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 …
Sunday’s bike ride book research took us up along the old Duranes ditch, through Albuquerque’s near north valley. The landscape is still wearing its winter coat, but it’s clearly dusting off its leaf-growing apparatus and getting ready for spring. We stopped to get a look at one of my favorite old farm fields, on Los …
Continue reading ‘“partición de bienes” – Albuquerque’s Long Lots’ »
The first water is heading down the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District’s Albuquerque Main toward town. “I love this time of year,” an MRGCD guy told me years ago. “You can feel the valley breathing in.”
With the March 24-month study out, a status report on the Colorado River Basin’s critical numbers. I’ve added the “minimum probable” forecast this time to help better understand the risk profile. In brief, water users continue to take more water out of Lake Mead than is flowing in. Most Probable Lake Mead million acre feet …
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It is easy to forget that California’s Tulare Lake, in the southern San Joaquin Valley, once competed with Lake Cahuilla (the “Salton Sea”) for the title of “largest lake west of the Mississippi”. We drained it. We farm it. But as Erica Gies happily reminds us at every opportunity, water is a formidable adversary if …
A Colorado River report card Lake Mead Water Year 2023, based on the most recent Bureau of Reclamation 24-month study Lake Mead million acre feet percent full Start of WY2023 7.328 28.08% End of WY2023 6.508 24.93% gain(loss) (0.820) -3.14% Current forecast U.S. Lower Basin water use state projected use in maf percent of …
Continue reading ‘Deadpool Diaries: A report card on our response to inconvenient science’ »