I had a really scary dream this morning. My memory is vague, but I was somehow involved in making decisions about how to allocate the water in a big river among various users. But we didn’t have good data on how much water the river actually held. Terrifying.
ABQJournal video edition of the weekend post-fire flood flow explainer, with the remarkable Kerry Jones video of the torrent in Cochiti Canyon: (Thanks to Troy Simpson, Richard Pipes and Kerry Jones)
On my way home from a bike ride this afternoon, I stopped by the vendor selling sweet Moriarty corn out of her pickup truck on old Route 66 just west of Tijeras Canyon: I could only fit three in my shirt pockets, which will not be enough to get my family through the winter.
One of my new tricks when looking at western water problems is to pose the question: “What is the failure mode?” It’s clear that on many scales, both temporal and geographic, we’ve got supply-demand imbalances. It’s easy to point that out and call the system unsustainable, to point out that we’re headed for a crash. …
The results of a couple of trips north last week into the flood zone in the canyons below the watersheds burned by the Las Conchas fire (sub/ad req): In Cochiti Canyon, a New Mexico Environment Department team estimated the Aug. 21 flow that caused the first round of damage at Dixon’s at 12,000 cubic feet …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on the power of moving water’ »
If you’ve driven the stretch of Interstate 40 across northern Arizona between Gallup and Holbrook, you’ve perhaps seen the signs for a place called Goodwater. If you’ve not, trust me – there’s not much good water around those parts. The story of human settlement in the region is the story of the struggle for good …
Stopped in the new Routes Rentals on Mountain west of Old Town on my bike ride today. Don’t know much about them, but I’m happy to see an Albuquerque bicycle rental shop give it a go. Their cruisers are gorgeous.
As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this: Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, …
Continue reading ‘On the relevance of paleoclimate studies’ »
Now that I get to be an occasional columnist in the newspaper, it’s remarkable how much of the work that seems appropriate in that new (for me) form builds off of something that started here, as a simple riff. To the extent that I’m getting my legs beneath myself as a columnist, it’s pretty clear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Banana Peel Sticker War’ »
Jay Lund and colleagues have modeled a range of possible impacts of climate change on flood flows in California. From a nice summary on the UC Davis California WaterBlog: Warming generally worsened flood inflows into reservoirs. Even with less precipitation, warmer conditions often increased flood inflows to reservoirs. When more precipitation fell as rain, rather …