Now that I’ve got this “largest artificial watershed in the world” hammer, everything’s beginning to look like a nail. The “hammer” involves the notion that the vast artificial plumbing system we’ve built across the west has linked our water management fates in a way that did not exist when water tended to spend its human- …
More art from the hard drive reorganization. This is the headwaters of the Little Colorado River from another Lissa-John road trip (we road trip well) through Arizona. It’s just outside Springerville, and yes, it’s green, and flowing. (The Little Colorado is more famous for brown, and its relative lack of flowing.) The development of the …
Watching California’s water argument from afar, I can’t help but see what looks like a remarkable failure to develop a process for juggling competing interests in the management of a classic common pool resource. From yesterday’s political theater drama House field hearing, here’s Mike Connor’s explanation of why it’s not a simple matter of just …
Since apparently all the cool kids love data, here’s some of mine. This is total storage in Lake Mead (blue), Lake Powell (reddish) and combined (orangey), updated with the 2011 end-of-year numbers as estimated by the USBR’s latest 24-month study (pdf). Note that if the numbers hold up, this will be the second time since …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Estimated Storage in Mead, Powell’ »
I’ve a chance to get out to California later this year and do some reporting on water issues, so I’ve been doing some reading, trying to get a better feel for where to focus my attention. This is in part driven by my belief that the West’s water issues have become inextricably linked, and to …
Continue reading ‘California Water Governance: Some Questions’ »
I’ve been spending a lot of my work days of late in a blow-by-blow rundown of the growing drought conditions in New Mexico: An already dismal forecast for spring runoff in New Mexico’s rivers has gotten worse, after a dry, windy March sapped the state’s snowpack. Spring and summer flow on the Rio Grande into …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert – low flows on the Rio Grande’ »
From the US Bureau of Reclamation’s April 24-month Colorado River operations plan (pdf): The April 24-Month Study with an annual release volume from Glen Canyon Dam of 8.23 maf projects a Lake Powell end of water year elevation of 3,662.63 feet. Based on this projected condition and consistent with the provision in Section 6.B.3 of the …
Sometimes a comparison can be useful.
Watching them bring water to the 300-year-old Duranes irrigation ditch.