There’s a long and important history behind Arizona’s enthusiasm for water supply augmentation. The short arm-wave version is Arizona’s belief that part of the Central Arizona Project’s grand bargain was that the Superhot State would accept a junior priority for its CAP water in return for a commitment to water supply augmentation at some unspecified …
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Jim Carlton, in the Wall Street Journal last week (behind paywall, sorry*) does something I wish there was more of – looking at what happens when drought ends. In particular, a visit to Wyoming, where it was dry for a spell, then got wet: “You can get out of drought if everything goes right, and …
Water managers in the Upper Colorado River Basin are beginning to roll out details of their contingency planning aimed at preventing Lake Powell from dropping to troublingly low levels. Among the key steps being discussed, according to a presentation Monday by New Mexico’s Kevin Flanagan to his state’s Interstate Stream Commission (more over on my …
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I’m taking another shot at my “why I’m optimistic about the Colorado River” schtick. Friday in Albuquerque, at UNM, economics colloquium series: Building 57 on the campus map (pdf), due northwest of the Duck Pond.
Alfalfa, the crop with the largest acreage in California, could well emerge as a survivor in the state hard hit by drought. “This plant is a tough plant,” said Dan Putnam, alfalfa and forage specialist with the University of California at Davis. He believes the deeply-rooted plant “will likely survive once the plant is rehydrated,” …
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In his book Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico, geographer Eric Perramond offers a fascinating description of the linkages among choice of cattle breed, farm and ranch practices and the resulting groundwater levels in the Río Sonora of northern Mexico, with irrigated farm fields once used to grow food for human inhabitants now …
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The Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal outlook, published this morning, is another “meh” for the Colorado River Basin. The good news is that odds favor wet for the southerly part of the basin, especially Arizona and New Mexico. The “meh” part is that the low country doesn’t contribute much of the river’s overall supply. Most of …
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Colorado River, Water Source For Craft Beer, Drying Up: Some of the best craft beer in the US is produced in the West, in places like Colorado and California. And the craft beer culture in that part of the country is also strong. Many craft brewers, such as Stone Brewing, obtain all of their brewing …
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From the Orange County (Calif.) Weekly, a story about how drought shaped Southern California: Orange County as we know it exists because of the Great Drought of 1864. It wrecked Southern California’s cattle industry, then one of the largest in the world and the heart of the area’s economy, and forced ranchers to unload their …
In Colorado River Basin planning, there is a common mistake growing out the the Bureau of Reclamation’s Basin Study. It is made by seizing on the study’s finding regarding the impact of climate change (as exemplified by the results of General Circulation Models, or GCM’s) on the river, quoted here from the executive summary (pdf), …
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