Farmers’ economic flexibility
Zetland, worth elevating from the comments: Most farmers tend to underplay their flexibility when talking about how much water they “need” but not when allocating the water they have.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
I’m on the teevee box, explaining why I’m optimistic about our ability to solve water problems
On KNME’s In Focus with historian Sonia Dickey and the Bureau of Reclamation’s Mike Hamman, talking about the risks and possibilities of our western water future:
California’s drought – is this what climate adaptation looks like?
Bloomberg’s Alan Bjerga last week gave us a nice tour through the details of how California’s agricultural businesses are responding to drought conditions. He notes especially a shift, was water gets more expensive, into higher valued crops. Stuff that can be grown in places where water is cheap and plentiful, like what, into high-dollar crops …
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The beauty of our monsoon clouds
Driving back from southern New Mexico yesterday afternoon, I saw a lot of this: Video courtesy of Todd Shoemake at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office, where they enjoy the monsoon as much as anyone. Maybe more.
How we use water in the desert: Hatch green chiles
On a bit of a water nerd’s lark today, I ended up knee deep in a chile field outside Salem, New Mexico, in the area technically known as the Rincon Valley but more commonly called the Hatch Valley. It’s a ribbon of green (to borrow John Van Dyke’s memorable phrase) gripping the Rio Grande as …
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Bonus water likely for Lake Mead in 2015, but it’ll just keep dropping anyway
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s key August forecast, out today (pdf),projects that there will be enough water in the Colorado River system next year to release a bonus pulse of 770,000 acre feet of water from Lake Powell down to lake Mead above and beyond the legal requirements of the Colorado River Compact. But even with …
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USBR: Gila diversion costs exceed benefits
On the scale of Colorado River water diversions yet unbuilt, the possibility of taking water out of the Gila River in southwestern New Mexico is small stuff – 14,000 acre feet per year, or maybe less if the water’s simply not there. But the current debate in New Mexico illustrates a common refrain as western …
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The problem with “drought”
I’m increasingly at a loss about how to do useful journalism because of the gap between the technical world I try to understand (risks associated with water contamination, for example, or the problem of drought) and the public reaction to my efforts to provide a nuanced but accurate explanation of the thing at hand. Mark …
Why Lake Mead keeps dropping
Water released from Lake Mead, through Hoover Dam’s turbines, travels downstream about 150 miles to Lake Havasu. There, massive pumps on the river’s left bank push the water up on the start of a 336 mile journey that ends in groundwater spreading basins west of Tucson. The Colorado River’s water then recharges an aquifer, where …
Annals of Indian water: “hot, scorching sands”
Most of the land in these reservations is and always has been arid. If the water necessary to sustain life is to be had, it must come from the Colorado River or its tributaries. It can be said without overstatement that when the Indians were put on these reservations they were not considered to be …
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