It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent. There are two ways …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year’ »
While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today? Which is why the Imperial Valley of …
Continue reading ‘Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s’ »
One of the most promising strategies for water conservation in the arid west involves fallowing of agricultural lands. Done badly, it has earned the pejorative nickname “buy and dry”, as cities buy up ag water rights, take the land out of production and shift the water to urban toilets and taps. But done right – …
Continue reading ‘Commodity prices and the economics of fallowing’ »
It’s not a big drop, but in the face of drought and modest population growth, Albuquerque’s water use dropped in 2011. From the morning paper: The drop was tiny — less than 1 percent. But with Albuquerque weathering one of its driest years in history in 2011, the consumption drop is significant, said Katherine Yuhas, …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Albuquerque water use down in 2011’ »
The Lamont-Doherty group that has done so much to help our understanding of the factors that drive multi-decadal droughts has added a nice piece to our understanding of the issues. In a paper in review (for which they’ve done a nice accessible writeup), Ben Cook and colleagues looked at a number of drivers for long-duration …
In communities that fully reuse their wastewater (Albuquerque and Las Vegas do this now, for example, by returning sewage treatment effluent to the water’s source), it’s outdoor water use that dominates the water supply equation. And here in the arid southwest, sooner or later everyone will fully reuse their wastewater. This is not an argument …
I’m a fan of NOAA’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. Here’s an example of why. In working on my book, I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin – how much precipitation falls, and where, and when. The CBRFC has great data and great tools to help. Last …
Continue reading ‘In praise of the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’ »
Mark Lubbell at UC Davis makes the case for abandoning the Mark Twain “whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’ over” quote, and not just because Twain didn’t say it: Unfortunately, perpetuating water wars and the language of conflict will never solve California’s water problems. Water wars are equivalent to the “tragedy” aspect of managing common-pool …
John Bass has been pushing an excellent question about the direction of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan: Why isn’t the “fortress Delta” solution the most cost effective way of pursuing the co-equal goals question. John’s come to this line of thinking based on a cost-benefit argument: Couldn’t armoring the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees achieve the …
Continue reading ‘As Southern California eyes the Delta, a question of cost’ »
Well that was fun while it lasted, eh? Looks like it’s back to draining reservoirs on the Colorado! 2011, a big sloppy wet kiss of a water year, pumped up total storage in the reservoirs behind Glen Canyon and Hoover dams by some 5 million acre feet. But the first forecast of the year suggests …
Continue reading ‘2012: back to draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs?’ »