precedents for federal drought responses on other rivers regulated by federal dams and for future management of the ACF. The current debate about managing the ACF is focused on whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) should implement emergency measures to preserve more water in storage than is possible under current operating procedures. The water at stake is vital for municipalities (including Atlanta), electricity generation, threatened and endangered species, and the Apalachicola Bay oyster industry. Drought in the ACF has escalated competition for the water in federal reservoirs that are near or at record lows. Reservoir drawdown and predictions for a continued drought have Georgia's upper basin municipal customers concerned about depleting their principal water supply, Lake Lanier. They also have Alabama's and Florida's lower basin interests concerned about river flows to meet their municipal, electricity, and ecosystem needs. At issue is how to manage federal reservoirs to meet municipal and industrial water needs equitably in the upper and lower basins, while maintaining compliance with federal law (e.g., the Endangered Species Act (ESA)) and minimizing harm to the ACF river and Apalachicola Bay species and ecosystems ... Many view the conflict in the ACF as a harbinger of increasing competition for water in basins across the nation, including others in the East, and as a testing ground for legal action on federal river management, especially during drought. Moreover, resolution of conflicts between endangered species and other uses in the ACF basin could have much wider implications for ESA implementation, especially in western states.

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Category :
Languages : en
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Author: John Robert Dean
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Category : Apalachicola River Watershed (Fla.)
Languages : en
Pages :

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The Georgia General Assembly, like many states, has enacted pre-defined, comprehensive, drought-mitigation apparatus, but they need rainfall outlooks. Global circulation models (GCMs) provide rainfall outlooks, but they are too spatially course for jurisdictional impact assessment. To wed these efforts, spatially averaged, time-smoothed, daily precipitation observations from the National Weather Service cooperative network are fitted to eight points of 700 mbar atmospheric data from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project for climate downscaling and drought prediction in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) river basin. The domain is regionalized with a factor analysis to create specialized models. All models complied well with mathematical assumptions, though the residuals were somewhat skewed and flattened. All models had an R-squared> 0.2. The models revealed map points to the south to be especially influential. A leave-one-out cross-validation showed the models to be unbiased with a percent error of

Author:
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Category : Droughts
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Drought in the Southeast has brought congressional attention to an ongoing interstate water conflict among Alabama, Florida, and Georgia over water allocation and management of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) basin. Reservoir drawdown and predictions for a continued drought have Georgia's upper basin municipal and industrial customers concerned about depleting their principal (in some cases, their only) water supply, Lake Lanier in northern Georgia. Alabama, Florida, and Georgia's lower basin interests are concerned about sustaining river flows to meet their municipal, agricultural, electrical, recreational, and ecosystem needs. In addition, four federally protected species, once widely distributed but now confined to the lower basin, are caught in the net of the controversy. The issue for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) is how to manage ACF federal reservoirs, which are at record low levels, to meet needs in the upper and lower basin equitably. The challenge includes complying with federal law (e.g., the Endangered Species Act (ESA)); minimizing harm to the ACF basin and Apalachicola Bay species, ecosystems, recreation, fishing, and oyster industry; and providing flows for hydropower and thermoelectric cooling, while also meeting water needs of the Atlanta region, other communities, and industries. To varying degrees, the southeastern drought has been in effect for several years, depleting supplies in the basin's reservoirs, with Lake Lanier being the largest reservoir and therefore largest source able to supply downstream needs. The Corps therefore has released water at various times from Lake Lanier in the upper basin to meet minimum flow requirements in the lower basin Apalachicola River -- to the consternation of upper basin users As an emergency drought response in 2007, the Corps began to implement its proposal for lower flows in the Apalachicola River, thereby reducing the rate of drawdown of Lake Lanier, though heavy rains in early 2008 in the southern basin at least temporarily halted extra releases from Lake Lanier. The Corps' Exceptional Drought Operations (EDO) calls for a 16% lower flow in the Apalachicola River and measures to allow the reservoirs to refill. The EDO is being implemented in phases. Judging that the Corps' actions would neither jeopardize the continued existence of listed species nor adversely modify their critical habitat, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) approved an initial 6% flow reduction and called for the Corps to develop criteria that would trigger further reductions. Four species protected under the Endangered Species Act -- three mussels and a sturgeon -- depend on Apalachicola River flows. The impacts of the EDO on these notably uncharismatic protected species continue to be the subject of study and debate. Yet the species protected under ESA are not the focus of debate. Rather the law itself acts as a hammer, forcing parties to reach decisions that may produce winners and losers. As climate change and population growth continue to affect ecosystems, ESA controversies may be at the center of still more stormy debates. Responses to the ACF and species protection controversy may presage responses to future river management controversies.

Author: Nathan Taylor Johnson
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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ABSTRACT: The unimpaired flow data was developed to populate the HEC-5, ACF-STELLA, and more recently Res-Sim models for 23 local inflows at control points throughout the Apalachicola Chattahoochee Flint (ACF) watershed. Unimpaired flows are created when the influence of human regulation and withdrawals are removed from historical streamflow gauge records. Regionally accumulated unimpaired inflows or unimpaired local incremental inflows were developed and routed together through a model in the main channels to form the main channel unimpaired flows. The UIFs are used as inputs into several models where they are routed through a series of diversions, consumption, and water control structure releases. Simulations of policies on the ACF can then be conducted for a variety of operations. This type of model has been used to analyze the impacts of various governance scenarios on the ACF basin and other basins throughout the nation.

Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry
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ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Author: James M. Barkuloo
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Category : Apalachicola River (Fla.)
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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This document was prepared as part of the ongoing U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Mobile District's Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) Rivers Basin '308' Study. The Resource Inventory has been written from the viewpoint of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with emphasis on natural resources of high Federal concern. The document should not be construed as a comprehensive account of all natural resources occurring in the ACF basin, nor a detailed discussion of all ecological relationships and functions of the system. The complex nature of the ACF system cannot be adequately described in any one report, as evidenced by attention it has received by many Federal, State, and local governments, academic interests, conservation organizations and the public.

Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Public Works and Transportation. Subcommittee on Water Resources
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alabama River Watershed (Ala.)
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Author: Melinda Susan Mosner
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Category : Aquifers
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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