You’d never know you’re in the city
Went with friends this morning in the woods along the Rio Grande in search of porcupines. You’d never know you’re in the middle of New Mexico’s largest metro area. (We found porcupines!)
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Morelos Dam, Minute 319 and replumbing the Colorado River Delta
When I give talks about western water and the Colorado River they usually end, or sometimes start, at Morelos Dam. Built from 1948-50, it spans the river between Baja California Norte and Arizona, scooping up the last of the great river and diverting it west, to the farmlands of the Mexicali Valley. Visiting the Lower …
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When there is less water, people use less water, Texas edition
From Bobby Magill, more evidence for my thesis that we’re such profligate water users in the United States that we’ve got lots of room to move as drought and climate change reduce supply: Eventually, TV station weathercasters began reporting the level of the Edwards Aquifer along with the daily weather forecast, forcing residents there to …
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Why is Paso Robles failing to self-regulate groundwater?
As California struggles against the problems posed by its current drought, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the lack of groundwater regulation. Melody Gutierrez has a great example today, from Paso Robles: How scant has the crucial underground water supply become around the San Luis Obispo County city? Sue Luft can …
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When the “plumbing” metaphor breaks down
I’ve often written about the ways in which our rivers in the western United States have become like plumbing (and here, here, and especially here). But one of the most interesting things to me about metaphors is when you push them to too hard. You can learn a lot at the point where the metaphor breaks …
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Metering water sales
To folks in many parts of the arid western United States, the notion that some California communities don’t meter residential and business water sales seems crazy. It is. This may be, by some measures, a record drought in California. But even without it, Californians have known they have serious water stresses. That it has taken …
dead piñon
One of the casualties of drought is the piñon in the mountains of New Mexico. I took this picture back in February in the Sandias, the mountains on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Where you see snow the slopes are generally north-facing. No snow is south-facing, and that’s where you see brown trees. I tweaked …
creosote
If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the creosote. – Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the WIPP accident that was never supposed to happen
If I was a more clever writer, I’d have a joke here about how the statistics of a WIPP accident change now that we’ve got a Bayesian prior: The radiation leak that has shut down the nation’s only operating underground nuclear waste disposal site was, for all practical purposes, never supposed to happen. No one …
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Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain
Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a new paper that offers a reminder of why the impact of climate change on our ecosystems and water supplies involves more than “will it rain less”? In some sense this is an old and obvious point, which I link here just to repeat said …
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