Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Fallowing – the path of least resistance?

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Antoine Abou-Diwan had an interesting story over the weekend in the Imperial Valley Press suggesting fallowing, rather than more sophisticated agricultural water conservation approaches, has become the default standard for water savings in the Imperial Valley needed to meet the Imperial Irrigation District’s obligations under California’s Quantification Settlement Agreement. Under the QSA, water saved in …

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Increasing aridity in the Colorado River Basin

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A new paper by Darrin Ficklin and colleagues anticipates drying in the Upper Colorado River Basin, especially in its southern region: The shift from semi-arid to arid conditions is likely to be especially prominent for the southern and central subbasins of the UCRB. Climate Change Impacts on Streamflow and Subbasin-Scale Hydrology in the Upper Colorado …

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The ag irrigation efficiency paradox

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A visit to Santo Domingo Pueblo yesterday morning to look at irrigation efficiency work funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and others offered a nice demonstration of the paradox of ag water conservation. From my story (behind a Google survey wall, sorry): By using the pueblo’s irrigation supplies more efficiently, the project, funded by …

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Brad Udall on the Colorado River and “the reality of the public”

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My name’s John, and I’m a water law junkie. I can’t get enough of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact. I love picking fights over the Upper Basin’s share of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre feet delivery obligation. I don’t care. I’ll argue either side.  Just give me my fix. So I’ll happily stipulate that …

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the Colorado River doomsday clock

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Chatting on the sidelines of last week’s Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference in Boulder, Doug Kenney had a great suggestion. We need something along the lines of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous nuclear doomsday clock for Colorado River water management. Doug’s comment came when I was grabbing some quotes for my newspaper story on the Bureau of …

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The case for the Lake Powell announcement being no big deal

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To be clear: I think the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement today that it is curtailing releases from Lake Powell in 2014 is a big deal. But one of the members of my brain trust (journalism is a mashup – I just repackage the ideas of people much smarter than myself) points out that there’s an …

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