Daniel Salzler No. 1336 EnviroInsight.org Four Items December 12, 2025
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1. Phoenix’s Wettest Fall On Record Eases Short-Term Drought, Preps Soil For Winter Runoff. While long-term drought conditions still persist, a leading Arizona climate expert said Phoenix’s wettest fall on record was a welcome sight.
“We’ve been in a drought since 1994, so there’s a lot to make up there,” Erinanne Saffell, whose titles include Arizona State Climatologist and Arizona State University professor, told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News on Thursday.
Saffell, who is director of the Arizona State Climate Office, explained that the record wet autumn helped the area catch up after the state’s third driest January-August stretch on record.
“This has been great,” she said. “We’re mitigating some of that short-term drought, and we’re happy to see that.”
How much did it rain in Phoenix in fall 2025?
September-November is what climatologists consider meteorological fall. Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which the National Weather Service uses for the city’s official records, received 6.31 inches of rainfall during that span as several major storm systems hit the area. That broke the previous record of 6.18 inches set back in 1939.
The Phoenix rainfall totals don’t always reflect activity in other parts of the Valley, but it was a pretty good indicator of how wet it was across the region this fall, Saffel said.
“Deer Valley was wet. Scottsdale was wet. … We have hundreds of weather stations across the state, but if we look at Maricopa County, that looks like we’re going to have the wettest fall from Maricopa County,” she said.
What does Drought Monitor say after Phoenix’s wettest fall on record?
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor map provides additional insight into the impact of Phoenix’s wettest fall.
Phoenix’s wettest fall prepares soil for snowfall runoff.
Phoenix’s wettest fall will pay off down the road when it comes to the Valley’s water supply, part of which comes from winter snowfall runoff from mountains in northern and eastern Arizona.
“We are in that La Niña kind of situation, which statistically for our winters in Arizona means we won’t have as much of a storm event, but we certainly can get those storms and we will get some snowpack. And so, we just kind of wait and see and see what happens,” she said. Source: KTAR News.
2. Water Wise
3. Arizona Water Board Approves Desalination Plants In California, Mexico. Arizona will provide taxpayer money to help private companies develop plans for at least two and possibly three desalination plants in California or Mexico under proposals approved by a state agency’s board on Wednesday.
The Water Infrastructure Finance Authority board also approved initial development of several other projects from the two applicants that proposed new Arizona water supplies and made it past a lengthy review process. Those proposals would rely on treating wastewater, capturing storm water and storing it underground or making agricultural irrigation more efficient, with the projects located in California, Colorado, Utah or Mexico.
Both the desalination plants and the remaining projects envision trading that new water for Colorado River allocations currently used by those states or Mexico.
The amount of money the state will pay the companies involved to further develop their proposals isn’t known;. Instead, the state agency will issue “task orders” in the coming months and determine how much it will pay for each project to be fleshed out.
And the water won’t come quickly: The earliest a proposal could supply any new water is in 2028, but most aim for the early to mid-2030s to begin deliveries.
No cost estimates for the projects were immediately released, but previous desalination proposals were expected to each cost between $5 billion and $10 billion to develop.
All told, Arizona’s water supplies could be boosted by between 427,000 acre feet and 1.6 million acre feet a year if all the projects were implemented. An acre foot is about 326,000 gallons — enough water to cover an acre of land one foot deep and typically enough to supply three homes for a year.
The moves by the agency known as WIFA come as the state faces additional cutbacks in its Colorado River supplies and its existing sources of groundwater are stressed to the limit. The unanimous vote by the 9-member board and the release of the proposals mark the first time the public has seen any details of the projects proposed to WIFA over the summer and reviewed in secret by agency staff and by a WIFA committee last week.
Chelsea McGuire, WIFA’s executive director, told reporters after the meeting that three years after the Legislature expanded the agency’s mission to include finding new water, she was excited to get to the point where the agency is acting to get new supplies.
“These are real projects, this is no longer a hypothetical,” McGuire said. “This is no longer something that someone is dreaming of in a room somewhere.”
Not considered by the board at Wednesday’s meeting was a proposal by water provider EPCOR to import water from a controversial project in the southeastern California desert under development for decades by a company called Cadiz Inc.
Cadiz owns a large swath of remote desert land about 60 miles west of Parker, AZ. The company has worked for more than three decades to tap a large and ancient underground aquifer as a water source for thirsty California cities but has faced fervent opposition from conservation groups and state political leaders.
Environmental groups turned out in force Wednesday to urge the WIFA board not to approve the Cadiz project, only to learn it wasn’t recommended for approval by a board committee that reviewed the projects in secret last week.
“That one’s over, we’re not doing that,” board member David Becham said. What remained were three other projects proposed by EPCOR, which provides water in multiple areas of the state, including San Tan Valley, Sun City and Paradise Valley, and four by a group led by a Spanish company.
EPCOR is proposing a desalination plant in Baja California that would produce between 167,000 and 500,000 acre feet of water per year by 2034 .
The water would be delivered by pipeline to the Colorado River at the U.S.-Mexico border and allowed to flow into Mexico. In return, Arizona would get to take that amount of water out of the river farther north and send it to the Phoenix and Tucson areas through the Central Arizona Project canal.
The other desalination proposals that were OK-ed for funding Wednesday are from a group called the ACCIONA-Fengate Water Augmentation Alliance.
Acciona develops those plants across the world, and Fengate Capitol specializes in infrastructure investment. Acciona won a contract last December to design and build a desalination plant in Dana Point, Calif.
The partnership actually made two desalination plant proposals, according to one-page project outlines provided by WIFA.
Under the first, it would build a new plant in Baja California that would supply 150,000 acre feet of water a year by 2034. The water would be delivered through existing Colorado River water delivery systems or directly exchanged with Mexico for its river allocations.
The second desalination proposal is more general, with the Acciona alliance proposing to use “new or existing” plants in California or Mexico to deliver between 50,000 and 200,000 acre feet of water per year by 2031. That water would be swapped for part of Mexico’s Colorado River supply.
Both EPCOR and the Acciona group applied for state money to create new supplies in other ways. EPCOR wants to invest and develop projects in California. It envisions capturing excess runoff in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and other sources and storing it underground for later use. In exchange for that 10,000 to 100,000 acre feet of water per year, Arizona would get part of that state’s Colorado River supply.
It also proposes adding a new plant to further treat wastewater from an existing sewage treatment plant near San Diego to drinking water quality in exchange for part of that region’s Colorado River supply. It hopes to net between 14,000 and 95,000 acre feet of new water.
The Acciona group has a similar “toilet to tap” proposal, hoping to treat wastewater in Mexico and Colorado to high quality, freeing up between 20,000 and 130,000 acre feet of Colorado River water those areas would normally use.
Acciona also wants to invest in improving the efficiency of irrigation operations in Mexico, California and Utah in hopes of obtaining between 16,000 and 466,000 acre feet of water from those areas between 2028 and 2037.
Ted Cooke, a board member who led the WIFA’s board committee that evaluated the projects, said finding and developing new water supplies for Arizona required a private public partnership the board is now embarking upon.
“We need private equity to get this done,” he said. “We need private expertise to get this done,” Cooke said while explaining one of his votes. “WIFA cannot operate a plant, WIFA cannot build a plant, WIFA cannot finance this on our own.” Source: KAWC
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