BOARD01542

• Board Meeting Date: 3/20/2000
• Description: OWC Section - Drought Planning Fact Sheet
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

STATE OF COLORADO

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Colorado Water Conservation Board

Department of Natural Resources
1313 Sherman Street, Room 721
Denver, Colorado 80203
Phone, [phone]
FAX, [phone]

~

Bill Owens
Governor

MEMORANDUM

Greg E. Walcher
Executive Director

Peter H. Evans
ewes Director

TO:

Colorado Water conservation~ard Members

William P. Stanton, P.E. yJ P.
Chief, Water Conservation Planning Section

Dan McAuliffe
Deputy Director

FROM:

DATE: March 10,2000

SUBJECT: Agenda Item 27c, March 20-21. 2000 Board Meeting-
Water Conservation Planning Program - Drought Planning Fact Sheet

. Introduction

This memo is a progress report on the staffs efforts to develop a drought planning fact sheet.

Background

Under the belief that most utilities have designed water supply systems based on the average
year, Peter Evans had an idea to develop a "Regional Drought Estimate." In fact, the recent survey
of municipalities showed that only about 22% have a drought response plan, and only 4% have done
any serious risk based drought analysis. The idea was to provide an estimate of drought
characteristics (such as duration and percent of average precipitation similar to the parameters
developed from a flood flow frequency analysis) by major river basin or climatic region. With such
information, planners would have a better idea about what is needed to survive a drought, and
attitudes about the need for reservoir storage might change.

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A meeting was held in January with Jolm Henz of Henz Meteorological Services and Nolan
Doesken of CSU's Colorado Climate Center to define the tasks necessary to determine regional
drought characteristics from climate records and to produce such a fact sheet. The Climate Center
had recently released a report on "Historical Dry and Wet Periods in Colorado," and it appeared that
additional climatic data from this research was available. Henz would serve as project coordinator
and prepare the fact sheet. Subsequently, Henz and Doesken submitted an outline proposal to do the
work in 4 months under a preliminary budget of $20,000.

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