A dry forecast for the Colorado River Basin. A note on policy implications.

The UC Merced Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI) points to drying over the Colorado River Basin over the next four weeks. EDDI is a new experimental tool that offers potential for tracking quickly emerging drought conditions by analyzing the evaporative demand of the atmosphere. It combines how moist things are with how hot and dry …

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Historical Perspective on the Accounting for Evaporation and System Losses in the Lower Colorado River Basin

Over the past year, the question of how to account for evaporation and system losses in the Lower Colorado River Basin has become a hot political and policy topic. With the recent Lower Basin water use reduction scheme, we seem to have set the question aside for now. But it’s not going away. My Science …

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A century ago in Colorado River Compact negotiations: seeds of a deal planted, but which will grow?

By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck With the arrival of all of the commissioners and their key advisors, the Commission got back together on Saturday morning. The purpose of this meeting had been agreed to back in early April. Each commissioner would be given the opportunity to suggest the form of a compact. Nevada’s James …

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Carpenter’s Last Stand for Complete State Sovereignty – 100 Years Ago at the Compact Negotiations

By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck On Saturday, April 1st, 1922, at 9:00 AM in Denver’s iconic Brown Palace Hotel, Chairman Herbert Hoover opened the 9th meeting of the Colorado River Commission. The official meeting lasted only 30 minutes. The commission took only one action of consequence. It asked its members to submit to Executive …

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Getting Acquainted with the Colorado River Basin: 100 years ago in compact negotiations

By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck The Colorado Commissions’ 8th Meeting Wednesday, March 15th, 1922, Phoenix, Arizona After a six-week break from the disappointing series of negotiating meetings that ended on January 31st  in Washington, D.C., the commissioners from the seven U.S. Colorado River Basin states and the federal government reconvened for the group’s 8th …

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Now out in paperback (and perhaps timely given the chaos?): Science Be Dammed – How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River

Our friends at the University of Arizona Press have kindly printed a bunch of new copies of our book Science Be Dammed, this time in paperback so it’s cheaper! Eric and I did a fun Q&A with Abby Mogollon at the press to accompany this second launch: Q: Why did you embark on this project? …

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Taking climate change seriously on the Colorado River: a practical step

Preparing for climate change on the Colorado River is hard. But we will make it harder, and narrow the scope of our options for dealing with it, if we don’t incorporate realistic flow reduction scenarios in our planning efforts. That’s the thrust of an editorial Brad Udall and I have in this week’s issue of …

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The question of reservoir evaporation – How much water are the Lower Colorado River Basin states really using?

The conventional simplification of the Colorado River Compact’s water allocation scheme is that it set aside 7.5 million acre feet of water use for the “exclusive beneficial consumptive use” of the states of the Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, and California. In the 21st century, the official accounting shows the Lower Basin states using an …

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Science Be Damned

When USGS reports a century ago suggested there wasn’t enough water to meet the allocations of the Colorado River Compact, the politicians just kinda pretended they weren’t there. I wasn’t done this blatantly: Hours after President Trump assailed guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for reopening schools, Vice President Mike Pence, …

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