California had one of its memorable (and important for water supply) “atmospheric river” storms earlier this month. The folks at NASA have posted a particularly beautiful image of one of the results: That’s a huge blast of sediment flowing out the mouth of the Eel River in northern California following the storm.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about University of Colorado law school professor Doug Kenney’s argument that the states of the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (UB) faced a very real risk under climate change – that to the extent the river shrinks across the 21st century, the Upper Basin states will have the eat …
Continue reading ‘Is the Upper Basin more vulnerable than I thought?’ »
One of the points Steven Solomon’s book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization hammered home for me is water’s importance in providing transportation routes. Here in the western United States, it’s not something I’ve had to think of too much (see rivers without water to understand the cognitive dissonance). So I’ve been …
Last week’s release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study was a headline-grabbing event – “Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand, study says“, to cite but one of a zillion examples of the core message getting big play. Barry Nelson argued the study “has the potential to mark a new era in the …
Continue reading ‘With the Basin Study done, we can get back to draining Lake Mead’ »
As I’ve written previously, the Colorado Basin Study suggests that augmenting water supply in the region is the most expensive and least quick approach to closing the supply-demand gap. But if folks do want to pursue augmentation, Juliet McKenna is asking the right questions: The consequences of implementing any water supply augmentation plan need to …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, my distillation of the Colorado River Basin Study’s key message: Towing icebergs from Alaska or building a giant pipeline from the Missouri River won’t bail out the western United States from its growing water supply crisis, federal officials said Wednesday. Instead, conservation by the region’s farms and cities offers the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Basin Study – it’s conservation for now’ »
The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of …
Continue reading ‘Why the Basin Study is not about a pipeline to the Missouri’ »
New Mexico’s 2012 weather feels increasingly like a teachable moment, though the lessons must be handled with care. As the folks in the local media-weather complex went into stormpocalypse mode over the possibility that it might actually snow this weekend, I took pause in Saturday’s paper to look back: The storm comes as New Mexico …
We’ve not had much opportunity of late to measure snow here in Albuquerque, so I had to snag this picture from some time ago. But it’s that time of year when thoughts of weather nerds turn to the snow in their backyards, which offers me another chance to flog my book, which would be a …
The All-American Canal, which grabs water from Imperial Dam and runs it along the north side of the California-Baja border before delivering it to Imperial Valley farmers, was built at some great expense to replace the original wandering route that took the water south into Mexico before curving back north to US farms. The folks …