The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority announced today that it will temporarily stop diverting water from the Rio Grande for our drinking water, shifting entirely to groundwater to meet municipal supplies through the summer. In itself, it’s no emergency for city water supplies – the groundwater is the reserve for use in dry years, …
Some years ago, when I first began riding bikes in Albuquerque, my office chum Jimmie took me riding south through Albuquerque’s Rio Grande valley floor along a street called Guadalupe Trail. It’s not a street I would have found by myself – following the contours of one of the early acequias, the irrigation ditches that …
Continue reading ‘Seeing Like a State: the corner of Ortega Road and Guadalupe Trail’ »
“We really need to call [what we’re experiencing] aridification — the drying out of the Colorado River Basin because of climate change, we can’t just call it ‘drought’ anymore,” Fleck said. “It appears to be this permanent phenomenon that’s lowering the lake levels. You should not expect it to return to high lake levels over …
Continue reading ‘Why I hate “Drought Contingency Plan” (the name, not the plan)’ »
Faced with the challenge of teaching some or all of our coursework this fall on line, my University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleagues and I have been having a think about what we’re trying to accomplish. A lot of the thinking revolves around translating our educational goals from face-to-face classroom discussion to the …
Continue reading ‘Tradeoffs: Colorado River water, flowing down the Rio Grande’ »
Brett Walton had a great bit of business in yesterday’s Circle of Blue story on 2019’s remarkable drop in Colorado River Lower Basin water use: The last time water consumption from the river was that low was in 1986, the year after an enormous canal in Arizona opened that allowed the state to lay claim …
Continue reading ‘March 1985: when everything on the Colorado River changed’ »
By Eric Kuhn As Utah pushes forward with its proposed Lake Powell Pipeline – an attempt move over 80,000 acre feet per year of its Upper Colorado River Basin allocation to communities in the Lower Basin – it is worth revisiting one of the critical legal milestones in the evolution of what we have come …
Continue reading ‘The roots of a coming Lake Powell Pipeline legal tangle’ »
My NIDIS webinar from earlier this week is posted. Key bits: This year’s “sneaky drought” is a problem. The longer term “megadrought” (climate change-driven aridification) we seem to be in is an even bigger problem. We’ve done some great work in the Colorado River Basin reducing our use of water and building the institutional widgets …
Continue reading ‘Coping with Megadrought in the Colorado River Basin’ »
By Eric Kuhn This winter’s decent snowfall has turned into an abysmal runoff on the Colorado River, thanks to the dry soils heading into the winter, along with a warm spring. It’s alarming, but given the large amount of storage capacity in the basin and the recent string of good runoff years in the upper …
I’ll be I’ll be yammering about the Colorado River basin, sneaky droughts, and megadroughts with the folks at NIDIS (the National Integrated Drought Information System): As the Colorado River Basin experiences 2020’s “sneaky drought” amid a long term pattern that looks increasingly like one of the region’s millennial “megadroughts” that last decades, water managers are …
Had occasion to revisit this written several years ago by the University of Arizona’s Kathy Jacobs, it seems very much on point as we pursue the next set of Colorado River negotiations: There has been an unending chorus of people who are convinced that the “Law of the River”—the numerous contracts, laws, court decisions, and …