LAS VEGAS – I like the fact that Las Vegas, Nev., is preserving the relics of its water origin story. From “spring hill” at the Springs Preserve municipal park, you can see the towers of Las Vegas’s gambling strip. Visitation at the park this afternoon when I snuck away for a bird-watching walk after a morning …
People monitoring snowpack and planning for the coming water year use two quite different definitions for the “Upper Colorado” basin/headwaters/watershed. One definition involves the watershed above Glenwood Springs, within the state of Colorado, where the branch of the big river once known as the “Grand” and then renamed the “Colorado” begins. (Bob in the comments …
Continue reading ‘A word of caution about what “Upper Colorado” means’ »
Here’s my obligatory picture of Lake Mead’s bathtub ring, as seen this afternoon from Hoover Dam: The surface elevation this afternoon was 1,088.97 feet above sea level, the lowest it’s been at this time of year since 1956. It has dropped 20 feet since this time a year ago, which is among the biggest one-year …
Continue reading ‘Bathtub Ring, and yet more thoughts on why Lake Mead is dropping’ »
PARKER STRIP – In 2005, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the 16 concessionaires leasing BLM land along this strip of the Colorado River reported more than 4 million “visitor days”, people like these motorboaters enjoying a warm (but not hot) late winter day on the river. That’s a mobile home and RV park …
Continue reading ‘“half-told stories about the value of water”’ »
BLYTHE, CALIF. – It’s not quite the way I remember it. I suppose it never is. I’m on a reporting trip. I had some meetings in Phoenix today, then made a freeway dash out to the Colorado River for a few days of journalism-by-wandering-around. I ended up this evening near sundown in Blythe, Calif., dumped …
On the road, I made it to greater Phoenix this evening in time to catch the five o’clock show at Fountain Hills, a suburban enclave on the northeast edge of the metro area.
While the current snowpack numbers look lousy for Colorado River Basin runoff, a glimmer of hope for a late-season uptick in the latest Climate Prediction Center seasonal outlook. Green means “odd tipped toward wet”: I prefer to ignore, then the cognitive dissonance caused by this:
The new paper by Ben Cook and colleagues clarifying our understanding the risk of megadrought in the southwestern United States has rightly gotten a lot of attention. Combining paleo records and modeling of a changing climate under rising greenhouse gas scenarios, Cook and his colleagues have created some scary reading: [F]uture drought risk will likely …
Continue reading ‘Megadrought paper: message received, now what do we do?’ »
Last year, I began experimenting with a sort-of-weekly (except when it’s not) emailed water newsletter. I’ve got a few reasons for doing it: Some people read blogs, some people do twitter, some like email, I’m trying to reach folks where they’re most comfortable. Marketing! I’m going to have a book to sell soon, and a …
January was bad for snowpack and therefore spring runoff in the Colorado and Rio Grande basins. February has been worse. But we don’t use water at the basin scale, we use it one irrigation district and city at the time. Here I will attempt to sum up the current snowpack and water supply situation and …
Continue reading ‘Bad January, worse February in Colorado, Rio Grande basins’ »