Archive of entries posted by jfleck

University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career

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Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning. University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run …

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Moving toward drought

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A fascinating analysis by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program concludes that 57 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2000 and 2014 happened in places currently experiencing drought. Weird. But there also is this: In the midst of these challenges, though, some of the fastest-growing places like Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio, and Austin …

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UC Davis team puts 2015 California drought impacts at 4 percent of the state’s ag economy

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The U.C. Davis drought team today released its estimates for the economic impact of the drought this year. Spoiler alert – it’s worse than last year. Highlights: 560,000 acres fallowed, which is 6 to 7 percent $1.8 billion in direct ag losses (increased groundwater pumping costs and reduced sales), which is about 4 percent Total …

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Hauling water: Navajo

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Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available: As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly …

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“Miracle May” leaves Colorado River reservoirs in much better shape than when the month started

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A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, …

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Tree Rings and Megadroughts

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Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest: I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more …

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Rio Grande flows again through southern New Mexico

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My friend Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and water advisor to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, has been following the water down through the Rio Grande southern New Mexico valleys as irrigation season starts:   For those unfamiliar with water management practices in Southern New Mexico, this is an odd place. …

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ProPublica on the Colorado River Basin solution space

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Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of …

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The difficulty in U.S. municipal water use comparisons

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Kathleen Ferris of the Arizona Municipal Water Users Association on the difficulty of comparative water use analysis: [C]omprehensive information on conservation and reuse implemented to date is not available. Each of the water providers within the ten metropolitan areas track information about their conservation programs differently. For example, water use in central Arizona is tracked by …

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