Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action

Posted by on

By Jack Schmidt,1 Anne Castle,2 John Fleck,3 Eric Kuhn,4 Kathryn Sorensen,5 Katherine Tara,6 While Colorado River Basin attention is focused on negotiating post-2026 operating rules, a near term crisis is unfolding before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken to reduce water use, our already-thin buffer of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead …

Continue reading ‘Analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage Suggests Need For Immediate Action’ »

Rio Abajo and the Unit 7 Drain

Posted by on

NEAR THE CONFLUENCE OF THE RIO PUERCO AND THE RIO GRANDE – The broad delta where the Rio Puerco meets the Rio Grande in central New Mexico has never been a great place to live, though people try. To the east, across the river, the Ancestral Puebloan Piro built the village Spanish colonizers named “Sevilleta” …

Continue reading ‘Rio Abajo and the Unit 7 Drain’ »

New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations

Posted by on

Alert Inkstain reader Rolf asked in the comments of last weekend’s post for a version of the above graph – number of days of low flow at the Central Avenue Bridge – with a threshold above zero. I usually set the threshold at 25, because our experience in the last two drying episodes – 2022 …

Continue reading ‘New Mexico’s Dry Middle Rio Grande: More Data Visualizations’ »

Driest on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since when? 1972? 1964?

Posted by on

I spent some time this morning crunching numbers, trying to make numerical sense of how bad this year is on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande. We keep saying it’s only the second time the Rio Grande has dried through Albuquerque since the 1980s, but that felt insufficient. Some data visualization experiments: By this measure – …

Continue reading ‘Driest on New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande since when? 1972? 1964?’ »

Awaiting the Colorado River 24-Month Study

Posted by on

By John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara As we await Friday’s (Aug. 15, 2025) release of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River 24-Month Study, we need to remember a painful lesson of the last five years of crisis management: whatever you see in Reclamation’s report of the “Most …

Continue reading ‘Awaiting the Colorado River 24-Month Study’ »

Craig Allen joins us on the Utton Center’s Water Matters! podcast

Posted by on

Formed in a series of volcanic eruptions between 1 and 2 million years ago, the Jemez Mountains dominate the cultural and environmental history of central New Mexico. For more than four decades, forest ecologist Craig Allen has studied them, engaging in what has come to be known as “place-based ecology,” with deep roots in what …

Continue reading ‘Craig Allen joins us on the Utton Center’s Water Matters! podcast’ »