California’s 2025 use of Colorado River water is on track to be the lowest since 1949

Posted by on
Four graphs showing declining water use in Arizona, California, and Nevada.

Lower Basin water use since 1964. 2025 data provisional, based on USBR projections Oct. 29, 2015.

California’s projected use of Colorado River water this year, 3.76 million acre feet as of Reclamation’s Oct. 29 modeling runs, would be, as near as I can tell, the state’s lowest use since 1949.

Also notable:

  • Nevada’s 197,280 acre feet would be the lowest since 1992.
  • The two lowest years in Imperial Irrigation District’s history (my dataset goes back to 1941) were last year and this year.
  • This will be the third year in a row that Arizona’s main stem use has been below 2 million acre feet. The last time that happened (three consecutive years below 2maf) was in the 1980s.

Total take by the US Lower Basin states is projected to be 5.917 million acre feet, the lowest total US main stem use since 1983.

A few things to note.

First, the tenuous fabric of the Basin States negotiations is predicated right now, in part, on the Lower Basin cutting 1.5 million acre feet of annual use. They’ve already done that.

Second, the current cuts are enabled by significant federal payments to compensate the water agencies for their cuts. As my colleagues and I wrote back in September, counting on that money in the future would be unwise.

Third, the economies of Arizona, southern Nevada, and southern California are chugging along just fine right now. As I have written in the past, having less water does not mean scary doom. We can do this.

A note on the data:

The projection of total 2025 use by Lower Basin water users is based on model runs done by the Bureau of Reclamation every few days. It’s a rich source of data, with detailed accounting of the various conservation programs being run by the Lower Basin agencies. PDF here.

The comparison with prior years is based in part on the Lower Basin accounting reports, prepared each year since 1964. For prior years, I have a dataset I got years ago from the technical staff at the Metropolitan Water District of California, who had pieced together California numbers back to 1941. (Thanks, Met!)

We have no comparable data for the Upper Basin that might allow us to track water use at this level of detail, and with this kind of immediacy. This is a problem.

Salmon return to the Klamath headwaters

Posted by on

For the first time in more than a century, salmon have reached the headwaters of the Klamath River Basin, a milestone made possible by the removal of four major dams along the California–Oregon border. The event marks a defining moment for both environmental restoration and the communities of southern Oregon that depend on the river’s health for ecological and cultural vitality.

– Bryce Robinson, Grants Pass Tribune

Administration proposes budget cuts for Tribal clean water initiatives

Posted by on

In carrying out its treaty obligations with the Indian tribes, the Government is something more than a mere contracting party. Under a humane and self imposed policy which has found expression in many acts of Congress and numerous decisions of this Court, it has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust. Its conduct, as disclosed in the acts of those who represent it in dealings with the Indians, should therefore be judged by the most exacting fiduciary standards.

Seminole Nation v. United States, 316 US 286, 86 L. Ed. 1480, 62 S. Ct. 1049 – Supreme Court, 1942

The bipartisan consensus on the pursuit of access to clean, safe drinking water on behalf of U.S. Native American Communities seems to be break down, according to a new report from the Initiative on Universal Access
to Clean Water for Tribal Communities:

As EPA’s Administrator has made clear, every American is entitled to clean air, land, and water. The necessity of, and entitlement to, clean water is nowhere more apparent than on Tribal lands. Not only is the need there the greatest, the federal government has specific responsibilities to Tribes to provide a permanent and livable homeland in exchange for the land concessions Tribes made in the last centuries. We cannot continue to ignore or gloss over this responsibility. Yet the FY 2026 proposals move in the opposite direction—Interior would eliminate BIA’s Tribal Community Resilience program; Reclamation would zero out the WaterSMART toolbox and cut the Native American Affairs Program; EPA would reduce SRF capitalizations to historic lows; and IHS would reduce the SFC program budget to $13.5 million—a reduction of 85% in the one funding stream that directly connects homes to water and sewer. The President’s proposed FY 2026 budget reflects his policy choices.

Key to the group’s argument,  however, is a reminder that the Administration proposes budgetary allocations, but the actual appropriations require action by Congress.

You know what to do.

 

Externalities of fallowing

Posted by on

We identified fallowed land—an unplanted agricultural land parcel—as a key anthropogenic dust source in California. Specifically, we find that the Central Valley accounts for about 77% of total fallowed land areas in California, where they are associated with about 88% of major anthropogenic dust events. We also find that the geographic coverage of these fallowed lands expanded between 2008 and 2022 with associated increasing anthropogenic dust activities. Additionally, these anthropogenic dust activities are sensitive to the drought severity over the fallowed lands, with potential cumulative effects on downstream dust burden during prolonged multi-year drought conditions. Overall, our results have important implications for public health, including increased risk for Valley fever….

Adebiyi, Adeyemi A., Md Minhazul Kibria, John T. Abatzoglou, Paul Ginoux, Satyendra Pandey, Alexandra Heaney, Shu-Hua Chen, and Akintomide A. Akinsanola. “Fallowed agricultural lands dominate anthropogenic dust sources in California.” Communications Earth & Environment 6, no. 1 (2025): 324. 

The driest year on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since 1964

Posted by on
Bar chart of Rio Grande flow at Otowi Bridge, in acre-feet, for 1895–2025 (values to date through Oct 11). Red bars mark the current year and any years with lower flow; the current year is among the lowest on record.

The driest year at Otowi since 1964. Code: https://github.com/johnrfleck/water-tools

 

Locator map showing Otowi on the Rio Grande upstream from Albuquerque.

Otowi

Total flow to date on the Rio Grande at Otowi is the lowest since 1964.

Otowi is the place where the river leaves the upper valleys and enters the canyons that lie at the head of the valley of Albuquerque, what we in New Mexico call the “Middle Rio Grande.”

The graph shows total flow to date this year, with previous drier years called out in red. You can see that the “drought of the ’50s,” (which really extended well into the 1960s) was the big impact decadal-scale event here, not the ’30s, Dust Bowl.

If you squint, you also can see the subtle impact of the San Juan-Chama Project, which beginning in the 1970s began importing Colorado River water. I’m measuring total flow with this calculation, not what is formally called the “Otowi Index Flow,” the official measure of native water used for Rio Grande Compact accounting. This is the number that matters the most to me – it’s the total amount of water we have to work with here in the Middle Rio Grande, the actual flow of water into the valley each year. You can see a subtle impact of that SJC water, raising up the floor in dry years. At least I think I can see that.

A Note on Method

I am not a computer programmer, or software engineer, or whatever you call that thing. But I’ve been writing computer code since I was a teenager in Upland, California, writing Fortran on punch cards that we would send to the guy who ran the school district mainframe to run in the middle of the night. (Southern California’s Mediterranean climate meant we did not have to trudge miles to school barefoot in the snow, but we did write code on punch cards.)

I’ve done it because it’s fun (I did a stint as a free software volunteer on the GNOME project 20-plus years ago), as a toolkit for analyzing data in my haphazard career as a “data journalist,” and in early days of newspaper Internet work, when we rolled our own web site code in Perl. I am a terrible coder, but with some help (site:stackexchange.com “cryptic error message”) I know enough to make my way around the data I have questions about. I was the guy at the newspaper who “borrowed” Lotus 1-2-3 from a friend to analyze city budgets, and persuaded the IT folks to put “R” on my desktop computer against their better judgment. But it’s laborious stuff because of the gap between my subject matter expertise and my coding skills. As a result, there were things I didn’t bother with.

Luis Villa, a friend from my GNOME days who went on to become a lawyer and big think person about “open” and the commons, posed a question on his blog last month about the gateway language model coding tools provide into open data. The provocative header to the section of the post was “Accessibility & Democratization”:

Open data enabler? We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has never been as big as open code. But if open data + vibecoding = powerful, does that make open data way more relevant?

“Vibecoding” is a technique by which you tell a language model in plain language what you want your code to  do. It writes it. You run it. It chokes, you paste in the error message and say “Fix this.” After a couple of iterations, it works. This is both dangerous and liberating. For me, it opens up vast areas of open data for analysis that I never would have bothered with because of the agony of pasting error messages into a search engine trying to find someone on Stackexchange who had the same problem, running their code, getting a new error message, turtles all the way down. I know the questions and the analytical structures I need, but turning those ideas into code was a pain in the ass!

In the case of the graph above, I had some old code I had written that downloaded USGS streamflow data, converted cubic feet per second (a rate) to acre feet over a specified time period (a volume), compared flow to date this year to flow to the same date in previous years, and made a graph.

This year has been super dry. I was curious about previous years that had been this dry. Updating the code to color those with lower flow than this year’s red was conceptually trivial, but would have been tedious and time consuming. Also, the old code’s visualization was ugly. Vibecoding the changes took an order of magnitude less time than writing all of that code by hand. I’m pretty sure it took longer to make the locator map in Datawrapper (which is fast!) than it did to update the code.

This would be a terrible idea, as Simon Willison argues, if my goal was to become a better programmer, or a software engineer writing production code. This is the same reason using language models to do your writing for you – if your goal is to come to understanding – is a terrible idea. The act of writing is an act of coming to understanding. For me, the knowledge work here is staring at the graph, incorporating what it is telling me into my knowledge framework, and doing the work of writing this blog post. I need to know enough to look at the code and the data it spits out to be confident that it’s sane. But I don’t care about the finicky syntax of R’s “mutate” and “ifelse.”

Code here, part of a set of water data analysis scripts I’ve used for years, updated this week with Anthropic’s codebase management tools to fix a bunch of messes I knew needed fixing, freely licensed under the MIT license so you can do with them what you will.

 

 

 

“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”

Posted by on
Line chart showing combined storage in Northern Rio Grande reservoirs (Cochiti, Abiquiu, El Vado, and Heron) from January through December. The shaded green area marks the 30th to 70th percentile range of reservoir storage from 1980 to the present, and the blue area marks the 10th to 90th percentile range. A dashed black line shows the historical median. Solid gray and red lines show 2024 and 2025 storage, respectively, both well below historical medians, with 2025 slightly above 2024. Storage peaks around May–June and declines through autumn.

Exploring the data commons (I need to update the legend, the black lines are max and min)

A bunch of odds and ends cluttering my brain, blog posts that are half written in my mind that are in the way:

Quoting Luis Villa on accessing the open data commons

We’ve been talking about open data for a long time, but since using data is hard to consume and manipulate, open data has never been as big as open code. But if open data + vibecoding = powerful, does that make open data way more relevant?

Yes.

See graph above.

I always have had more questions (sometimes ill-posed, sometimes well-thought-through) than my coding abilities can execute. (See also domestic wells below.)

Source

The Commons

I pay for a subscription to Newspapers.com in order to have access to a large portion of my written work. I view what I have written over the course of my life – newspapers, books, blogs – as a mindful and intentional contribution to the information commons. But this aligns poorly with the formal economic and legal structures – “institutions” as we might define them for our water resources students, the rules that serve as the foundation for the more common-language definitions of “institutions” that might apply here, the organizations of publishing – newspapers and book publishers and Inkstain.

The newspaper paid me well (it wasn’t a lot of money, but I viewed it as a fair transaction) and owned what I produced. I pay now for the privilege of reading it. The books are more complicated. I choose to make Inkstain freely available.

Derrida and Adorno, two philosophers I have been poking at of late, are helping me think about the definitional challenges – not “the commons” in particular, but what we’re doing when we attach words/concepts to things, the cultural quicksand beneath our linguistic feet.

That Postcard

Postcard of Point Sublime at the North Rim of the Grande Canyon.

Point Sublime

A vintage postcard dated June 18, 1946, postmarked at Kaibab, Arizona, with a green 1-cent United States postage stamp featuring George Washington. The card is addressed to Mr. Herbert H. Bleck, 1527 Delaware Ave., Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Printed text on left (description of image side): "POINT SUBLIME on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon affords a magnificent view of this stupendous chasm. The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is reached by Union Pacific Railroad to Cedar City, Utah, thence by delightful motor bus tour. Natural Color Photograph from Kodachrome." Handwritten message: "18 June ’46 Mother & Dad: I saw these colors today and they are the nearest thing I have seen to being true. Everything is going perfectly. Bob" Postmark details: "Kaibab Forest, Ariz. Jun 19, 1946, 7 AM."

“the nearest thing I have seen to being true”

Found this in a stack of old Dad stuff. It is my origin story, my father as a young artist in a moment of profound change. In laying the groundwork for his life, it laid the groundwork for mine.

Domestic Wells

A map of greater Albuquerque showing green along the river and in the near northeast heights and brown elsewhere.

OpenET-reported change in evapotranspiration, 2000-2004 compared to 2020-2024. Green is places water consumptive use from all sources has gone up. Brown is places it has gone down.

Map of Albuquerque showing green areas along the Rio Grand and brown elsewhere.

Density of domestic wells in greater Albuquerque. Dark green is >150 wells per square kilometer. Brown is no wells at all.

See Luis’s comment above about vibe coding and open data.

I am not sure what to do with this. I can’t unsee it.

I’m out on the epistemological thin ice here, but as a journalist I spent much of my life working in areas where that ice is thin, it’s where the interesting stuff happens.

Ostrom and the Colorado River

I’ve mostly been grabbing the handrail and trying not to fall off as my Wilburys friends, in what we see as a discourse vacuum, charge ahead with our critique of Colorado River governance:

In a 2011 paper, Elinor Ostrom laid out one of the final versions of her “design principles,” characteristics of successful institutional arrangements for collective action around natural resource systems. We spend a lot of time on this in the class I teach with Bob Berrens each fall for UNM graduate students. It was at the heart of my book Water is For Fighting Over, and it is at the heart of Ribbons of Green, the book Bob and I wrote that UNM Press will be publishing next year.

(Did I mention how much I love teaching?)

There are two design principles in particular that are at the heart of the current Colorado River challenges. Quoting from Ostrom 2011:

  • How are conflicts over harvesting and maintenance to be resolved?
  • How will the rules affecting the above be changed over time with changes in the performance of the resource system, the strategies of participants, and external opportunities and constraints?

There is an additional principle from Ostrom that shows up over and over in her work, that’s embedded in her explicit principles: a need for a shared understanding of the quantification of the resource.

I am thinking through how these ideas relate to the current Colorado River challenges. Those challenges suggest what I had thought was a functional system lacks these three things. I am thinking a lot about what I described in 2015 when I was writing Water is For Fighting Over, versus what I see happening in 2025. What has changed, or what did I miss?

In which I get my first ambulance ride

Burying the lead here (I always hated the artifice of the journalistic jargon-spelling “lede”), but I had occasion recently to spend a few days in the bubble of the medical-industrial complex. I’m fine, I think, but the identification of a “new” life-changing risk is in actuality the identification of a risk that has probably been there all along. It’s just that now I know about it.

Which means I can do some stuff to reduce that risk, including magical pharmacology (“If I crash,” I told my bike-riding buddy Sunday, “be sure to tell the EMT’s!”) and also saying more “nos” to the stresses of my life of public engagement. My contributions to the commons are not without personal cost, as well as the personal benefits I derive. (Sorry, J.)

It also means that I spend a lot of time thinking about this (new?) risk. This is subtext to all the rest of what I just wrote.

The 1922 Colorado River Compact is Now the Obvious Elephant in the Negotiating Room

Posted by on

By Eric Kuhn, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Kathryn Sorensen, Jack Schmidt, and Katherine Tara

As negotiators for the seven Colorado River Basin states rapidly approach Reclamation’s November deadline for providing a framework for a seven-state agreement for the Post-2026 Operating Guidelines for Lakes Powell and Mead, a larger threat looms. Reclamation’s recently released September 24-Month study minimum probable projection is consistent with our mass balance analysis of storage in the next year, solidifying the likelihood of critical conditions if the coming winter is dry. Reclamation’s latest analysis predicts that storage at Lake Powell would fall below the 3500-ft elevation as early August 2026 and might continue to be below this critical elevation until March 2028. As we noted in our recent white paper, Reclamation has committed to protecting Lake Powell from going below 3500 ft.

This projection of future conditions in the event of persistent dry conditions poses a conundrum—Reclamation could reduce releases from Powell to protect the 3500-ft reservoir elevation, but in doing so, low releases would most likely trigger the dreaded 1922 Colorado River Compact tripwire–the amount of water delivered from Lake Powell to Lake Mead during a 10-year period that is less than the threshold. The Lower Division states are likely to litigate if the 10-yr average wire is tripped. Under one prevailing interpretation of the Compact, Upper Basin states must not cause the 10-yr flow at Lee Ferry to be depleted to less than 82.5 MAF to deliver water to the Lower Basin and Mexico. As explained in a new white paper, there is a very real chance that the 10-yr running average will be 82.78 MAF, just a hair above the tripwire, one year from now. In alternate scenarios, the 10-yr running average would hit the tripwire in 2027 or 2028. If Reclamation exercises its authority to reduce Lake Powell deliveries to as low as 6 MAF, the tripwire is triggered even earlier. In the face of this imminent possibility, Basin States and the Federal Government must commit to an enforceable agreement to reduce their total consumptive Colorado River uses with an equitable sharing of the burden sufficient to justify a waiver of claims under the Compact for the duration of the agreement. The alternative is a deeply uncertain future for the Basin.

Read the full white paper.

The ungrievable and blockbuster art

Posted by on
Graffiti words, possibly ‘SUCH’ and ‘PESO’ painted in large block letters across the top of a vacant high-rise building.

Props.

Props to the artists who tagged the vacant Two Park Central Tower at Central and San Mateo in Albuquerque. I like to think Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would approve.

I noticed the art today while out on my morning dérive, walking and riding my bike through one of the weirder and more interesting neighborhoods in my part of Albuquerque. It’s one of two vacant office towers surrounding a stunningly busy and stunningly vacant Albuquerque intersection – a car wash on one corner, a closed WalMart just down the street, a closed Walgreens on the corner opposite.

Folks who live in nearby told me the graffiti – a style called “blockbuster,” big block letters, usually two colors, often in dramatic locations – has been there for a couple of months – I only now had the occasion to look up, I guess.

The artists must have gotten into the building and hung off the roof to paint it. It is hard to make out the words – maybe “SUCH” and “PESO”? Blockbuster is usually easier to make out – that’s one of its characteristics. But the weird ins and outs of the building make it tricky, and I can imagine hanging off the top in the middle of the night made the work more challenging.

Kulturindustrie

I’ve had some enforced down time this week, some of which I’ve spent on Adorno, a mid-century German philosopher, kinda Marxist, whose critique of the Enlightenment, drawn out in response to Auschwitz, is helpful in thinking about the intersection of Central and San Mateo. Adorno’s “negative dialectic” is a response to Hegel’s positive dialectic – a thesis, its antithesis, and then a tidy new synthesis in response. Adorno said no, it’s never that tidy, and society’s contradictions can’t be resolved. The inexorable workings of capitalism, Adorno argued, means things just stay a mess, injustices are inevitable, and the work of the moral critique is to just stare at it and be unhappy. All the stuff you might try to do to make things a little bit better in the here and now only make it easier for the deep injustices to persist.

„Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.“ (Roughly: You can’t live a good life in a bad life. I do not like this. I do not like it one bit.)

The depth of the contradiction reared up as I talked to the neighbors over on Madeira Drive east of the empty, vacant Two Park Tower, living rough in the shadow of an abandoned building. A developer bought the 1970s-era building and its 1960s sibling across the parking lot in 2023, with plans for more than 250 apartments and a proposal for government help. The folks I talked to this morning when I was asking around about the graffiti were, as I said, living rough, back today after the police and city trash crews did one of their encampment sweeps on Madeira yesterday.

Judith Butler, in a 2012 talk/essay when they were awarded Frankfurt’s Adorno Prize, talked about those they described as “ungrievable”:

[W]hose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Of course, this question becomes most acute for someone, anyone, who already understands him- or herself to be a dispensable sort of being, one who registers at an affective and corporeal level that his or her life is not worth safeguarding, protecting and valuing. This is someone who understands that she or he will not be grieved for if his or her life were lost, and so one for whom the conditional claim ‘I would not be grieved for’ is actively lived in the present moment. If it turns out that I have no certainty that I will have food or shelter, or that no social network or institution would catch me if I fall, then I come to belong to the ungrievable.

A big part of Adorno’s critique involves what he and Horkheimer called “the culture industry” – the again inexorable workings of the creation of cultural products:

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

I’m not saying here that I buy what Adorno was selling. There is a remarkable show right now at the Albuquerque Museum – Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945. It is in significant part a collection work by artists responding to the rise of the National Socialists, the Nazis, in Germany in the 1930s. The confrontation of those artists with what was happened is by measures terrifying, heartbreaking, and liberating. It ranks among the handful of most intellectually stimulating art exhibits I have seen in a lifetime of many, many art exhibits. (If you are in Albuquerque, go see it, it’s here through Jan. 4.) Their art was an often fierce critique. But sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it was an accommodation.

It documents how Hitler’s minions packaged art in Nazi, Germany. It is in a show that has been crisply – marvelously! – packaged for my consumption. The shadow of Adorno’s argument is there.

This is why I so love street art. Someone, or a few someones, snuck into an abandoned office tower in the dark of night, hung off the side of the building 10 floors up, and made us a painting, claiming this space as their own.