The March 1 forecast for the Rio Grande in New Mexico suggests we are heading into another dry year on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, with a median forecast of 80 percent of the 1981-2010 average flowing into Elephant Butte Reservoir. (source pdf) That is close enough to average that there is a lot …
Continue reading ‘A forecast for another dry year on the Rio Grande’ »
WILLOW BEACH, ARIZ. – One of the things I miss about my newspaper life is the quiet pleasure of a cool dateline, dangling at the start of a story like a sparkle of anticipation. So grant me this one. Willow Beach is a boat landing and picnic spot at the bottom of Black Canyon on …
I’ll be at the Nevada Water Resources Association meeting in Las Vegas next week, talking Wednesday morning about what we need to do to avoid running out of water. If you’re there, say “hi”.
Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, is in the hunt for more water: A recycled water project started in 1993 moved forward Monday night as the Pasadena City Council approved the environmental review of a plan to funnel water from Glendale. The $50 million project could take 20 years to complete, with a pipeline running …
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Sarah Tory at High Country News has a nice summary of one of those classic western water issues worth watching – the Lake Powell Pipeline proposal: The project would pump 86,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Powell 140 miles across the desert through a 69-inch buried pipe and then 2,000 feet up and over the …
Continue reading ‘Will Utah take more water from the Colorado River Basin?’ »
Via the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, here’s the February precipitation to date in the parts of the basin that make snow and therefore water: Beyond the dry, this map does a good job of how tenuously tiny an area produces the river’s water supply.
I was talking the other day about California’s struggle to solve its Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta problems with a friend who grows food with Colorado River water in California’s southeastern desert. The delta’s more than five hundred miles and three or four watersheds away as the crow flies from his farm. Why such a keen interest? …
Continue reading ‘The Sacramento Delta-Colorado River farming nexus’ »
I’ve recently become acquainted with interesting research by Texas A&M geographer Wendy Jepson, who has studied household water insecurity along the U.S.-Mexico border. There’s a tendency to look for a technological fix (“Look at this cool new filter we invented!”), but Jepson found this less than effective (“HWS” is “household water security”): We evaluated the efficacy …
Continue reading ‘Water insecurity: think poverty, not climate’ »
In my endless puzzling over the meanings we attach to the word “drought”, there is this, from yesterday’s Climate Prediction Center seasonal drought outlook: What does it mean to talk about “drought” in places like Yuma or the Imperial Valley that average less than 4 inches (10 cm) of rain a year, and that get …
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Members of the Colorado River Research Group, scholars who study the basin, have a useful new report out today (pdf here) urging a more unified approach to the currently fragmented environmental management initiatives on the Colorado River. It describes “an incomplete patchwork of largely uncoordinated efforts, existing in some cases to facilitate compliance with environmental …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado River, the environment is the junior user’ »