Updating my Colorado River reservoir storage spreadsheet today to make a graph for a friend was a pretty discouraging exercise. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the system’s two massive reservoirs on which 9 states and a gazillion people and farm acres depend, are at their lowest combined level since 1967, when they were filling Powell …
Continue reading ‘Coase’s reservoirs: how transaction costs are emptying Lake Mead’ »
From the newly released archive of British Movietone newsreels, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes in October 1938 hits the button to open the gates on Imperial Dam, diverting the first Colorado River water into the All-American Canal and on its way to irrigate the farms of the Imperial Valley: The newsreel makes …
Continue reading ‘Imperial Valley, 1938: “a million parched acres awaiting for irrigation”’ »
Some things I learned from the late Richard Pipes.
New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission yesterday formally approved the creation of a “New Mexico Central Arizona Project Entity,” a governance gizmo needed to move forward with a proposal to divert Colorado River tributary water from the Gila River in New Mexico: Interstate Stream Commission members have approved a resolution designating a 14-member unit to design …
Continue reading ‘Gila River water governance gizmo built. Sort of.’ »
University of California researchers have a novel idea: what if we dump more water on alfalfa and use that to recharge aquifers? Over a six-week period in February, March and April, Dahlke oversaw a test in Siskiyou County in which 140 acre-feet of water were applied to 10 acres of alfalfa. That’s well over twice …
On the first of May, the official forecast for the 2015 water year on the Colorado River was 6.4 million acre feet. The July mid-month forecast is up to 10.2 million acre feet (pdf). That’s been enough to prevent the need for a Lower Basin shortage declaration (which would have forced water curtailment in Arizona) …
Continue reading ‘Ten amazing weeks in the Colorado River Basin’ »
I joined the Albuquerque Journal in 1990 in what I now think of as “the golden age of journalism”. That’s shorthand for reliable access to expense account travel, but something more. If, as it often was, the story happened to be at a nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico, or at an Air Force …
Aquifer replenishment works. Sort of. And depending on what you mean by “works”. That’s the message in a new paper ($$$-walled) from Brian Thomas and Jay Famiglietti at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory looking at groundwater levels in California’s Coachella Valley. Coachella is the northwestern extension of the Salton trough, edging the Salton Sea and spreading …
Continue reading ‘Coachella groundwater management: it’s complicated’ »
I especially like number three: [View the story “Advice for reporters new to the drought beat” on Storify] More of Brian’s thoughts on western water here.
A couple of blocks from my Albuquerque home is Del Sol Park, but everyone in the neighborhood calls it “Twin Parks”, because of the short street that divides it in two. On one side of that street, a nondescript concrete pad marks the spot where the U.S. Geological Survey measures the depth to groundwater beneath …