Audubon is looking to hire someone to help save the Salton Sea. It’s a great twofer – you get to help the birds, and if you succeed you also get to help save Colorado River manage as a whole, as the two are integrally related. If we fail to get the Salton Sea right, everything …
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News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall …
Amy Thomson in 5280: Denver residents have managed to reduce water consumption by more than 20 percent in the last 15 years, even with a 15 percent increase in population.
This is your semi-regular, repetitive reminder that El Niño and La Niña don’t matter a hill of beans, in statistical terms, for the Colorado River Basin as a whole. The Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch. That means cooler temperatures across the equatorial Pacific, which tends on average to influence the North …
I love this: Thursday is the lowest release for the week, so starting late Thursday the water begins to drop in the river, with the lowest flows on Saturday. If you are a recreational water user — skiing, fishing, pleasure boating, or jet skiing — less water means more sandbars or exposed debris to avoid. …
Continue reading ‘on the Lower Colorado, the weekly human hydrograph’ »
It is impossible, I have found, to write seriously about water in the western United States without being in conversation with the late Marc Reisner and his classic Cadillac Desert, published thirty years ago. It’s assessment of our problems is foundational, and even if I disagree with some of what he had to say (as …
Continue reading ‘the long shadow of Marc Reisner and Cadillac Desert’ »
On the Public Record posted yesterday soliciting water management recommendations for the new presidential administration (and offering some of their own). As happens with that smart blog and audience, cool ideas quickly emerged – better use of remote sensing to measure water use in something closer to real time, municipal leak detection, planning grants for …
California’s epic, headline-grabbing drought has not dented the value of the state’s farm land. According to a new USDA dataset released today, California cropland rose 2.1 percent in value per acre in the last year, and 16 percent since 2012. Despite drought, California cropland remains at $10,900 an acre the second most valuable in the …
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When Bob Berrens invited me three years ago to join him in teaching a class on contemporary issues in water management in the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, I was hesitant. I was pretty busy – working full time at the Albuquerque Journal, trying to write a book. But heck, it seemed like …
Continue reading ‘I’m the new director of the University of New Mexico Water Resources Program’ »
update: A correction to this post here, thanks to some excellent journalistic sleuthing by Tony Davis. **** The Bureau of Reclamation’s Aug. 1 Colorado River Lower Basin Water Use Forecast (pdf here) passed a symbolically important milestone: at a forecast consumptive use of 6.998 million acre feet, if the forecast holds, this will be the …
Continue reading ‘Lower Colorado water consumption lowest since 1992’ »