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State Water Resources Control Board posts Shasta watershed model, asks for public comment and schedules technical workshop
Summary
The State Water Resources Control Board released a coupled surface‑water/groundwater model for the Shasta River watershed, opened a public comment period (due June 12) and will hold a technical workshop on June 3 to walk through model operation and data inputs.
The State Water Resources Control Board on May 7 released a coupled surface‑water and groundwater model for the Shasta River watershed and opened a public comment period, the board’s senior engineer said. Shahab Araghanajjad, senior water resources control engineer in the Division of Water Rights, urged stakeholders to submit written comments by email before the June 12 deadline and said the model report will undergo a CalEPA external peer review process.
The model package posted on the board’s website includes two scenarios: a calibrated base case that represents current anthropogenic activity and an “unimpaired” scenario in which diversions, irrigation and most pumping are turned off to illustrate hypothetical flow conditions. Araghanajjad said the technical team will host a second workshop on June 3 focused on running the model and other technical details; attendees can request a seat by contacting staff.
Presenters said the public comment period is intended to surface local datasets and corrections the modeling team can incorporate before the report goes to external peer review. John Riverson of Alltech (formerly Paradigm Environmental), who led the technical presentation, noted the team compiled available winter and summer monitoring, irrigation information and local engineering studies and asked commenters to flag missing well logs, pumping schedules or other time‑series data.
Why it matters: the model provides a system‑scale, testable estimate of how surface and groundwater interact in the Shasta River watershed and will be used as the hydrologic foundation for downstream tools, including a water‑temperature tool and an allocation model the team is building with the Stockholm Environment Institute. Advocates and technical stakeholders at the meeting emphasized that local datasets — especially pump locations and high‑frequency spring records — will materially affect the model’s performance and its usefulness for ecological and water‑rights analyses.
What’s next: written comments are due June 12; the team plans to post the presentation PDF and recording and to make selected model inputs and outputs available through a visualization and download tool after the comment/peer‑review phase.
