After a couple of years of setback, the aquifer underneath the University of New Mexico neighorhood is rising again. The spring measurement shows that it’s risen three feet since last year around this time. The annual variability (the graph’s ups and downs) are the result of regional groundwater pumping for our municipal supply – more …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s aquifer recovery seems to be returning’ »
In the early 1990s, a group of New Mexico scientists set up experimental plots at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque for in an effort to determine what might happen when water was reintroduced to the flood-starved woods flanking the river. Their description of what happened is …
Continue reading ‘Bosque overbanking as the Rio Grande rises’ »
My friend Scot and I rode north on yesterday’s bike ride to see the Corrales Siphon pumps. Built in the 1930s, the siphon for nearly a century carried water beneath the Rio Grande to irrigate a thousand acres of land on the west side of the river at the northern end of the Albuquerque …
Continue reading ‘Thick places, infrastructural inversions, and the gift of ideas’ »
The Rio Grande through central New Mexico is up. Yesterday’s daily average flow, 3,360 cubic feet per second, is the highest for that date since 1993. For Albuquerque’s river nerds, “overbanking” is an important cultural phenomenon. The Bureau of Reclamation’s Middle Rio Grande Project in the 1950s narrowed and channelized the river through our valley, …
Continue reading ‘Overbanking on Albuquerque’s Middle Rio Grande’ »
Ryan Boetel at the Albuquerque Journal has the latest in the morning paper on the big flows on the Rio Jemez, a Rio Grande tributary north of Albuquerque. For non-Albuquerque readers, the Jemez flows through the Jemez Mountains northwest of Albuquerque. Its confluence with the Rio Grande is ~25 miles (~40km) river miles upstream from …
Last updated 2 p.m. MDT April 12, 2023 – with explanation of why the feds’ cut isn’t as deep as the states’ I’ll need a few more days to digest all 476 pages of the Department of Interior’s Colorado River Draft Supplemental Environmental Environmental Impact Statement, but the top line numbers are worth sharing right …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: tapping the brakes on Colorado River cuts’ »
Snowpack, runoff, reservoirs In the comments, Nick from Australia is on “team Powell 3600”. Last month Reclamation was on “team Powell 3569.93“, meaning the projected elevation of Lake Powell above sea level at the end of the water year, and the CBRFC’s forecast for runoff into Powell is up two million acre feet since those …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool diaries: Bonkers snowpack, open thread’ »
I’ve been obsessed with John van Dyke’s “ribbons of green” image for a long time. Rummaging through some old computer files last night, I found the following, circa 2009, in a folder of notes and sketches for what would become my book “Water is for Fighting Over.” Notes from Moab There’s a moment when you’re …
The ditches were flowing across Albuquerque’s valley floor yesterday as I criss-crossed them on a long, aimless bike ride, the first day it really felt like spring. The cycling challenge at this winter<->spring pivot point is clothing – layers for a morning start hovering just above freezing, with a pannier stuffed with the layers by …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: In March, the Rio Grande/Colorado River snowpack went bonkers’ »
With more wet in the forecast, the latest numbers from the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center look very good right now: The active weather pattern that began around mid-February continued through mid-March across the region. Precipitation was above to well above normal across most of the region during the first half of March. March 1-16 …