The Bureau of Reclamation Colorado River team did something remarkable in yesterday’s release of its new 5-year reservoir levels analysis – the “stress test”, a methodology pioneered a decade ago by an Upper Colorado River Basin technical team that included John Carron of Hydros and Eric Kuhn and Dave Kanzer of the Colorado River …
Continue reading ‘Taking climate change seriously: the Colorado River “stress test”’ »
Getting ready for class class discussion this afternoon about “drought” (“I get to see my students in person!” he exclaimed nervously.), I had occasion to check the latest Climate Prediction Center long lead forecast. It’s a few weeks old, but I don’t expect it’ll have changed much. The brownest blob captures both river basins I …
I had the joy of sharing a goofy group text thread yesterday evening with a couple of friends exchanging pictures of the round rocks we each collected yesterday morning on a field trip to see the plumbing of the San Juan-Chama Project, which diverts Colorado River Basin water beneath the continental divide to bring drinking …
This morning’s operations missive from the federal-state-local Middle Rio Grande operations group (by “Middle” here we mean central New Mexico) notes a release of ~100 cubic feet per second of imported San Juan-Chama Project water for environmental flows, an effort to help the struggling Rio Grande silvery minnow. SJC water is removed from the Colorado …
I’ve been thrashing about this year thinking about ways of visualizing and measuring how dry this year has been on my home river, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque. Above is my latest stab at it. A flow of 100 cubic feet per second at the USGS gage at Albuquerque’s Route 66 bridge in the middle …
Colorado State University’s Brad Udall has been doing some really interesting thinking about how to conceptualize and communicate climate change risk to water supplies in the Colorado River Basin. Shown above (and shared with permission) is one of Brad’s “selected averages” graphs. The horizontal lines show the average river flow value for a period of …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall on Upper Colorado River Basin climate change risk’ »
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? …
My co-instructor Bob Berrens and I added a slide this morning to our welcome lecture for first-year students in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, hoping to foreshadow two questions we’ll be asking the students over and over and over and over this semester: Bob: That sounds great, how are you going to …
Continue reading ‘Why don’t they redo the Colorado River Compact?’ »
When I was a little kid, the Fleck family had a big box with a radio and a record player and speakers in the family room. Radio was always magical to me, and when I was at my littlest I imagined a man inside the box, scrunched up and holding a guitar, talking and singing …
As we lumber toward a renegotiation of the operating rules on the Colorado River, one of the challenges folks in basin management face is the differing understandings of the Law of the River. There’s stuff we all know, or think we know, or stuff Lower Basin folks think they know that Upper Basin people may …
Continue reading ‘Sources of Controversy in the Law of the River – Larry MacDonnell’ »