When Albuquerque’s new AAA baseball park opened in 2003, the drinking fountain by the restrooms on the third base side was somehow connected to a hot water line. I’m sure it was an accident, right? We’re dealing with the flaws of arguing from anecdote here, but Peter Gleick’s piece this week offers a number of …
Eleven years ago next week, I stuck up a rain gauge in the backyard and starting dutifully writing down daily data on NOAA WS FORM B-91, “Record of River and Climatological Observations.” Today, my employer kindly indulged my little hobby, affording me space on the front page of the newspaper for a riff on the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Measuring the Weather’ »
Caltech prof David Rutledge’s “peak coal” argument is getting a lot of traction of late, and came up in a discussion on twitter this morning. The question was posed: if Rutledge is right, does this mean greenhouse gas regulation is not needed? Rutledge, in a talk two years ago here in Albuquerque, said the answer …
Continue reading ‘Rutledge on Climate Change and Peak Stuff’ »
One of the central struggles in moving water out of the Colorado River a century ago was the silt. Moving water moves a lot of it, and when you slow the water down, the silt drops out. It was siltation that kept clogging Charles Rockwood’s Imperial Valley diversions, where he was taking water from the …
Scrawled on the whiteboard in my home office is the phrase “moving water”. The phrase is Lissa’s. It seemed to capture the set of problems I’m trying to write about. As the hydrologists among my readership can attest, water is an enormously powerful force that tends to want to do what it wants to do, …
Water law in the western U.S. doesn’t generally allow a user to save water from one year to the next. You use it, or you lose it. That, for example, is the situation faced by the Imperial Irrigation District this year, which faces the prospect of (horrors!) having Los Angeles get the extra water if …
This week’s bit of western water history comes from the archives of the Library of Congress. Elephant Butte Dam (originally Engle Dam) is on the Rio Grande upstream from El Paso. Completed in 1915, it is currently the subject of a fascinating New Mexico water rights adjudication battle, nicely detailed by Sig Silber.
It’s been called the largest tributary in New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande – the outfall from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant. A friend loaned me his mountain bike for the weekend (I’m in the market for a new bike that I can ride off the pavement), so I took it for a test ride down in …
Continue reading ‘The Largest Tributary in the Middle Rio Grande?’ »
My on-again, off-again infatuation with 1083.57, the elevation Lake Mead reached in March 1956, is back on. As Shaun McKinnon reports in this morning’s Arizona Republic, Mead’s at the lowest it’s been since then. The latest “24-month study” from the Bureau of Reclamation (pdf), out this week, is back to forecasting that we’ll drop below …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: “We know that it’s being drained.”’ »
Professional Car Washing and Detailing magazine recently excitedly reported the results of an investigation by News 8 in Austin, Texas, into water consumption associated with various ways of washing your car: A self-serve carwash uses about 17 gallons of water (depending on the nozzle; an IBA wash, found at a gas station can use between …
Continue reading ‘The Most Water Efficient Way to Wash Your Car’ »