Lauren Villagran’s story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal about the impact of the Boxing Day blizzard on New Mexico dairies is a reminder of the single most important trend in New Mexico agriculture in the last few decades – the remarkable growth of the state’s dairy industry. Some numbers on that below, but it reminded me …
Continue reading ‘New Mexico population (cattle v. people) through history’ »
In this week’s Science, Andrew Lawler reports from Basra (paywalled) on problems strikingly similar to the risks in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, as upstream water use shuts down a delta river discharge, allowing saltwater intrusion: The Persian Gulf is creeping relentlessly up rivers and canals shrunken by water diversions upstream and by years of drought. …
Continue reading ‘In Iraq, a problem like the Sacramento Delta, except with actual war’ »
With snow on the mountains to the north, the preliminary forecast circulated yesterday by the Natural Resources Conservation Service calls for 11 percent above average flow on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico into Elephant Butte reservoir. This is early in the season, so there are still huge error bars on the numbers, with …
Continue reading ‘Preliminary forecast for above average flow on New Mexico’s Rio Grande’ »
UC Davis’s Thomas Harter makes an important point in a recent Public Policy Institute of California blog post about California’s evolving effort to manage its groundwater: The state’s new groundwater law requires locals to form groundwater sustainability agencies and develop sustainability plans, and it will be important for farmers and rural communities to actively engage …
Continue reading ‘The importance of local knowledge in groundwater management’ »
Davis Dam has always been overshadowed by its Lower Colorado River siblings – the scale of Hoover Dam, the striking architecture of Parker Dam, the ability of Imperial Dam to move all that water to the farms to the south and west. Davis mostly generates power, and power generation has always been a bit of …
Continue reading ‘Turning on Davis Dam, 65 years ago tomorrow’ »
My California water friends are breathing a tiny bit easier, as an El Niño-fueled jet stream queues up a series of storms for the parched state. But the latest forecast models suggest the Colorado River Basin is going to have to wait its turn. The invaluable Daniel Swain wrote a couple of days ago about …
Continue reading ‘California wetting up, Colorado Basin will have to wait’ »
Michael McGuire reminds us that today is the 116th anniversary of one of the great milestones in the push toward clean and safe drinking water in the urbanized world – the opening of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. This allowed Chicago to dump its sewage into the Mississippi River rather than Lake Michigan, from …
We got 12.86 inches of precipitation in 2015 (32.66 cm) at the Heineman-Fleck house in Albuquerque. Average going back to 2000 is 9.72, which qualifies by the arbitrary 10 inch mark as a desert.
At the risk of repeating myself, Lake Mead ended 2015 with a surface elevation 1,080.91 feet above sea level, its lowest year end since it was filling in 1936. Happy New Year, y’all know what you need to do now.