Total Mead/Powell storage headed for lowest level since Powell first filled
Ever the journalist in search of gloomy extremes, I just noticed that total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs used to manage flows on the Colorado River, is currently forecast (USBR pdf here) to end the current water year at its lowest level since 1968, when Powell, the uppermost reservoir [...]
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: San Juan-Chama supply at risk from climate change
Concerned the current drought will end? No worries, climate change has your back: Climate change is likely to render a key part of the water supply for Santa Fe and Albuquerque increasingly unreliable in coming decades, according to a new analysis by federal scientists. The San Juan-Chama project, which imports water from the mountains of [...]
Folks, we’ve got a drought going on
Bill Hasencamp at the Metropolitan Water District (I think it was Bill) asked a question today on the Colorada Basin River Forecast Center monthly briefing call that led to an email exchange that led to this, from the work blog: the forecast for spring inflow into Lake Powell, on the Colorado River, is the lowest [...]
River Beat: The “Severe Sustained Drought” study
I recently (happily) stumbled across a web version of the full 1995 publication of the Colorado River “Severe Sustained Drought” study, a comprehensive “what if” exercise done in the 1980s and early 1990s. From the forward:: The Severe Sustained Drought Study contemplates a much more dire water supply scenario than that which has occurred in the [...]
River beat: the emptying of Lake Powell
In late 2010 and early 2011, when I was plotting out the narrative arc for my Colorado River book, I began collecting what I imagined was the detailed storytelling material to describe the decline of the river’s great reservoirs. I’d been out to Lake Mead to document the day it dropped to record level. And [...]
landmark Arizona-Nevada water deal coming to an end
The agreement between the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas) and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, under which Arizona banked water for Nevada, has always seemed to me like a harbinger of the future in the Colorado River Basin – mutually beneficial sharing across state borders. Via Juliet McKenna and Michele Robertson, it now appears [...]
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights
From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico: It was 1948. Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading. “The state of New Mexico wants [...]
River beat: 54 percent of average runoff into Lake Powell
The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell: The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue bands mean that, even [...]
What exactly does the Basin Study mean we need to do?
Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed. Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”? Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of [...]
Dust, runoff and the Vegas pipeline
Juliet McKenna has done a fantastic back-of-the-envelope calculation about potential effect of dust created by Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposed groundwater pumping system. Vegas, you’ll recall, wants to build a pipeline across the state, using groundwater from distant rural areas to fuel growth in that state’s largest metropolis. McKenna notes that various analyses of the project [...]
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