As I learn about the development of large-scale water management institutions in regions other than my own (the southwestern United States), I’m increasingly convinced that our oft-discussed tradition of conflict – Marc Reisner famously described the Colorado as “the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world” – may really be viewed …
Continue reading ‘Why fighting over water isn’t a bad thing’ »
Here’s another look into the western water solution space – an agreement on the Lower Rio Grande under which willing farmers will have a chance to sell their water rights for use recreating lost riparian habitat (story behind survey wall for non-subscribers): To the list of the Lower Rio Grande’s famous crops, like Hatch’s chile …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: farming cottonwoods’ »
The latest monthly Colorado River water management report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (pdf) takes a major step toward the river’s first ever shortage declaration. We’ll know more in a month, but the preliminary estimates now show drops in the level of Lake Powell by the end of this year could trigger provisions of …
Continue reading ‘Creeping toward shortage on the Colorado River’ »
Brett Walton explains new research on the water lost in the Great Texas Drought of 2011. It’s a lot. But the thing that caught my eye was where most of the water loss occurred: “Groundwater depletion can be significant locally. However, by taking Texas as a whole, most water depletion comes from soil moisture during …
Continue reading ‘Texas drought: it’s all about the soil moisture’ »
A new paper in Nature by Jinbao Li and colleagues, using tree rings to create an El Niño/La Niña (the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO) reconstruction of unprecedented fidelity, suggests an increase in ENSO in the second half of the 20th century: Our data indicate that ENSO activity in the late twentieth century was anomalously high …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings suggest strong ENSO response to greenhouse forcing’ »
Doing daily journalism on the declining Rio Grande, I have frequent occasion to use this handy tool from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and the Bureau of Reclamation. It gives close-to-real time readings on all the main river and irrigation system gauges: It occurs to me that its crisp reductionism rather supports my recent …
An AP story that made the rounds yesterday pointed out that Phoenix set an all-time water consumption record during last weekend’s heat wave: Water Services Department spokesman David Cerull tells radio station KJZZ that homeowners used most of the water. He says demand generally goes up when it gets hot and that people water their …
Continue reading ‘Is Phoenix’s fondness for lawns and pools really a water management strength?’ »
Kate Galbraith in the New York Times last week had a piece with another example of how farmers respond when the water begins to run out: Mr. Grall’s cornfield is part of a closely watched demonstration project aimed at showing farmers how to use less irrigation water on their crops. It was put together by …
An experiment in repeat photography on a dwindling Rio Grande.
Trying an experiment here (because there are some things you can’t get to work on your employer’s production server) [View the story “A dwindling Rio Grande” on Storify]