Archive of posts filed under the water category.
Some context on central New Mexico’s big June 4 storm
Out bike riding yesterday morning, my friend Scot and I were watching the radar app and judging wind and storm direction, dodging the occasional raindrops with a spectacular sky around us. (In fact our ride was delayed because Scot had to put the goat in, something about lightning-goat risks.) But despite the stormy show, the …
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How to crash Lake Mead: Step 1 – crash Lake Powell
A new analysis suggests Lake Powell could crash in less than three years if there were to be a repeat of drought (aridification?) conditions seen in the recent past. While the basin community’s attention has been focused on the risk of Lake Mead plummeting at some point in the future, Lake Powell at the bottom …
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How Lake Mead could crash
Speaking last week before the Imperial Irrigation District board, Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman showed this remarkable slide. It is remarkable for obvious reasons – it shows how easily we could crash Lake Mead! But it’s remarkable in a more subtle way that reflects a shift in our approach to the hydrologic analysis of the Colorado …
Record low flows on the Gila
Another of my attempts to visualize data from this remarkably bad water year in New Mexico. The cloud of gray lines is flow at the Gila gauge as the river leaves its headwaters mountains in southwestern New Mexico, one line for each year. The red line is this year – significantly lower than in any …
Old water – the San Luis People’s Ditch
I took the long way home from a meeting in Alamos, Colorado, yesterday to make a pilgrimage to San Luis. In the Culebra Valley of Colorado in the high country near the New Mexico border, San Luis lays claim to being the oldest town in Colorado, settled by the descendants of Spanish immigrant families. Native …
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What’s left of the Rio Grande
I stopped on the Gail Ryba Bridge over the Rio Grande this morning, the bike bridge adjacent to Interstate 40 that offers one of the great views of our river. The morning light was lovely, I saw a couple of egrets in the ditch down below. I love this place. Flows right now are stable …
New Mexico is a dry place
Putting together a talk for our (UNM’s) big water conference tomorrow, I had occasion to fall completely in love with this Arthur Rothstein photo from his 1936 trip through New Mexico for the Farm Service Administration:
Federal pressure to do a Colorado River water conservation deal
Catching up after a busy final week of the semester at the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, I had time today to sit down and and think through the implications of this remarkable Bureau of Reclamation press release. It did a great job of achieving one of the primary goals of a news …
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A drying Rio Grande
I went out to the Rio Grande yesterday morning to talk to KOB’s Eddie Garcia about the prospect of a drying Rio Grande through Albuquerque this summer. The final forecast numbers put this year’s runoff at just 18 percent of the long term average. The flow right now at Embudo, as the Rio Grande is …