UPDATE, APRIL 7, NOON: The state should've tapped the water in my bleary eyes while writing the original post because I scanned right over the part about it being a working researchers' conference that is NOT open to the public. So sorry.
ORIGINAL POST, APRIL 7, 6:35 A.M.: Is Governor Jerry Brown going too far or not far enough in ordering Californians to cut their water consumption by 25 percent? That will be among the hot topics of debate at UC Irvine on April 20-22, when top researchers, water managers and policymakers explore the latest drought findings and fast-moving policy.
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Hosted by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the Water UCI program and the UCI Center for Hydrometeorology & Remote Sensing, the three-day AGU-Chapman Conference in the Arnold & Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering will include as speakers: Jeanine Jones and Michael Anderson of the California Department of Water Resources; David Feldman and Amir AghaKouchak of UCI; Martin Hoerling, Roger Pulwarty and Andrew Wood of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration; Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and UC Irvine (and a Weekly cover story awhile back); Claudia Faunt of the U.S. Geological Survey; Roger Bales of UC Merced; Daniel Swain of Stanford University; Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; and A.G. Kawamura, grower and former California secretary of agriculture.
Click here for the full program (and here for the conference location on the campus map), but this is the short backgrounder UCI provided on the event:
California is in its fourth year of drought, affecting the holders of more than 36,000 water rights that serve 30 million people and irrigate over 5,680,000 acres of farmland. Following the lowest snow pack ever recorded and with no end in sight, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. on April 1 ordered cities and towns across California to cut water use by 25 percent–a first in state history. At this conference, national researchers and state water managers will explore drought monitoring and prediction, seek to better understand the drought's impacts on the water supply and ecosystems, discuss possible links to climate change, and identify policy and management solutions to enhance California's resilience. The conference aims to highlight key research gaps and produce a road map for future work.
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