From yesterday’s landmark California court ruling on the legality of tiered municipal water rates (pdf): Southern California is a “semi-desert with a desert heart.”1 Visionary engineers and scientists have done a remarkable job of making our home habitable, and too many of us south of the Tehachapis never give a thought to its remarkable reclamation. …
Continue reading ‘Tiered water rates in the Cadillac Desert’ »
At the risk of nickel-and-diming you with bad forecast news, today’s Bureau of Reclamation mid-month report is bad forecast news. April-July flow into Lake Powell is now forecast to be just 3.4 million acre feet, 47 percent of average (pdf). That’s down from 3.75 maf (52 percent) just two weeks ago. Runoff for the full …
Continue reading ‘Lake Powell spring runoff forecast this year now less than half of average’ »
Crazy California’s proclivity for “governance by voter initiative” seems to have just undercut one of the major tools in the municipal water conservation kit. Tiered water rates, in which residents are charged a low rate for basic needs and increasingly higher rates for high usage, violate California law, according to a court ruling handed down …
Continue reading ‘In California, you can’t charge water hogs more than the rest of us’ »
This paper is measuring stuff in Australia, but seems to mimic the dropoff in runoff we’re seeing on the Rio Grande and other western U.S. rivers compared to the precipitation deficits we’re experiencing: Annual rainfall and runoff records from south-eastern Australia are used to examine whether interdecadal climate variability induces changes in hydrological behavior. We test …
Continue reading ‘Precipitation-runoff relationships in sustained drought’ »
What to make of this California drought story from Alex Breitler? Farmers within the Delta and farmers south of the Delta aren’t exactly bosom buddies. Not when it comes to water. But this spring, as their lawyers geared up for another year of fighting over limited supplies, farmers on both sides quietly started talking. They …
Continue reading ‘In California drought, when the water’s not fer fightin’ over’ »
Brian Devine has written one of those special pieces that made me smack my forehead repeatedly and say, “Yeah, that!”: To conflate the myriad problems of water in California into a single problem is the hallmark of a generalist reporter on deadline, as if I wrote that the Detroit auto industry’s collapse was because they made …
Continue reading ‘Deconstructing media coverage of the California drought’ »
Mike Cohen of the Pacific Institute, in some conversations last week sparked by my post about the risk of what we often call the “first ever” shortage in the Colorado River Basin, points out that shortages in fact are routine in the river’s Upper Basin. This is a result of hydrology. The Lower Basin – …
Continue reading ‘The Upper Basin: the Colorado River shortage that has already happened’ »
I presume that the audience for this blog is, in significant measure, made of people who think a lot about water. Many of your are probably already familiar with Florida write Cynthia Barnett’s books, Mirage, and Blue Revolution. For you, the news that Cynthia has a new book is self-recommending. There’s so much good to …
Continue reading ‘You should read Cynthia Barnett’s new book, “Rain”’ »
Seventeen of the last 20 years have had below-average runoff at Otowi (north-central New Mexico) on the Rio Grande: That’s from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Annual Operating Plan presentation, done in Albuquerque last week. “Average” is the 1895-2014 mean.
Sorry, that was a clickbait headline. Let me walk it back: Odds shifted slightly toward a wetter Southwest monsoon this summer! The usual forecast explainer: this shifts the odds from the climatological one-in-three-years-is-wet statistical binning to a 33-40 percent chance of wet in the light green area, upwards of 40 percent in the dark …