SacPAS serves to provide information integration services to the Central Valley Project Improvement Act and practitioners working on matters related to ESA-listed fishes. The web-based services relate fish passage to environmental conditions and provide resources for evaluating the effects of river management and environmental conditions on salmon passage and survival.
The work performed as part of this agreement includes developing, maintaining, and making accessible query tools and decision support tools to access: historical, real-time and forecasted data; data summaries and visualizations; and hindcasts, forecasts, and scenario-derived predictions from statistical and mechanistic models. More specifically, the objectives are to:
1) Maintain and extend a secondary data repository of historical, real-time, and forecasted fish, environmental, and operational data from the Sacramento River and other river systems in the Central Valley, integrated from primary, public databases.
2) Maintain and improve the data query and visualization tools and services provided through the SacPAS website (https://www.cbr.washington.edu/sacramento/) for historical, real-time, and forecasted environmental and fish data.
3) Conduct research and provide access to modeling tools for fish survival and migration, through the SacPAS website, in support of Reclamation-funded and ESA-mandated activities, especially in efforts to predict, track, and evaluate the efficacy of proposed or actual actions.
This project examined cold water storage and regulation in Shasta Lake through the Shasta Dam Temperature Control Device (TCD). The TCD is a 300-foot structure with multiple gate openings, allowing water from different depths - and thus different temperatures - to be selectively released to manage water temperature in the river downstream. River water temperature is managed to support the imperiled Chinook salmon, a species of fish that is native to California. This capability is becoming increasingly important because low water years generally mean warmer river water temperatures that compromise habitat suitability for different species. In particular, cold pool management is essential for downstream spawning and rearing habitat for winter-run Chinook salmon that rely on cooler water temperatures to survive and reproduce. When the water is too warm, oxygen availability is limited for Chinook salmon and their eggs, which contributes to their mortality. Although the TCD allows reservoir managers to control water release and downstream water temperature, flow contributions into the TCD under day-to-day operations for different gate openings, operations, and thermal conditions within the reservoir are largely unquantified. Further complicating temperature management, TCD leakage (whether within the structure itself or through malfunctioning gates) needs to be better quantified in location and magnitude. This information will improve operational strategies for cold water performance especially during summer and fall months to manage cold water supply for downstream Chinook salmon habitat.
