Every fall semester, I have our UNM Water Resources Program students read Kelly Redmond’s 2002 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society paper on the definitions of drought. It’s a classic in a very particular and important way. Based at the Desert Research Center in Reno, Kelly carried the title of “Regional Climatologist” for the western …
People have been sharing pictures of my book as it travels to interesting places. This makes me so happy. Today Michael Thomas Bogan, desert fish and other aquatic critter researcher (don’t snicker, that’s a thing, desert fish are really important!) at the University of Arizona shared this one:
Folks in Nevada today are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Hoover Dam’s sort-of-semi-official power production. Hoover Dam is such a dominant feature on the history of the west in the 20th century that it’s fun to contemplate what people thought about it before it happened. One of my fascinating side trips when I was researching …
Continue reading ‘The unexpected history of Las Vegas and Hoover Dam’ »
In the 1908 case, Winters v. United States, the court ruled Indian tribes are entitled to sufficient water supplies for their reservations. But the Supreme Court has never specified whether those so-called “Winters rights” apply to groundwater in addition to surface water.Ian James writes about a fascinating case now making its way through the California …
Continue reading ‘Do US native communities’ water rights extend to groundwater?’ »
The folks at the Security and Sustainability Forum are doing a webinar tomorrow around some of the issues in my book, about water governance, resilience, and sustainability. I am especially jazzed about the company – Sharon Megdal from the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center and Jay Lund from the University of California Davis Center …
Continue reading ‘Webinar tomorrow with Sharon Megdal, Jay Lund, and me’ »
Kirk Yazzie, his wife and three children, ages 2 to 9, live in a one-room house in Thoreau that uses a solar-powered water pump that draws water from a cistern to a tap inside their home.Before the demonstration project started two months ago, Yazzie said he hauled water from St. Bonaventure’s well across town. “I …
Continue reading ‘In Indian Country, where pickle buckets count as water infrastructure’ »
Elephant Butte, one of the first big dams built by the then-Reclamation Service (now Bureau of Reclamation), is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. As the graph above shows, its reservoir ended the 2016 water year Sept. 30 at less than 7 percent full. The reservoir’s ups and downs through history show the great variability …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Butte Reservoir and climate change’ »
There’s an important point I try to make when I’m out in public talking about the 2014 Colorado River Delta environmental pulse flow: the amount of water used and the size of the landscape that got wet, compared to the once-vast delta, is tiny. I get excited about the pulse flow, when water managers on …
Discussions about climate change and water supply in the western United States risk getting bogged down in pursuit of uncertainties. Those uncertainties are real, but there’s a bunch that we already know, and it’s sufficient to help us form policy responses, according to a new summary paper from the Colorado River Research Group: Assuming the …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the Colorado River Basin’ »
A new study published last week by Heather Cooley and colleagues at the Pacific Institute concludes that water conservation remains the cheapest water supply alternative as compared to the big new sources widely discussed, things like storm water capture, desalination, and recycling/reuse: Urban water conservation and efficiency are the most cost-effective ways to meet current …
Continue reading ‘New study suggests water conservation remains the cheapest alternative’ »