My students have all heard me tell this story, many more than once (sorry!), but it was fun to work it through in writing: Some years ago, through the serendipity of a missed airport connection, I found myself stranded for 24 hours in Prague. I was tired, my mind set in the way of air …
Chris Harris, the new executive director of the Colorado River Board of California (just named to the job Wednesday, congratulations, Chris!) made a point in the comments of this post that’s worth highlighting. While the dry March in the Upper Colorado River Basin has eating into the runoff forecast, likely eliminating the chance of a …
Continue reading ‘don’t let the dry March overshadow the good news for Lake Mead’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s monthly forecast, out this morning (pdf), contains some very good news for Lake Mead and its water users in California, Nevada, and Arizona. But there is a huge caveat. the good news As it stood in early March, the snowpack in the Rockies was enough to send a big slug of …
I always figured Sally Jewell, who until January was the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, had the best job. If you followed her on social media, you’d see her visiting cool places, hiking around, looking at stuff. I realize being Secretary of the Interior has some hard bits, too, involving meetings and policy and big …
Continue reading ‘Sally Jewell’s post-cabinet road trip is the best thing on the Internet’ »
In my book, I focused a great deal on the environmental and cultural benefits of the “pulse flow” through the Colorado River Delta, enabled by a 2012 agreement between the United States and Mexico. It was a shiny bauble, but there’s a lot more to the agreement than that. Most important from the perspective of …
Continue reading ‘US-Mexico water sharing deal is sparing Colorado River users from shortage’ »
I took a detour from the bike trail this morning to see water in the Albuquerque Main Canal, which brings irrigation water to Albuquerque’s strangely urbanized rural valley. There are 350 miles of canals threaded through the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Division, bringing water to something like 10,000 acres of land. It was …
New work by UNM colleagues (Dadhi Adhikari and others) suggests municipal water users are willing to pay for work to improve the health of the watersheds that supply the city’s water – in this case Albuquerque: Econometric results show evidence of … significant public support for forest restoration – linking forests to faucets. (Dadhi is …
Happy to be on In Focus, a proud New Mexico institution, talking about all kinds of water (or lack thereof).
This Bee aerial video of the work on the Feather River to try to cope with the problems at Oroville Dam is an amazing illustration of the scale of human intervention in rivers: Click through for the full video, no one screen grab can do it justice. They’ve completely shut down the spillway so they …
Continue reading ‘To fix Oroville, they shut down a river. Then built a road.’ »
The always thoughtful Mike Dettinger: Calling the long term groundwater depletion (overdraft) part of the drought is blaming a thing we've done to ourselves on the weather. https://t.co/bWI6arxSXY — Michael Dettinger (@Mdettinger) February 27, 2017