It’s increasingly clear that the lessons we’re learning from California’s drought are not those we expected. Far from the doom of so much of the rhetoric, Californians are adapting to scarcity with remarkable aplomb. The latest data point, from Phillip Reese and Dale Kasler of the Sacramento Bee, may be the most interesting yet: California’s …
Continue reading ‘Despite drought, California agriculture adds 30,000 jobs’ »
One of my journalistic tricks has always to pick my moments for grim weather stories – watch the forecast and write when it is at its worst. Because tomorrow the forecast will be different, and I’ll loose my window to write the “It could be the driest/wettest/hottest coldest since X” story. I am not proud, …
Continue reading ‘Correction: It might rain in Albuquerque again after all’ »
My kindasortaweekly water news is out. Somehow drought shaming in California helped fill Lake Shasta, or something. You should click. Or subscribe for all the goodness delivered direct to your in box. This week’s includes a picture that’s prettier than I realized when I took it:
Add the South Platte in the state of Colorado to my list of watersheds outside of the Colorado River Basin that I need to pay attention to in order to understand what’s happening inside the Colorado River Basin. I’ve written here before about the linkage between the Sacramento-San Joaquin River system and the Colorado, because …
Continue reading ‘The South Platte-Colorado Basin linkage’ »
Correction (update?): As of Friday, March 25, 2016, it’s now not likely to rain in March after all. Correction (update?): It might rain after all! In 1934, the official Albuquerque weather station received 0.04 inches of rain in February and 0.01 in March. This year, we received 0.05 in February. So far, we’ve gotten …
Continue reading ‘One of the driest February-March’s in Albuquerque history’ »
There’s no way to pin down the moment I started working on my book, because it happened in fits and starts that extend back in one form or another for more than a decade. But the first time I really went all in was in the spring of 2010, when I made a trip down …
Continue reading ‘Hitting “send” on my book’s manuscript, again’ »
Lions, like water lawyers, are doing pretty well for themselves in the drought. Mostly for the same reasons. https://t.co/ktMC6TO1nZ — WatergrlJD (@watergrlJD) March 13, 2016 Why lions can feast during a drought https://t.co/H7zc7fzsET — PRI (@PRI) March 13, 2016
In a neat new paper looking at sediment layers near Blythe, California, Jordan Bright of the University of California and colleagues (paper here, $ gated) argue that they’ve found evidence of the moment (in geological time, the “moment” is really hundreds of years) when the Colorado River made its first dash to the sea. The …
Continue reading ‘5 million years ago, when the Colorado River made its first dash to the sea’ »
This month’s US Bureau of Reclamation reservoir forecast model runs show the implications of the warm, dry spring, with a drop of 620,000 acre feet and six feet in elevation in the estimated end-of-year storage in Lake Powell, the major reservoir in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Here’s my long term forecast graph, updated with …
Continue reading ‘The warm, dry spring pushing Colorado River reservoir forecast levels down’ »