Upstream diversions

What right holders reported taking from the rivers above the Delta, watershed by watershed, for every water year since 2010. Reported by right holders, screened. This is a different record from Dayflow, and it never shares an axis with it.

A reported diversion is what a right holder filed with the State Water Board, screened for filings that fail the holder’s own record. It counts water taken into a reservoir and taken again downstream each time it is filed, so a watershed’s total can exceed the river’s runoff in a wet year. Read it as the size of the claim on each river, not as a flow.
Reported diversions by river system and water year
Click a bar for the year’s figures by river system.
Table of the same figures (text twin)
Watersheds above the Delta
The Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems by watershed (USGS HUC8) for the selected water year, largest first. Friant diversions from Millerton sit in Upper San Joaquin and largely never reach the Delta.
Table of every watershed in the selected year (text twin)

Related: Delta diversions (Dayflow: inflow, exports, outflow, the floor) Water Rights Toolkit (the same reports by right, purpose, and seniority) How screening works

Sources. State Water Resources Control Board, Electronic Water Rights Information Management System (eWRIMS), annual reports of diversion and use by right holders, as rolled up by watershed and water year on this site’s Water Rights Toolkit (datasets water.ewrims_huc8_wy and water.ewrims_state_wy, column diverted_af_screened; best available is best_reported_af_total; diverted to storage and direct diversion are storage_af_screened and direct_af_screened). Watershed boundaries: USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset, eight-digit hydrologic units grouped by river system (four-digit units). Sacramento Valley water-year type: CDEC water-year classification, served by the Water Supply Live set on this site.

Method. Screening sets aside a filing that fails one of five tests against the right holder’s own record (a report more than twice the right’s own maximum, gallons filed as acre-feet, a repeated figure, an outlier against the holder’s own history, or no test possible, which is kept and marked); it never corrects a value and never compares a filing to a model or a neighbor. Best available prefers reported use over reported diversion for each right and falls back to face value only when no credible report exists. Water diverted to storage and diverted again downstream is counted each time it is filed. Diverted to storage and direct diversion are the two parts of the same screened report, split by how the right holder filed each month (diversion to storage, or direct diversion for use without storage); a filing entered as a combined figure stays in the reported diversion total only, and the screening test applies to the whole report, so a report set aside is set aside from all three measures. The record before water year 2010 is thin, because reporting was less frequent and less complete before the 2009 reporting reforms took hold, so the public view begins there. These figures are reports, not measurements, and they are never placed on the Dayflow axis. Full rules: the Water Rights Toolkit definitions and this toolkit’s definitions .

Screening and orientation aids that precede engineering and operations analysis. conciseVerbosity is an independent personal project; the views and tools here are separate from the organizations I serve.