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Jay Jasperse and Marty Ralph: Piloting Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations at Lake Mendocino
A panorama of Lake Mendocino in Northern California.
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any western reservoirs are operated under strict water level rules that are intended to ensure that they have the necessary capacity to control storm water and prevent floods. However, it stands to reason that as our understanding of and capacity to forecast those storms improves, those long-standing rules can be made more responsive to actual conditions, with the result that more water can be stored for use during dry periods. The effort to do this is known as forecastinformed reservoir operations (FIRO). One groundbreaking FIRO effort occurred at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Lake Mendocino reservoir, which is operated for water conservation and water supply purposes by Sonoma Water. In this interview, Jay Jasperse of Sonoma Water and Dr. F. Martin “Marty” Ralph of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) tell us about the grassroots beginnings of their cooperation, the new management practices being implemented based on their project, and how the process is creating a better model for the future. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.
22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | September 2021
Marty Ralph: I am a meteorologist by training, but I have spent time around hydrologists, so in a way, I’m a hydro meteorologist. After working at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 21 years in Boulder, Colorado, I moved to UCSD in 2013 to build its capabilities to work on Western water-related challenges. Put simply, my job as a scientist is to help improve weather forecasts. I do that by understanding the storms that produce the rain that becomes our water supply or creates floods. I founded the CW3E at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography to pursue this work. Scripps is a worldwide leader in oceanographic science and climate science, and it is the perfect home for our new center, which will build on its deep knowledge of ocean and climate and culture of linking science to solutions. Working with Jay at Sonoma Water and with the Army Corps to explore the possibility of using forecasts to help reservoir operators at Sonoma Water’s facilities was one of the sentinel projects that launched CW3E. Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are another major focus of our center. municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF SONOMA WATER.
Jay Jasperse: I am the chief engineer and director of groundwater management at Sonoma Water, where I oversee engineering, capital projects, and water resources planning. I am also the cochair, along with Marty, of the Lake Mendocino FIRO steering committee. Marty and I helped initiate the project approximately 6 years ago.
Sonoma Water is a California special act district that provides water supply, flood control, and wastewater services to Sonoma County and other parts of the northern Bay Area. Among our responsibilities is water resource management. We are the local sponsor of the federal projects that are owned and operated by the Army Corps on the Russian River in Northern California. One of those federal projects is Lake Mendocino, which is the site of our FIRO project. The Army Corps’ San Francisco District manages the reservoir’s flood risk, and Sonoma Water operates it for water conservation and water supply purposes.
