Thumbs up: Leaving water behind the dam

One of our great sources of frustration during the most recent drought was watching water needlessly pour through the spillway at Lake Mendocino. For more than half a century, releases from Coyote Dam have been determined by a calendar-based formula. It didn't matter if there was room behind the dam and long-term weather forecasts were dry and dryer still, the Army Corps of Engineers had to open the tap. Six years ago, at the height of the drought, a third of the lake's capacity was drained to make room for runoff from storms that never materialized, intensifying water shortages in Sonoma and Mendocino county communities that rely on the Russian River.

This year, the Corps is setting aside the book to field test a program that relies on computer modeling and long-term weather forecasting. The system, developed over four years of computer practice runs, will allow dam operators to store an additional 4 billion gallons of water - enough to meet the needs of 97,000 people for a year. The water will be released only if forecasters predict a major storm system known as an atmospheric river, and runoff from the storm should refill the lake. This savvy approach to managing North Coast water is long overdue. Thumbs up.

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