A story is told in one of the old accounts of the community of Bluewater, New Mexico, about a visit some time around the turn of the last century, by Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., to the Mormons trying to scratch out a farming life in this high desert valley west of Grants. The story involved …
Continue reading ‘“springs of living water would roll forth from these hills”’ »
I turned down this alley in Albuquerque’s Old Town on a bike ride this morning, amazed that I’d never noticed it before. I spend a lot of time on the bike. I’m long past my youthful zoomy lifestyle, but in my slow and plodding way I have come to deeply value my time wandering Albuquerque. …
Driving in a pickup down a ditchbank on Albuquerque’s valley floor some years ago, Joey Trujillo pointed off to the west, to a line of trees snaking away into what is now a tony suburban neighborhood. It was the neighborhood we now call “Dietz Farm”, named after the Dietz family, affluent interlopers from the east …
Managing outdoor water use while maintaining urban tree cover is a key challenge for water managers in arid climates. Urban trees generate flows of ecosystem services in arid areas, but also require significant amounts of irrigation. In this paper, a bioeconomic-health model of trees and water use is developed to investigate management of an urban …
Heron Reservoir, the first stop for central New Mexico’s imported Colorado River Basin water, dropped Oct. 10 to its lowest level since filling after it was first built in the 1970s: As I noted last month, total storage on New Mexico’s part of the Rio Grande system is at historic lows. I updated the numbers …
Continue reading ‘The draining of New Mexico’s reservoirs continues’ »
A great job here, helping solve problems on the Rio Grande: The incumbent will be responsible for independent technical and scientific engineering decisions based on the principles and methods of hydrologic/water resources analyses and evaluation. The position will required advanced technical analyses of complex hydrologic and water resource engineering issues; an in depth understanding of …
I went on a bike ride this morning to get a look at the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Flows dropped below 100 cubic feet per second Thursday evening for just the second time since we moved here in 1990. Flows this low are hard to measure – we didn’t get a numerical picture of just …
tl;dr Total reservoir storage on the Rio Grande in New Mexico at the end of August was the lowest it’s been since at least 1980. longer (with graphs!) In our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program class, we’ve been discussing the state of the Rio Grande in real time. This feels like a remarkable …
Continue reading ‘Draining the reservoirs on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
CUTTER CANYON – Cutter Reservoir is an incongruous sight. The 10ish miles of dirt road it takes to reach it, up San Juan County Road 4450, is not suggestive of water. Thanks to oilfield money, the road is good as northwest New Mexico washboard dirt roads go. )We counted 21 well pads between the reservoir …