River Beat: Colorado River Forecasts Continue to Drop
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the [...]
River Beat: Yuma Desalting Plant Dedication
Joyce Lobeck reports on yesterday’s festivities in Yuma to mark next week’s start of the Yuma Desalting Plant test run: On Monday, the desalting plant will be started up for a yearlong demonstration run that will produce about 29,000 acre-feet of desalinated water. That means 29,000 acre-feet of water – enough to serve 116,000 people [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lasers on the Moon
Some days you have to write about nuclear waste. Some days you have to write about water contamination in the Rio Grande. And some days you simply can’t avoid writing about shooting lasers at the moon (sub/ad req): Scientists using a NASA satellite and a New Mexico telescope have found a missing Soviet spacecraft on [...]
River Beat: Monitoring the Cienega de Santa Clara
The Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant is scheduled to begin its operational test phase next week. In preparation, a U.S.-Mexican team is ramping up its monitoring efforts at the Cienega de Santa Clara, an accidental wetland in what was once the Colorado River delta. The Cienega is the inadvertent product of U.S. ag drainage [...]
River Beat: Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand
There’s a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation graph making the rounds that captures the core issue going forward on the Colorado River Basin. Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand, courtesy USBR I first noticed it in Jennifer Pitt’s congressional testimony in early April. At the “Implications of Lower Lake Levels” symposium I just attended in Las Vegas, [...]
River Beat: Quake Didn’t Drain Cienega de Santa Clara
The Cienega de Santa Clara, the one remaining major wetland in the Colorado River Delta, is not being drained as a result of Mexico’s 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to Karl Flessa, the University of Arizona researcher who is part of a team monitoring the ecosystem. The area was hit hard by the earthquake. The San [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ryan and the black-necked stilt
Everywhere I went on my road trip over the last week up the Lower Colorado River, it seemed like the black-necked stilts were following me. I saw them Monday night in the East Yuma Wetlands, a great little habitat restoration project laced with trails on a bend in what’s left of the Colorado River, just upstream [...]
Water in the desert, Las Vegas edition II
LAS VEGAS, NEV – Walking up from our hotel to the strip in search of a place to eat last night, battered by neon and flashing lights, my dinner companion commented ruefully on how distant we were from nature. I suppose you could say that in the middle of any city, but in Las Vegas [...]
Who’s the most desperate for water?
YUMA, ARIZ – On the Lower Colorado River, there are three large municipal water wholesalers behaving with a certain air of desperation in their hunt for long term supplies of water: the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas), the Metropolitan Water District (Southern California) and the Central Arizona Project (Phoenix/Tucson). So who wants it bad? [...]
Water in the desert, Las Vegas edition
LAS VEGAS, NEV – The distance between Morelos Dam on the lower Colorado and the Bellagio Fountain is profound. Morelos spans the U.S.-Mexico border, with the wheat fields and onions of the Yuma County Water Users Association behind me as I took this picture and Algodones on the far bank. Most years, Morelos is where [...]
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